Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find the ‘cases going up’ and ‘cases going down’ indicators quite compelling.
Wastewater surveillance is even better than that.
Apparently, yeah, but we don’t have that indicator in Japan (as far as I know).
Tim Cook tells employees the return to offices will begin on April 11th
511–520 of 573 posts
Re: Tim Cook tells employees the return to offices will begin on April 11th
#512"We have hundred of billions of real estate deprecating in value because they're mostly abandoned"
Re: Tim Cook tells employees the return to offices will begin on April 11th
#513So much for big orgs adopting fully remote as an option eh? I really thought that had a chance…
Can anyone list some medium-to-biggish orgs with fully remote options? Is there a website somewhere that might have a list?
Re: Tim Cook tells employees the return to offices will begin on April 11th
#514Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair warning: my experience has been very different than yours or tombert's in most respects and some things have changed over time (some OSS contributions are now much easier, a very recent change). It is also the first company I've worked for that backed up appreciation for my efforts with compensation to match, and where my management chain cared about burnout and mental health with actions rather than empty words…
> It is still primarily an on-site company. At some point I would like people to quit vilifying a completely legitimate business setup because it doesn't fit their world view. I want to be in the office, and I prefer it when my coworkers are there too. I respect that not everyone feels the same - but I do think it is up to the employer to decide. So I will be picking companies that suit my preferences.
I, too, like the separation of the office - a pretty easy commute (less than 15 minutes) and not having to worry about managing the space myself is useful for me to get into "Work Mode" - and I very much appreciate leaving and not reading my emails until I get into work next morning. And this is effectively working remotely - while in a company building I am the only member of my team on site.
This is with a large Santa Clara-based tech company, and they have competitive rates in compensation to FAANG - though that may be misleading. For example I have had a lot of experience working adjacent to people working at Apple, and it's on my list of "Never Work Here" due to the culture, expectations of time, lack of work-life balance, and all while not compensating any more for those asks. Other friends who work for some other companies on that list, however, seem a lot happier. So in my experience lumping them together is a mistake.
Previously, I worked for a British company in the US in an office with some 4 total people on my team, that I found was a near perfect setup - the main company remote and a different timezone effectively meant all communication and meetings happened in the mornings US time, allowing the majority of the day to really get into complex stuff with no interruptions. And a small team allowed for some in-person whiteboard debugging and design discussion and bouncing ideas off people, but with a small team it wasn't a constant distraction.
I found that to be my personal "Perfect Balance" - and I feel I miss that.
Re: Tim Cook tells employees the return to offices will begin on April 11th
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can't help but wonder if this is the flip side to the Silicon Valley mantra of "if you want a raise, job hop," where hitting your four-year anniversary with the same company makes you an old-timer and gets people on HN asking you if you're stupid. (Hopefully more politely than that, but that's absolutely the subtext of some recent message threads I've seen.) I think that comes from misreading stats. If a company…
Well, it comes from reading HN. :) That's clearly anecdotal, but if you're a regular reader you've surely come across the job-hopping advice here! I've seen "the way you get a raise is by switching companies" as advice over and over and over here, and I don't think it's just a small selection of malcontents I just keep running into. Companies whose primary business is hardware seem to be more likely to keep people ar…
That's certainly true about hardware companies - the cycle of product inception to release is often large enough that if you followed the "advice" here you would never actually experience the full cycle.
I work on software at a similar company - and it certainly seems to have a significantly higher "employment age" than people seem possible here - I've worked here for 4 years and still one of the "new" ones. Some of that I feel due to a good work/life balance (And decent enough pay :), and a culture I find to be pleasant (I worked with Apple employees for a while, for example, and still don't understand why people put up with the crap I saw when there's a healthy job market).
But I wonder if there's something to be said for the work itself - people have been here for ages and still doing new things - one year you may be working on texture pipelines, the next a deep dive in ray tracing. Sure, they're kinda similar, but I feel it may be more rewarding than redesigning a perfectly good UI for the 5th time, or replacing whatever javascript framework you used to use with the "New Hotness".
Re: Tim Cook tells employees the return to offices will begin on April 11th
#516I left Apple after years of lack of any flexibility on the remote work process. They wouldn't allow transferring to any alternative office for most teams. From what I understood, VPs could protect a small minority of some of their employees if a senior leader made a case to them. Unfortunately, this just seemed to lead to the most politically connected folks going remote and directors friends and favorite hires getti…
Wow. Thanks for the insights. > work at a fast-paced startup and still work on average 10/hours a week less than at Apple. I am always floored by statements like this. I work as a principal data analyst and everything above 40 hours/week is overtime. While I have overtime included in my contract I still am able to reduce overtime (it is still being tracked to ensure compliance with local workers protection laws) if t…
My experience with apple (never worked there, but worked very closely with them for years) is there's a HUGE difference between teams.
If you're in the fancy new hotness that has VP political support, great.
If you're in a team with a manager who has your back and pushed back on extra work and raises and bonuses for the whole team, great.
But you're one of the lucky ones.
Re: Tim Cook tells employees the return to offices will begin on April 11th
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you contend that "the Democrats" (who obviously are a fully united entity who never disagree) should have kept all the restrictions even though the Omicron wave is ending? What should they have done?
I don't care who's in charge. I care if suggestions/mandates fit the data. As of today, daily new cases in California are 2x-4x and deaths around 2x what they were in November. If in a week they are 1x then ok, open. But before then? Further, I guess it remains to be seen but I'd suspect lifting the restrictions will just rebound the numbers. Happy if I'm wrong though. I certainly would like to go to meetups, bars, e…
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Re: Tim Cook tells employees the return to offices will begin on April 11th
#518Earlier quoted context omitted.
So then that makes me wonder, why work there? For the prestige? For having a bad-ass CV entry? I've spent my 11 year career working in start-ups and companies that nobody knows about, I get paid enough to be in top 2% earners in EU, I never work more than 40h a week because that simply isn't legal for an employer to tell me to do unless it explicitly states so in my contract, and none of my contracts have so far stat…
It's all in the compensation. FAANG and a few fintech operations pay the big USD. The lower bound on FAANG senior software engineers is apparently above or barely overlaps the upper bound for other massively profitable companies like Intel. So you can't even achieve FAANG comp most places unless you a department director.
I would be wary about assuming too much on "Salary estimation" websites or what people may say on HN. There's a perception that they must be highly paid, and so only the highest paid shout about it. I know a lot of people who work for FAANG in the bay area that have a similar total income to myself (and I work for a company I'd judge to be very similar to Intel).
Also a lot of their income was stock and share bonuses, great if the stock price is constantly going up and they're growing hand over fist, but when things slow down that non-guaranteed income is the first thing to be looked at - if it's not on the contract it's not guaranteed. Sure you might be lucky, but in my experience the "Buy your house in cash of FAANG" for a mid-level engineer gravy train seems to be over if you're not already sitting on the options.
Re: Tim Cook tells employees the return to offices will begin on April 11th
#519Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not so much. Average house in Illinois about 350k. At that you pay about 10k property tax. Salt limit reached.
You have to forego the standard deduction if you want to itemize And take advantage of SALT deductions. Which means you have to owe more federal income tax than $12.5k for single filers and $25.1k for married filers. This link goes into more detail: https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2021/07/what-is-the-salt-cap-and-w...
Yeah, but that was just the property tax — the SALT cap applies to the total state and local taxes.
Tack on the 5% income tax rate, and you'll hit the cap pretty easily. For example, a single person making any amount (with that property tax amount) will hit the cap. Ditto for a couple each making $145k.
Re: Tim Cook tells employees the return to offices will begin on April 11th
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience is the exact opposite: most innovation I came across was the result of a in-person informal discussion. So yeah, YMMV
How does the in-person part differ from zoom or phone?
If you want to see how the communication differs do this small study:
Notice how much people were talking in the first day of the war in Slack. In my experience being in a couple of slack workspaces (one for work, a couple from co-working hubs, 3 professional groups) in some people shared something, in one they created a channel for this, in some other there was one or two threads.
Now think about what was the state of almost all employees: I think the invasion was the main focus of everybody and also I assess the amount of work done these days on average is less than normal.
Now think about what is happening going into an office in that day: Everybody will talk about this. Every conversation will start with this, every chit chat before any meeting will start with that news.
If you remote communication is reflecting this then congrats your organization managed to create a good remote culture.
I am not saying one is good and one is bad. I am saying there is a big difference between them.