151–160 of 289 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of topic, but what does "stuffing on tips" mean? (not a native and google didn't help.
Sorry it was intended to be "stiffing". Usually when a group grows to a certain size, somebody will decide that rather than chipping in $30, because they "just had a salad", they'll toss in $12.95 for the salad, skip tax and tip and disappear.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another (minor) nit, in my experience you have always needed to be a dual tech income to afford a house in the cities near the bay. My wife and I bought our first house in 1984 for $153,000 and it required us to both be working well paid tech jobs. You can also buy a house usually if you have a lucky equity break and can use that to pay big chunk down so the mortgage is affordable on a single income but as far as I c…
I dunno - my in-laws bought their house in 1986 on a single engineer's salary (then renovated it into a bigger one when my mother-in-law went back to work). I also had a number of coworkers at Google who bought houses in 2009/2010 as single tech workers. Heck, I could've done so myself (2BR condos in MTV were going for $400K at the time), and am kicking myself for not doing it. Perhaps 09-10 was a bit of an aberratio…
So I was at one of these companies when the scandal broke. I didn't get screwed quite so much as my coworkers, since I'd only been working there for a year or so. The settlement was a joke - I got about $1100, but my compensation increased by roughly $100K/year the year after the cartel broke, and kept rising. Can't say I'm terribly pleased about either the wage-fixing or the settlement, but... My wife works in phila…
This just proves that the housing crises was the same before. A regular middle-class income cannot afford an $800k home. The problem is the same before and after: there isn't enough supply for people who want homes.
Until you look at sales numbers and supply, your analysis is meaningless. Increased wages don't make housing prices increase.
>not realizing that if they did hire remote workers, the same thing would happen in their communities.
Again, this is bullshit. Google could hire 10,000 remote employees at SV wages in somewhere like the Detroit area and it would have a negligible impact on housing prices because the supply is so large.
Remember, techies still make up a tiny percentage of the bay area population. 1% of the population being flush with cash should have absolutely zero impact on a healthy housing market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Just following orders" has been used as recently as the Obama administration as an excuse not to prosecute CIA operatives for torture, despite American law on the books that explicitly forbids using it as an excuse for torture.
Isn't the main part that they were given legal guidance that what they were doing was not legally torture though? There's a bit in another article that got posted today [0] about that. > Guantánamo leadership wanted to understand the legal gymnastics that would be required to implement a program of their own. “Torture has been prohibited by international law, but the language of the statutes is written vaguely,” and…
The United States Senate ratified, and President Reagan signed the The U.N. Convention Against Torture, which states that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”
No amount of legal hand waving by the Bush administration can justify what was done.
Likewise, there is no excuse for the Obama administration refusing to prosecute the crimes that occurred.
The critical thing here is that if pay was uncontrolled, then skilled employees could market themselves to the highest payer, and that would put more of the profits of the work of those employees into employee pay instead of into company margin (aka profit). It is pretty clear when you look at the revenue per employee numbers at some of these 'digital product' companies (specifically Google and Facebook), that rank a…
Managers at Google don't make much more and in some cases don't make more than the SWEs they manage. Did you mean to say shareholders?
Notice the difference: " Top executives of leading tech companies secretly agreed among themselves not to hire each other’s employees" "...brought charges against the companies " They should have been indicting both, or just the executives for their explicit role in this criminal behavior. I really detest the lack of individual accountability in all these cases when we deal with large companies. If this was a couple…
Being a rich executive is essentially a get out of jail free card in America. Only good outcome for us commoners is that they can't screw us in the same way again. They have to invent a new way next time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The critical point is that, potentially, you were a candidate of having your wages colluded to be depressed illegally. Ponder about this fact for a moment. Now, how could you straightforwardly make an argument that you are okay because they "treated me very well" or that it's a good thing because it helps the housing market (less income on your end)? These are not in any way, shape or form arguments or defences for t…
It was never OK or legal but it was settled. I can say that I was happy with the settlement. I cannot speak for others except to say that I don't think I'm all that much of an outlier, so don't write me off, bro. I still think this is a better argument than people arguing on behalf of hypothetical others they don't know anything about. One data point is better than zero. If you want to pursue justice, find a current…
> I still think this is a better argument than people arguing on behalf of hypothetical others they don't know anything about. One data point is better than zero.
Harh, harh. I must admit, I know nothing about a lot of things. Thanks for sharing your viewpoint however, it grows my knowledge by at least one :)
My main point I'll make is simple -- you were victim of wage depression, it was found out and 'fixed' because it was illegal, and you benefited -- precisely because you were an identifiable victim. Now, imagine if you 'benefited' X to (X+Y) years earlier. Wouldn't you have retired earlier -- if that's your desirable outcome?
So I was at one of these companies when the scandal broke. I didn't get screwed quite so much as my coworkers, since I'd only been working there for a year or so. The settlement was a joke - I got about $1100, but my compensation increased by roughly $100K/year the year after the cartel broke, and kept rising. Can't say I'm terribly pleased about either the wage-fixing or the settlement, but... My wife works in phila…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a powerful insight, thank you. I am fascinated by the way "fitness landscapes" manifest in companies OUTSIDE the financial fitness of the company's trade. People often act like trade fitness is the only realm where we compete in capitalism, but there are so many more. Moat fitness for a company doesn't benefit their trade at all. Customers don't benefit when you kill a competitor, but you do. Similarly PowerP…
Power Point? What have PPT ever done to you?
This becomes more stark when you compare powerpoint with another part of Microsoft Office: Excel. Excel is actually amazing software. Innumerable small businesses are basically run through Excel. Excel is truly user empowering software that lets lay-people exploit the power of their computer to solve real problem.
Compared to Excel, powerpoint is just sad. In theory it keeps people in the audience of any presentation awake, but in reality it fails at even that. Excel empowers users to solve problems, while powerpoint is little more than an emotional crutch for people who are nervous in front of crowds.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One person doesn't need 10 houses.
One person doesn't need billions of dollars either. Doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Real estate is a good investment.
I know a number of pre-IPO Googlers, as well as a couple folks who have struck it rich with startups. For the most part, they own their own (pretty nice) home, and have little interest in owning other homes. A couple owned double homes, a big suburban one in the South Bay and either a condo in SF or a beach home in Santa Cruz that they could stay at for weekend getaways. One guy owned homes near every Google office that he would regularly travel to, but since they're in different cities, they don't do much for Bay Area real estate prices.
For the most part, people who got rich in tech tended to invest fairly conservatively in conventional index funds etc, and do a bit of dabbling in angel investing on the side. (Another unfortunate unintended consequence of the huge Silicon Valley wage increases is the near-collapse of the individual angel funding market; it used to be someone could write a check for $100K and sustain a founding team for a year or more, but that's increasingly difficult with Bay Area housing prices.) That makes perfect sense: another cardinal rule of investing is to stick to what you know. People who go into real estate because they've heard real estate is a good investment tend to get slaughtered; like any capital market, there's a lot of subtlety to knowing where, when, how much, and how to buy. If your passion in life is software, these details are going to be terribly boring, and you probably won't be much good at them.
I also know a number of landlords. Interestingly, this group is largely disjoint from the people who struck it rich with tech startup options. They are largely ordinary high-paid professionals who are comfortable with leverage. They might use their salaries (and perhaps a little inheritance) to buy a duplex, pay that down a bit, then use the rental income to justify another loan on a small apartment block, fund the mortgage with cash flow from that, pay down principal, etc. The entry into becoming a landlord is made significantly easier if you're making $300-400K/year than if you're making $100-125K.
(Interestingly, duplexes seem underpriced in Mountain View right now - you can sometimes buy an old 3/2 duplex for less than a ritzy 3BR condo. That indicates to me that a number of home buyers today have no interest in becoming landlords.)