351–360 of 560 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm kind of surprised they listed a $140k starting pay. That's pretty low for new grads in the industry and very low for Facebook. You are living in a Valley bubble if you think $140k is "pretty low" for a new grad in general, and that's as total comp (not just salary).
Facebook mostly hires inside the “Valley bubble”-so it’s pretty important to discuss salaries taking that into account.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm kind of surprised they listed a $140k starting pay. That's pretty low for new grads in the industry and very low for Facebook. You are living in a Valley bubble if you think $140k is "pretty low" for a new grad in general, and that's as total comp (not just salary).
I don’t live in the Valley, I just have a lot of accomplished friends/acquaintances
I have concerns about Facebook just like everyone else, but I'd also like to point out that the New York Times is not repeatedly publishing articles criticizing FB simply because of their superior moral stance. They are doing it because FB took away a lot of revenue from publishers like them, and they are very, very angry about it.
And it's so transparent at this point. I've listened to podcasts with reporters and they lament the rise of Facebook and how "Facebook is stealing their business" through ads and algorithm changes that hurt them. But the bias doesn't matter because everyone on the internet hates them (and Google) so they just rush to pile on. Anything negative about Facebook gets to the front page very quickly. The thing is, Facebook…
Pretty much everyone (whether you're a Facebook user or not) got their privacy violated by Facebook. The majority doesn't know it but we're on HN and everyone is aware of what's happening, so it's not too surprising that people feel bitter about it. I feel bitter about it too.
> Facebook has billions of users and you don't get billions of users by being evil.
They got billions of users back when they actually had a decent product, nowadays it's just network effects - nobody signs up for the product itself. In fact, they're perfectly aware that Facebook (the product) is on its deathbed, otherwise they wouldn't be chasing new trends by buying Instagram & WhatsApp.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This kind of post-facto justification for poor working conditions or wages needs a name, so it can be dismissed out of hand. It seems to assume that the market is “fair” and getting poor pay must be justified by some other factor about the job. In reality, there are plenty of jobs that have garbage pay and suck. As well as jobs that are both lucrative and “easy”. Consider the average CEO: not the exceptional visionar…
> In western societies, no job should pay less than a living wage... Pay is determined chiefly by supply and demand in the labor market. Jobs that are more fun pay less because the supply of workers is higher. Fairness is literally not part of this equation. > On the other side of the ledger, you have immigrants with medical degrees, who are driving cabs for minimum wage. Medical licenses are controlled by the govern…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This kind of post-facto justification for poor working conditions or wages needs a name, so it can be dismissed out of hand. It seems to assume that the market is “fair” and getting poor pay must be justified by some other factor about the job. In reality, there are plenty of jobs that have garbage pay and suck. As well as jobs that are both lucrative and “easy”. Consider the average CEO: not the exceptional visionar…
For many jobs, the pay and working conditions really are a product of market forces. For other jobs, not so much. For software jobs, and for jobs with garbage pay and which also suck, it's mostly true. People who can competently write software aren't that common, and there's tons of jobs and demand for them, so the pay goes up, and companies compete with each other for them by offering better pay, better perks, etc.…
How do you decide what is a pointless bullshit job? How do you decide what it means to be productive? How much of the success of a business relies on its innovation, or the success of a book on how well written it is? How many people have the drive and self-discipline for self employment?
On the face of it, what it sounds like you're contrasting isn't "pointless bullshit" and innovative productivity, but "what bores me" and "what excites me" or "what fulfills me."
It's easy to confuse the good-in-itself of work with the goods-in-themselves that work facilitates (paying the bills, feeding a family, giving to the less fortunate, et c). If we prioritize the former over the latter, we're going to have a crummy society in whatever regime we use to try to solve the thorny issues of automation and living wages.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My assumption with mission statements was that they were always bullshit made up by a marketing team or some exec and I wouldn't expect them to have much relation to reality. Was I in the minority?
I work in Google and the mission statement seems to be followed.
What is Google's mission nowadays? I don't see them following a lot of "Organize the world's information and make it open". There's a ton of closed walls, they even acquired companies like freebase and then their stuff went behind closed doors.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What other companies do your acquaintances working in tech consider “prestigious”?
Generally it's FAANG (minus Amazon, plus some unicorns), for the reasons mentioned above: a very good balance of excellent compensation, talented peers to work with, and interesting work. Joining these companies in the right teams is literally what makes it possible to have an exciting technical career AND the guarantee of being able to retire (or more generally, gain financial freedom) in your early/mid 40s, if one…
> Ms. Brown said a lot of students criticize Facebook and talk about how they would not work there, but ultimately join. “Everyone cares about ethics in tech before they get a contract,” she said. This describes my what I've observed perfectly. There are very few companies that make new grad offers comparable to Facebook's, and career advancement opportunities and working conditions at Facebook tend to be better than…
It doesn’t mean grads are excited about working at Facebook, it means they accept an offer for the sake of common sense. This will most likely work to Facebooks disadvantage long term however; Facebooks workforce can’t only be motivated by money. There was certainly a time that people would’ve took way less money to be part of FB because they believed in the product and mission, which is now a joke.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This kind of post-facto justification for poor working conditions or wages needs a name, so it can be dismissed out of hand. It seems to assume that the market is “fair” and getting poor pay must be justified by some other factor about the job. In reality, there are plenty of jobs that have garbage pay and suck. As well as jobs that are both lucrative and “easy”. Consider the average CEO: not the exceptional visionar…
> In western societies, no job should pay less than a living wage... Pay is determined chiefly by supply and demand in the labor market. Jobs that are more fun pay less because the supply of workers is higher. Fairness is literally not part of this equation. > On the other side of the ledger, you have immigrants with medical degrees, who are driving cabs for minimum wage. Medical licenses are controlled by the govern…
I think the implication is that society and technology have advanced to the point where, ostensibly, work that can't be automated away should be work that would demand a living wage. If it's tenable for my job to still exist, it's tenable for it to pay me enough to live. If it doesn't... well, that would be less a function of higher level characterizations of the economy or any individual job and more a function of the basic availability of food and housing, anyway. If there isn't enough food and housing, people start dying, but since there does seem to be enough of those, what is happening?
I work retail full-time. It's definitely not "fun," and I definitely can't afford to carry my own weight; I have to rely on family to make ends meet, and I know people who rely on welfare. In regards to the time and opportunity cost of working that job in relation to compensation, it is unfair (imbalanced), but the situation emerges from a context defined by labor's complete lack of leverage, juxtaposed with the, perhaps, overcompensation of the people who support us, encompassed by our mutual desire for society to not collapse.
I think it's funny that you mention $50/hr for delivering papers as if we should be aghast at the mere thought. If it's a job that needs to be done to secure the solvency of the overall business, and that's what it costs to live in the area where whoever holds that job must live, then... that's the going rate. If someone can live on less, they get the job and are paid less. If the business can't afford to pay a full time wage for a full-time paperboy (or a commensurate wage for a part-time one), maybe we don't need or can't afford paperboys. But as a society, at some point it would be prudent to look around and see whether the way people are living is sustainable, or if, say, the inopportune removal of a welfare or familial wealth Jenga brick would cause the entire tower to collapse into, like, tent cities or whatever.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t live in the Valley, I just have a lot of accomplished friends/acquaintances
Where outside the Valley (and maybe NYC) where new grads are routinely getting total comp packages significantly greater than $140k? All the names you dropped in your other post are top companies that the typical new grad has very little chance of getting in to.