241–250 of 270 posts
In June 2021 I left Google after 6 years. I outlined my motivations here [1]. Long story short it's a conscious bet that time and energy are scarcer commodities for me than money. I'm not sure I'll last a full year but I think I have a few months left in me. [1] https://kayce.basqu.es/sabbatical/prologue
Please make a follow up post. I’d love to learn from your experience.
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From your post: > As luck would have it, global healthcare plans seem reasonably priced. My partner and I got covered under Aetna's MHP Exclusive plan (their most comprehensive package) for under $300 a month total (not $300 per person). As an Australian, this figure seems ridiculous, even if it were in $AUD! To give you an idea, I pay around $45 AUD/mo (but I've never had to use it because free healthcare).
I'm curious what your tax rate is. Most countries with way lower health care premiums have it offset with higher "middle class" taxes than we have in the US. This is the big issue with changing the system here, people are convinced that their taxes will go up without their premiums actually going down. This is a reasonable concern because it kind of is what happens / happened with middle of the road (arguably worst o…
It's completely to do with work from home. Everyone is fed up after what they had to deal with in 2020, and tech workers (almost 100% of them) got to work from home, many for the first time ever. After everything they've been through in 2020, it makes zero sense to willingly go back to work in an office where you put yourself at risk and have to deal with all those horrible things you had to deal with before 2020. So…
The robber barons of the industrial revolution seeded their greed DNA as the basis for industrialization - which while obviously gave great progress, but at the heaviest of costs.
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Appropriate retention based raises actually require a huge quantity of finesse and genuine ability from line managers and HR. Even if a company is willing to do so in in good faith , a rarity, a "market price" raise consumes an extraordinary amount of paperwork and HR time and effort. You take your employee, often parked with a nebulous job title and a role that has morphed entirely from the one they were hired for.…
Every employee you manage to retain in turn reduces HR work however, I imagine even if the sum isn't quite balanced (i.e it's slightly more work to retain than re-hire) then the difference is very easily offset by the massive reduction in disruption to the team in question. If HR is infact the reason why this doesn't happen then HR is hamstringing the rest of the company. The difference between companies with high re…
Yes, exactly.
The thing is you then have to hire a competent HR member to do all this. Believe it or not, the HR industry is actually even more mercenary than the software developer industry.
If you want a good HR employee, it costs money.
All in all it adds up to a "high investment, high reward", approach to hiring and retaining employees. Highly paid HR, highly paid employees, all as pre-requisites to a "good faith" market indexed pay raise.
But for many, many companies, this HR model doesn't make sense, or else management has decided not to implement it.
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I still think we are at the dawn of widespread adoption of remote work. I fully expect the pendulum to swing the other way from favoring intra-US remote work like it is now. Highly competent developers phoning it in from Peru, totally unlike the 1990s, very much seems like it'll be an extremely prominent trend in the future.
What was the 90s situation you're comparing to?
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I think maybe it has to do with isolation. For most of us, we just tolerate the job/company we are currently at. Social events, camaraderie and a sense of "we are in the same boat" causes people to continue on. Then lock-downs came and suddenly all of that is gone. You are now stuck in isolation with the thing you actually deep down dislike or resent. Previously, going to the office was like fighting in a pit, but at…
I just find this perspective to be largely BS. Have you actually worked from home and/or are you really just a CEO worried that this whole office expense you've paid for for years is/was worthless? You are correct that most people tolerate the job/company they are at, and this extends to the bullshitty "make the CEO feel important" things like social events, camaraderie, etc., which you seem to be in the minority for…
I wake up and instead of mentally preparing myself for a grueling 45-minute stop-and-go drive (no public transportation options), I can decide to go to the gym, run along the ocean, or read a book. Instead of scheduling my departure from work to avoid the dreaded traffic jam, I stop when it's time to stop and it's sooner than it was before.
I have no interest in meeting with my coworkers except once every two weeks so I can dress up and sparkle like a diamond. In part this is due to the fact that my colleagues are uninspiring people, but even if they were great people, over the past year I realized the toll that commuting was taking on me and I do not want to go back to the old times.
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Sounds like management needs to reduce friction in order to improve efficiency. There is no argument that it is more efficient to lose a successful employee who already knows your business and hire a new one who does not. A good system would be to always grant the retention raise when presented with a competing offer (without all this work you described), with a short window of time to allow for someone up the chain…
The problem here is the competing offer. By the time someone has gone through the work to obtain an offer elsewhere they have already mentally decided they are making the move. It also poisons the well a bit in terms of recruiting/interviewing as offers come late in that process so if they are being done to farm offers to present for a counter-offer that is likely also happening to your pipeline for other companies,…
Ever since I graduated I have worked in technology, SAAS (B2B) specifically I am 27 year old- Male, SAAS (B2B) specifically. I just accepted an offer to leave one of the hottest companies in the Bay (Went from 400 mil (2.5 Years ago, when I started) to 6 Billion today), I work in sales and have now been a part of 3 unicorns in the last 5 years. (All of them I started as an employee when they were small, 1 is worth 1.…
Can we get the story about how you lost 392k?
Was a very dumb move :) I actually sold out a day before my birthday at the start october... so I can start my 27's on the right foot, losses teach us and make us better :)
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You can do it fairly reliably selling calls against large equity holdings. Doesn't have to be 10% if capital base is higher.
That's not interest, it's yield enhancement. You're giving away upside potential in exchange for premium collected, and you still have downside exposure.
Giving away long tail upside in exchange for guaranteed yield is a perfectly fine method of salary replacement.
I still remember the days when people were posting on Slashdot that software engineering has no future in the US because it's all moving to India. As we know, that turned out not to be the case. Tech companies have been willing to pay literally 10x for engineers to work from their US headquarters. Now folks are again claiming that the era of remote work is upon us. Maybe that's true. But be careful what you wish for.
I’m actually from India, and since the pandemic started it’s been quite an equaliser. I work for companies in the US, and since I stay up late I can manage a lot of time zone overlap. And I get paid nearly (not 100%, but close) of US salaries. So there’s definitely a case of on the Internet no one knows where you’re from kicking in. Instead of cheap outsourcing, I’m seeing more of an approach where salaries are cut s…
99% of Indians who work on outsourced projects, don't make any where close to that money. In fact the very reason outsourcing exists is because of price arbitrage.
FANG's are an exception to this, but that only proves the rule. Bulk of the world needs software written and maintained for cheap.