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San Francisco Bubble

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Re: San Francisco Bubble

#171

Post by popmystack »

heraclez wrote: post #144
brianwawok wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish it were a protected word in the states, maybe an Engineering association sitting over it. Would help with things like H1B flooding

As an experienced Canadian developer who is seeking a work visa to work in the US, it is actually extremely difficult to get one. It seems as though the US prioritizes shit-developers/wannabe-engineers over experienced Canadian developers. Which kind of makes sense, in that you feed your own before feeding your neighbour. So I really doubt that H1B flooding is a thing. Open to debate though.

The first part of your statement doesn't really agree with your last.

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#172

Post by amyjess »

luckydude wrote: post #89
themagician wrote: post #3

Money has been close to free for years. As the interest rate ticks up everything will change. It's already starting to. More expensive borrowing, less leverage, and better places to put dollars than venture. The one thing I really agree with though is the funny thing that happens here with the word "engineer". If you can make a website you somehow qualify for the title software engineer. By Bay Area standards, I myse…

It's the dotcom stuff all over again. I remember interviewing some guy who wanted to be my VP of engineering. Have you ever fired anyone? "Nope" Have you ever shipped a product and supported it for more than a year? "Nope" Do you have any quality engineers that would come with you? "Nope" Have you ever managed a manager? "Nope" I noped his ass out the door. Fear not, this craziness will pass.

You can thank companies giving out VP or Director titles to their first technical hires for that.

At my last company, my boss was the first technical hire. His title was Director of Software Engineering. He got that title and the responsibilities that came with it solely because he was the first technical hire.

He had no management experience at all. He was a great engineer, but he couldn't manage his way out of a paper bag. He had the double whammy of both not knowing a thing about process and not understanding people. He didn't think having a process was necessary because his own code was amazing, he wrote the initial versions of our software all by himself in what actually is a solid example of a well-engineered project, and he couldn't fathom how anyone's code could be less than amazing. He also couldn't handle stress, and he had a habit of screaming at his subordinates and treating us like children whenever he got stressed.

His management was the biggest reason I quit.

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#173

Post by macavity23 »

wheaties wrote: post #117
YuriNiyazov wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea no kidding. "AppNexus helps brands connect with consumers, empowering agencies and advertisers with a uniquely powerful approach to programmatic online advertising." Thanks for working on Ad Tech, the very thing that powers this bubble by trading attention as a commodity. Other people work on silly startups, but this shit is akin to HFT.

Advertising is a necessary part of selling a product. Selling a product is a necessary part of being profitable. Why hate on that? Way better than waste-my-time Farmville or an enhanced "like" button. Adtech actually helps commerce.

Many products succeed with zero advertising.

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#174

Post by IndianAstronaut »

josh2600 wrote: post #76
mbesto wrote: post #62

This is why the free market is so great. 1. Everything too expensive? Good, don't live here, eventually enough people will leave to drive all of the costs back to other market norms. 2. Dumb startups? Good, they will fail, people won't be able to afford to live here and they'll leave. 3. People are spoiled? Uber is cheaper and more convenient in some cases than taking the local transportation. When people stop taking…

Part of the fallacy of this is the implication that you need "good" engineers for most startups. I think, frankly, that many startups need a website with a google form + some excel sheets to get started and if the thing takes off they can hire someone who can use google to bang on stackoverflow. Very few things require genuinely novel pieces of code to work. Yes, lots of value can be captured using code, but you coul…

>Djikstra said "Beware premature optimization" and that's quite true.

This is why a product I was working on almost got killed. The senior engineer working on it wanted perfection before delivery. The project was already one year overdue. He suddenly came in one day and rushed me to finish up something and he wrapped up a couple things and we launched at the end of the week.

Found out that the project was going to be axed if we didn't deliver very soon.

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#175

Post by wambotron »

luckydude wrote: post #89
themagician wrote: post #3

Money has been close to free for years. As the interest rate ticks up everything will change. It's already starting to. More expensive borrowing, less leverage, and better places to put dollars than venture. The one thing I really agree with though is the funny thing that happens here with the word "engineer". If you can make a website you somehow qualify for the title software engineer. By Bay Area standards, I myse…

It's the dotcom stuff all over again. I remember interviewing some guy who wanted to be my VP of engineering. Have you ever fired anyone? "Nope" Have you ever shipped a product and supported it for more than a year? "Nope" Do you have any quality engineers that would come with you? "Nope" Have you ever managed a manager? "Nope" I noped his ass out the door. Fear not, this craziness will pass.

What does any of that have to do with 'dotcom stuff' or bubbles? People apply to jobs they're unqualified for in every field all the time.

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#176

Post by swalsh »

pyrrhotech wrote: post #130

Can we stop the whole "engineers make a lot of money" spiel? Most engineers make between 120 - 160k in SF, where the median household income is 104k. They don't make more than product managers, project managers or even many BART operators. See http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/bay-area if you don't believe me. Sure, they make a bit more than average, but if that's the standard of "a lot of money", you have a totall…

I think a lot of engineers make more money then the value they provide. Last year I worked for 3 different places. I worked at one startup, and one large company on a new product in a new market. Both products were purely speculative plays They did make money, but not enough to support the staff. My pay was not based on how much value I provided, but how much value I could have provided if the products took off (they didn't, thus the 3rd job).

All i'm saying is you should look at other markets that have been propped up by speculation... and see what happens when the market corrects. Most of the time they over-correct before finding a new better more stable price.

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#177

Post by deathcakes »

mbesto wrote: post #62

This is why the free market is so great. 1. Everything too expensive? Good, don't live here, eventually enough people will leave to drive all of the costs back to other market norms. 2. Dumb startups? Good, they will fail, people won't be able to afford to live here and they'll leave. 3. People are spoiled? Uber is cheaper and more convenient in some cases than taking the local transportation. When people stop taking…

1) Sure, eventually. 2) Sure, eventually. 3) Sure because you are so averse to being taxed that you will deliberately destroy your own potential to get to work rather than acknowledge the idea that this could be a shared problem solveable by shared funds. 4) Sure, eventually.

So your argument is that this is really bad at the moment, but over an unspecified amount of time, 'the market' will sort it out. No worries. No need to think about things. No need to consider things. Just the market. Isn't the market great.

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#178

Post by mattmanser »

gedy wrote: post #97
mattmanser wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on with the hyperbole, if you didn't spend so much money on a nice area and expensive stuff you could afford it easily. I don't get people who are so smart and yet simultaneously so stupid that they think spending $100,000 a year is normal. Wake up, you're rich, you're just too stupid to realize you could be living at a much cheaper level.

Hey, you know that the vast majority of businesses are not very friendly to remote work, and moving away from these areas frequently means a pay cut or sometimes inability to find work? I'm not defending this at all, as I think it's stupid, but they are not "rich". They are frankly just less screwed than other middle class folks.

The median household income in the US is $51,939 (2013).

You seriously think having double or probably triple from just one salary isn't rich?

And where exactly are all your caterers and cleaners and gardeners and nannies and baristas and tavern workers and shop people living and buying their food with their minimum wage in the bay area? Obviously they aren't remote working.

Perspective is a bitch.

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#179

Post by ComteDeLaFere »

Reading about the number of cowork spaces along the author's short walk reminds me of working for an ecommerce startup during the last dotcom bubble. Our main office was in the NYC Financial District, so every morning I would hop off the 4 train and walk down Wall St. (as mobs of people sped past on their Razor scooters - this was 2001, yo!). One morning, I noticed something odd with a hot dog stand that was set up right across the street from the Stock Exchange. On closer inspection, I realized that the stand had an umbrella that was made up of 8 or 10 colorful segments, and each segment had an advertisement for a different dotcom (which of course was amplified by the numerous billboards, stickers, sidewalk chalk drawings, etc. along Wall St. at the time).

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#180

Post by Phlarp »

heraclez wrote: post #104
themagician wrote: post #3

Money has been close to free for years. As the interest rate ticks up everything will change. It's already starting to. More expensive borrowing, less leverage, and better places to put dollars than venture. The one thing I really agree with though is the funny thing that happens here with the word "engineer". If you can make a website you somehow qualify for the title software engineer. By Bay Area standards, I myse…

In Canada, you get sued if you call yourself an engineer when you're not part of an order of engineers. Even if you're a bona fide engineer, but not enrolled in the order, calling yourself one opens the floodgates of hell where spaghetti coders do the same and get hired by retarded HR departments to take the lead on some mission-critical software. I like this. I am a self-learned developer. When my peers call themsel…

Here in states 23 year old fresh graduates list themselves as "software engineers" on linkedin so they can demand 'senior' level salaries.

We do it because it works...

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