Earlier quoted context omitted.
That stock tho.
Not much to complain if you are shorting it :P
Shorting SNAP via puts was one of the best decisions I've made this year.
Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?
341–350 of 449 posts
Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
A mortgage (or the lack thereof) has a guaranteed rate of return. Any investment that would beat most mortgage rates doesn't.
Two years ago a CD would have beat it. Today it's not quite there, but there are very safe invenstments out there that will almost certainly beat a mortgage rate.
That would only be true for non-traditional loans (ARM etc). I don't believe you could have obtained a CD APR > 3% two years ago.
Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?
#343Ex-Googler here. I was a SWE L4 and left after four years in frustration with the promotion process ( https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/ ). Since then, I: * Moved out of my $3.3k/mo Manhattan apartment and bought a home for $200k in Western Massachusetts. Paid in cash so I no longer have to pay rent/mortgage. I feel like my time is much less "metered" now because my annual living expenses are so low, I can pursue…
I want to do something with AI/ML and recipes also but monetizing a passion is not always possible. Have you seen the NYTs open source recipe ingredient parser?
+1 for moving to a less expensive area and ‘buying back’ some of your own time. I did this a long time ago and have seldom regretted it.
Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
Contractors still do a bit better than employees, though HMRC keep talking about seriously cracking down on the practice.
> Contractors still do a bit better than employees Curious if that is actually true when comparing to tier 1 banks/hedge funds full time employee salaries+bonus+retirement+healthcare. Assume 600 GBP/day * 22 day/month * 10 months (realistically) full time work, that's 132k/yr. From that take out accounting, illness, insurance, healthcare, retirement, travel, possibly more. All things considered, once you get above 10…
600 seems low - I earned a lot more than that back in the day, and that was a long time ago. A quick search of jobserve.com for just "java" found roles quoting up to 750 on the first page, and if you're any good that'll be negotiable. And if you get into even slightly niche things (Oracle Coherence, in my case) the rates are much higher.
Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was my signing bonus , nevermind pay or RSUs. It's not hard to acquire that much money.
>It's not hard to acquire that much money. As a privileged developer, this is an extremely untrue and privileged statement. Developers like myself who don't live in SF are lucky to receive any signing bonus, and would be lucky to earn half of that as a yearly salary. Outside the US it's not possible. You are part of a very small and very fortunate group. Source: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#salary
The original question is: "ex-FAANG developers...".
In that context, it's definitely priviledged but far from being extremely untrue.
Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a great article. But, I'm always surprised to see people are surprised by this: "That conversation made me realize that I’m not Google. I provide a service to Google in exchange for money." And it's doubly surprising when highly educated/smart people don't understand this. I think there's something fundamentally flawed about our education system that isn't teaching or preparing people for the real world. I think…
I think that's oversimplifying it a bit. I minored in Economics so I'd like to believe I have a decent understanding of it. The problem isn't that Google just says, "Hi, donate time to us, your corporate overlords, in exchange for nothing." Instead, they make a very reasonable argument of, "You should help your teammates and colleagues." Imagine that you're on a team with a junior developer. Their feedback is basical…
"You should help your teammates and colleagues." is not, by itself, an argument. It's a moral precept.
"You should help your teammates and colleagues produce more value for the company because we hired you to produce value for the company" is an argument.
Now if the company's employee evaluation process doesn't recognize the second-order value you produced here then that's the company's problem, not yours.
Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?
#347Ex-Googler here. I was a SWE L4 and left after four years in frustration with the promotion process ( https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/ ). Since then, I: * Moved out of my $3.3k/mo Manhattan apartment and bought a home for $200k in Western Massachusetts. Paid in cash so I no longer have to pay rent/mortgage. I feel like my time is much less "metered" now because my annual living expenses are so low, I can pursue…
>"Will we be able to maintain this for the next 5 years?” to, “Can this last until I’m promoted?”"
If that mentality is widespread, it explains so much about Google.
Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is spot-on, and it's also true in organizations without stack ranking. It's actually not a cynical way to view your job. If what you do doesn't make an impact for customers and/or other teams in the organization, was it really worth doing? I've consistently seen that successful engineers focus on work that has an impact, and they are good at making it known. The first part is obviously good, but a lot of enginee…
> If what you do doesn't make an impact for customers and/or other teams in the organization, was it really worth doing? If what you are doing isn't making an impact, why is it being assigned to you in the first place? Or, to put that another way: a worker is hired to do things. Their comparative advantage is in doing ; time they spend in any other role than doing is labor that would have been better allocated/delega…
Why do "old" organizations like hospitals understand comparative advantage better than FAANG? Why isn't it seen as a failure of management to prioritize effectively when everybody isn't always doing the most important thing they could be doing at that moment?
reply
That's so good i want to steal it for a chapter in my book
Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is spot-on, and it's also true in organizations without stack ranking. It's actually not a cynical way to view your job. If what you do doesn't make an impact for customers and/or other teams in the organization, was it really worth doing? I've consistently seen that successful engineers focus on work that has an impact, and they are good at making it known. The first part is obviously good, but a lot of enginee…
> If what you do doesn't make an impact for customers and/or other teams in the organization, was it really worth doing? If what you are doing isn't making an impact, why is it being assigned to you in the first place? Or, to put that another way: a worker is hired to do things. Their comparative advantage is in doing ; time they spend in any other role than doing is labor that would have been better allocated/delega…
This is so right and also so different from reality that I had to read it twice for it to register.
Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, in a big company, culture is not homogeneous. Your direct manager and team will create their culture, with mild influence from the surrounding corporation.
Definitely this. I'm in a large org at a large company and there are drastic differences between groups because of managers. Simply changing groups can completely change your experience from a toxic team to a great one or vice versa. If a smaller company has a toxic culture or you have a toxic manager you may have no choice but to leave. Bad managers are everywhere!
Just to add to this, a good manager can insulate a team from problems "outside" that team, but there's a balance. Too much insulation and you'll disappear from everyone else's view (no more funding for you!), not enough and you'll become a dumping ground for people/problems/projects.