111–120 of 218 posts
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"Top talent... selling advertising... for a news aggregator. Sigh" Google? Facebook?
Channeling that old quote: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads."
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Both of your examples, more users and better titles, can absolutely be technical improvements. Both of them could be, for example, improved by using machine learning to attract more users by appealing on an individual level and doing things like optimizing titles for the individual and pushing those individualized results out. I'm sure there are even more technological advancements that can be made - and I suspect th…
I think using AI to make clickbaity titles is still sigh-worthy.
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Sure, but at $3M a year, sock $2.5M away, live extremely comfortably, and have one hell of a rainy day fund.
If 80-90% of it is in stock / options with vesting (as I'd suspect it is based on that article) it is likely only true after the targets / target dates are hit.
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The relative amount of taxes paid doesn't really change anymore once you've reached six figures. On the other hand, the absolute amount still increases, which makes it more reasonable to spend significant money on tax accountants. So, if anything, taxes should become less of a worry, because you can more easily let really good professionals take care of it. But yes, I'm aware most people won't look at it rationally.
If you're an employee, you generally can't optimise much. Perhaps you can take some basic deductions, but that's in. If you take two people earning $1M a year, the employee will in most jurisdictions (both relative and absolute) pay significantly more in taxes than the self employed person.
Just being able to max out your Pension and ISA at $27k is a big win for those earning enough - basically you can put £20k a year beyond the reach of CGT and Dividend Tax per year
> Zhang declined to comment on specific figures, saying most employees prefer stock over cash. His employees must be pretty confident considering that a few years of cash could set them up for life.
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news aggregation, and the selective targeting of individuals for advertising might just be the most powerful social influence today. Wins elections even...
Yes and that's what's so depressing about it. As engineers, wouldn't it be cool if the most valuable thing we could do was building tools that are inherently valuable instead of valuable because of the tool's ability to connect users with someone who wants to buy their attention? You know, build some software that doesn't make you feel like a pimp.
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"Show me the money" is biased toward the status quo. If your litmus test for smart policy or decision-making "is everyone else who is successful doing it?", you will always lag behind the best.
That's true, and I can't think of a good alternative. But there's a clear problem on HN where people who don't run businesses and don't know how to pontificate on things like this citing nebulous results on productivity. If open-offices are so remarkably detrimental, then I await the disrupting startup that blows the rest of the industry out of the water by using private offices.
The thing that surprises me is that, after paying these engineers seven figures, they're still sticking them in open plan offices (as far as I can tell from the photos). Though I do know some people who can work effectively in that environment, it would be interesting to compare ever-so-slightly-cheaper engineers + a less-distracted work environment.
I personally love working close with my team in an open-setting. That's the reason I go to office every day even though my employer offers WFH. I just prefer turning around and asking a question or have a quick discussion. If everyone is working from home or in their personal offices, I hate having to get on a call or schedule a meeting to gather everyone to a meeting room for a quick discussion. Sure, at times it ca…
Some complicated development tasks require 100% uninterrupted concentration for several minutes at a time. You're sitting there trying to build and maintain an extremely complicated model in your head, involving many complex parts, and their interactions along a time line, introducing permutations of that model to simulate the changes you are considering and simulating the outcome in your head. Then someone asks you something, or asks someone else something, or simply passes in your peripheral vision, and poof it's gone.
There a many tasks that don't require that kind of concentration, and many jobs, even in software development, that never involve those kinds of tasks. But with a setup that encourages 'communication', in the form of forced non-stop interaction, you have effectively made sure that the developers will never reach those heights, and most likely not by conscious decision, but out of ignorance.
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"Show me the money" is biased toward the status quo. If your litmus test for smart policy or decision-making "is everyone else who is successful doing it?", you will always lag behind the best.
That's true, and I can't think of a good alternative. But there's a clear problem on HN where people who don't run businesses and don't know how to pontificate on things like this citing nebulous results on productivity. If open-offices are so remarkably detrimental, then I await the disrupting startup that blows the rest of the industry out of the water by using private offices.
Assume they aren't. This place may of course be a bit biased - but among developers the opinion is at least appears to be very clear on that open offices suck. I'd even dare argue that many developers would either not work at a company with open offices, or would at least factor it in and weigh it against compensation.
Now if this is the case, then regardless of whether there are tangible benefits of having private offices, companies would either lose out on talent, or need to compensate them more than they otherwise would. See the point isn't only whether developers are less happy or less productive in open offices - the point is also whether they believe they are less happy and less productive in open offices. And that is much easier to test/prove than whether they actually are.