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Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?

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Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?

#431

Post by ryloric »

jeffyang wrote: post #421
ryloric wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This almost reads like someone paid you to write this.

Ha really? I mean, no one paid me, but thanks? Seriously, have you ever worked at a place where people (outside of leadership) care strongly about making sure the company does the right thing rather than just accepting the status quo? That's pretty rare I would say and it was very surprising to me. I'm not saying that Facebook is good. I'm just saying that people paint it like everyone who works at Facebook made a de…

I've worked at two of the FAANG companies before as an engineer, so I have some idea of the general culture.

What I meant was that the average employee at any of them doesn't care about about doing the 'right thing' any more than employees at any other corporation care about doing the 'right thing'. I'm not saying employees at FB support an evil empire but neither are they revolutionaries who deeply care about the society and are fighting tirelessly to bring some positive change.

They know what their products do and they still work there, so I'm pretty sure they're okay with the compensation-conscience tradeoff they made and I have nothing against that, we all do that; but to paint them as some deeply caring people who tirelessly strive to do the right thing is just disingenuous and like I said earlier it sounds like something a paid PR person would write.

Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?

#432

Post by a-saleh »

dustintrex wrote: post #152
a-saleh wrote: post #102

Red Hat. Worked there as an intern during college, continued for few more years and returned there after a brief stint at a startup. Work/life balance is great, most code public has so many advantages and colleagues are friendly and decent humans. Some teams might be worse than what I experienced, but even if I was growing mildly frustrated (i.e. pressure from product people to push product out of hte gate before it…

How is assimilation into IBM going?

Well, there was lot of jokes at the start, people comming in to work in blue ties for day or two.

In reality, nothing changed, for better or worse, we did kinda speculate that this was kind of an expensive acquihire of one James M. Whitehurst and if the have to buy this profitable company alongside with him, might as well :D

Another speculation is, that we are one of the more profitable parts of IBM, so the rest of the company doesn't want to f- with that, but if we stop being the golden-goose our management was selling us as, more interference might comme our way.

Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?

#433

Post by a-saleh »

bogomipz wrote: post #161
a-saleh wrote: post #102

Red Hat. Worked there as an intern during college, continued for few more years and returned there after a brief stint at a startup. Work/life balance is great, most code public has so many advantages and colleagues are friendly and decent humans. Some teams might be worse than what I experienced, but even if I was growing mildly frustrated (i.e. pressure from product people to push product out of hte gate before it…

I'd be curious if the IBM acquisition has had any effect on that culture? Is that pressure from product people a result post-IBM?

No, product/dev disconect was there quite often for years. Red Hat has kinda been living off the unix-to-linux migration that happened in early 2000s, and because I think we didn't wan to become the kind of company that just maintains legacy kernel for banking mainframes, we spent most of the 2010s comming up with ideas to see what gains traction. And sometimes these ideas were ... oversold ... to our potential customers?

Despite how nice I find the culture at Red Hat, it definitely isn't lacking in some of the corporate disconnects that sometimes happen. Like, I think we are working on it and it differs from team to team, but it still is there :)

Other than that, I don't see much change in the culture in general.

Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?

#434

Post by tech_tuna »

jee1shi wrote: post #356
ab_testing wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these salary ranges correct. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Smartleaf-Software-Engineer... Looks like a software engineer would need to pick up a second job to make up for Boston's cost of living.

I've always found Glass Door salary ranges to be wrong (generally much lower than reality) for the positions I have knowledge about.

My experience as well. It makes sense. Of course, lots of people treat Glass Door like it's accurate.

Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?

#435

Post by jeffyang »

ryloric wrote: post #431
jeffyang wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha really? I mean, no one paid me, but thanks? Seriously, have you ever worked at a place where people (outside of leadership) care strongly about making sure the company does the right thing rather than just accepting the status quo? That's pretty rare I would say and it was very surprising to me. I'm not saying that Facebook is good. I'm just saying that people paint it like everyone who works at Facebook made a de…

I've worked at two of the FAANG companies before as an engineer, so I have some idea of the general culture. What I meant was that the average employee at any of them doesn't care about about doing the 'right thing' any more than employees at any other corporation care about doing the 'right thing'. I'm not saying employees at FB support an evil empire but neither are they revolutionaries who deeply care about the so…

Yeah, you're right, I did get a bit dramatic there. This was helpful, I understand your comment now, thanks!

I want to note that like you I did say that the majority at FB don't care. I also didn't care when I started and that's why it was such a surprise that people actually did care and that it wasn't shut down by leadership. I think that is compounded by the fact that certain teams are more like that than others and I was at a stage in my life where I was ready to be influenced by that, and so I agree that I have a rosier view than is probably accurate.

Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?

#436

Post by dudeinjapan »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #106
dudeinjapan wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company uses a lot of Eastern European developers and they are all fantastic--they jump right into the code and solve the problem, and they are in general a joy to work with.

If we want to generalise: Eastern Europe is hit or miss. I had some good experiences and plenty of terrible ones (more so recently). I think that eastern Europe used to be good, but there are plenty of actors milking the scene and reputation of eastern Europe. I know 2 smart fellas making bank selling remote junior developers from Hungary and Poland to London clueless companies for slightly cheaper than senior London…

Of course there is a distribution of talent in any industry and geography. However, in my experience, there are dev cultural attitudes (especially DIY-ness) that make Eastern Europe and Russia ideal for hacking.

Example: I had a relatively complex ticket with a new dev to my team located in Russia with sparse documentation. I scheduled a call to do a deep-dive how the system works and I got a rather laconic reply:

"Why need call? I will read the code."

Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?

#437

Post by dudeinjapan »

toyg wrote: post #144
jokethrowaway wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we want to generalise: Eastern Europe is hit or miss. I had some good experiences and plenty of terrible ones (more so recently). I think that eastern Europe used to be good, but there are plenty of actors milking the scene and reputation of eastern Europe. I know 2 smart fellas making bank selling remote junior developers from Hungary and Poland to London clueless companies for slightly cheaper than senior London…

> maybe they should start learning Chinese. Despite all the cool Matrix aesthetic, I dread to think of a programming language in Chinese.

As my handle would imply I've spend most of my career in Japan. Paradoxically some of the best coders among Japanese are the worse English speakers--perhaps an inverse-correlation. It's not uncommon to see code comments in Japanese (or Chinese for that matter in China.)

Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?

#438

Post by 8ytecoder »

Sander_Marechal wrote: post #365
tedsanders wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a pretty excellent time at Netflix myself. The business model is refreshingly simple: people pay to watch shows they'll enjoy. As a result, our work is pretty aligned with our customers. No annoying ads, no selling data, no focusing on whales, no anti-consumer dark patterns (or at least not many). And Reed is an excellent CEO, imo. He's tried his best to build a culture that treats everyone as human and inte…

> no anti-consumer dark patterns (or at least not many) There's plenty of those. They removed the star ratings, they don't show IMDB or other external ratings, nonsensical categories, things that still autoplay even with all autoplay options off (e.g. when selecting an episode in a series). They keep producing average to bad content and keep pushing it in front of you without any option to filter it out. And the thin…

They also intentionally don’t integrate with Apple TV - which is what I use to organise all my watchlist in one place. It’s anti-consumer.

Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?

#439

Post by ToxicMegacolon »

awsthro00945 wrote: post #427
ToxicMegacolon wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since we are talking numbers, I am gonna do some hypothetical calculation. Lets assume two employees A and B, their numbers are as follows: A - $150k Salary + $150k RSU -> TOTAL = $300k B - $150k Salary + $30k RSU + $120k cash bonus -> TOTAL = $300k Also lets assume the year is 2017, specifically around Oct 2017 when AMZN price was ~$1000 ($1002 on Oct 13 2017) With a price of $1000, A gets 150 RSU Units and B gets 3…

Your math seems right, but again you're neglecting the $120k cash bonus in your calculations. >Price of A's RSU on Nov 3 2021 - $3384 * 150 = $507,600 Price of B's RSU on Nov 3 2021 - $3384 * 30 = $101,520 This is the correct price of the RSUs , but again, neglects the cash bonus. If you look at it (more correctly) through the lens of "the amount of compensation given", the price of A's RSU+bonus is $507k, and the pr…

> This is the correct price of the RSUs, but again, neglects the cash bonus. If you look at it (more correctly) through the lens of "the amount of compensation given", the price of A's RSU+bonus is $507k, and the price of B's RSU+bonus is $221k (your $101k + the $120k cash).

The difference is still almost ~$300k. Almost 1 extra year's income.

> But! There's no reason that the $120k cash just has to stay cash forever.

This is obviously a very simple scenario. There is obviously an assumption here that neither A nor B does any extra investing on the side and just hold onto whatever Amazon has paid them.

Individual investment into the stock market is a whole different can of worms. B could just invest that $120k cash in one of the r/wallstreetbets and lose it all. On the other hand, A could cash out all AMZN vests and invest that in TSLA.

The scenarios become endlessly complicated if we consider side investments in individual stocks.

I think, despite being grossly simplistic, this calculation may provide an interesting insight into why AMZN prefers to delay significant stock vesting for its employees, especially when other similar companies don't. Especially given the fact that avg. tenure at AWS (as per linkedin) seems to be 1.6 years. So a large number of AWS employees may not be receiving 80% of their stocks.

Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?

#440

Post by awsthro00945 »

ToxicMegacolon wrote: post #439
awsthro00945 wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your math seems right, but again you're neglecting the $120k cash bonus in your calculations. >Price of A's RSU on Nov 3 2021 - $3384 * 150 = $507,600 Price of B's RSU on Nov 3 2021 - $3384 * 30 = $101,520 This is the correct price of the RSUs , but again, neglects the cash bonus. If you look at it (more correctly) through the lens of "the amount of compensation given", the price of A's RSU+bonus is $507k, and the pr…

> This is the correct price of the RSUs, but again, neglects the cash bonus. If you look at it (more correctly) through the lens of "the amount of compensation given", the price of A's RSU+bonus is $507k, and the price of B's RSU+bonus is $221k (your $101k + the $120k cash). The difference is still almost ~$300k. Almost 1 extra year's income. > But! There's no reason that the $120k cash just has to stay cash forever.…

The problem is that your calculations aren't just "grossly simplistic", they completely ignore the cash bonus, which again, is the entire problem. The cash bonus is a core part of the compensation strategy, which means you must include consideration of it in your calculations for them to be accurate, but you did not do so.

Even for the person who receives $150k in RSUs, they are still simply receiving a dollar amount. It doesn't matter if it's in AMZN stock or if it's in cash, because the cash amount and the AMZN stock can be exchanged equally, and B has just the same opportunity for stock growth as A has (because either of them can purchase whatever investments they want with the $150k they receive, regardless of it it's cash or a stock unit). If you aren't considering this, then all of your calculations about "which situation pays more" are wrong.

>The scenarios become endlessly complicated if we consider side investments in individual stocks.

And they become completely useless if we don't consider it. Attempting to simplify your calculations isn't a good reason to make them wholly inaccurate.

They also aren't "endlessly complicated". It's still very simple: any investment opportunity that A has, B also has, because they are receiving the same dollar amount of compensation that can be invested. So when comparing A vs B, there is no difference.

>So a large number of AWS employees may not be receiving 80% of their stocks.

Again, this doesn't matter, because they get cash instead of the stocks.

You are making the classic mistake that many make that imagines that RSUs are fundamentally any different than just receiving cash. But they aren't. Receiving an RSU for $3000 is the exact same thing as receiving $3000 cash and then using it to purchase $3000 worth of that stock. There is a reason that the IRS taxes RSUs vests just like normal cash income.

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