throwaway713

I don’t know anything about Indian culture; could someone who is from there shed some light on how prevalent the prejudiced mindset is? E.g., do 80% of people think the caste system is stupid and outdated whereas the other 20% still hold some prejudice toward Dalits? What about Indians that have moved to the U.S.? And is this issue improving quickly or slowly?

You make $540k and still want to live in Atlanta? Out of curiosity, do you really like the area more than other places? Or is it because family is nearby?

> Minimizing menial tasks. Menial tasks really suck. I know everyone must hate doing these, but to put it into perspective, I would rather do 20 hours of really really hard work on a tough project than do 5 hours of menial tasks

Interesting. I have ADHD (inattentive subtype) and am quite the opposite. My apartment is never cleaner than when I have an extremely important, open-ended project with multiple stakeholders to address. Seriously, I end up dusting the screws that hold up the door frames.

> being liked by your coworkers (including your boss) is 10X more important than the amount of output you produce

Is this really true? I can think of people I like very well as a person, but they are extremely unproductive and I would not want to have them on a project with me. On the flip side, there are people that I would not say I am friends with (not enemies either, just neutral interactions) who do an excellent job at getting work done and who I have given very positive peer feedback to.

I always hope that things like promotions aren’t popularity contests, but I never can tell for sure how much that’s the case, particularly at higher levels of management...

> there was a man present who thought he could answer them as well

That’s a funny way to characterize a bunch of male doctors ignoring my wife’s request for them to ask me simple questions instead of her because she was incapacitated with pain, particularly when in a previous situation I broke my ankle and my request for questions to be addressed to her went fulfilled without any objections by the hospital staff.

But I will be sure to let my wife know that a stranger on the internet thinks her claims of sexism at the hospital are unfounded.

There was a young anesthesiologist in training (resident?) who was administering the epidural while a more experienced anesthesiologist was supposed to be watching. The trainee put the epidural in the wrong spot three times and ended up giving my wife Horner's syndrome after the final insert. The older anesthesiologist didn't notice the failed attempts because he was staring at something on the TV in the room. I eventually told him he needed to pay attention because his resident kept screwing up.

Also, I suspect (but cannot prove) that our daughter ended up in the NICU because of additional failings during delivery related to a very long period of trying to induce while our daughter did not have sufficient oxygen.

My wife gave birth to our child this past year in Palo Alto. While at the hospital, my wife and I noticed that no questions at all were addressed to me (the husband), particularly questions that I could have answered while she was in pain during delivery.

Afterward, we were provided with a form to fill out for the birth certificate, which required a parental signature. I filled the form out and returned it to the office, at which point I noticed that the clerk changed the signature to state my wife's name when inputting it into the system.

Later in the day, a social worker came by and began to ask questions about my income (when I told her I worked for one of the large tech companies, she immediately left and stopped questioning me). She independently took my wife aside to ask questions, and my wife later told me that she did not ask about her income, but did ask to make sure she was not being abused, a question I was never asked.

All in all, we felt it was a very poor experience (not to mention multiple mistakes were made during delivery because the anesthesiologist was distracted by the television), and we were surprised by the degree of sexism in what we thought was one of the more progressive cities in the U.S.

> I'm not sure there are many people who are publicly abusive and privately kind

Gordon Ramsay perhaps?

You’re looking at the wrong pool of potential employees. On my team of ~40 people, I am the only one who was born in the U.S. They hire from all over the world and will pay what’s necessary to import top talent from other countries.

Also, 200,000 sounds way too high for total number of technical positions at these companies. There are a very large number of people working non-technical jobs there as well.

The author doesn’t consider Stripe prestigious? I work at one of the companies he lists as prestigious, and I think most of my co-workers consider Stripe to be a top company to work at and very competitive to get into. A lot have in fact left to go work for them, because they have a reputation for having good career growth and great engineers. If I decided to go somewhere else, that’s actually where I would send my resume first.

Bragging about salaries is always annoying; however, it was one of those braggy comments that led me to reconsider my own job so that I ended up working for a FANG company. I had previously just used Glassdoor to check salaries and did not realize it was not giving an accurate picture of the total, more recent compensation offered at these companies. When I realized how much lower my income was compared to what was possible, it motivated me to start practicing and interviewing. I would have never known if it weren't for those posts.

The problem is the compensation ceiling in these cities. It’s not the Midwest, but when I was searching in Atlanta for tech jobs to stay closer to family, the upper limit was about $150k, which I think was at Square. There are other non-tech companies that offer SWE positions (The Home Depot, Warner Media), but you will always be treated as a cost center and the career growth is limited.

Meanwhile, SWE comp at FANG can end up closer to $350k for senior engineers and $600k for staff positions. With a lot of these companies now offering permanent remote work, even a 50% pay cut is better than the local offerings.

> The companies should allow people who need more time to handle things time off with benefits but no pay or reduced hours

So how do you feel about maternity leave for pregnant women?

> he just turned around and walked away

> You’re an idiot

That seems awfully rude of them. They don't sound like very pleasant people.

With sleep, I feel like you’re sort of still there since when you wake up you have the perception that time has passed. What’s truly unnerving is going under anesthesia, where it’s like that period of time just never existed at all.

In articles like this, everyone crawls out of the woodwork to brag about how they don’t fear death. I don’t believe it for a minute. The number of people who could have a loaded gun staring them in the face and truly not feel the slightest bit of fear has to be minuscule. Humans just wouldn’t have made it this far otherwise.

What I think is scarier than the concept of non-existence though is the possibility that our universe might be cyclical; i.e., that its evolution would repeat over and over again an infinite number of times. Imagine all of the suffering that you’ve ever experienced happening again, indefinitely. Or the Holocaust repeating. Or slavery. Just thinking about the idea of an endless, cyclical universe is almost sickening. I much prefer the other theories of how the universe might end.

One counterexample doesn’t make a point. I could list many people who are simultaneous experts in multiple fields and it wouldn’t help my argument either.

Because intelligence is general and correlates well across fields, and intelligence has a loose causal link with a PhD in biology. So I wouldn’t say it "helps" with investment per se but there is a connection there.

I’ve often thought that if I ran my own company I would have a ban on hiring new grads from certain schools, particularly those like Harvard. Between their racism of denying qualified Asian applicants to accepting giant bribes to let in the children of rich or famous people, there’s no way for a company to to tell whether the credentials mean anything at all.

Except San Francisco has nature (and even more nature close by) which makes all the difference to me. The few times I’ve been in NYC, I found the sheer amount of gray concrete and steel to be unnerving and dystopian; I’m legitimately amazed that humans can live in such an environment for so long without becoming depressed. That’s not to disparage the city or people who like it; there’s just many of us who need at least some amount of natural beauty (and I don’t mean Central Park).

I’m in tech, but I like the Bay Area for what it is. I plan on working remote to be near family, but also intend to use the lower cost of living to save up and purchase a house in SF at some point later in life, hopefully to retire to. It’s a nice area and I think many people will be back after the pandemic (tech people or not); it just doesn’t make economic sense to be here now.

That always reminds me of this: https://i.redd.it/wwje449jjge21.jpg

> only 0.65%

...

Gamification of exercise does not work currently and probably never will. No matter how you dress it up, it’s still exercise and still requires physical exertion, and there seems to be people who can do it and those who can’t.

I'm a bit surprised the rich take private jets as much as they do. They are about as dangerous as cars on a distance basis, and considering how far a trans-Atlantic flight is, I don't know... I'd be hesitant to do that much driving in my car even.

Do you mind sharing which town? Or which part of the world / U.S.? I’m just curious where you dislike so much...

My way involves a lot more risk that nothing useful will be produced.

I basically want a higher risk / reward than what working in this field as an employee would provide. I wouldn’t be able to try far out ideas if I wanted to keep my job, because it may be the case that one avenue of research never goes anywhere for years.

Peter Higgs has some interesting thoughts on how he would probably not have produced anything valuable if his work had occurred in the current academic environment that prioritizes frequent publications in high impact factor journals (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...)

> When people ask me about my life’s ambitions, I often joke that my goal is to become independently wealthy so that I can afford to get some work done. Mainly that’s about being able to do things without having to explain them first, so that the finished product can be the explanation. I think this will be a major labor saving improvement.

This is an excellent explanation that mirrors my own life goals, but I have struggled to put the sentiment into words this well. At the end of the day, I just want to spend (waste?) all of my time doing AI research or working on a cure for cancer, but I want to do it my own way.

I have become increasingly frustrated with the NYT's reporting practices. They are very hypocritical about criticizing tech while continuing to advertise heavily on the same services they criticize to promote their journalism.

A lot of what they publish nowadays is often "technically correct" but misleading to the point of being dangerous. That, combined with the philosophy of the younger journalists working there to refuse having any contrasting opinions published (I say this as someone under 30), and it's clear that the NYT feeds off of bipartisan hatred and conflict in order to make money. It's astounding that the same practices they criticize others of they engage in themselves. The nation is becoming ever more deeply polarized, and I put much of the blame on the NYT and similar publications.

I always find it interesting how the people who are so strongly against the gentrification caused by the apparently bland and one dimensional tech workers are reluctant to move themselves to cheaper mid-sized cities that ostensibly have more “soul” if that’s what they’re looking for.