chris11

> Please don’t, unless you’re willing to confront your own contribution to the situation you’re fleeing.

What do you mean? I've lived in Colorado and now live in California. Sure, it has serious problems but I'd say some of them are from population density. Millions of people living in small area causes issues. Housing prices? I'd want housing prices to go up if I owned. Taxes? That's a financial question, and the bay area offers world class comp in tech. Traffic? Also bad, but that's from attracting so many people. Crime and homelessness is a serious issue. But I don't think there are easy answers. I live in a safe area, and I would run into other political issues in different states.

It's worse than that. Gamer's Nexus had a video a few months ago about power transients becoming a bigger problem. Power spikes can double the amount of power needed. It doesn't really impact average power useage, but it can cause a psu's ocp to shut down the machine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnRyyCsuHFQ

I can imagine on prem hw being a benefit if a company didn't want a 3rd party to index material. But yeah, I wouldn't want to manage an on-prem setup unless it was necessary.

I think my employers IT policies have a lot to do with it, but fans on my laptop do spin up in the middle of the night. It can be annoying.

> Same for Lemoine.

Lemoine got a lawyer invovled and they started filing lawsuits on the AI's behalf. I'm not shocked he was fired.

https://fortune.com/2022/06/23/google-blade-lemoine-ai-lamda...

The state offered money for early completion, and got an early completion. I don't necessary see anything wrong with that as long as quality standards were met, and the final cost wasn't outrageous.

In China 8 is considered to be a really lucky number, signifying wealth. https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/it-s-in-the-numbers-l...

And if abortion is going to be decided by the states, what state law is Google violating? CA isn't going to make not sharing this data illegal.

Also startups are non-public, so their equity may still be overvalued.

This comparison isn't totally valid. Behavioral and system design rounds become much more important in the typical Silicon Valley interview process as you get more senior.

And algorithmic questions are a straightforward way to get a scalable, structured interview round. It's difficult to entirely replace algorithmic rounds with questions that are both scalable and structured.

Sometimes leveling changes interview rounds. They could be considering upleveling or downleveling OP. OP should clarify that though.

> We found out what was going on and had reservations whether to continue with the process, but he was invited to the second round and aced it.

Did you ask the candidate about the copied code? To me that's an honesty issue.

I have heard CA EDD is now sending out some letters requesting more information. They are probably backlogged, but they might respond.

What about winner takes all markets? For instance there's only a few major ridesharing companies. It would be hard to start a small, profitable ridesharing business. And they couldn't pay staff engineers 500k+.

- attrition for these employees drops to near zero because it’s better pay than they can get anywhere

I get the argument, but I think remote work is making that less of a risk. Paying significantly above local market value will let them have high standards. Great engineers should be able to get other great remote offers. Salaries might not keep those engineers from leaving.

- when you’re making 3x the salary comparatively what additional motivation would a promotion get you to make 3.15x?

Is it a huge issue if a senior engineer doesn't want to get promoted if they are doing well in their current job?

> We are anchoring our pay to the 60th percentile of San Francisco

It works out as long as SF has the highest pay.

You don't get paid that much money without being incredibly ambitious. Sure you got all the money you need, but what comes next? Sheryl Sandberg has literally changed the world. I'd guess choosing to redefine her life took a lot of thought.

This is definitely an issue, but I don't think it's a serious concern for larger companies with good HR departments. When covid first hit HR at my employer was interested in where employees were located, there was a list of allowed work locations. But they got it figured out and physical location is less of an issue for tax and insurance.

I'm not sure what exactly would happen, but forgiven debt is usually taxable.

It's short term capital gains vs long term.

If you don't exercise and just sell short term capital gains tax applies.

If you exercise ISOs and hold long enough you pay AMT, which can be refundable, and LTCG when you sell the shares.

Employers cannot replace financial advice from an advisor with a fiduciary duty. Providing general education is good, and so is getting them free sessions with a financial advisor. But I don't totally agree they should be liable.

This was an incredibly risky program, and I don't understand how Bolt was valued last year. But engineers were potentially sitting on a life changing amount of money. Not exercising could have cost engineers hundreds of thousands in additional taxes if Bolt had a great IPO. They needed to get financial advice from an independent advisor.

Agreed. The biggest issue I have with it is only having 90 days to repay if you leave. I hope they company works with those individuals, a few people might be in some serious trouble. And I'm curious how much was loaned, it's 200k just from the people who were laid off.

But I'm not sure how Bolt significantly benefit financially from this program. And $200k is not a ton of money for a unicorn. If you're an early employee at a unicorn you can work with 3rd parties to make more aggressive financial decisions.

It's last year, and an employee wants to change jobs. But tech is sky high, they are confident about the companies future, and want to get the tax benefits of exercising before they leave.

Or it's last year, and an employee wants to lock in the FMV for AMT before the next round/IPO.

It's definitely an aggressive move, but I can understand why someone would exercise.

That doesn't seem really complicated to communicate. Levels are common across large companies. Just post the targeted levels and salary bands. You can still make out of band offers if you decide the candidate doesn't meet or surpasses the intended level.

> a person richer than anyone has ever been in the history of the planet

Tesla's P/E ratio is currently 106. I have no idea why Tesla is so expensive.

> apathetic consumers

All automakers have to do is require access to that data for features, like maps, traffic updates, or entertainment.

I hate the idea of in-car advertising, and I don't like the thought my data being sold. But I do give up some privacy for functionality. My biggest annoyance with my car is I don't have Android Auto for the maps, I use google maps when driving, and video from my ADAS is used as training data.

> Should we go back to Waterfall?

Waterfall seems like a strawman to me. Has the tech industry ever used it? The first reference I could find for it was back in the 70s as what not to do. I don't think waterfall should be used as a defense to scrum.

As for alternatives, you can start with giving engineering teams autonomy and ownership of their work. Gergely Orosz has a good article on project management in tech.

http://www-scf.usc.edu/~csci201/lectures/Lecture11/royce1970...

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/project-managemen...

> Besides, what's so bad about access to "disinformation"?

Disinformation doesn't just try to present an alternative view, it also tries to drown out other viewpoints. I don't think it's possible to accurately and neutrally present search results when bad actors try to subvert rankings.

I think propaganda can be interesting, I don't think it should be banned. But penalizing it seems fair to me. I don't want other searches to get flooded with clickbait.

Did bandcamp raise a lot of money from venture capital? The last round listed on crunchbase was a series A in 2010. It looks like management were fine running it more like a lifestyle business.