throwthisawayt

Fair point !

I work in health tech and I genuinely believe that this is an endemic problem that can’t be solved by a startup. It is a social issue approaching a health crisis and we need to have our policy, educator, and parents addressing this. While private industry can help, the ultimate responsibility lies with our democracy.

Why can’t it be low willpower along with availability of instant cheap calorically rich unsatiating food? In the past even if you had low will power you didn’t have access to cheap 2000+ simple carb / sugar meals. Now we do.

Many cfo actually have the biz dev unit under them. Google and my current company both have the biz dev unit under the CFO. I also worked for CFO at a mobile telecom and he was actually a key executive in charge of the 3g expansion. The role is actually much more than accounting.

Did it seem to anyone else that sticking to Python would have been way easier? It didn’t seem like any of the performance gains were through Golang.

Ok maybe I should clarify that I’m originally from Texas and work in sf so I have some pretty direct experience and know that there is a big economic difference and the salary differential is not that small.

I completely agree that there is way more to life than economics, but for the young single engineer the business case for Bay Area (and even more Seattle) is very compelling.

To put it in perspective, when I compare myself to a friend with similar skills my net worth is already 2x greater.

I went to a bootcamp and myself along with all of my closest friends at the bootcamp hit that 130K number in SF on total REAL comp.

Ok, your salary estimates for SF are completely off.

Let me level set by saying I went to a bootcamp and have two years experience. I make 165K (25% higher than 130) and my 3 close bootcamp colleagues all make around the same. I don’t work for some hot company like Google - 95% of people reading this haven’t heard of us. And just to be clear this is all liquid compensation (cash, bonus, and public stock equity).

So yes for me and my closest friends with comparable experience SF is by far the best option economically.

Note as others have mentioned; I don’t think that will be the case when I start a family.

No where in the article do they mention how they factor in cost of living into the comparison. As other commenters have pointed out, most studies naively make a linear adjustment; i.e. if cost of living is 2x you need 2x the salary. This makes no sense. Say your cost of living is 30k and your salary is 100k in one city. In a 2nd City your cost of living is 60k and 180k. A rational economic decision would be to live in City 2 since it maximizes your savings. The linear adjustment based on cost of living only make sense if a person is saving 0% of their salary.

The other issue is I don’t buy the 110k vs 130k difference in Austin. They are not considering total comp in which case the delta is way bigger.

Finally, Hired is mostly used by startups and low to medium paying employers. There is a huger salary difference at large tech firms between SF and other cities.

What this study is really saying is “if you want to work at medium size companies, don’t earn anything beyond a salary, and spend all of your salary San Francisco is not worth it”.

The fine is for the stats that were on places like their website. They didn't define the stats clearly on their site.

You should wait till they cross the intersection instead of timing your cross with the pedestrian. You need to yield to the pedestrian as soon as they enter the cross walk - that's the law and what all road traffic is required to follow.

I think people forget that vc backed startups are profit and greed driven (like all free enterprises). We all like to drink the cool aid and think that a startup's purpose is societal impact but really they are engineered to make $$$.

As such, it makes sense that people pour millions of dollars to target the 1%. They've got a shitload of more money than the rest of the country. Seriously, if you've got an product that every rich person wants but that no other person cares about, you will have vcs knocking on your door. We need to think of vcs as building cash machines, not as the money behind "changing the world". Yes occasionally vcs fund companies like Google that have broader impact but that's not their primary aim.

If we want more people building ventures that impact society we need to either * change the funding model * build bootstrap ventures * build non profit ventures * ask the government to step in (a socialist approach)

A good example are institutions like the Gates foundation and WHO eradicating polio in the last few years. Yeah it's not sexy but organizations like that are making real societal impact.

This is not how most large companies I've worked with operate. Large IT decisions are driven top down, not organically through the engineering front line. The CTO, CIO, etc. work with vendors that market to them. It's the way organizations like Salesforce, Workday, Cisco, and Concur operate. The consumer/developer first organizations like Dropbox, Twilio, and Stripe can only get to a certain stage before they need to target the big fish. It's this huge cultural shift (focusing on making something users want vs figuring out how to sell to behometh organizations) that will make or break these companies.

If they figure it out, they will own their markets because frankly their products are better since they were user first.

I think it's important part of building a company - recognizing that the heart and soul that led you to say $100M sales can completely differnent from what leads you to $1B. It's almost like a mini innovators dilemma for startups.

My partner is a doctor who works at one the top medical systems in America. The EHR system she works is atrocious. Last time she asked me to look at it to help figure out how to print an image and I stared at this 90s era windows app that looked like the pied piper interface. I gave up after 15 minutes and we ended up screenshoting the image. Taleo felt like it had a better UX than it.

I can't believe we let some of best doctors in the country waste hours each day fighting with terrible software instead of treating patients. My partner spends more time trying to figure out the EHR than she does treating patients.

It might "feel" sketchier but Oakland's crime rate in some of its nicest areas is on par without SFs rougher areas. Oakland is awesome but the per capita crime (even in areas like Lake Merritt) is not nice.

They probably use delivery services for groceries or don't cook. The point of blue apron was it was an easy way for people intimidated by cooking to start doing it.

I'm really surprised about the physician comment. My gf works in the largest medical system in the Bay Area and her "perks" (discounted cafeteria food) are drastically below what I've had at any company in the tech industry for the last decade. They don't even pay for flights for residency or fellowship interviews so doctors have to pay thousands during these times while they are huge debt. She actually has to rotate between hospitals and they don't even subsidize her parking. They don't even support pregnancy for fellows, you have to take state disability.

Which hospital / medical systems give great perks to doctors ?

I finished AppAcademy about 2.5 years ago. It took me about 4 months to find a job and I've been working as a full stack engineer since. I mostly work in Java & Typescript (Angular) now.

My trajectory has been pretty solid - we had several people join when I started and I've been at the top of my cohort. I've been promoted and given a raise while my company went through layoffs and perform well even compared to the CS grads from Stanford & Berkeley who joined at the same time.

I expect to be promoted to the senior title in 1-2 years, but I will probably job hop somewhere else in the next year so I can get exposed to tougher cs areas (distributed systems, scaling, information retrieval, etc)

My close friends at the bootcamp work at companies like Pivotal Labs, Pinterest, Yammer, etc. it's definitely a biased sample but I've seen many people do well. Many fail as well, but that's expected.

My anecodatal experience is they don't because I had friends in South Africa, DRC, and Nigeria who came from more privileged middle class backgrounds and still struggled due to a lack of education. They were never recruited by tech firms due to the issues the author faced. One asked me to refer them into some of the firms here but I was unable to get them in.

I don't know if it would have been cheaper to recruit them but I do know they had no chance here in America. They have hustled their way to a living but have worked 10x harder than me because I have an American citizenship and degree.

Can you talk about engineering benefits for working on this team besides "you will get to network with hot startups and stuff"? Maybe a bit more color on the technical challenges / culture ?

As a Bengali, I was hoping for more detail and context here.

If you are on a developer salary this makes no sense

The Bay Area is the most expensive place in the US for no real reason except for regulation.

It's kinda like everyone cheering for Uber and Lyft because medallion rules in SF prevented ever having enough cabs.

There's no real reason and that's the problem.

Also maybe they had those kids in the 1990s when things were a bit more affordable ? The Bay Area wasn't always the most expensive place in the US

Where did you go?

Are you a minority race and if so would you say that Utah is friendly to non-whites ?

I assume this is a senior only position ?

On a slight tangent, anyone else really annoyed by the articles which seem to be "company profiles" but really are PR puff pieces. They masquered as real journalism but they feel like content spoon fed by the company's PR manager. They tend to be at publications like Fast company, Techcrunch, and business insider. Anyone have a way to filter out puff pieces? I have been thinking about building an algorithm since these pieces now filter into more reputable sources like WSJ and Nytimes too.

How much product management experience do you have ? What type of companies have you had PM experience at? What were you doing before product ?

It's very hard to get people to diagnose the problem online but maybe if you give more details we can help you out. Otherwise reach out to a trusted colleague.

This sounds like a really interesting problem to work on. Are you hiring anyone for this team (esp those new to search)?

What's the regulation that allows you to do that ? From what I understood, you aren't legally allowed to reduce the number of units that a property is zoned for.