371–380 of 464 posts
A few days ago I got the usual call from the Google recruiter, after being rejected a year ago with feedback of 2 sure hire, one lean, two no hire. A strange collection, isn't it? Well, I would have “fired" two of them plus the recruiter, one who wasn't paying attention to my interview and one who turned off the video and whose accent and questions were basically incomprehensible (I am non-US myself, btw). Maybe the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Outsiders also don't grasp how high a lowly senior engineer earns. Compensation in tech is so insane. Other high earning occupation just doesn't even come close. It would take doctors years to earn 250k a year. In tech with stock growth + RSU, you might get that as a junior eng. I earned 450k as a junior per year with pre-ipo company. This is why engineers can just leave and others are surprised.
Get a google job straight of of college and it seems you can retire very comfortably in your mid 30s
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they could have even done most of those things and remained small and lean. Most of the bloat isn't that they've entered these spaces, but that there are a million little sub-projects within each one chasing marginal (at best) improvements.
Didn’t Craigslist did basically that? I’m not familiar with recent developments but for decades they stayed small and focused and seemed to have done well.
A few days ago I got the usual call from the Google recruiter, after being rejected a year ago with feedback of 2 sure hire, one lean, two no hire. A strange collection, isn't it? Well, I would have “fired" two of them plus the recruiter, one who wasn't paying attention to my interview and one who turned off the video and whose accent and questions were basically incomprehensible (I am non-US myself, btw). Maybe the…
Why did you pursue the position? You seem content where you are?
I am not a hardcore tech guy, in the sense that I could switch tomorrow to selling bicycles (for the same money, of course), and not miss tech one bit, so my north stars are money conditional on time spent working and stress (assuming the job itself if not terrible).
I would guess that my current position, given zero stress, little time at work, and good salary, is on par with the Google position I was interviewing for.
But I am not willing to go through those ridiculous interviews again, then waiting for weeks for a the committee decision, then the recruiter cannot say what happened, are you kidding me.
Note that Google was a huge, profitable, publicly traded company before this happened - it was possible to be an institution and be publicly traded, but for how long? Can we build long term focused companies that are subject to the whims of the stock markets? I'm not sure. Truthfully, I think it's a social problem.
“Quite a few activists and researchers were fired for asking Google to be a bit more ethical” In the examples the author cited, those activists and researchers were fired for reasons going beyond “asking Google to be a bit more ethical. And frankly it doesn’t seem ethical for activists, researchers, and the author to deliberately misconstrue facts whenever they believe they’re on the right side of an ethical (and som…
Exactly, perhaps people read too many comic book with these one dimensional villains to think that an employee asked Google to be more ethical and then they fired them right there and you could hear an evil laugh in the background. I've looked at some of the correspondence between Timnit and others and it's fairly unprofessional on her part if you ask me and it has this self righteousness tone to it too. Another very…
Well otherwise it would be considered securities fraud
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Owners do not want dividends. I do not want dividends from my tech stocks if I’m simply going to turn around and reinvest in them. That is just paying extra short term capital gains taxes when you do not have to.
Qualified dividends (which represent the vast majority of them) are taxed as long-term capital gains to avoid this concern.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the best time to be alive, because we can leverage their platforms (ex. google search, YT) to learn anything and everything to ultimately destroy them by building something different. Just excited to live in a time where we (anyone with basic internet access pretty much) can execute runtime hacks on capitalism by changing the inputs a bit while still creating value where it matters to us.
Given the history of Facebook's acquisitions, I think this is a little optimistic. The sheer disgusting amount of money that FAANGs have allows them to buy or undercut any competitor that looks to gain steam.
Money is so plentiful these days, from personal experience you can just work for a FAANG/eqv. for max 4 years and amass at least 500k to a million bucks easily.
That's plenty money to bootstrap your company, and in some cases more than enough to cut out needing vulture- sorry I mean venture- capital for a good while or ever. Also, you can leverage free resources (like YC's videos, since we're on this site) and find VC related podcasts to understand how they work, so you can learn strategies on how to grow and completely avoid them.
Not to mention, 4 years will give you access to competent like-minded people (networking), a deeper understanding of how these companies operate and what to avoid/adopt, and if you're in a technical position you will most likely level up like crazy to the point you feel confident on learning any new tech and doing everything yourself. Don't know design? Attend some design workshops. Don't understand product marketing? Attend the workshop with the dude who wrote a book on how to do exactly that, and ask him questions. What does operational strategy mean? Attend that workshop.
These companies also have conferences and events where they bring leaders to speak and share their expertise- go to these and learn as much as you can.
The only resource that truly matters is time, so while you're alive, do execute. Just my 2 cents.
A few days ago I got the usual call from the Google recruiter, after being rejected a year ago with feedback of 2 sure hire, one lean, two no hire. A strange collection, isn't it? Well, I would have “fired" two of them plus the recruiter, one who wasn't paying attention to my interview and one who turned off the video and whose accent and questions were basically incomprehensible (I am non-US myself, btw). Maybe the…
What does this mean?