351–360 of 564 posts
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If you’re going to work from home, do so for a company where WFH is first class. I’ve worked for remote-only companies and for mixed companies. The mixed ones were really terrible WFH experiences. The remote-only / remote-first ones were excellent. It really makes a difference. /anecdote
Funny enough, I start with Shopify tomorrow. They went remote-only last year.
Does everyone else get multiple recruitment emails a week from Amazon? I get more recruitment emails from them than all other companies combined. Even when I suspended my linkedin I am still getting emails.
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As a counterpoint, I loved my commute to work in the Bay. After almost 16 years of not riding a bike, I took a chance on getting one and fell in love with riding around the city. For the first year I also rode BART pretty much every day. It had its downsides but honestly I just learned to have a more positive mindset about it. Obviously this isn't viable solution to many people, and cycling has lots of risks, but its…
Bart is beyond a minor downside, it’s absolutely atrocious public transportation.
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1-2 hours away from a major city is actually kind of a sweet spot, IMO. Big cities have things like major hospitals and major employers, they have airports, they have baseball stadiums. They've also got social networks -- it's much easier to make friends in a place with 100,000 people your age than 50. Now, escaping to the undeveloped areas is cheap, and many of them have access to things like beautiful mountains or…
> The whole "move to the mountains" thing that so many people talk about assumes you don't care about good schools, airports, hospitals, etc. That certainly is a trade off some people have to make. We're finalizing a move to a new home that fits that description. 20k pop, basically on the beach, backed by mountains and trails, 4 hour drive to anything with greater than 200k population, small hospital that is not well…
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Europe only has good public transport in very few selected cities and you have to ignore strikes in France to pretend its working well and is reliable. The city with the best public transport in the world is probably Tokyo in terms of frequency and service reliability but it is constantly over capacity and things are not getting better. Crowded trains are hell. so no commute is certainly better pretty much just anywh…
I don’t know why this is downvoted. This is very much true. Outside of a handful of largest cities, Europeans are as car-dependent as Americans, and if they drive less, it’s mostly because they are poorer, while cars and gas are more expensive: instead of replacing what in the US would be car trips with public transit, they simply travel less and stay home more. As European nations get wealthier, car ownership rises,…
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Off-topic, but is levels.fyi... on the level? I ask because I'm hearing about all sorts of 350k-500k offers for senior engineers, but they're not showing up there. My current salary seems right about "in band" on there, but people in my network who I talk to seem to think I'm way underpaid.
I'm an ICT5 at Apple, pushing for ICT6 (but it won't be next year, ICT6 is more about who you know than what you know), and just had my perf review. This year I got total comp (salary, bonus, RSUs) of just over 520k, which is consistent with last year and the year before.
I quit Amazon 3 weeks ago after nearly a decade. Work from home was one of the biggest reasons. In my view, the personality traits that are conducive to promotion up the Amazon leadership ladder are strongly aligned with loving work-from-office. Most people L10 and higher not only don't understand the desire for permanent work from home, I think maybe they cannot understand it. It's just too foreign to many of them.…
I looked it up so you don't have to.
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I have this theory that one of the contributing factors to the "I don't want to go to the office" trend in the US (which I'm part of), is that cities are also not made for commuting. Coming from Europe, where public transport is really practical, and cities are built for density, your commute is often much less cumbersome AND you can enjoy some social life after work since you're in the city. Here (the bay) it was ju…
Europe only has good public transport in very few selected cities and you have to ignore strikes in France to pretend its working well and is reliable. The city with the best public transport in the world is probably Tokyo in terms of frequency and service reliability but it is constantly over capacity and things are not getting better. Crowded trains are hell. so no commute is certainly better pretty much just anywh…
It's working well and reliable enough.
> The city with the best public transport in the world is probably Tokyo in terms of frequency and service reliability but it is constantly over capacity and things are not getting better.
Things absolutely are getting better; crowding is better than it was. A healthy growing city will always have some capacity issues at any given time, but that's the same as anything.
> so no commute is certainly better pretty much just anywhere.
Not at all proven. Most people choose not to live right next to their workplace even when that's an option. 15-30 minutes' separation is helpful IMO. Even if I'm not commuting, it takes me that long to get my head out of "work mode", and having my home be my workplace makes that worse. "You don't take your work home with you" was always something I looked for in job applications.
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Europe only has good public transport in very few selected cities and you have to ignore strikes in France to pretend its working well and is reliable. The city with the best public transport in the world is probably Tokyo in terms of frequency and service reliability but it is constantly over capacity and things are not getting better. Crowded trains are hell. so no commute is certainly better pretty much just anywh…
I don’t know why this is downvoted. This is very much true. Outside of a handful of largest cities, Europeans are as car-dependent as Americans, and if they drive less, it’s mostly because they are poorer, while cars and gas are more expensive: instead of replacing what in the US would be car trips with public transit, they simply travel less and stay home more. As European nations get wealthier, car ownership rises,…
Citation? I think we travel less far, but that's not because people choose to stay home so much as because you don't have to travel so far to achieve the same things (e.g. we probably travel less far to visit relatives than Americans, but still visit our relatives more often and spend more time with them).
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They can hire new grads every year Getting expensive to move to Seattle though
Running a giant company with nothing but new grads is really asking for every project management problem ever discovered.