671–680 of 717 posts
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Any institution that invested in "home workout" stuff deserves to lose every dollar they put in, how could you not see that coming.
Conversely, did you see it coming and make a ton of money?
Your best bet is just to stay away when something smells
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I think the more accurate measure is the median salary. It’s not that high now and probably wasnt back then either.
I’d agree that these salaries are roughly the same if not less, adjusted for inflation, regardless of the actual number.
According to BLS data [1], the median computer scientist salary in 1997 was $82k, adjusted for inflation [2]. The same data has software developers median salary today at $121k. It seems SWE are getting paid much, much better today.
Granted, the occupation titles don't align perfectly. There was no "software developer" role in the 1997 dataset, but most of the computer science positions have a median salary in the low $80k-range in todays dollars. Also note that the timeframe you chose was at the peak of a tech bubble. Probably not the best for comparison, just like you wouldn't want to use 2006 or 2021 for a gauge on housing costs.
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> And big money players would never use Robinhood over schwab et all Their entire business model is PFOF [0]. That is, a huge fucking scam against retail. [0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/paymentoforderflow.asp
Why would a typical retail investor prefer commissions to PFOF? Seems like a much better deal.
It's about incentives. I am more than happy to pay $0.65 to Fidelity for my options trades, because I know that Fidelity's incentive is to get me the best possible price. Commission fees are absolutely negligible compared to price improvement with a real broker.
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Why would a typical retail investor prefer commissions to PFOF? Seems like a much better deal.
>Why would a typical retail investor prefer commissions to PFOF? It's about incentives. I am more than happy to pay $0.65 to Fidelity for my options trades, because I know that Fidelity's incentive is to get me the best possible price. Commission fees are absolutely negligible compared to price improvement with a real broker.
You don't sound like a typical investor so I get why you might care deeply about pennies at price execution. But I think most retail investors really don't care about PFOF and prefer it to commissions. And some of these retail firms are basically about just getting your stock trading business so they can funnel you towards professional portfolio managers who will just take a cut of your savings for no real value...that is probably even worse than the PFOF business model imo.
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You can make your point (even a bad one, like this) without being snide. Do you have a source supporting your comment that SWE comp in 2005 was the same as it is today?
SWE’s straight out of school made 90-100k in the late 90’s. Isn’t that what they make now?
They absolutely did not with just a BS. Perhaps a few companies paid that high, but 100K would be an easy outlier.
To give you an idea, even in 2010 most non-big names outside of SV and Seattle paid under $100K right out of school. Many companies in my city were offering $70-80K. Even my big name company paid under $100K in those days.
A lot of Robin Hood's growth in particular was driven by people gambling their stimulus money because they didn't need it to make ends meet, and by the Fed juicing the markets with low rates for far too long, and by the ridiculous meme stock phenomenon. It was a perfect storm of stupidity. Personally I'm glad that some sanity is returning to investing, and we are still a long way from getting back to normal.
The hardest part of this to me to deal with is that it’s the truth. For decades, the conservative line was if you give people money they’ll just blow it on gambling and booze. Turns out it’s true.
What we had, in effect, was the closest thing we will ever get to a nationwide short-term UBI experiment and it was a complete disaster.
The worst fears about UBI were realized with just a few payments: people gambling with the money, creating stock bubbles with meme stocks, and contributing to a rapid rise in inflation.
People will say that wasn't really UBI -- but it's the closest we have ever been to it and probably the closest practical implementation we could ever expect from our government, and with "real" UBI people would have been given even more free money.
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I like Robinhood and I have no problem with them having technical issues when users a flash mobbed a meme stock. In the end they learned what to do next time.
Why do you not have a problem with them having technical issues (if they were technical) given that people lost money because of it?
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I like Robinhood and I have no problem with them having technical issues when users a flash mobbed a meme stock. In the end they learned what to do next time.
They weren’t technical issues; they were financial, business, and policy issues. And many people people either lost or think they lost a lot of money because of it. Robinhood branded themselves as bringing power to the people but as soon as the people got the upper hand in a market, Robinhood turned around and screwed them. It’s a lot worse than a young startup struggling to keep up with explosive demand.
So several times I've had the opportunity to join fast growing startups that offered quite a bit more compensation, and equity as well. One of the things that I always took consideration of was the stability of the company vs where I was at. Many of these people made a bet that working for Robinhood would pay off, it didn't that is part of the risk that came with the SV salaries, and the stock. I get that it sucks, b…
Name one company where you could be confident there's no risk of being laid off. Big companies definitely go through downturns and cut significant chunks of their staff, and you're even less likely to be able to do anything about it there than at a small company.
Companies are ruthless, but that's a straw man. Risk is not all or nothing.
The company I work for is profitable. That fact alone lets me sleep at night.
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No kidding, a few well off tech bros use the stimulus to gamble and suddenly every family who actually needed that money was a waste? Was the government just supposed to lower taxes for corporations and the rich yet again?!
It would have been even better had the Paycheck Protection Program worked more like Kurzarbeit does in Germany - instead of just giving money to employers on the promise that they'd use it to protect jobs, insist that the employers use it to pay the wages that employees were going to be missing due to reduced hours, and have to prove that that's where the money went. Kurzarbeit was one of the main reasons my employer…