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Joining Apple 40 years ago

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Re: Joining Apple 40 years ago

#121

Post by supernova87a »

ghaff wrote: post #115
bcrosby95 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My parents almost had to leave in the late 70s. They moved to San Jose to work in tech. Bought a house in 72 or so. Their home value tripled in around 6 years and so did their property taxes.

Which is why Prop 13 got passed. It may have bad features and bad side effects but IMO you really don't want to force people to sell their homes because their property taxes have rapidly gone up.

One way that other states have done it more intelligently is to allow people to stay in their homes as long as they want, and not paying the proper tax bill. When they die/sell, that $ liability gets deducted from their house sale price.

Re: Joining Apple 40 years ago

#122

Post by Lammy »

dragonwriter wrote: post #116
ghaff wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why Prop 13 got passed. It may have bad features and bad side effects but IMO you really don't want to force people to sell their homes because their property taxes have rapidly gone up.

The bad features and bad side effects are the point, avoiding forcing people on limited incomes out of their homes was a convenient leverage point that could be much better served by more targeted policy. Like, for one, if that was actually your policy goal, the policy would only apply to primary residences, not all real property.

> The bad features and bad side effects are the point

Agreed, especially with how good Prop 13 is at baking existing segregation in forever, since then nothing else makes economic sense on the individual level except to stay put.

Re: Joining Apple 40 years ago

#123

Post by smnrchrds »

supernova87a wrote: post #4

Can you imagine moving to the Bay Area in the 80s? To grow up when land was still cheap, before college competition was cutthroat and unaffordable, when relatively simple competence could get you a solid job and VC/PE firms weren't plundering and incentivizing the latest 30-second attention-span app to reach $1B? It would be me living in Los Altos now, instead of the old rich people who I curse for refusing to die or…

Combination of high income and low cost of living is ever elusive. We saw the dream get a glimmer of hope with remote work, only to be soon crushed by CoL adjustment announcements. You would be hard-pressed to find, anytime in history and anywhere on planet earth, a time and place where salaries are really high and CoL is really low.

Re: Joining Apple 40 years ago

#124

Post by anonAndOn »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #80
supernova87a wrote: post #4

Can you imagine moving to the Bay Area in the 80s? To grow up when land was still cheap, before college competition was cutthroat and unaffordable, when relatively simple competence could get you a solid job and VC/PE firms weren't plundering and incentivizing the latest 30-second attention-span app to reach $1B? It would be me living in Los Altos now, instead of the old rich people who I curse for refusing to die or…

You have a distorted picture. I moved to the bay area in 85, stayed 20 years, then left. If you moved there and were already well established, sure, real estate would have been more affordable then than now. But as a young engineer, things were still pretty expensive. My starting salary as a BSEE working for a minicomputer company was $30,000. Two weeks after arriving they had layoffs. They were nice to the new hires…

Sure 280 was known as the Billionaire's Highway and 101 was the Millionaire's Highway even back in the late 80's but there were still lots of affordable tract homes in the south bay. Nobody knew the industrial park across from Vallco Fashion Park would become the mothership for the world's most valuable company.

Re: Joining Apple 40 years ago

#125

Post by ChrisLomont »

lliamander wrote: post #119
tasty_freeze wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a distorted picture. I moved to the bay area in 85, stayed 20 years, then left. If you moved there and were already well established, sure, real estate would have been more affordable then than now. But as a young engineer, things were still pretty expensive. My starting salary as a BSEE working for a minicomputer company was $30,000. Two weeks after arriving they had layoffs. They were nice to the new hires…

> $27K/year ($65.3K in 2020 dollars) Side bar: that is a breathtaking amount of inflation in just 35 years. Even if wages kept up with inflation, the impact this would have on cash savings is just devastating.

> that is a breathtaking amount of inflation in just 35 years.

That's under 3% inflation which is a not breathtaking. The Fed targets 2%, which helps avoid deflationary spirals and helps both stability and lowers unemployment, two of their mandates.

>Even if wages kept up with inflation,

Wages have surpassed inflation in just about every income bracket for the past 100 years. And when you factor in total remuneration, returns to workers are even higher. Here's 50+ years of data [1]

>the impact this would have on cash savings is just devastating.

No one in their right mind holds cash savings for 35 years. It's a ludicrously long time to simply hold your savings in a cash pile.

[1] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44705.pdf

Re: Joining Apple 40 years ago

#126

Post by ghaff »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #28

I don’t know if Chris Espinosa still works for Apple, but I think he might have been around a couple of years before Gassé. He started as a teenager. I’ve been writing Apple software since 1986. Lots of changes, since then. I remember it as being a fairly “scruffy” little company; especially if you went to MacHack. I worked for GE, at the time, and the corporate culture differences were quite stark. GE was a “shirt a…

I started to work at a minicomputer company in the mid-80s. Product managers and the like still wore suits. Many older engineers still wore ties but engineering in general was shifting towards what we call business casual today.

Re: Joining Apple 40 years ago

#127

Post by Torwald »

linguae wrote: post #45

I'm a big fan of Jean-Louis Gassée and I wish there were more visionaries like him in the personal computing industry. He helped push the Mac further during his tenure at Apple, and his work at BeOS also pushed the state of the art of personal computing. There are two major standouts in his career that I greatly appreciate: 1. His transformation of the Mac from the non-expandable appliance it was in the original 1984…

The BeOS is also featured in Neil Stephenson's "In the beginning there was the command line"

https://steve-parker.org/articles/others/stephenson/index.sh...

Re: Joining Apple 40 years ago

#128

Post by 908B64B197 »

bsaul wrote: post #25
martin_balsam wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ops...my bad. I was wondering this morning why there seams to be a tradition at Apple to hire French engineers and executives.

The whole valley has been filled with top french engineers for 40 years. This brain drain is actually one of the reason france is in such a miserable state relative to IT economy. The only ones left are the ones prefering a cosy seat at a large established company. All the entrepreneurs have been leaving, and it’s a misery (another example under the spotlight now, although in a different field, is the head of moderna…

It's something I never understood.

Worked along folks from EPFL, the X and Poly. What they told me about their startup ecosystem back home was unbelievable. And compensation was a joke too.

Are French folks... aware their smartest are in California?

Re: Joining Apple 40 years ago

#129

Post by bluntfang »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #67
bluntfang wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The US is a stable and functioning democracy. Our current president and almost half of the country explicitly doesn't think so.

This is hogwash, and a lie mostly propagated by blue check journo twitter. Remember, twitter is not representative of anything even close to consensus political opinion. It's mostly an echo chamber for elites patting themselves on the back for their "correct" opinions https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/04/twitt...

so the recently elected AG of Utah took a leave of absence immediately after taking office to fight voter fraud is just lies made up by lefties on twitter?

Re: Joining Apple 40 years ago

#130

Post by nitrogen »

shuckles wrote: post #100
OkGoDoIt wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that is perspective I’d like to hear more about, considering how much my peers whine about how things would’ve been better if they moved to the bay area long ago and it’s all crappy nowadays. That’s not nearly as much change as I would’ve expected in inflation-adjusted dollars. I do wonder how typical your case is though. I would love to hear more data points from others in similar situations. With all the old re…

San Francisco rent control is below inflation, so it gets cheaper every year you stay.

If you stay in downtown SF in a "YIMBY"/new construction building, there's no rent control and the prices are astronomical. $3900ish for the cheapest studio in some buildings.
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