Whoa! I didn’t realize Leland Stanford was racist. And blatantly so. Makes you wonder if the university should be renamed.
2,277 karma · joined September 21, 2016
I'm not sure I understand; how could one not be thinking about things constantly? If I try to just sit there and think about nothing, it doesn't work. The only time when the thinking has stopped for me is while under anesthesia.
Cost of living adjustments occur because companies can get away with it. That’s pretty much all there is to it. They have additional leverage when a potential employer wants to live in a particular location and that puts the potential employee at a disadvantage.
That said, I actually think most of these companies would prefer to pay everyone equally if they could get away with it as well, because ultimately they will cost the company less in labor. But they can’t at the moment. All the talent is concentrated in just a few spots and much of this talent does not want to move. In a hypothetical world where remote work really takes off, location will no longer matter. No company is going to pay someone twice as much just because they want to live in a nice location. It’s simply that this is what is required by companies at the present time to keep the employees that they value and have already invested in.
It would be interesting to run some simulations where you vary the desire of a workforce to work remotely and see how it changes the pay required for maximum talent retention. Since widespread remote work is new, we’re not anywhere near an equilibrium yet.
Sometimes I wonder if the U.S. is purposefully trying to move down in world rankings... I'm not sure why anyone would think it's a good idea to intentionally limit the opportunities to the best and hardest working people in the world; those opportunities will just spring up elsewhere instead. I have a theory that a society cannot maintain leading world standings without also leading in science and technology, and it's not long before the U.S. loses this (if it hasn't already). Most of the greatest recent technological advances are already driven by people born outside the U.S. that work within the country; it wouldn't surprise me if they decide that coming to the U.S. is just no longer worth the hassle.
Haha, isn't this the truth. I work at one of FAANG as well and was curious how one of my colleagues was accomplishing so much. His output is astonishing. I checked his work profile and noticed he had commits, notes, and research actions starting at 7:00 AM and going until 1:00 AM the next day, every day, including weekends. I don't think the founder of this company ever even worked that much. I guess there's just some people who never burn out. Meanwhile, my wife gets annoyed about dinner when I work past 6 PM...
Sure, but this also applies to understanding the U.S. tax code, which I think is a needlessly overcomplicated, poorly designed system that requires layers of inefficiencies to extract value from, much like web development.
I didn’t say anything about not getting consent to share personal information. I think almost everyone would agree consent is always necessary.
Your point definitely makes a lot of sense, but there are many of us who believe that we should be able to make our own decision to give up certain types of privacy in exchange for something of value.
Everything involves some level of risk/reward. Should I not be allowed to skydive because of the increased risk of death? Generally, I think my rights end where others’ rights begin, so I fail to see how sharing or withholding my personal information affects anyone else.
Or not. Personally I have no problem with cookies. Maybe they will just lose traffic from a small fraction of HN users instead of going out of business.
It’s kind of like paywalls. I get annoyed whenever I visit a news website and a paywall pops up, but I just leave the site unless I’m interested in subscribing. If enough people leave instead of paying (i.e. providing something of value in exchange for accessing interesting content), then the publication goes out of business.
Yikes! You may want to review laws about hiring... immediately.
The current situation is not representative of typical remote working conditions. I am fortunate in that I do not have relatives that need care or children that are home from school (yet), and that I have an extra room with a door that I can close, a comfortable chair, and a nice view out the window. Many people do not have these luxuries at the moment; a lot of my coworkers in the Bay Area have 2-3 children home from school, are sharing cramped apartment spaces, and have an unergonomic setup with poor internet connectivity.
If anything, I worry that the current situation may drive the possibility of remote work backwards a bit.
The really interesting research type work (Bayesian modeling, convolutional neural networks, etc.) takes a long time to implement and may produce no useful results, which is a really bad outcome at a company that measures performance in six month units of work and highly values scheduled deliverables and concrete impact. Many of the data scientists I work with tend to stick to methods that are actually quite simple (e.g., logistic regression, ARIMA) because these at least deliver something quickly, despite the fact that many of my coworkers come from research-heavy backgrounds.
In my org, there's nothing stopping anyone from pursuing advanced machine learning; for the most part we set our own agenda (in fact, determining priorities is part of the job role). And some people do in fact go after state-of-the-art ML, with some really cool results to show for it. But in terms of career progression and job safety, the risk is just way too high, at least for me personally. I save the highly mathematical stuff for a hobby.
Edit: while this may sound a bit negative, I will add that my description of data science isn't a complaint per se; I am mainly trying to inform those who are seeking a career in data science of what to expect compared to what is often promised. The work that is most valuable to a business is not exciting all of the time, but I don't think there is another job in the tech industry that I would find more enjoyable than my current one at the moment.
It's definitely an interesting phenomenon. I work at a large tech company, and within my team of ~70 people, I think there is maybe one other person beside myself who was born in the U.S.
My suspicion is that this is mainly due to the fact that U.S. culture no longer prioritizes STEM the way it does pop culture and entertainment, and so I don't really have any sympathy for the apparent inability of people born in the U.S. to compete with those from other countries who (at least from my perspective) appear to study and work much harder.
There was another article posted recently about a CEO raising the minimum salary of all of his employees to $70,000 and cutting his personal costs to afford it, and even with this gesture there were many negative comments and conspiracy theories about it.
My question is: if we assume 20-40% of people in the U.S. are drastically underestimating how bad the virus is going to be, then they are more likely to hold their stock until there is finally "proof" that the virus is as bad as everyone with some amount of scientific understanding knows it is going to be, at which point we would expect some portion of these people to panic sell. Wouldn't that indicate that in an event like this, we're not betting on essentially random fluctuations of an emergent economic system, but rather on many people not understanding the trajectory of the virus?
In other words, it's almost like a prediction market at this point — you're betting against other people about how damaging the virus is going to end up being. Am I off base here?
This is a strong claim. Can you prove it?
What’s wrong with this? I’m one of these engineers in Silicon Valley who would like to live near family. “Half the cost” is still massively higher than the local rate in my home state, which I would happily accept.
I think I remember reading that Americans, on average, have $700k saved up for retirement. When I dug further into the data, the median was many multiples less than that.
I disagree with this. I’ve never felt "inadequate" because of an ad.
Same here. It’s actually kind of mind-blowing how little I get done at work compared to hobby projects, despite feeling as though I’m working much harder. In my free time, I’ve written my own global illumination software from the ground up, my own website, and a few open source libraries. In the same time at work, maybe one tiny feature for one internal tool. I understand why it happens and why it is necessary to some extent, but it’s much less satisfying than seeing the substantial day-to-day progress that can be accomplished on a solo project.
That said, I've received feedback from multiple people that they never know how my work is progressing, are surprised when it's completed, and would like more status updates along the way, so I think it's safe to say that my preferences are an anomaly and you should probably follow the article's advice instead.
The other thing that confuses me is why companies aren’t moving either. It’s been a long time since a "new" city was created, but we have plenty of land available, and a lot of it is in pretty (but not natural park) locations. Is there that much of a network effect with talent being in one region that companies would rather pay a 4x compensation premium than relocate to new or lower cost locations? Are there any examples of big companies that have relocated their HQ to lower COL locations and then failed because they couldn't attract talent to move there, or is it just conjecture that this would occur?