wwalser

> this article seems to imply the only value of side projects is for future employers

It doesn't imply that. When writing about anything, explaining all the things that you're _not_ talking about is a great way to never get to the point.

Determining that the post is about side projects aimed at landing a job is a task left to the reader. If the title didn't get you there, the second sentence is here to help: "For the distinct purpose of getting a job in tech, side projects are either a great use of your time or a great waste of your time."

"Distinct" as in specific — "The following may not apply if you're objective is not specifically to getting a job in the tech industry."

If you'd like to talk about other great uses of side projects, I think that's a completely reasonable discussion to have. Simi-related threads in top-level comments are common: "I know it's a little different form what the article is talking about, but I'd like to talk about…"

That's a good question but one that I'm not 100% confident that I'm qualified to answer.

If you have the flexibility it sounds like Austin is your best bet for a close-but-high-paying jobs. It's a beautiful city as well, I love Austin. Would move there in a second. Remote work is possible but getting those positions is much more plagued with the whole catch-22 of needing previous experience in order to gain experience.

Obviously brush up on algorithms and data structures prior to interviews. Whether you think it's BS or not, that's just the best approximation of ability that most companies can manage to come up with.

You mentioned that some of your jobs had been paid hourly. My advice is to try to get a reasonable salaried position ($65k+/year) at a tech company and hold that down for ~2 years and ratchet your way up to companies that pay better. If you start that low it's not unreasonable to request 15% raises each year for several years. If you can hold a position at around that range for 1.5-3 years, changing companies should net you a 25% raise.

I've had co-workers with fairly scatter-shot resumes. It's a small red flag in interviews but I've never seen someone dropped from an interview because of sporadic work history. I've seen people dropped for lying about their work history.

I was a bit brief on tactics. Yes. Don't just ask for a referral.

Tactics:

Understand that they are there to recruit. This should give you confidence. This isn't some weird game, you're not manipulating or tricking them. They are here for these conversations. Some soft-skill tactics don't work for everyone. If some/none of the below materializes or isn't your thing, it's alway okay to ask. "Are you doing any recruiting while in town? I'm interested in talking to someone at NeatCo."

If you can speak at the conference, that is preferable. If not, walking up and saying hi will work but it should involve you asking a well-informed question about the thing they are speaking about. Spend an hour before the conference researching their topic and come with something in mind: What lead company X to create Y? If someone were motivated, could they create ${interesting but not crazy new feature/thing} using Y?

If you don't have a question, just talk about the content of the talk. Tell them what you thought.

The person speaking on behalf of NeatCo will often bring another person with them. The speaker is the domain expert, the other person will often be someone capable of hiring. If they bring a +1, talk to that person as well.

The goal of your chat is to get any of: dinner invite, next-day coffee, straight up ad-hoc interview.

I'm in Sydney in Feb. If that's a location that works for you I could chat or get coffee.

I'd take the day off for the prospect of $100k+ raise.

Good call. I can't.

I feel unreasonably lucky and make this claim to myself in an effort to engender urgency and grace — I have what many want and few have and it is fleeting.

The other two shortage that I was aware of during my primary education seem to have been filled at this point. I was told regularly that the best paths toward success was to study law or accounting. At the time law firms were experiencing a lack of supply similar to the current state of software that has since been filled. You can still make great money but you're going to need crazy hours + prestigious education or unreasonable amounts of proof-of-awesome. Similarly, after SOX there was an immense need for accountants but that demand was filled rapidly when higher ed was successful in pushing huge numbers of degrees out the door.

Education in practical skills for software development has been slower to fill demand. I see three reasons, I'm sure there are many more: Software doesn't have the same social prestige as law or accounting — the first dot-com crash scared people — demand has grown more quickly than any other field.

In every single thread where someone publicly discloses rates like this the comments are flooded with people who use all kinds of FUD to explain why what they've just read must be untrue.

It's strange.

> Are these numbers real?

Yes. I'm not the author, but they don't appear at all unusual to me. SF's developer market is nearly as screwed up as it's housing market (except not really, the housing market is truly something else).

> Is this "normal"?

No. Well… yes and no. These numbers are real and you can get offers like that too. But this type of pay isn't "normal" in the sense of historical norms. Tech isn't normal right now. We have a shortage on one side of the market. It will be relatively short lived. That doesn't mean you should ignore you're ability to make unreasonably amounts of money for the next 10 years. If you're qualified to fill the positions that people are over-paying for, you should totally take that money.

> But this person had "special" access because of ${referral/previous company/magic}!

Yes. This person did have "special" access. But being granted that access is literally as easy as talking to someone who works for the company that you'd like to work for. Are they attending a conference? Walk up to them. It's really that easy. I know. I've done it.

> No really, this person got lucky because they worked for a unicorn before applying to these companies. They got lucky by picking a place that happened to turn into a rocket ship.

Little secret, you don't have to work at a unicorn _before_ applying to a unicorn. There's a phase after everyone knows it's a rocket ship where the company is still hiring like a madhouse. You can join during that phase and still get credit for "picking" a unicorn. You'll likely get a very small piece of an over-saturated employee pool so the equity won't make you rich, but it does allow you the pick of the litter amongst other top tier firms, App/Goo/Ama/book/Soft, which all pay along the lines of what the author posted.

> I have no desire to live in SF.

Yeah, SF is awful, don't move there. You can get close to these numbers in some cities that have a much better standard of living. NY, LA, Austin (the numbers are close but come down in that order).

Feel free to ask any questions about getting a job in a company like this if you'd like. I find it mystifying that people consider it some kind of secret so I'm down for sharing w/e people want to know (within some personal boundaries). I wouldn't say that it's easy to get a job like this, but the information isn't hidden. In my experience it's right in front of people and they either ignore it or choose different paths because they prefer the lifestyle that they have outside of these major US hubs.

The entry fee for a referral is striking up a single conversation at a conference. If someone from a big tech company is speaking at a conference, the fact that they are speaking isn't the primary reason for being present. They are there to recruit.

If you have the flexibility, most of the companies on this list recruit regularly in Australia for roles in the US. You may need to fly state-side of an on-site but the initial round can be done in Melbourne or Sydney.

Tech companies love E3 visas.

> outrage

Someone kindly shared an opinion and gave their reason for having that opinion. Outrage is a different thing.

I think this looks super interesting. Great job shipping. I too would like to see more examples of the errors that it can catch in the documentation.

Ignore the troll posts, they happen every time a hacker posts news about a project they've launched on Hacker News.

Do you mean that you actually don't believe it? As in, "I think that's a false statement"? Or do you mean that you're jokingly in "a state of disbelief", as in… surprised or taken aback?

I have friends in low cost areas that make around what you're describing. They don't continue doing that because of willful disbelief, they understand that they could move and make 2.5x their current income. They just like the lifestyle. Which, totally makes sense to me. It's an amazing lifestyle.

I'm not in this guy's head but, it's not difficult to come up with a charitable interpretation from his perspective. Let me be clear, I'm not saying that this is what I believe. I'm saying that based on the rest of his writing, this _one potential_ lense through which he may have constructed this sentence.

> Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate

> decreasing the false negative rate

(Again! This is from his POV): The false positive rate has not gone up. The diverse candidates are, in fact, qualified and should have their jobs. They are excellent. I am going out of my way to make sure no one interprets this deluge of text as me questioning my peers ability; something that I will fail at in spectacular fashion.

> lower the bar

(His POV don't pin this on me): However, diverse candidates may now have a lower bar than non-diverse candidates.

How is it possible that some candidates have both a "lower bar" and yet are still qualified?

> Hiring practices

(still his POV folks): Because for diverse candidates we have different hiring practices. Practices which are tailored to diverse candidates. It's not a lower bar, it's a different bar. A bar specifically designed to help us discover the best side of these diverse candidates.

(Speaking for myself now): I think the author is saying that going out of your way to create specific affordances for _some_ and not for _all_ is discriminatory. I _don't_ think he's a horrible monster for thinking this. I _do_ think that this way of thinking fails to acknowledge the fact that an organization that is already steeped to the brim with a specific group of people is likely to _already_ have built in affordance for that group.

He fucked up. Hard. Like so hard that I find it kind of funny (wtf was he thinking?). I, personally, don't think that the ideas that he espoused merit firing, I think they merit careful correction wherein the person doing the correcting attempts to read his meaning charitably, carefully, truthfully and fully. I feel that most of the public responses have failed in this regard. Most of what I've seen start with "he's basically wrote: {$straw_man}". Some are pandering to an audience, some are more interested in winning than in being right, but some people who retort in this way just have limited time and patience. I can understand why the straw man is appealing. I've just written three paragraphs about a single sentence, who has time for this shit?

Here's the thing though, careful correction, truth, charity—that's my "ideal world" case for him. The simple matter of fact is that Google is not the ideal world, they have no incentive to apply my ideal to him. He's a professional and the fuck up alone (separated form the ideas) represents enough potential harm to Google that he had no hope of keeping his job. Maybe one of his friends can give him the careful walk through of how his ideas are flawed. Hell, maybe a good friend will do that and he'll decide that he was right all along.

Edit: After further reading I realized I had made a mistake when I (speaking from his POV) said: "it's not a lower bar, it's a different bar". He did actually use the words "lower the bar", something I failed to fully account for. One could, with liberal amounts of charity, imagine that he meant that the bar was lower but still sufficient? We're getting into logical acrobatics. That said, logical acrobatics are part of the point. The goal in reading someone whose world view is different to your own is to better understand their logic. To imagine how, within their world view, their ideas are consistent. We could be reading the words of a monster who doesn't care about logic. Or we could, and I think this is much more common, be reading the words of someone with flaws and ignorances and prejudices. Someone not so unlike ourselves.

I'm not sure if you're being facetious? If you are, I apologize as it's gone over my head. I don't have a dog in the Google controversy. But I will put my hand up briefly and say that you've you just said, doesn't follow for me.

From your quote:

> Our interview process has put too much weight on brainteaser-type problems and I think we should scale that back.

I would not infer that you meant: The implication is that people who have been hired because they scored high on brainteaser problems are not, on average, going to be as qualified to do the actual job because the metric that we used to measure them (brainteaser problems) is not relevant to the job.

The most likely case is that someone saying the above quote would be a co-worker of mine. Someone I'm cooperating with in a common endeavor. I would assume they are trying to help us achieve our goals more readily. I would have heard something like: We're turning down highly qualified candidates for software engineering roles because of their failure to answer non-software-engineering questions. Is there any evidence that these non-software-engineering questions contribute meaningfully to our assessment of candidates? If not, we should drop the questions. Turning down qualified candidates makes it harder for to hire the great people that coming through our pipeline.

To conclude that suggesting any changes to an interview process is an implicit indication that the people currently employed by a company were unqualified means that no improvements could ever be made.

This is entirely fair. I think when someone's take differs from our own, it's easy to assume that it took effort for them to get there. You're right though. It was probably just what jumped into their mind.

When I do have a negative interpretation of someone's words, and I'm sure I'm less good at this than I like to imagine myself, I like to think that I at least try to imagine how they would have liked me to interpret those words. This sounds kind of, moral platitude-ish. I don't mean it in that way. Attempting to interpret someone charitably is a self defense. It's for me. I need to think this way to keep myself settled. If I don't, I end up angry at everything.

I think you're right and I appreciate the insight. Thanks.

Why would someone reading this assume that they will do something illegal? Why is that the conclusion that _anyone_ jumps to?

Considered, if possible, that if money isn't out by the deadline that they will do… some other legal and responsible thing with the money. Hand it over the the governing jurisdiction as "unclaimed property"? More pro-actively reach out to people?

Nothing in this statement says they are going to do something illegal. There is no "…or we'll keep it". That line isn't in there. Your mind had to fabricate it.

I don't understand the desire to actively interpret things in the worst possible way. When I read stuff like this my entire emotional reaction is "…okay". My mental model for the state of the world has been mutated, fine. Some people seem to read stuff and want to fight with whoever wrote it. It's a press release. It was a mildly important three hours of two people's day. They do not have time to deal with people who set out to misinterpret their intentions. How does anyone have time for this? Why am I still typing!

This is content marketing for ceros.com. Their job was to build a compelling experience so that other people telling stories online want to use Ceros.

Regulatory capture.

Is that the right phrase?

Thanks! Sounds pretty solid. I may check it out if my investment side gets a little more complex.

I agree that the GP missed the criticism, but…

That's not how margin trading works. It is a loan, but it's collateralized against your existing holdings. Most institutions will only loan you a percentage of your existing holdings (somewhere between 30% and 50%). Additionally, if the market value of your existing holdings dips such that the total loan amount is greater than the maximum percentage loan, those assets can (in most cases) be immediately sold to pay back the loan. This is called a "margin call".

To use your example, if you were using margin from an institution that allows for a 50% rate, in order to get that $10k loan, you'd have to already have $20k available in a relatively liquid assets (stocks, bonds, ETFs, mutual funds). If the value of your holdings ever dipped such that you held less than $20k, thus making your loan greater than the institutions 50% limit, some of those assets would be sold to pay down the loan.

There are additional safety measures built into margin accounts by brokers that offer them such as ensuring that the collateral assets aren't 100% allocated a single risk prone stock for example. Margin is a very well understood and safe business model for many brokers.

My understanding of the criticism of the GGP is not that Robinhood's business model is unsafe for Robinhood, it's that it's unsafe for their target market (casual stock traders). The idea is that casual trading is, for most of the population, gambling. Depending on your moral stance on gambling, using "free trades" as a marketing funnel for loans designed to be used for gambling falls somewhere between grey and repugnant.

I've been retargeted by Personal Capital on FB for several months now. Are you recommending the "free financial tools" from Personal Capital? I sort of assumed the "free" was just there to entice you into paying for their wealth management services which look like every other robo but with higher fees.

Are the tools actually good? Several low-cost robos (Wealthfront and Betterment) now have fairly good retirement planning interfaces which take your outside accounts into consideration and Mint has investment tracking now as well.

> How is that possible?

I paid just shy of $3k for tax prep last year. The package of information that I sent to the IRS was more than 50 pages of documentation. I joke with friends that you'd think I was an international oil baron but in my mind I'm a pretty regular person.

Judging from Patio11's writing I would guess that his situation is similar to mine (though he seems more confident in grocking IRS rules and doing his own accounting and taxation than me). Here are a few of the complicating factors that make me want to pay to make the problem go away instead of reading IRS documentation for literal weeks to learn how to do it properly:

* Income in two countries.

* Tax treaty between those two countries.

* RSUs from two companies.

* Options from one company.

* Difference between what stock events are taxable in the two countries.

* 401k and similar account in other country.

* Vanguard ETFs with some sells for loss harvesting purposes.

* Running a company into which I've put some personal cash.

I did my taxes myself using Turbo Tax for around $60/year for years. Until suddenly I didn't and started paying what seems like a lot of money. Once you leave W-2 land, things get complicated more quickly that seems reasonable.

You have to change your destination in the app which recalculates a new fare.

An alternative title for the post could be "I'm going to compete with two of the most dominant tech companies in the world and blog about it."

I've heard that Slack isn't really interested in supporting paid Slack communities in a meaningful way (all of the money is in enterprise chat). So I could see a company that's truly focused winning that battle. Facebook on the other hand seems pretty invested in private groups.

Naturally, I wish John the best of luck. Building a company is hard in and of itself, he's choosing to take on a particularly difficult version of that challenge. I hope he doesn't plan to bootstrap a community chat application.

For software engineers, I haven't seen a company which doesn't offer all of those things. I guess it depends on one's definition of "normal", "plenty" and "certain degree".

Yeah, okay. If A) that's true and B) Users paid a different amount than what Uber indicates to drivers was paid, it seems like drivers have an excellent case against Uber.

In which case we'll see Uber, a company that seems set on self-destruction at this point, pay a moderate settlement that's unlikely to be material compared to their funding.

I've used Uber in NY, CA, and FL in the past 6 months. Every time I've done so I was shown exactly the price that I would pay up front. It's a static price. I pay that amount to go from X to Y, regardless of minutes, miles or extraordinary circumstances.

I have no idea what the driver's compensation is based on but it isn't transparently obvious to me that it would be fraudulent for Uber to offer me a static fare that, over the course of the ride, turns out to be different to the value of that ride to the driver.

Imagine: When I am offered a fare based on expected traffic that doesn't materialize, the miles+minutes value to the driver is well under what I paid. Other times, when I hit unexpected traffic, I pay Uber less than they pay the driver because of the extra minutes.

I'm not saying "this wasn't fraud". I'm saying, "I can imagine a pricing and reward scheme by which it's not." If at some point Uber said to drivers "We take an x% cut of the fare.", then yes, it seems clear that drivers would be defrauded by the scheme. Maybe we'll get to find out :).

edit: Other comments have links indicating that my "x% of fare" idea may, in fact, be in Uber's contract with drivers.

This is not true anymore. It was at one point but now it's a static fare to take a person from x to y. That static fare is based on the route generated by Uber at the time that the trip is requested. Naturally, the static price is based on a minutes and miles estimation but it doesn't change in cases of unexpected delays or altered routes. The driver does maintain their ability to choose a different route, but it won't alter the cost to the rider or the driver's compensation. Passengers are shown the exact amount that a ride will cost at the time that they book.

I recently took a ride in SF where I asked the driver if we could stock for fast food along the way (I had just had a 6 hour flight and I can't eat on planes for fear of motion sickness). He said that a few months back he would have said yes but now that Uber has an upfront ride cost he wouldn't make any money while were were sitting in the driver through line. I had to eat so I offered $15 on top of the fare, great results, would ride again.

edit: It occurs to me that while users are offered a static fare, drivers could still be paid based on miles and minutes. That's obviously not how the driver in my example understood his compensation but it _could_ be the case.

> They don't have any fiduciary duty to give the customer the "best rate."

This, to me, is the critical point from the rider side.

If drivers were ever told something along the lines of "We, Uber, take an x% cut of the fare" then I can see a court deciding that drivers were defrauded by Uber when they misrepresented what the user paid.

> 2) It tells the driver that it will pay them $Z to drive from A -> B and the driver agrees to it.

I don't disagree with the overall sentiment that this seems like a non-issue.

However, the driver doesn't see the route, price, then agree to it. They see a pickup point of a passenger and agree to that alone. My understanding is that this is all the information they have when agreeing to a ride. It's a feature to prevent drivers being picky about passengers based on their trip value. It's one of the more important features to me. I've lived in two cities where cab drivers ask where you're going before letting you into the car for exactly this reason. In both cities it is both illegal and common practice.

The most charitable form of this same argument, assuming I've got my facts straight, seems to be: You've driven for Uber for >=1 ride and have a grasp on the reward structure and have chosen to continue doing the job in exchange for said reward structure.