271–280 of 451 posts
One thing that is very important to realize after being laid-off from a very big company during a recession is that you need to adjust your salary expectations for the new reality. And the other thing is that you should have been prepared for this a long, long time ago. Economic cycles are a thing, it is in all history books, there's no excuse for not being aware of them. I have always been very very conservative wit…
It would be quite hard for frivolous spending to become a problem on levels.fyi money. What you really have to watch out for is things like buying a house or starting a family. Not only are they much larger in absolute terms, but you must sustain them at the same quantity every month for decades. Nothing is easy or pleasant to cut back on, but frivolous stuff is much easier.
This dynamic is an important reason for the "perpetual childhood" people complain about in the educated urban classes. Because real estate is so expensive, it is legitimately much easier to access "fun" stuff than to have the kind of security needed to pay a mortgage for 30 years. The two don't even trade off against each other that meaningfully. $9-12k/mo mortgage and property tax payments buy a lot of toys, travel, and fancy dinners!
Laid-off tech worker here. (backend engineer, ruby/rails/javascript). 5 years of experience. I'm working on not ever going back into tech. I've changed careers a number of times in my 34 years of life, and am doing it again. I'm only a mediocre software developer, have always had strong people/business skills, informed by my pre-software experience of commercial construction, teaching/training at a climbing gym, cust…
How does a business like this make money? It sounds almost like it could be a nonprofit.
This week is the beginning of my sales process, and I've talked to many people that are super interested, working my way to the people that sign checks.
I'm hoping to get a spend of a few grand per month per company I work with, and get them to commit to a few months of my efforts.
It costs $1500 to pave a new asphalt parking spot (and $25k for a parking spot in a parking garage) so a service that "adds 10 parking spots", roughly, is valuable, and, more importantly, adds capacity to the business when they're otherwise maxed out.
I'm talking to restaurants, breweries, and climbing gyms, at the moment. All of these institutions are sensitive to their customers and staff not being able to find parking.
This whole debacle really made it clear that there is no way to be an ethical success in capitalism at the highest levels (CEO, Board, C-Suite generally, SVP). It is literally impossible to be a public company CEO or senior manager for that matter, which is the goal of most founders in this sphere, and not be slavishly devoted to maximizing profit margin at all costs and irrespective of anything else. Why? You'll be…
Relevant quote:
> Paul Tillich wrote that all institutions, including the church, are inherently demonic. Reinhold Niebuhr asserted that no institution could ever achieve the morality of the individual. Institutions, he warned, to extend their lives when confronted with collapse, will swiftly betray the stances that ostensibly define them. Only individual men and women have the strength to hold fast to virtue when faced with the threat of death.
Also:
> A group will never admit they were wrong. A group will never admit, “We made a mistake,” because a group that tries to change its mind falls apart. I’m hard pressed to find examples in history of large groups that said, “We thought A, but the answer’s actually B.” - https://nav.al/failure
Laid-off tech worker here. (backend engineer, ruby/rails/javascript). 5 years of experience. I'm working on not ever going back into tech. I've changed careers a number of times in my 34 years of life, and am doing it again. I'm only a mediocre software developer, have always had strong people/business skills, informed by my pre-software experience of commercial construction, teaching/training at a climbing gym, cust…
Sounds interesting! Any way to follow your progress?
I write to that list about random things, which is inclusive of more than scooters.
Currently, the next thing I'll be emailing about is about my journey out of evangelicalism, so... Consider yourself warned. ;)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
good question. No idea. I didn't ask, and wasn't there as a laid-off tech worker. :) I was visiting a friend who moved there a decade ago, and scootering around the island. So, I had good food, met lots of interesting people, read books in beautiful places, and saw beautiful sites. I called it 'a research trip for bringing better scooter norms to the USA'. Bali's scooter game is fire!
You're not first one I have heard from.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There’s a very good chance that their new jobs The linked blog post reads like the other 43.3% don't seem to have found any new jobs at all (if I'm reading it right). ("There could of course still be many that have found new jobs, which they might not yet update their profiles - a common practice on LinkedIn").
Zero of my friends laid off from google are even looking for a new job. My wife was always asking me to retire, but after a year or so she’d say “it would be good for you to have a job”. Then repeat. Retiring isn’t that fun when you’re in your 30s. So I suspect a bunch of them will be back in the job market eventually.
Finally the market is correcting themself. Software engineers aren't worth more than any other engineers.
From my experience, from colleagues and friends, equity is worth 100x that of salary, if you know where to "bet" yourself. You can add the option to retire really early with equity as an engineer. One can't with salary before one's 60s.
That other engineering fields might be extremely underpriced is a different topic. But that is not true either. But again I am not seeing the salary data that support that argument.
Companies either pay for an "average web developer" perhaps with some experience, which is maybe what you are hinting? Or they pay for a specialist or strong generalist that will design a system to ensure they don't lose millions to billions if it goes down.
You need to calculate your Shapley value. And that usually in the Bay area says you are vastly underpaid if the stock doesn't pay out. The cash is nothing compared to the value a good engineer could add.
Again depends on the specialty. If you are one of the 10-20 people in the world that can build a particular system in production -- my case say -- you are valued differently.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zero of my friends laid off from google are even looking for a new job. My wife was always asking me to retire, but after a year or so she’d say “it would be good for you to have a job”. Then repeat. Retiring isn’t that fun when you’re in your 30s. So I suspect a bunch of them will be back in the job market eventually.
Its actually not that unexpected, a big contributor is inflation. If you've any experience with Argentina, or other hyper-inflationary events, there comes a point where your labor is more valuable to you than what others are willing to pay you for. When the store of value is degrading rapidly, and wages in general always lag, those with options will do something else. Most companies I know simply are unwilling to adj…
Your point is probably applicable in less developed economies/low paid positions. For highly specialized well paid positions if this was the case you'd probably have a societal collapse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If I catch anyone "innovating"
It's in quotes because it's not actually innovative, in every case (so far) it's an NIH instance.
On the other hand, in my little corner of the world I've seen plenty of damage done by an "invent-nothing" mentality and an approach to software architecture that permits only plugging together popular open source components with fancy websites and corporate backing. For lack of a better term I call it "noun-driven development". You needed a disk reachable through an ssh server and an Apache directory listing, you ended up with Artifactory. You needed a library to replicate data with a Merkle tree, you ended up with someone's Kafka + etcd + memcached + redis + glusterfs Frankenstein monster, etc.
Don't mind me, I'm mostly talking to myself here.