271–280 of 393 posts
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How does a guy like that become senior? As a senior one should know that there is a pragmatic balance lost in trying to aim for perfection.
He has his strengths. He produces exceptional quality code (albeit a bit on the spaghetti side) and is good at finding problems in code. He is also 63 and has decades of experience.
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Sorry, but this is a totally heartless comment. By saying things like "Good, they will fail, people won't be able to afford to live here and they'll leave" you're completely overlooking the human costs and implications. Things don't just change overnight. It's an slow, painful, eventual decline. Things shouldn't need to be pushed to a breaking point for us to make necessary changes to alleviate these problems.
Wait, what are the problems? "Everyone rides an Uber" is great for the Uber drivers. "People spend too much on organic produce" is great for the farmers. "Even bad engineers are in high demand" is great for the mediocre engineers. Housing is a problem, but this post didn't mention it. So before we start making changes, what are the problems in your opinion? And, then, what changes are you proposing?
Even mentioning Uber, organics, bad engineers and mediocre engineers ignores places like the south side of Chicago and any gradient between. It's not as pretty outside as you think it is.
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"Zero-bound" means "at or near zero." Inflation is easy to kill in today's world: just raise interest rates a little tiny bit for a short period of time and the deflationary downdraft will snuff any little inflationary ticks upward. But they'll be forced to drop rates again quickly or we'll fall back into deflation. The instant they raise rates the debt defaults and asset price collapses will start. Earth is now Japa…
Earth is not Japan yet. We still have China and India...
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Tens of thousands of man hours have gone into making them seem trivial, and the fact that they seem so to you is a testament to their design.
Well the fact that they've hammered on them for years doesn't mean they're not trivial, it just means they've spent a lot of time on them. And I think we've got to differentiate between the app being [non-]trivial and the infrastructure behind it supporting the massive load being [non-]trivial.
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What about the people who have already lived there, who aren't on engineering salaries and work service positions? I think it's fun to be flippant, but there still certain demographics that are being displaced and negatively impacted by the bubble.
Coming from a family of immigrants that had to move around to find work, it's interesting to hear about people's sense of entitlement to a certain lifestyle. Especially the expensive beachside living lifestyle. Am I wrong for not feeling sorry for them? Disclosure. I tried living in SF. The cost of living was too high. I left. Problem solved. Ta da, no bitching required
Based on your experience you described, you weren't displaced.
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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.
Too many fall into the "Field of Dreams" fallacy thinking that if you build it, they will come. Most of the time it doesn't work like that.
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…
What do free markets and San Francisco NIMBYism have to do with each-other?
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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.
Unless microtransactions for content take off, and they haven't, ad tech is necessary to incentivize content on the web. 90% of the websites you read could not exist without the ecosystem that appnexus is a big player in. Hacker News, being one big ad for ycombinator, doesn't need to bother. So he's doing a real thing that provides real value to the web. And it's actually a sustainable business, to boot. Lastly, ther…
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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.
It's difficult for people like you specifically because of the H1B flooding. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/11/us/large-companies-game-h-... "Many of the visas are given out through a lottery, and a small number of giant global outsourcing companies had flooded the system with applications, significantly increasing their chances of success. While he had one application in last year’s lottery and lost, one of the outs…
If you move to the bay area in your 20s, by the time you're in your 40s you will have a specific knowledge of a fad language that is 20 years old. But even if you somehow keep up with new tech in your spare time, you will look 40 something and thus be nearly unemployable solely on those grounds.
And you simply will be unable to save any reasonable amount of money no mater how many beers you don't drink. Like anyone else in the states, your sole savings would be home equity which you won't have because you won't be able to buy any kind of home in the few years your age makes you employable.
If in doubt, for those still in SF, determine the savings of your co workers in their 20s and 30s (who are now near then end of their employability), and whether they rent or own (good luck finding a 50 something coworker to ask). Be aware that you do not leave the bay area rich, you leave it because you can't afford it. And be aware there are few middle aged and effectively no old people there. And beware that 45 is only half way to retirement age.