sombremesa

I usually don't argue with people who are this out of touch, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

Let's do some math. In both cases we're buying the same home for keeps, so we can ignore the value of the final asset (would be the same in, say, 2100 A.D. in both cases):

Amazon stock 13x'd from 2012 to 2023. Say you had $50k vested by year 1 (close to what you'd have in 2013 as new grad). That money would be $650k in 2023. If you invested that into a house just around then, say in a $300k home, your interest rate would be ~3.7%. That means you would be paying $415,040 over the next 30 years, including your down payment.

Now let's say you were...you...and decided to wait till today. That same home is now worth $1.3 million in 2023. Your mortgage rate is 6.5%. You have your $650k in stock, so you put 20% down ($260k). Your mortgage is $1.04M. Over the next 30 years, you will be paying...a whopping $2,341,800. But hey, congrats on your "extra" $390k in stocks. By the way, you paid (if we are VERY conservative) ~$250k in rent while living in an equivalent property in those ten years.

You can look on levels.fyi for current comp, but it's a bit harder to find what someone's comp is like if they started ten years ago. Perhaps you could look at H1B data and extrapolate at a 3-5% raise p.a. with larger bumps every now and then. Even at just today's numbers though, MSFT lags behind comparable employers.

You missed the "personal" part of "personal finance." If you live in Seattle and started working in, say 2012, that "smart" decision would be costing you a ton of money today (certainly more than a few mil all said and done) should you be in need of a home.

I updated the wording to help you out.

> There is a component in contentment that I think is lacking in complacency...that of general happiness.

I don't see it that way, complacency can be just contentment from one's own perspective — it may take a third party to call it complacency (sometimes wrongly so, such as that parable[0]).

[0] https://thestorytellers.com/the-businessman-and-the-fisherma...

(Though that parable fails to account for unforeseen financial emergencies and such...)

> They are all multi millionaires.

Sure, but so am I — and I know for a fact they make very little, because of the way they talk about our mutual friends' job offers — I cannot even tell them my salary, to be honest. (Making less money is not a bad thing, but the pertinent point is that they work longer hours than I do, in the same industry!)

> Msft stock is up 10X in 10 years.

Here I'd like to correct you on one point — stock going up like this does not necessarily equate to outsized wealth. When you join as a new grad, you get very little stock, and as you get more grants, they are market-adjusted (not to mention vested over time). Plus the early stock inevitably gets sold to buy a home, etc.

Feel free to ignore me if you knew these things.

> What you call complacency, I call contentment.

Contentment and complacency are ostensibly the same thing, though the primary reason I tend towards the latter term is because I think we ought to aspire to growth (in whatever sense you determine for yourself). That's just my opinion though. It's also worth noting that I have no way of knowing what others are aspiring to, aside from what happens in their life over the years (which can be a poor proxy, given the role of luck).

Microsoft employees are some of the most complacent I've ever seen. Some of my Microsoftie friends haven't had an interview (aside from maybe one or two recruiter calls) in over ten years, having been there since graduation. Needless to say, their comp is peanuts. Yet they frequently stay at work late and have to drop engagements as a result.

Microsoft has the magic formula for lifers who don't ask much and work just as hard as anyone else, if not harder (by big tech standards — startups folks work way harder for way less).

Bingo. Getting it into production is a non-concern for non-entities with no reputation, but Google has a lot more to lose. The big guys watch and wait, and use their sizeable wallets when the time comes. I have no doubts that Apple is going to eat Meta's lunch soon, for example — a lunch Meta didn't even realize was there, for all their innovation and go-to-market.

Not sure I would call this a "backdoor," but nice of them to do that.

> One would be eventual consistency.

In the vein of the TFA, this would be a negative shibboleth (which just goes to show how being pedantic in certain contexts is just silly). The reason being that eventual consistency has no guarantee on what "eventual" means. If your replicas converge ten years from when a change is made, you can (correctly) claim to have eventual consistency.

The genuinely qualified people in tech are probably not the ones finding this article organically. TFA is not even industry specific...just think of the target audience, and then consider whether this is a cause for concern.

> When I type 'git add', it lists the two files I actually modified.

Is not typing `-u` really worth installing a whole app that spies on you? Especially since shells like `fish` (FOSS!) will have you just write `-u` + up arrow?

This seems objectively worse to me but I guess we'll see whether they find a real market.

Yep. The best time to get a promotion is as you interview. The second best time is now...at another company.

Thankfully, at a large company with plenty of hard problems to solve (and smart folks to work with), you can grow quite a lot whether or not the company chooses to recognize said growth.

What makes this list "well-crafted"? It doesn't seem to be any different than any other listicle on the internet. Is it?

> Reverse mortgages don't prevent death

Except in this case: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1995-12-27-951228...

> to demand that I only consider the earliest smartphones

The earliest smartphones did not even have touchscreens, I just used an example that would be easier to digest.

> when I tried the first iPhone

What about when you tried the first touchscreen smartphone, which was probably resistive and came with a stylus?

Seems unfair to compare an emerging tech with the iPhone (which took an emerging tech to the next level) off the bat. It's almost an argument in bad faith.

Unreal vs. Unity is pretty much the 'spaces vs. tabs' or the 'emacs vs. vim' debate at this point. Nobody who makes a living from gamedev is dropping their engine of choice thanks to a flashy demo or even a killer feature unless they're facing some kind of existential threat. Thus, the most knowledgeable folks can't fairly compare the engines, and the only people really making noise in this debate are amateurs with little to no skin in the game.

There are exceptions, such as where a studio that made the switch for reason X or reason Y is able to clearly articulate what they're doing and why, but these exceptions only serve to prove the rule since they're extremely rare to come across.

I've been using https://144blocks.com, is this inspired by that?

This is a very interesting comment. At first I found myself in strong agreement with GP (believing people chasing status are probably misguided), but after reading your comment I realized that it might have to do with my current status (independently wealthy in a first world country).

In places like China or India, there is indeed a very big difference in QoL between those who have status and/or social power and those who do not.

That being said, it might be better to change your environment (and the people who you surround yourself with), because that will change your status as TFA outlines — without you having to go out of your way to change who you are and what you do.

Easier said than done when this involves changing countries, but it's a long-term strat.

The best pilot would not rationalize for even a second why their instrument readings did not match their intuition. They would fall back on their training immediately in the face of ambiguity.

This person is not even close to being the best…which is irrelevant, since they should have known better anyway.

That being said, bad stuff can happen to anyone regardless of who they are.

Better title might be “the average bicycle isn’t designed to maximally leverage human anatomy.”

To which the answer is: so what? The market doesn’t care about efficiency that much, else clip-in pedals wouldn’t be optional.

It's completely unsurprising to me that HN likes to get information from a search engine that doesn't know the difference between 'careen' and 'career'.

This may indeed explain how the author came about their incorrect definition, though.

It's completely unsurprising to me that HN likes to take career advice from someone who doesn't know the difference between 'careen' and 'career'.

An example of what happens when you "speak out" (read: do anything but be servile) in India: https://twitter.com/Reashiee/status/1484811188844199936

> Many times, I wish that our Indian contract workers, would speak out when they see something wrong, about process, quality, or business requests.

> our US-born hires are way quicker to say something to management if they feel something is wrong

Apparently the obvious and easy solution here is to only get US-born hires. So why don't you?

> If there are only 120 cases of this disease worldwide...

120 known cases. Some of the afflicted likely died without ever seeing a doctor, and given the difficult diagnosis, others may have died without the cause ever being known.

Huh, and I thought people on this forum were smart and would not stand for obvious FUD.

Personally I’d never choose to use rhetoric like this. (“My life is in danger because of X, and so is YOURS!”/“They are coming for you and yours next!”) - that’s the kind of thing leads to the worst of humanity. Good for you if you like that (and who wouldn’t, when you have a personal hatred of X, right?), but some people have to stand against it.

> I'm scared of Apple. They can do my business in on a whim. Yours too.

They can't. My business is manufacturing for wholesale, nothing whatsoever to do with computers.

These kinds of over-generalizations and FUD only serve to reduce your credibility.

That’s kind of passive aggressive in my opinion (I believe you’ll disagree, and that’s fine), I’m unlikely to adopt that communication style.