It's possible folks used that merely as a conversation opener. Sure there was some concern but primarily they wanted to reach out and talk. Concerns for hysteria are valid, but there are more plausible explanations.
1. Browser APIs have subtle differences, or don't always exist in every browser you need to support (e.g, https://caniuse.com/)
2. You'll need at least a transpiler (if writing anything above ES5) and polyfills to solve #1, and if you're diving that far into the JavaScript tooling chain (bundler + babel), might as well choose to use a framework.
You could change the process by being the person who rubber-stamps everyone, regardless of how silly the "process" is. If the person didn't get the PhD algorithm perfect, yet still did a good job, let them in. Anyone who is good enough to be considered for an interview at FB or G is good enough to do the job. That's the truth of the matter. Be the change you want to see-- this somewhat reads as a 'stick-in-mud' approach which may not get your desired outcome.
I told myself I'd be fine at 300k. Now I'm there, and I've picked up more hobbies. Doesn't stop me from looking for new gigs, from time to time. Going super deep into optimizing for one thing might be a good short-term, but bad long-term proposition. A lot of getting to 700k, I imagine, is luck. So long as you're competent, it's right place, right time. You can't force that situation to happen, so it's wasted energy to invest further.
Is this a joke? No I don't care about the companies I work for in the slightest. A company is only as good to me as their last paycheck, to paraphrase from The Sopranos.
Not the person you're replying to, but I think there's a whole lot of mistaken assumptions in this comment.
There is one employer in the world that will reliably give me work I care about and am happy to work on for its own sake, and that employer is myself. Unfortunately, I can't afford to hire myself full-time. I tried it once, and it turns out (unsurprisingly, given my career) that I'm interested in working on interesting infrastructure problems and not interested in building a product, let alone marketing or selling it. I got some PRs into an open source project and then I ran out of money.
So no matter what I do, I have to settle for an employer I care less about. At that point, the choice of employer is just negotiation.
Also, it turns out there are a handful of employers who pay really well - to the point where if I work a job I'm fairly happy with, I can then eventually save enough money that I can hire myself full-time for the things I care about.
There is no hypocrisy here, and bluntly you're being scammed by your employer if you've let them convince you there is. The way the employer wants to treat you is to pay you money in exchange for services. That's it. Would you feel hypocritical if you were an Uber driver who took rides from people you didn't care about? Would you feel hypocritical if you were a barber who cut one person's hair, and then the next day you cut a different person's hair?
I didn't make a vow of faithfulness to my employer, promising to be with them for richer or poorer, for better or worse. (And even that agreement is two-sided, and you can non-hypocritically break that agreement if the other party isn't holding up their end of the deal.) I signed an employment contract, promising them that I would do work for them and they would pay me, and that they could stop paying me at any time and I could in turn stop working for them at any time.
I think I'd sooner go back to drugs and homelessness than face the thought of waking up every day to give the majority of my waking hours to something I don't care about. For almost the rest of my life.
Or even worse, something I disliked/working for trash people.
I used to have panic attacks thinking about this when I worked mundane, dead-end jobs.
Pardon my language but: the fuck is the point even?
At least if you're high, in a park reading a book or papers on the internet you're enjoying life.
I'm being genuine and not trying to be antagonistic, I'm not sure I understand why you bother to work at all?
If you don't find anything in the world interesting, what gives you the will to live and not commit suicide?
Here's another viewpoint: just because there's no job that I I would enjoy doing doesn't mean that I don't enjoy anything. There are so many things that I enjoy doing, but no company is going to pay me 100K a year to just do whatever I want.
Furthermore, what I enjoy changes radically from month to month. Earlier this month I was enthralled by geology and thought about how awesome it would be to be a geologist. Now, something else has captured my attention and I rarely think about geology. Soon, I'll move on to something else.
So, at best, a job can keep my interest for maybe 2 to 3 months, I'm burned out within a year and I can usually manage to stay for about two years total before my productivity abruptly drops to near zero. To me a job is solely a means to obtain money and time off so that I can go do what I actually enjoy.
To me, you're just as much as an enigma. How could you possibly enjoy doing the same thing for a long period of time? What do you do when you are consumed by the euphoria that comes when you finally find something new that finally scratches that insatiable itch inside of you? The indescribable joy and obsession that makes everything that's come before seem empty and jejune by comparison?
Though I have been diagnosed with pretty severe ADHD, so that probably explains a lot of it.
No issues, I get what you’re saying. Funny though, although it’s mostly a “rose colored glasses” sort of thing, I think fondly on my time working shit dead end jobs because I was at least working towards something better whereas now I have to constantly question whether I’ve peaked.
> Pardon my language but: the fuck is the point even?
When you find out let me know. Some people seem to get lucky enough to have all sorts of other, non work things to keep them going, family, etc. so I suppose if you have that it’s motivation.
> I'm not sure I understand why you bother to work at all?
Because the alternative is throwing away both my past and any potential for the future, even if it looks grim. As stupid as it is, I’ve thought about though, if not at least because it would give me a blank slate and something to work towards again. Though the few fleeting moments of content was I find are generally at times I wouldn’t be there if I wasn’t wageslaving the rest of the time.
> If you don't find anything in the world interesting, what gives you the will to live and not commit suicide?
There’s plenty of things I find interesting, just nothing that anyone would ever pay me to do. Maybe they aren’t commercially viable, maybe they’re not really career related things, or maybe I’m not smart/wealthy/educated enough to take them on.
I and my partner don't have family either really. We have living families, but not the way most people consider family I think.
> There’s plenty of things I find interesting, just nothing that anyone would ever pay me to do. Maybe they aren’t commercially viable, maybe they’re not really career related things, or maybe I’m not smart/wealthy/educated enough to take them on.
This hits close to home for me. I got lucky with my interests/hobbies, but your scenario is identical to my partners.
6 years of a wildlife biology + animal behavior degree and she says she can't find a job doing what she wants.
I'm convinced it's possible, but that it would take a lot of hunting people down, knocking on doors, networking, emailing random people, basically taking every measure and avenue available.
I could also be wrong though, who knows.
But, she doesn't want me to do that and has something else she's doing so I go "Okey, if that's what you want."
I have no idea what it is you like to do, but if there's any earthly way for you to do it for a living, or make your living off of something tangential IMO you should quit tech and do that.
I'm sure you have pursued that at this point though.
In addition, work doesn't need to consume the majority of waking hours. If you have a high-paying job at a company with a nice culture you can spend ~4 hours a day or less working, with the rest of the time spent reading articles on the internet, browsing hacker news, occasionally replying to Slack messages etc.
I wouldn't leave my job for a "slight" increase in pay, though that's subjective and we haven't defined concrete amounts, other than 300k and 700k in my previous comment, and such a jump (more than double) could not be characterized as slight-- it's substantial.
I need to be paid a risk premium for the new gig having potentially worse colleagues, poorer WLB, or whatever things I find after the interview process. With my current job, I know all of these things. So jumping from 300k, to say, 325k would be unwise and immaterial (8.3%). I might jump for 350, definitely for 400.
Why would you ever work for a company that employs that many people and would treat you like shit?
For the (slightly more) money? Well then that's your own doing, innit?
The great thing about having any sort of skills is that you can pick and choose what you want to do with them.
If you choose to work for someone like that, you're willingly subjecting yourself to misery, and to (probably) wasting some of the best years of your life working on things you don't give a flying fuck about.
For people who also don't give a flying fuck. There are no fucks to be given -- the organization is, for lack of a better term, Fuckless.
Working in a Fuckless org does not, as Marie Kondo would say, "Spark Joy".
If you have to choose between:
- $150k Salary @ small startup working on something you're passionate about with a close-knit team
- $250k Salary @ $BIGCO to be COG_IN_WHEEL_#3356
The tradeoff you're making there is pretty clear
I'm not a judgmental person and don't ride moral high-horses. Personally, I value happiness, mental wellbeing, and have a fulfilling life more than slightly more money.
If you don't and you choose to subject yourself to all that awful stuff for the money, that's well and good, but you also can't turn around and complain about it or act like it's the only/a normal choice.
Bud you said you make 110k and we’re originally responding to people talking about 300k, 500k, and more.
There is no reasonable way to look at ~300%+ increase in compensation as “slightly more”.
You’ve got a point about working for a company you believe in, but that’s part of your total comp. You chose a package that’s lower pay + fits your interests. When people drop the “fits your interests” requirement they are able to get more comp as part of the package
Been in both roles before at Small Fun Startup and BigCo and I'll take BigCo every time now because that extra $100K/yr (and its usually way way way more than that compared to the startup) get me closer to my life goals of total fiscal independence and retirement quicker.
So yea, I'll sell my soul and eat shit for enough $$$.
Probably not since your government will most likely always require you to pay taxes, but you may be able to achieve financial independence for some definition of the expression.
How many companies are building something worth believing in?
The ones who are (few) defintiely don't worry about this problem as much. If a company is having problems with it it's probably that their estimation of their own moral self worth is what's incorrect, not the attitude of their employees.
I work at my current job because I used their OSS tool at a past position and felt like I had my life changed. Then wanted to share it with every other developer.
So I got in contact with them and told them how I felt, and now that's what I do.
If I ever feel like the tool doesn't represent the same quality as when I started or the company values have changed, welp, then it's quittin' time and on to the next thing I go I suppose. But I don't see that happening -- or at least I really hope so.
Nobody's integrity and happiness should be compromised or up for sale, unless that's what they want.
I've slept under bridges and I'll go back to it again before I sell myself out, tell lies, or pretend to be someone I'm not.
Here's some examples of things I think are genuinely valuable and jobs I would do:
- Software for addiction treatment centers and rehabilitation
- Bioinformatics and genomics for disease, especially making information accessible to regular people. Genomics for fitness/sports performance.
- Software reform in partnership with state/governmental agencies for criminal justice
- Anything to do with LLVM. LLVM is fucking cool.
- GraalVM is fucking cool.
- Music software -- production (DAW's), plugins, education software to make music theory accessible
- Software to make learning programming accessible. Stuff like repl.it, Codesandbox, Scrimba
I could go on and on. The world has so many serious issues, and interesting problems/challenges to work on -- just pick one you like and relentlessly hunt companies + people down + study (if you need to, to learn the domain) until you get a job.
If I can claw myself out of poverty, drug-addiction, and homelessness as a highschool dropout, into a white-collar career then I'm pretty sure most people with less disadvantaged life scenarios can too.
---
Not to pull the cliche, stupid "by-your-bootstraps" argument. But look, humans are driven and intelligent beings that drive the force of history.
Don't tell me that there's no company in the world doing something you believe in, and you can't get a job doing what you like, etc.
> Here's some examples of things I think are genuinely valuable and jobs I would do:
- Software for addiction treatment centers and rehabilitation
Where's the money in that? San Francisco can't even scrounge enough funding and will to effectively treat its own addiction-afflicted citizens and homeless population, the local VCs are likely even less interested in that line of work.
> - Bioinformatics and genomics for disease, especially making information accessible to regular people. Genomics for fitness/sports performance.
23AndMe, Verily, etc. are in this big industry. Of course, a considerable of this is going to lead to people's medical data being resold to Big Pharma, which is where the big monetization in.
> - Software reform in partnership with state/governmental agencies for criminal justice
They do exist, but again where is that funding coming from?
> - Anything to do with LLVM. LLVM is fucking cool.
Apple has that locked down, sure.
> - GraalVM is fucking cool.
That'd be Oracle's baby.
> - Music software -- production (DAW's), plugins, education software to make music theory accessible
That does exist, sure.
> - Software to make learning programming accessible. Stuff like repl.it, Codesandbox, Scrimba
Plenty of projects like that exist, sure.
> That's really pessimistic and defeatist.
Any industry with the amount of dumb money and hype as tech is going to lead to these emotional consequences. Ask yourself how much world-changing prosocial visions are on Wall Street, how many sunny optimistic dreams left unscathed by Hollywood. Silicon Valley is just another face of the bleeding edge of capital generation.
> What ever happened to working somewhere because you believe in what you're building and the people you're around bring you joy?
Sounds like capitalist propaganda, unless you work at some sort of co-op which is employee owned or something, ordinary rank-and-file employees are compensated with absolute pennies in terms of equity.
If they already have their budget in mind before the interview process began, it won't buy you any leverage waiting until the very end. They won't care that they burnt the money/time/energy considering your candidacy, even if that costs them more in the long run.
I've ended up wasting a lot of my own time with this strategy. I'll get to the point where they want to extend an offer, I name my number, and then we have an awkward 15 minutes on the phone (e.g., "the VP couldn't ever approve that amount") and then I say I'm not interested 24 hours later.
"If they already have their budget in mind before the interview process began"
This is impossible to know though, as is its breakdown. Many places have very fixed limits on salary and bonus, for instance, but RSUs and sign on they have a lot of freedom.
Even the places that have fixed budgets all around may have multiple openings of varying levels; a strong interview showing may cause them to bump the level they'd look to hire you at, just to meet your comp expectations (I've seen this happen numerous times as a manager when a candidate came back asking for more).
If they bring it up at the start, great, it saves a lot of time for both of you. If -you- bring it up at the start, though, you're just closing off opportunities.
If you’re closing off opportunities that you wouldn’t take anyway, it’s just another form of time savings. I make sure we’re at least in the same chapter if not the exact same page on comp before spending more than a 25-minute intro.
As I mentioned elsewhere, I upped my RSU comp 4x what was initially offered by bringing it up at the end, for a position I -was- interested in. Had I come out of the gate saying I expected that, I'm quite certain the response would have been "we can't do that" and moved on.
Fair enough if you only want to work for a company that offers your target comp -without- negotiation (since even if they're open to negotiating at the start, you're doing so when your hand is weakest), but otherwise there is nothing to be gained by bringing it up at the start.
100k vesting over 4 years -> 400k vesting over 4 years. No; only that I didn't have to leave my current place of employ. The total comp was toward the upper end for my market, though slightly lower than FAANG for the area (and with a company whose stock ticker is less aggressively/consistently rising, so less likely to be a huge gain come vestment). I did not make it explicit that I did not have competing offers, instead using phrasing that may have implied it (for instance, "will next week work for your timeline?" "Yes, though please let me know ASAP if it slips as I can't speak to after that").
Yes, I was surprised as well that they were willing to move that much. However, I know RSUs tend to be a lot easier to move on for companies than salary or bonuses (in fact, the salary offered was about 5% lower than my prior; I didn't even touch on that, instead looking to make up the difference, and then some, in the RSUs), and vary a lot more in the market. There are some companies that don't offer RSUs at all, pre-IPO startups whose grants are of questionable value, companies that grant RSUs yearly but only to a percentage of their employees, companies that give comparatively small amounts of RSUs to all their employees, and companies that give comparatively large amounts of RSUs to all their employees. That means the market range is huge and increases can more easily be justified; market range for salary tends to be far more constrained.
It's possible this may have also been due to being outside of SV; while the company has an office in my metropolitan area, I don't believe it's mostly dev, and while they have salary guidelines for outside of SV for dev, they may not for equity. So it may have been that the initial RSU offer was tailored to the locale, and my ask was okayed because it was in line for dev. Point still stands; they were incentivized to move, and they were able to. Had I asked at the start they would likely not have, simply because a recruiter isn't going to ask to make an exception for a candidate they haven't even interviewed yet.
A simple rule would be only permitting publicly traded companies from being included in an IRA. No private companies. Then, no more 100,000% growth inside of the IRA.
Combining "enterprise" with "vague promise of longevity" is quite the oxymoron. Google should start celling cell service if they want to continue upleveling their doublespeak abilities.
Google Fi already sells cell service, it's essentially T-Mobile service but without most domestic roaming and with higher prices than Mint, T-Mobile Connect and their other MVNOs.
From what I hear MMS stopped working a few months ago for iPhones on Google Fi.
Re-frame the question: if they could have western style liberal democracy without any bloodshed, would they? The answers you're seeing might be tainted with knowing the path to democracy would be painful, and all else equal, that pain is worse than the current power structure.
There is without any bloodshed and without any bloodshed. The Soviet Union fell down with very little bloodshed, but around 7 million people died from the economic disruption, and the democracy that came from it was rapidly compromised both by local oligarchs and foreign powers in most of it.
I don't think the Chinese would want a fall of the USSR scenario, however little the bloodshed is. Economic disruption can kill a lot of people and there is not even any guarantee the next system would stand on it's own.
> There is without any bloodshed and without any bloodshed. The Soviet Union fell down with very little bloodshed, but around 7 million people died from the economic disruption, and the democracy that came from it was rapidly compromised both by local oligarchs and foreign powers in most of it.
But you're comparing apples and oranges.
Russia was still a command economy when the Soviet Union disintegrated, and went straight to democracy and capitalism at the same time with very little transition (IIRC, mainly because of the bad advice of Westerners who were too ideological and infatuated with markets).
China has already made the transition to capitalism, so I don't think a political transition to liberal democracy there would entail the kind of economic disruption Russia experienced.
China has never made a transition to capitalism. Roughly half of the workforce is employed by the State, it's at best state capitalism.
A transition to hard capitalism and a collapse of the government would absolutely bring economic disruption. And China right now is much less self sufficient than Russia was in 1991, and gets its foreign exchange from complex and vulnerable supply chains.
China is also much less educated than Russia was at the time, and would be even more vulnerable to corruption.
> A transition to hard capitalism and a collapse of the government would absolutely bring economic disruption.
I mean, one of the takeaways from the experience of Russia is to not repeat the same mistakes. If China makes a transition to liberal democracy, it should continue to protect its state sector for a long time, and draw out any reform of it to minimize economic disruption.
It absolutely should not let a bunch of crazed free marketers come in and "creatively" fuck everything up with a blind application of their ideology.
Don't forget that western liberal democracies look pretty un-attractive at the moment. When the choice is between a raving loony geriatric dementia patient and Trump a lot of people think they'd be better off without.
If you can take a relatively small amount of money (e.g, $40,000-- the price of a new car, which is something the middle class does buy), and invest it for say, 70 years, earning a 7% annual return, you could leave your heirs $4.5 million:
40000 * (1.07 ^ 70) = $4,559,575
If you can buy a car, you can make your beneficiaries multi-millionaires, if you want to.
The chance that you live for 70 years after you have an extra $40,000 to invest is highly unlikely unless you started out wealthy. Also, you will not get 7% annual interest on $40K.
Edit: Let me expand. You won't get 7% real returns on $40K. Yes, the S&P500 can return that much, but that's before inflation.
OP was comparing the cost of a car now to the average wealthy person's inheritance now, which isn't a fair comparison. You have to account for inflation over 70 years.
If I'm old enough to buy a car, then I likely am having kids soon - so a 70 year time horizon means that my kids will be multi-millionaires when they are around 70, which doesn't do much for them. Maybe it'll do something for their children, who probably are in their 40's with kids of their own, but by then you are splitting things maybe three to six ways, so it's just a nice inheritance, not quick riches.
The average life expectancy in the US is 78 years, so this plan is fantastic for all the 8 year olds with $40k just sitting around waiting to be invested.
It's less than the median household income. If you save 15% of the median income for a few years, you could come up with $40k. It's also small relative to $4.5m (0.88%).
In 70 years that 4.5 million won't be nearly as impressive. If you had $40,000 in 1951 that was a pretty serious chunk of change. For reference, that new car in 1951 was around $1,500.
There's a pervasive sense of stagnant wages, unaffordable homes, etc in first world and developing countries. In China, it's tangping. In America, it's my step sibling having 0 desire to move out of our parents home (e.g., "Millennials kill X" headlines).
Your options are to try very hard, and maybe secure a barely conventional middle class life, or not try. And for people who aren't a fit for the knowledge economy, the second is the optimal choice.
That might explain the ratings. COVID has begun a kind of shift. Those in the upper class are getting it hard. Real estate traders are screwed. Those who pay minimum wage are having difficulty hiring, especially with the number pf deaths from those exposed to it. Things like bus driving come with hefty hazard pay now.
