Why One of Silicon Valley’s Savviest Investors Has Shut His Wallet • Hacker News Board

Re: Why One of Silicon Valley’s Savviest Investors Has Shut His Wallet

#61

Post by joshAg » Sat, May 12, 2012, 5:33 AM UTC

hef19898 wrote: post #59

joshAg wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

here's why I don't plan on leaving the bay area for anything other than the perfect job with the perfect pay and perfect benefits (note, those are all time-varient): 1) employment options: I'm most likely not going to work for the same company forever. I love my current company and coworkers, but I'm also realistic. I doubt I'll be at the same company in 10 years. Many times the only way to get a raise or a promotion…

After hearing points 4 and 7 one could become jealous...

Number 4 is awesome! Portland, Reno, and San Diego are all weekend car-trips away (~8 hours 1 way, so 16 hours driving gives about a half a weekend's worth of time for exploring) for two or more people. You can also fly to have more time there, and flights are only about ~$150 round trip on Southwest. Then there's Napa, Monterrey, Lake Tahoe, Yosemite, Muir Woods, Point Reyes, Santa Cruz, Sonoma, and probably more that I'm forgetting as well. And then there's SF, Oakland, and San Jose, which all have events on the weekends, not to mention various things to do and see as well.

Number 7 is pretty great, too. Some are only going to be around until there is an abundance of well qualified software engineers, like free snacks and drinks and ornate gamerooms. But others, like flexible hours are just the nature of this job, so any place that understands how to maximize productivity will allow for this in various degrees.

And I'm just at a post-ipo company that most people haven't heard of, so it's not like i'm looking down from my ivory tower at facebook, apple, google, microsoft, or .

Re: Why One of Silicon Valley’s Savviest Investors Has Shut His Wallet

#62

Post by rogerbinns » Sat, May 12, 2012, 4:12 PM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #60

rogerbinns wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing about California is that state law explicitly says anything developed on your own time with your own equipment is yours (obvious conflicts with your employer aside). Every employment contract I have seen outside of California has said something to the effect that anything you develop, no matter whose time and equipment is used, or relevance to your job or employer belongs to them. Even if you worked for a s…

"Even if you worked for a software company, coming up with new cat food would belong to them." As would any terrorist plans or child porn. This has come up a couple times in contracts with employers in the past, and I tell them they really don't want to own everything I develop, and I've had that clause struck from a contract with a bit of pushing.

I've encountered several contracts in California where they ask you to list everything you created outside of the company. The implication is that anything you don't list was then created while working for the company and hence implicitly owned by them. They explained the provision is for my benefit. I finally just started putting in "Numerous past and future works identified with my personal copyright".

Re: Why One of Silicon Valley’s Savviest Investors Has Shut His Wallet

#63

Post by podperson » Mon, May 14, 2012, 3:06 AM UTC

netmau5 wrote: post #25

podperson wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Paul Graham has discussed this fairly well: http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html I live in Alabama. I joke that "high tech" here means "installing Windows and supporting Sharepoint" and it's not far from the truth. If I weren't the "trailing spouse" of an academic there's no way I'd live here given my skill set. It follows that people with similar or complementary skill sets to mine are hard to find h…

I'm in Bama too. We've got plenty of brilliant people but they can be difficult to find and usually aren't well-connected. Want to get coffee sometime?

Love to!