throwawaybbqed

Given the current high stock price of FANGs (or should I say MANGs?), is appreciation really that likely? I'm hearing of offers for mid-career engineers with just 500-700K in equity. And that is over 4 years.

Wow ... I want to pull my eyes out now. Is this really some uber critical path in the code or did the author(s) have too much time on their hands/optimizing some other metric (e.g. promotion, proving how smart they are, attempting to get job security). I am also astounded by two things related to documentation .. it is nearly non-existent, and where it exists, seems to provide almost no context to someone other than the original authors.

You posted this for a reason .. would be good to get your thoughts.

edit: adding one more point. I went to a fairly high-ranked university(top-20). We would get graded based on how clear our code was, comments (both for functions and inline comments). This code would get a zero on those metrics.

Hey random Internet stranger. Don't feel terrible. I have a CS PhD, work in AI, have a fancy job title and decent resume ..yet, I am not making anywhere close to these crazy numbers. I painted myself into a bad corner and am somehow stuck. I work crazy hours to keep myself up to date so I can get myself unstuck. I think most engineers are not making 300K-500K .. it is a bit like social media .. you just hear about the winners and not the losers. Also, the stock market was up like crazy in the last 2 years .. I think this accounts for some of the insane numbers we are seeing, people retiring, etc. The biggest mistake I made is my job doesn't give me shares/RSUs, etc. It was somewhat obvious that this was a problem but it wasn't terrible until most major tech companies did a x3 in 1 year. This was a 1 time lottery I missed (and I suspect many others did too). Things could have gone the other way too (I graduated from my PhD in 2008 and recall how terrible those days were).

Azure is not bad compared to the options. Also, MSFT is throwing a lot of brain power at it (notable systems researchers from MSR). Curious what you consider is better?

I suggest you understand the material with as much depth as you can. If you gloss over details early on, it will bite you later on. Are you focusing on DL?

What is a SAFE? Any newbie reads? I got the 7% equity part, but some examples could be useful for the code monks amongst us.

I'm a new manager. Thanks so much for posting this .. it might be obvious but hits on issues I have faced with my team. I do have a question about the "writing down part". In my org, we do perf evals every 6 months. I do weekly 1-1s with my team members. When I course correct or communicate an expectation during a 1-1, what is an appropriate mechanism to document? Email is a bit byzantine .. most of our comms are on slack.

Hacker Dojo used to be pretty cool when I lived in the Bay area(but in MV/Santa Clara). Met some interesting characters there.

I pay for a bunch of google services (Google One, YouTube premium) and for the life of me, have not been able to get my country changed. After some time with tech support (was shocked I was able to get someone), the conclusion was to use the play store ON AN ANDROID DEVICE to try to change my country. Quite strange if you use google services without an android device. It doesn't matter if I'm an edge case. They need to support their customer.

I was an early user of coinbase. I only bought a fraction of a coin because of Paul Graham and YC's reputation. Well .. I was wrong. I was not an active trader. It seems they have closed by account and liquidated the btc within (if there were actually btc in my name). I am deeply disappointed that they don't have a telephone number I can call to help figure out the situation. Pretty disappointed.

Interesting observation about Moscow having a lot of research labs. I never thought to wonder why Moscow had so many but this is an interesting point. What do you mean by join study program? Can you explain? Also, is there anything that stops top talent from moving to Silicon Valley (or some place else?) after they finish school?

I'd like to point out that as a manager, my stress and anxiety level have gone through the roof during this WFH period. As I was an IC for many years, I completely see your point but I'd like to point out the other side. I've talked to several other managers in my org, and I am not alone. Some part of it may be that older people (who are likely to be in management) are more likely to have kids (which led to untenable situations during school lockdowns).

Flexibility in producing the "right" work product is really key. In many large corporate environments, figuring out what is the right work product is possibly more work than the work itself. I have a feeling we may even see different models between different types of companies (nimble startups vs small companies vs large corps). In my personal org, what you are describing can be viewed as an engineer "phoning it in" .. as the engineer is depending on their manager or team lead to assign them the right work. An IC who phones it in may think they are a top producer but will get surprised when it comes to their career progression.

Thx for your thoughts. You mentioned R&D flavor tickets. Really curious about the mechanics of this. Does the responsible engineer update once a sprint, weekly? I've seen junior staff spend months on dead ends .. curious how to manage that via process.

Also, if the R&D project is a team project involving multiple people, what is a reasonable update/sprint cadence?

Can you please describe how you had a Jira/ticket system that you felt gave you autonomy? Very curious how it could be implemented in a research setting.

Not disagreeing with you but some additional points:

I don't think CT's housing issues are anywhere remotely as bad as the Bay area. Stamford is the tier 1 city in CT IMHO, which seemed kind of lame. i.e. we would have friends in places further east (almost as far as New Haven) who would come to Stamford for the "scene". I use quotes because the scene in Stamford was pretty muted. We (who lived in Stamford) would drive to Manhattan for our weekends and special weeknights. I thought it worked really well for us. For 2400 a month, we were living in Luxury apartments and life was car friendly. Housing didn't seem too overpriced (starter homes were 600K IIRC). IMO, Stamford was pretty neat a few years back .. not sure if it has changed.

Bay area housing just went stupid until the pandemic hit. I moved out and so did many people I know. It was just not "affordable" on a 200K salary if you have multiple kids and a stay at home spouse. The housing you could get for $2400 was terrible in most parts that were reasonable commuting distance. I also would take metro north over caltrain any day.

Taxes are bad in both places. Stamford seemed more affordable and a lot better culture to me. I love the Bay area but can't make the math work :(

What you are describing seems exactly like the text for first year math in school. Check out Spivak. I remember loling that it starts out explaining what is a number and why addition works the way it does. Heh .. I still lol a bit at that but if that is your cup of tea ..

My personal philosophy is to develop my mathematical intuition. I like applied problems. I really liked my high school math text: https://www.amazon.ca/Calculus-First-Course-James-Stewart/dp...

You can get old versions of these btw ... basic math has been the same since Newton :-p I also highly recommend the MIT course of Gilbert Strang on linear algebra.

Hi Peter .. thx for taking time to answer questions on the weekend.

Curious what happens when someone with an H1B (say greater than 3 years used but less than 6 post-extension) leaves the US to go back to their home country? If that person is interested in working in the US again as an H1B, do they need to be subject to the lottery again or are they exempt since they were already "approved" for an H1B?

I heard it has something to do with the time when you re-file to go back? I'm specifically curious about the case when the person decides to go back after a few years (after when the H1B would have expired).

Canadian here btw.

These are very good points. I'm curious what the process is from the perspective of the manager. I'm new at the management side of things and was always a top performer as an IC (so didn't get a chance to learn how its down on the flip side). My biggest challenge is figuring out how to give negative feedback (and not destroy a weak player's morale). If someone is having not performing well, I act as a cheerleader and suggest ways of improving. I'm not sure how strong I could/should go (I'm not going to berate anyone since I am not a psycopath). By not providing stronger feedback, I think I am failing the struggling teammember since they may eventually get put on a pip. Any blogs, books or suggestions on how to develop this skill?

I stood up a vanilla baremetal cluster (on the latest Ubuntu) a few days back using Kubeadm ... it was fairly trivial to do. I used the NGINX Ingress and it was also generally straightforward (maybe took an hour or two to understand what was going on). Curious what we did different?

I saw Rancher's offering afterwards and it does look really slick .. the UI is bloody awesome. Wish I could get it for regular kubernetes.

CodePath used to be an amazing resource. They had some of the best guides out there. It went beyond books and delved into practical libraries used in the real-world. I wish those guides were up to date :(

Can you explain what you mean by fingerprint? I'm a bit alarmed.

I've looked at WebRTC a few times, and every time I've been overwhelmed by the complexity of the protocol. I understand video streaming is hampered by codec patents, etc. but in 2020, the situation seems to be getting better with open source codecs unencumbered of patents (VP8,VP9, AV1, etc.) Why is the best we have still WebRTC? Seems it could be simplified as a protocol .. is this inherently hard or just a result of being designed in a committee?

Your comment raised the hair on back. I was a naive student in those days. Kamen's build up to the announcement and some of the posts of people who had tried "it" - they broke my heart and took away some of my innocence. You reminded me of all the hype pre-announcement. I couldn't sleep because of it.

I still respect Kamen but take every pre-announcement I hear with a strong degree of skepticism.

For mobile, the situation seems worse than a year ago. TF Mobile mostly worked. The current situation with TF lite is a joke .. tried a real-world Pytorch -> ONYX -> TF/TF lite and it has been weeks of misery.

What about Android?

Meh .. staff with PhDs are good for different things than those with Masters. If you are applying established methodology, you don't need PhDs on your team. For new things or things for which there is no established methods, PhDs are essential IMHO.

That world doesn't exist anymore. Computers in the 80s was far smaller a field and had less societal impact. Today, pretty much every human in the developed one has access to a computer (a cell phone). The ecosystems are lot more closed today than they used to be.

I like what the other person posted (webpage) but it isn't obscure. I'd say compiling your own Android image and putting it on a phone.

Thanks. I missed one such opportunity in my life .. encountered guys at a YC event and thought they were brilliant. Managed to get an interview but it didn't work out (partially my fault, and partially because they had no idea how to deal with PhDs). Such opportunities are so rare in life. It is almost like winning the lottery.

Regarding the question of education/college costs rising drastically, I thought a key answer was that govt started to fund education a whole ton less.

In Canada (where this has not happened as badly), an undergrad in CS used to cost 3K annually a decade and a half ago, and costs 10K now. Other disciplines cost 6K I think .. CS degrees cost more since colleges decided that students earn a lot more and there is huge demand anyways. That doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

So .. Patrick's education costs question has an easy answer - govt funds got pulled in the US, and the wide availability of student loans acted like steroids. In places where got funds didn't get cut (e.g. Canada), things cost about the same (when adjusted for inflation and increases in salaries necessary due to things like rent/house price increases).

The question why we could get to the moon in just 9 years, or make the tallest building in 140 days? That is simple too. As a society, we are less desperate than our parents. We are more demanding when it comes to life (hence, wages and living conditions). This has spilled into the regulations we make as a society. I read it was near impossible to make some types of factories in the US anymore - due to our concern form environment, etc. I personally find a lot of red tape frustrating but then I remember .. we (as a society) put it there for some reason.

Not everything useful has APIs. The most frustrating example in my life is WhatsApp. It is positively horrible. On IOS? Only way to backup your chats is iCloud. On Android .. only backup option is google drive. On an ipad without a cell phone (low income seniors who cannot afford cell plans) .. go away. It is sad and messed up how much of a locked in kingdom we have in software today. It has NEVER been this bad.