SubuSS

I think that’s a software engineering dilemma spilling out to the rest of the world: how many ‘new software’ have you seen that are just a rehash of something existing already!

I really like the promise of green energy source. I do see the huge advancements made in terms of safety.

I have a question around waste management though: Do we know if there are big improvements here? IOW - https://apnews.com/article/washington-business-nuclear-waste... bothers me.

I don’t know op’s situation - but visa/green card is a big monkey wrench in those plans.

Also consider the wealth expatriation tax of your host country-they can really sting.

Are you talking about buying one or traveling in one? Latter is very accessible at least according to projections.

If you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But ten years later somehow, you don't quite know what problems are worth working on.

Richard Hamming

I don’t know your exact situation - but I precisely started working full time in 2003. I have many peers who have grown to vp levels from that time.

Without more details, any points I make / advice I give will just sound like platitudes. But I do hope you turn it around. The job market is very hot right now fwiw if you want a fresh start.

Have you seen the efforts in chrome around the home page with ‘Discover’?

There is too much value in the curation business for an entity like google to ignore.

Please see my answer above. I really hope it makes you reconsider that opinion. Most of us are just regular Joe’s looking to make a good life and have an impact.

How do you figure I am in that bucket? (Fwiw - I am not).

Well I was a part of SqlCE efforts which was the first storage engine tuned for flash devices during a time when flash meant you had to account for wear in software etc. I launched dynamodb - tech lead for storage engines. I’ve been a part of few infrastructure projects in snap where savings are huge (there are talks from my peers in reinvent). Those savings enable snap to make investments like our AR glasses (again I was a part of launching this). I am currently looking at other infra projects which mean big picture efforts that are mind boggling in scope (sorry for being vague about snap - most of these efforts aren’t public).

Each one of those represent very big dreams for me. Dynamo powers practically half the internet. AR experiences are the future of computing interfaces (IMO).

That’s just my experience. I also know of a million projects with equal scope getting built out even today.

It comes down to this: do you want to be judged by your best day or your worst? I personally don’t focus on the media narrative that target a sliver of badness in these places. I prefer to work within the system either advancing the goodness or trying to rethink the issues affecting folks - sometimes luckily both. I believe these companies are too big to be brushed off in a single stroke.

Well, again from personal experience and what I have seen, going the extra mile exactly like you said (not to) is what enabled many to grow both professionally and financially. For many, that’s exactly what put them on the faster track to all that’s good.

I know only a lucky few who got there by being there at the right time and coasting out. Most had to work it. I can really feel how it is easier to focus on those lucky ones (or the ones who missed out), but I prefer to still focus on the middle ones with right values for whom it worked out.

I totally agree with push back when necessary: my own career has seen lean times and heavy times as well and thankfully I had built enough work-equity with my employers that they gracefully helped me tide over them. So that’s not what am contesting.

I was addressing the heretical point you mentioned - ignore employer’s goals.

May be I missed an exaggeration there.

Again I think there is a curve :)

There is a point beyond which earning potential stops being a differentiator: you both have enough that it doesn’t matter. I agree there will be some hard conversations to get out of the preset habits though.

Till the point where the earning is necessary for your lifestyle - I can see how the first and second concept will play out: but that’s the trade off you’re taking for the benefits I mentioned.

I do agree all of this is based on the mutual agreement part. I was just pointing out it isn’t as dire as you say :)

I know of so many folks in fang and my current job who’d disagree that you can’t get rich from a day job. Most of them got there by not being cynical about their employer’s goals and working with the team to make those happen.

I guess I’ve been incredibly lucky and probably am in a nice west coast dream bubble, but my bubble vision means I definitely don’t buy that am a rare unicorn. I don’t think I would feel happy about working with peers who had a cynical outlook and we’re not invested in the shared dream.

I am replying only because this was the top comment - I really hope I reach at least one person who’s on the fence about committing to a goal bigger than personal!

How high?

There is a point where you hire help and this becomes moot.

Below that point, it comes to how you want to solve the finance problem as a couple IMO: if both your salaries are required, then obviously it means a full split.

Anecdotally - my wife chose to remain home and help raise our child / take care of the home and this turned out to be a force multiplier for me. I don’t think I would’ve made it to where I am, made whatever I made, built all my time sink hobbies without that decision.

It comes down to communication and being truthful to yourself Re: why do you want that job? If it is a passion, you should go for it irrespective of the earnings. If it is just an income, you’re just working for a random person instead of your own family. That’s a tough line to cross, but it worked for us with enough comms.

No you didn’t call them evil: you just called them

>Very, very toxic things for society, like human behavior modification (ad) systems

You didn’t say those points about people’s intents, you just said you won’t hire them / won’t work with them.

Sorry for paraphrasing. My argument stands.

Yes you’re allowed to have whatever opinions you want to hold. But here you’re proclaiming it in a public space where it can definitely be construed as judgmental.

Finally you call my arguments as fighting a straw man and yet you construct one yourself: ‘folks who work in an ethical vacuum’. My whole point is that’s probably a very minuscule amount of folks and something you are refining as a true Scotsman from your previous generic statements. My whole response is around how most folks do consider it but file it under fair use expectations and move on - so it is not a fair opinion. That’s all.

Lol isn’t it odd you consider the defense confrontational while the op started with calling a bunch of folks morally challenged?

Fwiw - I don’t work on ad systems. I was just stating my opinion about how borderline ethical considerations from misuse are pervading engineering and science today. What about intent?

I see two issues with that way of thinking:

- morality and ethics are a gradient and are fluidly getting defined as we evolve. Are you still immoral or apathetic if you use electricity generated from coal? Or are you saying we are all apathetic but this is the one instance you want to stake your argument on?

- almost all systems get misused over time: are all those makers apathetic? What about the intent of the hustlers using such systems?

I think there is a bit of goal most moving happening here:

- you started with ad systems as example of evil: they patently aren’t. They are more of a result of the deeper cause - folks don’t want to pay for things if possible. So now the bill gets moved to a different table, that’s all. All the humanitarian efforts (if any) are standing on the shoulders of the money generated from ads

- if someone says ‘I just want to solve hard problems’ - it is quite a leap from there to assuming they don’t care about social problems. May be they don’t feel empowered/qualified to tackle the big social questions and are just trying to make a living and possibly be productive doing so. Or they don’t want to tackle a social conversation in a workplace setting.

I am very wary of the forcing that’s happening of making everyone involved in social/philosophical questions whether they like it or not. A lot of people just want to make it through the day/build expertise in something and make it through their life. They’d prefer to pay taxes and let other entities / experts deal with those. This doesn’t mean apathy, it just means a lack of time and ability. I think that’s worth respecting.

Sorry dumb question: what are the dimensions of the board? I am not able to find this anywhere on the site.

When people talk about comp, they usually talk about the # of $$ they took home last year - anything else is magic money so to speak.

For the same reason a manager isn't going to value a $10MM grant in company that ended up being a penny stock, he isn't going to downgrade a company that resurrected from the pits either. Money in hand last year is the best measure possible/available.

There is definitely a class of staff/seniors making seven figures in FAANG - this may be because of stock growth, 'special' bonus stock awards from extreme performance or retention, matching offers etc.

But yes - these won't be the public / known numbers. These folks have no incentive to make it public and affect their own future numbers.

I think you may be over-defining what 'work' means.

The OP is a clear example of something that actually works, s/he even mentions some money being made.

If you set the bar for success at 'only an unicorn' - I can see how these can be considered failures. But that's a self-fulfilling prophecy by itself considering the tag unicorn :)

My browsers are stuck loading :( - tried two (Chrome/Edge). Any specific requirements?

But are the trade offs equivalent?

There is a reason folks flock more to SF rather than to nowhere state. If you save 10%, it is still 20k saved compared to 8k. If you lose your job, there are 10 choices compared to one (or none), access to cutting edge of tech rather than reading about it on hacker news and so on.

The other catch I see is how ‘life changing’ your job as an engineer can be in us vs rest of the world. US definitely is the better bet for the young and risk taking.

You can always go back and settled wherever you want after making a ton of cash in the US (assuming it works out), reverse isn’t true as much.

I remember someone trying to justify college over self-educating (quality varying all the way from coursera to Wikipedia to YouTube to Facebook): you just don’t learn the same way anywhere else. Being with your peers, having your ideas cross examined in real-time and having direct and personal feedback is invaluable.

I think the same applies to wfh. Yes it is fun, yes I like that I avoid commute, but I’ve also become a shell of what I used to be (remember I wasn’t the most social guy in the first place).

I am looking forward to going back to office and enjoying the hum of work around me.

I have the reverse question: if you have bandwidth to be able to do 20 interviews and you already know they do ask these inane leetcode questions, why wasn’t it possible to sink a month into solving a few of those and then interviewing?

It is hard to take folks for their resume or at their word alone. The inane questions just provide a common framework for evaluation. It is definitely not indicative of actual work to be done. It is totally an indicator for someone willing to pick up a new skill and learn in a short window. We in fact get the other kind of candidates as well: who can solve these problems very well but can’t do good work. So the interviews at snap at least try to go for a combination of informational and design/technical questions.

Ignore the feedback - we are not really allowed to give exact feedback because of liability issues :/. So it is going to be some super high level things you can’t sue us for.

So in the world you describe, if a parent wants better education for their child (than what the government provides uniformly across the country) - is the only recourse private schools?

So I come from India where the above model is in place - very few government funded schools are considered top ranking. Parents live closer to good private schools and fund the same when possible. But usually this means hours of transit for the child.

At least from my perspective, the US model seemed better. Here you can choose to live in a nice neighborhood if you can and get a lot more benefits than just good schools. These things seem to go together (safety / general wealth of the neighborhood / public services / good schools / accessibility to job locations and so on). I am curious to see why someone would not want this.

If the overall push is that the whole country should grow only at a uniform rate and we should penalize folks who work hard to get these benefits in lieu of folks who can't (or won't), that doesn't sound very American, at least not the American dream I was sold when I moved :).

What do you think should be the government's role in protecting the gullible and easily seduced?

Most of these drug laws are about this in essence: We are fast approaching a world where low level labor becomes more and more superflous. This is going to mean that there will be a growing portion of humanity on welfare in essence. How do you see that working out for humanity in a world with fully legal free access drugs?