CoffeeOnWrite

Love this but let’s go deeper here. “Tell me about the coffee situation.. what coffee do the team members that drink coffee drink day to day, and where does it come from?”

As a consultant once on a due diligence gig at a medium-sized quasi-tech company in the Midwest, on the day I arrived, one smart and charming QA engineer took me aside and shared “the free coffee in the micro kitchens is crap, here’s our [employee-provided] coffee pot on a filing cabinet in the corner, please drink as much as you want”. That told me, among other things, this was a decent team in a mediocre company..

The comment you’re replying to describes a bait and switch “counseling clinic”. Cf. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/pregnancy-clinics-...

The moderate pro-life crowd should see this behavior as scummy and denounce it, as it taints their cause. IE take the high road to attaining their goals. Those in support of this behavior, have more deep ethical challenges, and I sincerely hope and believe are not the majority of pro-life voters..

(Using “pro-life” reluctantly here, to avoid distractions)

Edit to add: my intent by this comment is to depolarize. It’s frustrating to see child comments from the pro-choice side that don’t take my hint :/ Let’s not engage with the extreme on either side folks, if we want to better understand the opposing points of view. Yes, the loudest voices are often the most extreme, and no the moderates don’t denounce (on both sides!), but we can try to do better on our beloved HN.

Wait what? Like half of the ish we talk about on HN is what’s wrong with society, and we often look for the structural reasons behind society’s ills.. Including direct shots at capitalism.. And this is just one of a zillion online communities for folks of different stripes..

For sure I can imagine someone getting to a place where they feel gaslit by dysfunctional society, many must be in this boat all the time, the world is a challenging place. Should we not offer them a friendly hand, if they’re open to it?

Oh my, what’s wrong with my Mac?? I’ll dig into this. Thanks!

Ah that's fair. I do it for the warm and fuzzies, not for my own self-interest.

In your next employer, if your recruiter is game, just do what I suggest upthread, don't bother asking permission.

Some kind of minimal helpful feedback upon request after an unsuccessful on-site is the big one for me. The hiring manager can share one sentence of filtered feedback with the recruiter, the recruiter can share that one sentence with the candidate over the phone. Five minutes per candidate all in. If you say "but legal liability" you have no courage.

Maybe by getting younger people to vote more? (I know this has been tried since forever, but have we tried everything?)

And, holding public comment hearings outside of traditional working hours so that non-retired people have a fair shot?

IDK seems pretty hopeless..

It's fairly popular in my organization yes, but too much trouble for me until/unless Google Meet supports it in Firefox.

Yep, I look forward to upgrading my housing at some point, for these great reasons and more..

Heh, a neutral wall in my 600 sq ft place? I have such limited layout options to put my desk, that would be an additional challenging constraint.

Virtual backgrounds are popular in my workspace, and I think a more general solution to the issue. I'm not a huge fan of virtual backgrounds, they make things even more artificial, anyhow I would use them occasionally but for the fact that Google Meet does not support them in Firefox.

I'm happy for you!

Out of curiosity, did your current housing situation provide the space for a comfortable and productive home office, or is this unexpected development putting pressure on your housing situation? (If you're part of a trend, that has implications for preferred housing layout and square footage. And, of course people in different housing situations should be expected to respond differently to fully-remote opportunities..)

(FWIW I'm single in a 600 sq ft apartment. I'm also a manager. My workspace needs for desk layout, equipment, and quiet are minimal compared to individual contributors, but I sometimes think of the perceived status implications when my humble abode appears on video, though I've reflected and don't really care..)

Edit to add regarding status implications: believe it or not, a candidate I was interviewing actually blurted out "You're a manager in tech! How come you don't have a nicer house?". That got into my head briefly, until I decided that I don't care.

Probably something to do with homeowners that oppose any marginal incremental density in their neighborhoods. No idea how they are able to effectively disregard the state laws (if they are, I haven't verified parent..) though, that's a good question.

Upvoted for creativity in offering a fun recreational option. Do folks have others to suggest?

This is great and I lean on it heavily when explaining technical stuff to a non-technical audience or low level stuff to an executive audience. This looks like a decent dive into this tactic sometimes called “headline style”: https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2017/05/03/conscious...

Curious for you to go a bit further here. I’d argue two links [0] [1] have all the info a regular person needs to make prudent investment decisions. Why do regular people need your research tools?

More pointedly, and I ask this as someone completely unfamiliar with Daniel’s content, but does Daniel claim to beat the market or that his audience could beat the market? If so, there’s a moral hazard here, in the opinion of folks like myself that believe such advice is fairly dangerous.

[0] http://efficientfrontier.com/ef/0adhoc/ifyoucan.pdf

[1] https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Three-fund_portfolio

What I mean by cognitive dissonance is “I have never read a business plan”, followed by “I wrote something I called a business plan, but is it really a business plan? I don’t know what a business plan is”, to “what I meant by business plan is 20 pages of fluff”. The rhetoric is so incohesive that one could not possibly engage in constructive dialogue. We’re wasting our brain cells here.

Words have meaning, and pg has done a poor job articulating himself in this instance, if his goal is to be understood. Since pg is a social media personality and his business ventures stand to benefit from his social media audience, reasonable people may speculate that his goal is NOT to be understood, but rather to drive engagement, and to that end he has been successful here. But it’s not actual thought leadership, it’s purely marketing.

The hate/cancel/pitchfork sentiment expressed by some replies, could be seen then as an intended consequence of pg’s remarks - the outrage-driven engagement cycle is a well known dynamic in social media. And the defenders like you are the other side of the same coin. It’s amazing and somewhat sad, but not surprising, seeing smart people get worked up over this.

Are we talking past each other? It seems like we just disagree on when segmentation on SSO will no longer be prudent - I believe we’ve crossed that point, and you believe it’s in the future. Seems like we agree in substance though.

Times are changing though. Smaller companies increasingly have SSO portals. At what tipping point will the industry embrace SSO for everyone?

I’m the commenter that’s not on a moral crusade, or even annoyed, I just question the business justification for gating SSO in this day and age :)

Ok this is a _fascinating_ comment. (thanks for the discussion as always by the way!)

Is there a link between the market for security engineering talent and the leverage that the security engineers have within their organizations? Are you seeing anecdotes play out in the industry that inspire hope that the balance of power in business decisions is shifting toward the engineers?

Do you really believe that these world-class security teams have the authority to influence this detail of the pricing models of their organizations, or the political naivete to fight this fight?

Without knowing the valuation that the SAFE converts at, there’s no way to tell what percentage ownership YC will get for the $375K. So to recap, what we know is they get the usual 7% for $125K, plus whatever they get from the SAFE.

You say this yourself with “That's $500k for (7% + ?) of the company.”

Bidding higher would mean more money for the same equity or less equity for the same money. That’s not what’s happening here.

To be clear, the new YC standard deal is strictly better than the old one, because you don’t have to take the SAFE. But it’s not dramatically better. For many of us the 7% for $125K remains a nonstarter.

Did you read the same post I read? 7% for $125K is not changing. Third sentence.

I love Rails (though criticism of its magic is fair), but this isn’t a good analogy. Async/await is literally syntactic sugar over the Promises abstraction. There’s nothing magic about Promises, and certainly nothing magic about async/await. In fact, I’d argue you’re in for a slower learning curve if you believe there to be magic in these areas.

> pluggable storage engines.

I can help shed light here. Postgres doesn’t make you choose between two storage engines and their compromises. It’s been years, but last time I looked the trade offs between MySQL storage engines were material and the newer engine was missing some valuable features of the older one. The advice was “pick the right engine for the job” - but I don’t want to, that another decision I have to make, why make me do that? At least until they come out with a new storage engine that’s “objectively better than Postgres”, I will enjoy the simplicity of using Postgres with its single storage engine. Choice isn’t always better.

I searched to see if anything has changed and found that InnoDB doesn’t support full text search - give me break, after it’s been the default for years, you gotta be kidding. https://hevodata.com/learn/myisam-vs-innodb/

Thanks. I can see that I could have worded my feedback more tactfully, and will do so in the future.

No worries! My intention was just helping you all look your best -- which you are doing with this friendly reply.

> I have been working remote for 17 years

This suggests you are likely a member of the professional class. A lot of labor regulation in the US (my country) is intended to protect the working class, not the professional class. Perhaps that was the intention of your politicians?

(This legislation does sound like treating a symptom, and not unlikely to have unintended detrimental consequences. But we should still empathize with and consider the needs of those workers less privileged than ourselves)

Because the power imbalance between CTO of one of the biggest cloud platforms in the world, and a rank and file recruiter. It’s a bad look, to those of us that care. Punch up not down.

Probably was a win for Microsoft Azure and its CTO though, with all the viral mindshare