throwthisawayt

the restrictions aren't on the green areas. The city can keep all of our parks and nature and be fine. The restriction are on the building heights and number of units on vast areas of the city that are already developed.

For example, the west portala Sherwood Forest area is essentially a suburb within the city. There are huge lots that are 5000 sq ft when next door neighborhoods you have 1600sq ft lots with 2-3 units. Essentially you have suburb neighborhoods right next to others that have 10x the density.

A developer would love to buy units in those areas and convert to duplexes but is literally impossible to do this.

So again, it's not a question of preserving our parks but a question of preserving our suburbs within the city so rich people get to live in a suburb within the city and watch their property prices skyrocket instead of allowing the city to expand and accommodate the middle class.

As an xoogler, this tells me that the voice team is now staffed again. It also tells me that the executive team is thinking about reducing headcount and focus on hangouts, but still are uncertain.

Finally, it tells me that google still has no idea how to crack the messaging space, and has so no team internally that is taking charge but a bunch of teams with different approaches, all jockeying for executive support.

Google will lose this space because it lacks focus while Facebook is owning it through focus on the messenger platform and the acquisition of whatsapp.

I can't believe the word "curated" is used here.

I don't know what elite company you work at but my closest friends at my bootcamp work at Pinterest, Credit Karma, and Pivotal Labs.

Those are solid companies. 2 years in I am finding that 75% of the companies I apply to respond within a week asking to screen me.

Name the bootcamp so people don't apply there

App academy. I assume hack reactor also has a strong js curriculum.

I actually went to app academy. Their placement rates are definitely deceptive. For example they touted a 95% placement rate on their website when my cohort went thorough but we had huge job hunt issues with our cohort. But that number never changed on the website even though we were at 80% at best and I can't believe that we didn't bring the average down. It's a great program but they are deceptive with numbers.

I did a coding bootcamp and it was a very positive experience. I transitioned from a PM to a software engineer and have been working full stack for 2 years.

Here's some advice:

* don't start the bootcamp without any practice on your own. Everyone successful at my Bootcamp had spent months / years practicing and learning to code beforehand. You won't be successful if this is your first attempt * you don't get really any job support. That will be your job * your "graduation" means nothing as an employer; it has no brand (or maybe negative) unlike a cs degree. The bootcamp gives you minimum skills to be competitive in an interview but it gives you no brand.

* My program had a strong curriculum. specifically our JavaScript curriculum was awesome and actually was a lot better than online resources. I actually understand key concepts like hoisting, this, and prototypical inheritance that a lot of people don't understand about JS. However quality of curriculum varies widely by program

* the job hunt will be brutal. You will rejected a lot and the hunt can last a long time. One of my colleagues took 9 months. if you don't have any pedigree on your resume (good school, good company, etc) many employers won't even interview you. You need a way to stand out of the crowd of bootcamp grads

Wait...there was a glass ceiling preventing Europeans from creating companies ?

I have a question for senior developers like the author. I've been a developer for 1.5 years and on this article's checklist for switching jobs I have everything except a mentor (that's probably more my fault). According to the this article I should not switch jobs. However I live in the Bay Area and there is a huge COL and also salary difference between top and "2nd tier" companies. Junior engineers at Google/FB/MSFT make 180+ while I would say market is 120+ for the Bay Area. This is a sizable income difference esp when you compound over 3-5 years. Dan Luu explains it better: http://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/

Does it make sense to stay at my job where I am learning well or should I try to switch to a larger tech company since it has a material impact on my financial well being ? I want to raise a family and hope own a home (or rent one near good schools) and I don't see that as being possible in the Bay Area without a Google salary. If I was living in a market like Texas I would stay at my current job because market salaries allow you easily have a middle class family lifestyle (my parents live there and you can easily raise a family on 90k). The Bay Area however is another beast and that 50-60K Google salary difference compounded over many years seems substantial (esp for that mortgage down payment). I don't want to move out of the Bay (my wife is tied here too). What do you guys think - are the financial reasons enough to consider switching jobs for the Bay Area ?

You are looking at a holiday shopping list which is the epitome of consumerism. You shouldn't find things that are elevating the human spirit you are looking for stuff that you would find in skymall or the home shopping network.

There are plenty of yc companies tackling interesting problems - you just wouldn't find them on a holiday list. For example:

Triplebyte - trying to take a data driven approach to make recruiting for more scientific

Gitlab - building cool open source software to host your code

Higherme - building customized education software to help kids learn math and science

Priceconomics - they have some of the most interesting content coming out of tech (opposite of huffpo/buzzfeed/etc)

Zapier - ifttt for the enterprise / lots of cool tools for companies

Mixpanel - power modern analytics for companies

I think it's unfair to judge all of yc based on a holiday shopping list which by its definition should cater to our consumerist desires. The most interesting companies shouldn't be on this list since most wouldn't have a product that is bought by consumers.

Not in the rest of America (I.e Latin America) where that would be common and even a term of endearment (gordita). It's common in South Asian cultures as well.

To me Americans are focused on being PC while not dealing with the root cause. In the case of "fat" the root problems is that Americans tend to shame & hate those who are fat. It has become a negative stigma, but instead of attacking the root cause we have removed fat as an adjective and think that by removing the hateful term (hateful by usage not by definition) we have solved the problem.

1) app academy San Francisco 2) it was challenging you get rejected a lot, you get tons of homework projects, and you end up having to practice skills that are useless for your job. I am dreading when I have to do the next job hunt (a lot of engineers hate the process). On the plus side most companies will want to interview you because of your background. 3) I am doing full stack web dev. Started mostly on the front end moving more towards the back. I just got moved to a search team. 4) Mostly not. I feel capable of doing web dev, mobile, and possibly embedded stuff. I do see myself able to get into machine learning within 4 years but that's because of my stem and math background. It is true though that by being a web dev many large companies will let you work on a team with machine learning guys so you can hustle your way in. Just don't think a bootcamp will give you the knowledge. 5) I like building things. I don't care that most of the things I build are crud apps, I have so much pride in being able to see something I built in the real world. 6) I feel lost and dumb a lot of the times. I realize now this feeling will never go away as an engineer - it's a part of the job. 7) I don't enjoy programming as much over the weekends. Before being an engineer I used to work on small coding projects on the weekend and loved it. Now that's it's my job I look forward to doing other stuff. It's kinda like how some NBA players probably don't want to play basketball in the offseason even if they love basketball. 8) I plan to move past web dev and go into something like computer vision or embedded systems. This will take several years but I think I can do it because I have a strong math background.

FYI I agree with many of the commenters that your reasons for doing a bootcamp seem a bit misguided. I did one because I'm genuinely excited by building things. I feel like I could be building boring crud apps for the next 5 years and I'd still be happy. If you don't feel that I would reconsider.

I'm going to disagree with the bootcamp grads don't do interesting work. My company employees a couple bootcamp grads including myself. All of them work on what are considered the most critical teams in our company. I work on search, which has some of the best engineers in our company. I will be working on elastic search, building our first angular 2 app, and I might even get a little exposure to machine learning / nlp.

I also extremely disagree with the do a bootcamp and then go back to a pm. You will have wasted a lot of money and will definitely not absorb much. We have bootcamp grads who have done that and they forget everything they learned. You need at least a year of professional experience to really get any meaningful knowledge. Not recommended.

Sounds like we are of similar backgrounds. I was a well paid PM, I've worked at a top tech company, and I had strategy consulting experience before that.

I quit my job went into a bootcamp and have been a software developer for a year plus. I've been pretty happy with the decision. My reasons were completely different though and were more about understanding what I was good at and passionate about.

I think I can help. Ask me anything.

They are liable in the sense that they report to a board chosen by their investors. So if I bought or invested in company XYZ at a valuation that assumed a lot of growth and company XYZ suddenly stopped pursuing that growth I would probably vote out current management. So yes most companies are beholden to investors; don't raise money if you don't want a new boss.

I don't think it's gullible for a user to proceed when they see a site missing an image, I think it's gullible that an engineer expects that the user would notice without any actual evidence. seems like a cardinal sin of engineering - don't assume your users will behave a certain way.

Yeah, but are you under rent control ?

Obesity is not the issue causing this. India has an almost billion person population with a 15% obesity rate with 0 medals while the US has a 33% obesity rate with 80 medals and a third of the population.

Funding and culture are the biggest issues. The only sport Indians care about and that you can financially support yourself professionally is in cricket. Unsurprisingly India is quite good at cricket and would def. have some medals if it was an Olympic sport.

The truth is that indian has millions of potential athletes who never pursue their passion because they are pressured by parents to focus on academics and other areas. There is no culture glorifying athletes. The few who do end up being athletes play cricket.

Google is one the few employers that where if you perform well you can get to a 250k+ comp within 5 years. The pay difference between Google and most other companies is quite big after a couple years.

There are obviously other options but Google is one of the few employers where you can say "well if i hit expectations I will be making 250k".

Unfortunately the economics don't really work out for those in the Bay Area.

I have to respectfully disagree. While this may be true for top recruiters, the SNR is very low in this field - a large majority of recruited are not helpful. Specifically I'm speaking on the hiring side of two companies. In one, we had decided to work with one recruiter who we had a good relationship with and they knew our salary requirements, needs etc. However, on a weekly basis we would get 10-12 unsolicited emails from recruiters who we didn't want to work with introducing candidates.

So from a candidates pov, it's very hard to see if the recruiter even has a relationship with the companies they are passing to. If you have a way to ascertain a good recruiter from a bad (maybe through personal recommendations) then sure go ahead. But I don't think it's useful to use cold call emails.

As another datapoint, I've had several friends go through the job hunt where we each applied to 20+ companies. All of us independently stopped using recruiters when we saw that it was more efficient to work directly with companies.

This is my experience as a junior dev. Ymmv with other roles but I find that the SNR is too low to get any benefit from recruiters.

I attended a bootcamp 1.5 years ago and have been working as a full stack dev for almost a year. My firm has hired a few bootcamp grads who have all done well.

However, I would only recommend HackReactor and App Academy in San Francisco as those are the bootcamps I've seen grads consistently do well in.

I find that the placement stats are a bit bs at bootcamps since they are unaudited but I have a strong confidence based on my network that both Hack Reactor and App Academy place 75% of their grads within 6 months into 6 figure jobs.

Happy to answer any questions.