who_is_firing

We actually have no idea. It is entirely possible but its unclear at this point:

"To our knowledge, there are no relevant study in humans on carcinogenic effects from pure nicotine including products, such as NRT and e-cigarettes." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4553893/

I think my overall argument was that we have barely studied studied e-cigarettes so OP's assertion "Vaping has been pretty well studied (except for the flavorings" is false.

You are correct that it's entirely possible that e-cigarettes are not in the same magnitude of impact as tobacco. However, it's also possible it may be just as bad. The research is too early stage. What I do know (anecdotally), is that most of the researchers in the field have a gut feeling that it is a large issue. Specifically, early findings are showing the product has convinced an entire new generation of teens that vaping is cool even while they believe smoking is gross. It is reseting the gains made in the 80s and 90s on reducing teen addiction to smoking. There is also research to indicate it has a strong impact on health. Probably not as strong as tobacco, but if you are more likely to use it as a teen because you perceive it as healthy and cool, the net effect on public health is just as bad. i.e. the individual effect might be less, but the overall net effect on society is more since its a more compelling product (for young people).

We are probably 5-10 years from knowing with solid peer reviewed research of knowing whether vaping is more like eating a few donuts a day or whether it's closer to smoking a pack a day.

Doing a review of the current research isn't valuable for the reasons I outlined: overall research is immutare so an overall review isn't going to be that insightful right now.

Here's an example of a gaping gap in research on e-cigs: "To our knowledge, there are no relevant study in humans on carcinogenic effects from pure nicotine including products, such as NRT and e-cigarettes." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4553893/

It's really hard to summarize a body of research if there's barely any research been done in an area.

This is incorrect. E cigarettes are still in a very early stage of research. My partner works at one of the leading institutes in tobacco research and they are literally just kicking off most of their research on e-cigs. Most of the researchers (including one of the world experts on tobacco research) has a gut feeling that the health effects will be in the same magnitude as cigarettes. Early research confirms this, but again it's still a gut opinion. Literally the first major study on e-cigs affect on heart disease was released last year (and it does not look good): https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190307103111.h...

I don't believe any e-cigarette research institute would agree with either of the claims that: 1) vaping is well studied. It is about 10-20 years from being well studied as most of the major research institutes are just starting (or are in grant application stage). 2) vaping is less harmful than the health effects of a high sugar diet (not to discount that a high sugar is very bad)

I think your job is to put money in companies with low valuations that EXIT with high valuations. Your investors won't give a crap if you do a good job of finding unicorns that eventually fissle out.

I think the basics of it (i.e. recognizing n vs n^2 vs exponential) is important for back end developers. After a few years of doing back end I've definitely had to have awareness in how I design things like my loops to optimize.

It's not a biggie for most companies, but you should have a general awareness. Unlike the author of the article, though, I do believe you can learn this on the job. Also, you don't have to necessarily know the big 0 notation, it's a good idea to write a load test which will give you a more relevant stat anyways. But sometimes its good to recognize "Oh I don't need a 2nd inner loop that will change this to O(n^2)".

I am a bootcamp grad with several years of experience now. I agree with the article that the two of the weakest areas for bootcamp grads are data structures and algorithms.

However, my advice would be to interview at places that have focus less on these areas instead of taking coursework. At the end of the day if you are bootcamp grad you are probably not in the financial situation to take extra coursework. It's better to lower your standards a bit to get your first job and then pick up these skills on the job.

You will still have to grind out algorithm prep by using sites like Leetcode and Cracking the Coding Interview, but it's probably a better idea to focus on companies that focus less on this area.

I don't think this is true; I come from a caste that is known for being scholars and hence had much better knowledge of imperialist languages (English, French, Urdu, etc.) than Brahmins since they traditional study Sanskrit and the Vedas. This allowed our caste to penetrate court & minister positions over the last millenium and surpass the wealth and power of the Brahmin community.

Even today our community is one of the strongest middle class communities in our region. This might not have happened in other regions, but at least in our region knowledge of languages help the community get embedded in the aristocracy and acquire wealth for generations.

Knowledge is power.

Thanks for answering the previous person's questions; your answers were very helpful. Can you talk about how long it takes most people to reach staff level (or how long it took you)?

At what level do most engineers plateau at Google (meaning most people are unable to go past it)?

This kind of behavior is why I recently steered a friend to a Roku. With any of the streaming devices (Amazon, Google, Apple) you risk losing out due to dueling between the major tech companies.. The major players tend to leave Roku alone since it's a 3rd party service that doesn't compete with them.

So I'm throwing my bet towards Roku since it's the only device that can survive a pissing match between all the tech companies.

If people cared about affordable housing, why are there protests again projects which are 100% affordable housing? You can see the hypocrisy here:

https://sf.curbed.com/2016/10/6/13189882/1296-shotwell-affor...

Even 100% affordable housing gets objected to: https://sf.curbed.com/2016/10/6/13189882/1296-shotwell-affor...

To be honest, people like to extol the virtues of Bay Area liberalism, but to me the housing policy in the Bay is one of the most systematic (and regulated) form of prejudice. Cities like SF are losing their minorities, their middle class, all to fatten the paycheck of existing landowners. Almost the entire black population has emptied out of SF. It's one of the most pervasive form of class discrimination I've seen.

Avoid saying the words "changing the world" or any other bullshit buzzword that deceptively gives your work a nobler, tone than it deserves. Trust me, if you are changing the world, people will figure it out from what you are doing; you don't need to mention that specifically.

I find this to be very helpful. Any chance you can keep historical records so we can see trends?

Yes agreed. dang can we get a comment at the top of the "Who is hiring thread?" to please avoid these kind of comments?

cool model! is the salary half of a normal job or less than that?

A startup, let's say company A, I used to work at did something very similar. I told the CEO that I knew another startup was shutting down, let's call it company B.

Company A decided to something really smart: they organized an information session just for Company B engineers. I sent over the invite and 10+ engineers from Company B joined our after work event. We had free food and drink (important) and an overview of our company; our CEO asked our team to stay over afterwards to socialize and answer questions. They also had an open invite to any engineer to come onsite to interview the next week. We basically structured it like an on campus recruiting process. The event cost us maybe $300 and we ended up getting 4 of their engineers, all of whom who stayed for over 3 years.

Company A actually had huge issues, but that was the smartest thing I saw them do while there.

This is not a special purpose account. You can see that I've used it to comment on many threads.

Most discussions are best as one-offs and there isn't much substance in the Who's is Hiring threads either.

Maybe the team should think of a small UI change to distinguish official threads from non official ones instead of restricting a community from entering certain helpful meta data on a free form text field.

It's sad that we are losing the monthly tag from dang. Also I tried making this a monthly thing but then one of my aliases got shadow banned. So we will probably have to organically submit each time.

I'm pretty confused on the location info on the 1st line. Are engineering roles in Santa Clara, San Francisco, Toronto, Sacramento, or Baltimore?

can you elaborate more?

Every HN hiring thread has someone comment on how low salaries sound for a specific country they are not from. Can we stop dis-incentivizing employers to be transparent about their salaries with negative comments?

As an FYI, I started a who is firing thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13528301

Please feel free to contribute if you know any companies involved in layoffs or want to find out who is conducting layoffs.

The following companies had layoffs receiving press in January:

* Fitbit: http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/30/14439028/fibit-layoffs-q4-...

* Medium: https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/04/medium-lays-off-50-employe...

* Microsoft: http://www.businessinsider.com/about-700-microsoft-employees...

* Oracle: http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/01/20/oracle-lays-off-450-em...

* Zesty: http://sf.eater.com/2017/1/9/14214764/zesty-layoffs-tech-foo...

* Munchery: http://fortune.com/2017/01/12/munchery-layoffs-goodbye-found...

* Boeing: http://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boeing...

* National Instruments: http://www.512tech.com/technology/national-instruments-plans...

* Walmart: http://fortune.com/2017/01/26/walmart-layoffs-ecommerce/

* Pandora: http://variety.com/2017/digital/news/pandora-layoffs-1201959...

* DoubleDutch: https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/10/events-app-maker-doubledut...

* Theranos: http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/06/technology/theranos-layoffs-...

* Verizon: http://variety.com/2017/digital/news/verizon-go90-layoffs-12...

* Parrot: https://www.recode.net/2017/1/9/14182200/parrot-drone-layoff...

I guess I would sacrifice the look of my city so that normal middle class people like teachers, policemen, firemen, artists, and minorities could live beside myself and fellow engineers and doctors.

The whole "we need to preserve the architecture of my city" is a first world problem. What comes before that is the ability for the middle and lower class to survive in the city. Cities are living dynamic entities and should be capable of change.

This is awesome. I'd like to support yimby efforts. Do you have a link where I can see how I can contribute as developer?

Yes we need to petition the large tech companies to be more supportive of remote work and invest more in their satellite offices.

Over the last 100 years, the Bay Area has created a regulatory environment which essentially has made increasing housing supply 100x more difficult than the average American city. This would be "fine" if the population of the area was constant.

"Unfortunately" the area has been a source of economic growth for the last century as well. So you need two things for high housing price growth: 1) factors that restrict housing supply from responding to the market 2) economic growth or some other factor to make people want to move to the city.

For the NIMBYs, they are ok with #1. They desire that their city stays the same, it has the same architecture, unblocked vistas, the density they are used to, the natives they know.

So the NIMBYs argue to those affected by high housing costs that #2 is the real factor, i.e. "if rich people stopped moving here we would be ok". #2 is the easier argument to make, as it casts the narrative as outsiders vs natives. #1 appeals to the existing natives since they don't want change.

We have to figure out a way to change the message to awareness of #1. The average Bay Area resident has no idea how many of our state and local laws are in place to make sure that market rents / housing prices can be as high as possible.

I have tried to start one from another alias (whoisfiring) but hacker news shadow banned me after my 2nd submission so I created this one. Unfortunately the latest thread didn't have many comments.