251–260 of 508 posts
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On the other hand, 1 person who knows AWS well today can do things that would take huge capital investments and a team of 40 people 20 years ago
On the other other hand, the total number of programmers has increased dramatically compared to 20 years ago notwithstanding those improvements.
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remains "the" place? the number one determinant of future success in the US is the zip code in which you're born.
Causation isn’t correlation; zip code is easy to measure, but I’d bet it’s not what actually matters.
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For men and women it tends to be equal and opposite. Young men are at their lowest social value when young, they're disposable, expected to destroy their bodies to make a living, etc. As they get older their social value goes up. It's the opposite for women whose social value peaks at 18 and declines over the years with a significant drop in the 30s when fertility wanes.
I suspect the (young, male) workers at the FAANG and the (older, male) workers in this thread would be counterexamples.
Having said that, the economy has been very different for this cycle than it was when I was fresh out of college. It clearly varies inside and outside SV, and all the other usual caveats.
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> Sounds discriminatory against ppl who don't have kids and are over 40. The economy ceases to exist if, in the long run, couples don't have at least 2.1 kids on average. People are free to not have kids, of course, but having them serves an essential social function and it's not "discriminatory" to have values that accommodate that.
So what does that value imply about ppl without kids? That they should be putting more hours in or have less flexible schedules? Why not have resonable work schedules for everyone, children or not. I just dont' get why employers have to come up with discriminatory policies for the 'good of the economy'. I would rather support a transparent 'tax childess ppl more' govt policies that these insidious "values". Whatever…
A manager can easily see on your resume if number 1 applies. In which case we look at number 2. The odds are good that no matter your badassery, you WON’T hit the jackpot, because a company’s IPO likelihood is dependent on far more things than your contribution.
What you see is some circuitous logic - “a talented person has made enough to retire”. But how do you define talented? By the fact they are of a certain age and have made enough to retire.
I’m so grateful to have worked with older colleagues who did not care about using the framework du jour. Influenced by their experience, we made some unorthodox tech choices as a web startup, including the choice to use C++ and Lisp-like languages heavily, and it worked out beautifully. From them, I learned that it is more important to ship simple, fast code than to contort your system to use the latest tech fads whe…
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> I'll then go check salaries using a job hunting site for the same positions in SV and they pay the same or less after adjusting for cost of living That's the problem. Salaries on job hunting sites are wildly inaccurate. Glassdoor lists FANG compensation as 2-3x less than what they actually pay. Also, the important metric isn't COL adjusted income; it's the total amount of money that's left over to save/invest after…
Under specific assumptions: 1) You don’t aspire to own a home here, as that will eat easily 100% or more of your savings. 2) You plan to spend your savings in a cheaper place. USD is a convenient shorthand for purchasing power, but breaks down under huge regional COL differences. A $200k savings account in the Bay Area is like a $50k savings account elsewhere: about enough to think about setting up a middle-class gro…
Which probably won´t be the case for most people working there now.
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> Nobody can know everything and wizardly is moving target - half composed of myths and half of smokescreen. These people do exist, though. Just like in any sufficently deep intellectual field, there are people who are very gifted and have insane focus. Compounded over years, they grow to be real beasts, just listen to any talk by John Carmack or Jonathan Blow. The bad news for the employees is that they tend to star…
The other thing is, those 'wizards' typically have deep knowledge, not broad. Would most of either of the two people you mentioned really be all that wizardly at an average web startup? Sure, a games company or similar, but would Carmack be a 'rockstar' on something like a node.js stack? I'm sure he could pick the tech up quickly, but most of his skills lie elsewhere. And yet there is the expectation in tech that tru…
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> Sounds discriminatory against ppl who don't have kids and are over 40. The economy ceases to exist if, in the long run, couples don't have at least 2.1 kids on average. People are free to not have kids, of course, but having them serves an essential social function and it's not "discriminatory" to have values that accommodate that.
So what does that value imply about ppl without kids? That they should be putting more hours in or have less flexible schedules? Why not have resonable work schedules for everyone, children or not. I just dont' get why employers have to come up with discriminatory policies for the 'good of the economy'. I would rather support a transparent 'tax childess ppl more' govt policies that these insidious "values". Whatever…
An employer might prefer having employees with children for a variety of reason and mostly would treat "family benefits" as method to hire older more experienced people.
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So what does that value imply about ppl without kids? That they should be putting more hours in or have less flexible schedules? Why not have resonable work schedules for everyone, children or not. I just dont' get why employers have to come up with discriminatory policies for the 'good of the economy'. I would rather support a transparent 'tax childess ppl more' govt policies that these insidious "values". Whatever…
Employers are part of society and have to accommodate peoples' human functions. Requiring employers to make bathrooms available and giving bathroom breaks is reasonable, as is requiring employers to provide say parental leave (even if childless people can't use it). Setting working hours that can accommodate having kids is another reasonable thing--expecting people to regularly be in the office after typical daycare…
You pivoted into govt laws on employers. That is not what we are discussing here though, I was referring to "values" that employers come up with voluntarily. I don't have any issues with clearly laid out govt policies.
> Setting working hours that can accommodate having kids is another reasonable thing
I don't disagree with this as long as everyone can use this flexibility.