brd529

You were downvoted but this is a legit point - people like the ones in this article on “effective altruism” made this decision: https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2020/09/23/effective...

If you can find an org that can convert dollars to lives saved (by climate advocacy eg climate central or direct action eg terraformation) and commit to donating a certain percentage of your paycheck to them it may make your job feel more meaningful. Doesn’t work for me but works for sum.

I was extremely disappointed to see this statistic trotted out in the New Yorker - almost as a throw away line. It’s such a weak claim for something to be “reputed to be” or “estimated by some” which is probably how it got past the fact checkers (I have not been able to find the source of the 1:100,000 estimate), but it’s stated with authority and smugness and contributes to national readers’ general misunderstandings of Utah and Latter-day Saints.

I know MLMs happen in and are more common in Utah than in other states for all the reasons people have identified in this thread, but it’s also true that high-trust communities have many many benefits, and though there are bad actors who figure out how to exploit these trust networks, the networks somehow stay resilient and help lead Utah to lead the nation on a number of wellness statistics such as the lowest unemployment rate in salt lake out of all big cities [1] and having the lowest income inequality other than Alaska and Wyoming (which have less than 1M people each) [2]

[1] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/09/18/salt-lake...

[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/income-ineq...

I also noticed this - e.g ‘wheel’ - I assume noun first would be a better default but haven't thought about it deeply

It was 30% of the recruiting team that was laid off today which almost certainly includes recruiting coordinators, sourcers and other entry level non technical roles. It is a challenging time to be looking for a job if you are a recruiter, so I hope these severance packages are generous.

FWIW I always configure my bank to bank transfers with micro deposits - I am very uncomfortable giving plaid my credentials. It takes a couple days which is lame but feels much safer.

Came here to say this. The other point I would add, and this gets churchy but it is also the wisdom of the ages “to find your life you have to lose it” - the great thing about a church is you are instantly plugged into a community of service that makes it easy to lose your life for the sake of others

> How do you go from talking to someone during some hobby activity to a friendship outside of that activity

Ask them for their phone number and text them to invite them to things, even if just to lunch

What did you do to beat Mixpanel to IPO - when they had a couple year head-start?

You can. Airtable is what salesforce would look like if it were built today. Because CRM is so dominated by salesforce though, Airtable's defaults are not CRM and it doesn't market itself as such.

It's not unreasonable to say Salesforce was MS Access / Filemaker in the cloud, and the cloud made all the difference.

> Historically, our merchants in China have benefitted from lower shipping costs due to the Universal Postal Union Treaty (“UPU”). Certain expected changes to UPU postal rates that went into effect in July 2020 are likely to increase the shipping rates our merchants incur to ship products from China. The actions we have taken in our logistics program to mitigate these increased costs may not be successful over the long term. If there are increases in shipping costs, the sales price of products on our platform could increase, which could reduce the volume of transaction activity on our platform to decrease and may consequently have a negative impact on our results of operations.

The S1 talks a lot about their logistics platform and diversifying their merchant base to come from different countries, instead of just China - and rightfully so, since until July Wish’s business was subsidized by the Universal Postal Union treaty. Thanks to the UPU, Before July it was cheaper to mail a package to Chicago from Shanghai than to shop to Chicago from Dallas.

This has now changed and so the era of cheap shipping from China is over. It’s unclear how much their logistics platform mitigates the new costs, but interesting that they had to go out and build their own fulfillment and cross border carrier services to mitigate.

Disagree hard. This piece is interesting because it is a relatable window into the history of database concepts and what it's like being on teams that work on them. For anyone who has done serious work on databases its a fascinating read. For example, IBM was working on a cloud native analytical database that separated storage from compute!? They could have had the next snowflake on their hands.

This explains it: https://harveymultani.substack.com/p/startup-employee-syndic...

The idea is for employees to raise money from their network into a special purpose vehicle, and have that SPV invest in their employer, charging a 20% carry to the other investors in the SPV

Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral!

Usually they have a paper at Sigmod

2018: https://sigmod2018.org/sigmod_industrial_list.shtml

RAPID: In-Memory Analytical Query Processing Engine with Extreme Performance per Watt

2020: https://sigmod2020.org/sigmod_industrial_list.shtml

Database Workload Capacity Planning using Time Series Analysis and Machine Learning

100% this. I do believe that a lot of two-job families would love for one or both parents to go part time. This way one parent doesn't have to 'give up' their career. Some generic advice I give to new grads which I never considered until I had kids was to seriously consider a medical profession because it is well-paying AND has a strong culture of part-time where shift work is the norm.

I've seen parents who negotiate hard for three days a week get it, but they are quickly 'mommy tracked' and stop getting promotions. Additionally when a crisis at work happens on their off day, they still get the call.

I think a tech company that figures out how to make part-time jobs work culturally will have a huge recruiting and talent advantage, especially this year. I haven't seen it pulled off yet though.

It's true that a company can't issue ISOs if the termination window is more than 90 days, they have to be NSOs instead. IMO the downside of the NSOs (pay tax immediately upon exercise instead of at next year's tax deadline - ISOs don't actually change the amount of tax that is due, just the timing of when you pay it) is small compared to the very real risk that your options will go poof if you don't have the cash to exercise and pay tax if there is a termination event.

Bravo bravo bravo! This piece neatly encapsulates all the problems with ISOs. The biggest one is mentioned at the beginning - information asymmetry. I don’t really understand why most companies, especially small ones less than 100 people, can’t be transparent about their cap table with employees.

I do think the culture around 90 day exercise Windows is changing. Here is a list of companies with extended windows [1]. At this point I would never join a company with 90 day windows.

[1] https://github.com/holman/extended-exercise-windows

Thanks for putting this up for feedback. I read with some interest. For me the biggest piece that was missing was evidence that the ideas work.

The content sounds aspirational “wouldn’t it be nice if” and not grounded in lived experience. You should definitely put some information in your intro about who you are and where you’ve seen these ideas work, and from what viewpoint you are coming from. This would add more credibility.

For example, it is not self evident to me that async is inherently better for decision making or assigning tasks. It is better for decision communicating and task tracking, but either in chat or a voice call it is so much faster to communicate the nuances of a complicated assignment or ask. You also may want the persons input on the issue at hand. You also may need a _quick_ decision.

The top open-source ecommerce platforms (magento, woocommerce, etc) and content management systems (wordpress) are all in PHP, and yes they were written before 2000. You don't need to know PHP to be a successful web dev if you are working at a silicon valley tech / social media company, but e-com and content management are still what most companies are trying to do on the internet, and if you are interested in a tech career outside of silicon valley, being handy with PHP is great.

My first glance reads it to be more like airtable or even salesforce at some level, which to your point are the modern iterations of access / filemaker. Drag and drop all-in-one database and application designer that by virtue of being online and multi-user make them way more useful.

In the article it makes clear that doordash calls the restaurant from their call center to make the order and gets the correct total verbally. Ostensibly this is what gets loaded to the delivery worker’s card.

Since this was part of a “demand test” door dash is more interested in capturing a large number of orders than per order profitability. Once their digital marketing muscle has doordash originating 10%+ of orders to the restaurant they have the leverage to negotiate a per order fee from the restaurant along with an agreement to force the restaurant to manage their prices on door dash, shifting liability to the restaurant for incorrect pricing online.

I've heard that premium processing has been suspended for H1Bs. If someone on an H1B loses their job right now, what does that mean for their ability to find a new job?

There is a large fee (~$5k iirc) to apply for a TN by mail. The fee for applying at the border is around ~$100.

The chronicle mentioned earlier this week that most of the $600k is supposedly for the mandatory environmental review. What a city.

It’s a total tax on the entire ecosystem. Every merchant that chooses to accept credit cards has to build 2-3% into their margins to cover the interchange fees. It’s often against their agreement with visa/mc to charge the fees for credit transactions only and so they build them into the base cost.

The looker blog post addresses this though the google one doesn’t:

> For customers and partners, it’s important to know that today’s announcement solidifies ours as well as Google Cloud’s commitment to multi-cloud. Looker customers can expect continuing support of all cloud databases like Amazon Redshift, Azure SQL, Snowflake, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Teradata and more.

Time will tell - but I suspect we’ll see new features will be “bigquery first”

Most looker instances I’ve seen are wired to redshift. How long until support for non google cloud databases is dropped, deprioritized, etc?

Having done logistics this happens all the time in international parcels. I saw 0.5% of parcels have some massively weird routing error to countries that made no sense.

If this had been a us govt request they wouldn’t have scanned the packages at the sorting facilities in the US!

Related - Some SF Supervisors are going to put a retroactive 1.12% stock compensation payroll tax on the November ballot: https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Here-come-the-I...