How the Valley treats experienced people • Hacker News Board

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#421

Post by sowbug » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 9:45 PM UTC

rak00n wrote: post #360

mixmastamyk wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too, I went all in on Apple stock when the iPhone was announced, on margin I was so convinced. Sounds great right? Well broker sold everything during the 2008 meltdown and lost everything.

I learned something new. A broker can sell your stock without your consent?

It's similar to a bank foreclosing on a house. The borrower pledges something as collateral for a loan, and if things go south, the lender can liquidate the collateral to recover some or all of the debt. It's not correct to say it's done without the borrower's consent because the original lending agreement allows it when the circumstances arise.

Tangentially related: Martingale betting system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system)). Aside from its theoretical impossibility, this system typically fails in practice when the gambler hits a house limit and can no longer continue placing bets.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#422

Post by a3n » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 9:47 PM UTC

> If you want a healthy team, you're going to need a mix of people. Cutting off entire segments of the population from your company's ranks just because you don't understand their value only hurts yourself.

That could be a direct quote from Peopleware.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#423

Post by a3n » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 9:50 PM UTC

shmat wrote: post #68

Sometimes you don't make enough money to retire early from a combination of bad luck and poor financial decisions. In my career, I followed a pattern of going to a company just a bit too late to get the really low priced options. I've ended up with dozens of former co-workers who are multimillionaires. I had a family and was (in hindsight) too conservative about when I went to a company. I also was a "paper" milliona…

> Sometimes you don't make enough money to retire early from a combination of bad luck and poor financial decisions.

Sad that cashing out may have ejected "staying and contributing" as a measure of success and indicator of worth.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#424

Post by bontaq » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 9:51 PM UTC

vinceguidry wrote: post #93

danohuiginn wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possible, but decreasingly likely. The US is now one of the countries where your success in life is most fully determined by your family background. e.g. it's in the bottom third of the OECD for income mobility, and the absolute worst in the OECD for how much your family background determines your educational success https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobi... https://www.oecd.org/centrodemexico/m…

These statistics all measure the wrong things. Let me tell you a story of two families. My step-dad was thrust into a parenting role over his siblings, a sister and a brother at an early age. The brother died early, in a train accident. My step-dad married my mother and they're still together, over 20 years later. His sister is on her second marriage. My aunt's family is constantly teetering on the edge of poverty, h…

This is a pretty bizarre response to actual data.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#425

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 9:55 PM UTC

kabdib wrote: post #377

kannanvijayan wrote: post #162

This is something that has been bothering me somewhat. The following in particular bothers me a lot: > "Why are you still working?" The answer for me is simple - because I want to. I learned how to program at the tender age of 10 using a book that came with a C64 that my dad got for free from a garage sale. Since those first years, the field at every turn has provided me with new intellectual challenges and as I've p…

I once expressed the "I'm not in it for money, I just want to do a great product" thing to a CEO, and he immediately offered to cut my salary in half. I got the message. (I had a few more happy years at that place, but never made much money there. I found that other companies could not only be better places to work, but that they paid better, too).

[deleted]

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#426

Post by lisper » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 10:01 PM UTC

dmoy wrote: post #400

lisper wrote: post #196

I'm one of those people who doesn't have to work, but I do because I enjoy it. I moved to the silicon valley nine years ago, and in that time I've done half a dozen or so job interviews. I got no offers, so now I run my own company. It was different story each time, but the upshot (IMHO) is that the interview process seemed to assume that I was a fresh-out undergrad. In one case, they asked me to debug some Ruby code…

> In one case, they asked me to debug some Ruby code despite the fact that I told them well in advance that I have never worked with Ruby. Were you applying to a place that writes a ton of Ruby?

Yes. And I told them up front, during the phone screen, that I had never written a single line of Ruby code, and they said that this was no problem, that they just wanted generally smart people, and that I could climb the Ruby learning curve after I came on board. They specifically told me that all of the coding during the live interview would be in a language of my choice. They even asked me what my preferred environment was.

That particular interview was a complete disaster from beginning to end, and not just because they started out by asking me to debug Ruby code after telling me that they were perfectly OK with me not knowing Ruby.

(And, just for the record, I actually succeeded in finding and fixing the bug.)

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#427

Post by WalterBright » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 10:06 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #252

earhart wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Causation isn’t correlation; zip code is easy to measure, but I’d bet it’s not what actually matters.

Zip code is a darn good proxy for race, family wealth, social standing, network prospects....

You can always move to another zip code.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#428

Post by WalterBright » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 10:07 PM UTC

int0x80 wrote: post #135

WalterBright wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about working hard, and never was. It's about working smart. And people make their own luck. You can't get lucky if you're not in the game swinging. I've known plenty of people who just sat at their desks, doing as little as possible, waiting for the boss to direct them, reading hackernews(!), watching the clock till they could go home. They were never going to get lucky. Then there are the ones who are alwa…

I agree with this thoughts very much. The attitude you mention is key, at least in my reduced and anecdotical experience. It is true, however, as others say, that you have to start from a reasonable and relative good baseline and that part is just pure luck.

Children can certainly blame their situation on their parents. But once an adult, then it becomes their responsibility.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#429

Post by komali2 » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 10:11 PM UTC

test6554 wrote: post #320

sharemywin wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its funny how much life is staked against with a family. especially if one or both of you don't have a college degree. school hours aren't set up for jobs. A lot of companies don't tolerate sick kids. daycare is beyond expensive. health care for families is just impossible. Most people don't have enough savings to make a dent.

In today's world you almost need a family with 3 adult partners. Two workers and one stay-at-home person taking care of the home and children. That sort of arrangement would put you solidly in the middle class at least while having a well-cared-for home and children.

My time as a teacher as well as my own studies have convinced me that moving away from the village model was a mistake - children in groups easily self regulate and self educate given minimal direction from a teacher (and powerful guidelines for timeboxed schedules), a role easily filled by the "wisest" in a group (the elderly).

Somewhat contradictorily, it's far easier to manage, teach, and set straight (punish/reward) 15 kids than it is 2. You have to be a falcon for bullying though - spot it from ten miles away and strike it at 100 miles an hour.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#430

Post by WalterBright » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 10:12 PM UTC

mark_l_watson wrote: post #77

WalterBright wrote: post #2

Sailing the world sounds boring. It's too passive. I'll be working creating new things until they carry me out in a box. I go out on sightseeing trips now and then, and very predictably at about 10 days I'm itching to go home and get back to work. I did go on a 3 day cruise once. By the third day I was bored out of my mind. I tried to get a tour of the engine room but the crew wasn't having any of that. I also annoye…

I am the opposite. I love to cruise, my wife and I have been on 23, many for long duration. I like to write and getting coffee at 5am, taking a walk around the ship (outside weather permitting), and then a couple of hours working on a book project in the ship library is a great way to start the day and sets me up for exploring a new port later in the day or reading a good book and enjoying the ocean if it is a sea da…

If you enjoy it, that's fine for you.

Another aspect I didn't enjoy was being a "guest", which means being treated like a retarded person. It's not the crew's fault, they have to do that because they get a lot of guests that sue when the guests do something stupid. But I don't really care for it.