271–280 of 335 posts
Can confirm. But it's not a nefarious thing and the people aren't slackers: 90% of the people who end up in this position are ass-kickers who strive to have impact and get bored: most feel bad about slacking but their bodies and minds simply need a rest. They created BILLIONS in value and even providing tech support, they "pay for themselves" many times over -- that's why companies like Google keep them around. Subtl…
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At Microsoft, we called a lot of these people in Group B, "volunteers". They were with the company through the glory years and had great wealth. They just wanted to come to work every day because they liked saying that they worked at MS. The best response given when I asked one why they still worked, "Why would I spend time at home? Have you met my wife and kids?"
> The best response given when I asked one why they still worked, "Why would I spend time at home? Have you met my wife and kids?" I am not sure whether I should fear sorry for the kids or for the father. Having father that jokes about not liking you must sux.
Ok, thanks for sharing this. I made this observation for the last 3 years myself, not as an employee even, but as a contractor. I had three positions at two companies, all paying quite high (150k$/year). I changed the positions because the workload was so low that I had an hour of work a day, then pretending I was doing work for the rest of the day which I can't stand for more than a few months. Now I changed again i…
It's kind of an open secret, I think, that (at least in the US) there's not anywhere near an average of 8 hours of work a day per "full-time" employee. Probably closer to 3 by the time you average out the overloaded and the ones who are doing almost nothing.
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You can teach and firefight anywhere on the planet. You can only work for the GAFA in a couple of cities, that happen to be the most expensive in the world.
The parent's point, I think, is that teachers and firefighters (in this country) are rarely (effectively never) compensated according to the value they provide. I happen to agree with that point.
By the way, in the country I come from, they are both compensated more or equally than developers.
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Usually companies try to make it so that levels mean roughly the same thing across all professions, so 1 and 2 or 3 mean "almost no experience". So while there might be people at level 1 and 2 in the HR department, or receptionist, or other professions where there is extremely close supervision, they don't hire anyone at that level for engineering. Often management also has a similar level system, but starts at a yet…
That doesn't explain why the bottom rung of software engineers has the profession-specific label "SWE II", though. Entry level at eBay is also "Software Engineer 2".
Also, a number of places need a few spine points below someone's normal band for probationary periods (I once started a role at a lower salary and they bumped me up to my real one on probation pass), or other reasons.
Most of it comes down to internal processes for job creation and sign off.
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I think I bought it at $60/share and it went down to $3 after dot com bust, wiping out Roth IRA. Oh well, that was years ago in my 20's and I'm diversified so really just a lesson (not to buy tech stocks).
except tech has been the driver of growth since the last economic crisis.
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I've also learned that a big reason why some people are workaholics is because they don't want to go home. Working late at the office gives them a good excuse.
I'm one of those. I live with roommates who do nothing but party all night (it's school vacation right now here, and I've started working full time last year). It's excruciating. They don't know what I'm going through, act like it's not that hard waking up every morning at 7AM and coming home to a balcony full of people I've never met, having to have small-talk with them (or feel like I need to when I just want to go…
Do that.
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I had a similar thought. I'd say that tech has been firmly in the "masters of the universe" phase for a while now and while I don't think the end of it will be the same as in finance (the nature of the businesses are completely different, there's no systemic risk), I think tech's comeuppance will be anti-trust. It's already happening in the EU, and in the US Democrats are making that a big part of their platform [1].…
The competition is a click away and has very low barriers to entry. Facebook might have network effects, but Google doesn't. If someone made a better search engine, people would switch. What evidence that Google's search monopoly is anti-consumer is there?
- As you mentioned, in anything social, the network effects are immense. - In anything where inputs are fuzzy and machine learning is required, the biggest data corpus wins (language recognition, image recognition, video recognition, translation, self-driving cars, payment fraud detection, etc etc). Open training corpuses won't ever be as extensive or fast to access as the proprietary hoards that the Big 5 US tech giants or the Big 4 Chinese giants have. - Given their value-add in terms of phone OSs+cloud storage+apps+mapping, Apple/Google/Facebook/MS get data that anyone else will never get. 24/7 location updates PLUS your full contact list PLUS most of your photos with pre-tagged content - enables targeting and monetisation of a vast scale and scope.
Basically, the antitrust issues are already so huge that I would not be willing to bet on firms outside the Big 5 in any profitable area that touches tech - whether it is self-driving taxis, cord-cutting smart TVs, home automation - and probably also online payments eventually. They will not just eat Uber's lunch and Netflix's and Spotify's, but eventually also that of the cable-cos and of the VISAs and MasterCards -- just like Tencent and Alibaba are demonstrating on the Chinese market.
Aren't companies like McKinsey more efficient? They have the rule that you either get better and a promotion or you will be fired. So they only keep people that improve every year or they get new people.