431–440 of 464 posts
I’ve been at Google for a little less than OP, and while I’m also considering leaving, my main reason is sort of the opposite: I’m bored. The whole team is bored. It feels like we’re doing nothing, and have been doing nothing for years. I work under 25 hours a week, and the vast majority of time is spent in useless meetings or reading useless docs. My actual work is maybe 5 hours a week. What are we even getting paid…
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This is exactly right. I studied both engineering and management, so I have experienced both schools. Actually understanding science and manipulating the world is hard. Try to explain to a non techie how a car moves, or how a web request happens. They can never understand it on the required level to fix things. Now try to explain to an engineer how a bond works, or how industrial strategy works. He can do both his ow…
> Try to explain to a non techie how a car moves I always love a classic hacker news take where software engineers are the only people who can understand how things work. It's not like high school dropouts are ever car mechanics.
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These businesses have a natural limit to their growth due to the estate tax. If the company grows too large, the taxes on death can be crippling for families that can not plan decades in advance. Public corporations do not have to pay this tax, and therefore have an unnatural advantage in holding valuable assets over long periods of time. The estate tax is well-intentioned, but because it hits only family firms it’s…
The owners of public companies dont have to pay the estate tax when they die, as their children inherit the stock? I thought it was for the total value exchanged?
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That’s true for academics getting grants (being able to publicly critizise the one that gave them). Why would it not be true for academics being directly bankrolled by a company?
No - the foundation of your question is a bit misaligned. The major difference is that as much as corporate research likes to pretend they’re academics, they’re not. In corporate research you’re not after some unalienable absolute truth that benefits society - you’re doing research that can benefit the company that is paying your salary. Sometimes those two align and that’s great. But anyone that thinks that an exper…
So you are doing research within a slightly more defined scope. If you still call it research then the results are completely separate from your affiliation.
If not, it’s not research, it’s just propaganda.
Obsession with promotions instead of product quality won't lead anywhere nice.
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There’re private in a sense that there isn’t internal registry where you can just look up anyone like at google. From what i can observe over years apple has almost exactly same perf culture as google and any other similarly sized company in the US
Interesting. Thanks for sharing. Why are they still able to continuously pushed out great products and keep innovating? What’s your hypothesis?
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Yes -- within engineering typically! That is a the role of a PE/Staff Eng.
Right, and in an engineering lead organization the PM etc are subordinate to engineers. Their job is to research the market and present the results to engineers so engineers can better understand what to build. This is opposite to non-engineers leading and hiring engineers to build the product they want. Ultimately the end result is the same, its just creates a different perspective. So it is easy to evaluate compani…
The most common reporting line I've seen (working at tech companies that you would know and recognize immediately) is director -> { sdm, pm-t } where the director is typically promoted from one of those roles. There is an insulation layer between product and engineering, and as levels progress the line between pm-t and sdm blurs significantly.
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While it's unclear whether grandparent was referring to tax advantages for the company vs. the individual, I'm not sure I understand your comment about lack of tax advantage in the context of individual awards. Scenario A: Company X gives me a sign-on bonus of $10,000 and an agreement to bonus me $100 * y%, where y is the increase in value of the company. Scenario B: Company X awards me $10,000 of RSU that vests afte…
RSUs are cash equivalent from tax purposes. They are taxed at market rate at vest time. If you sell at that moment and buy other stock it has the exact same LTCG treatment. It’s also the same as if you are compensated in all cash and go buy stock with that.
It can also be a cash flow problem if you have to cover quarterly estimated tax in between trading windows. My day job sells and withholds 22% of my vesting RSUs, because that’s the statutory rate for supplemental wages, but I always owe about 10% more.
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> and no market is really a "winner takes it all" Market for OSes for PCs (not Macs) is a great example. Windows has what, 98% market share there? It got there thanks to the dynamics of this particular market, which is totally a "winner takes all" one. In particular, if Microsoft were more relaxed in 80ties and 90ties, there likely would not be Microsoft or Windows at all today, and everybody'd be using Os/2 Warp or…
> OSes for PCs (not Macs) If you slice the market thin enough anything can be a monopoly. This particular distinction seems pretty arbitrary to me.