doktorhladnjak

A lot of employers who only pay cash have salaries similar to companies that pay cash salary plus equity. Perhaps the equity won't be worth anything, but often times it's extra on top of what's being offered. Those accepting cash only are often leaving potential expected value on the table.

This is not true at all. It only has to do with if you have "substantial risk of forfeiture". If they are your shares to own forever, the IRS considers receiving them taxable. This is why double trigger RSUs have expiration dates. It's possible they never become liquid. Therefore they're not your property yet. Therefore you don't owe tax until they are. Or they expire worthless someday, and you don't owe anything.

> Today’s entrepreneurs would do well to note that Microsoft made minimal use of venture capital. Microsoft’s only VC only owned 6.2 percent of the company. Gates didn’t trust them.

While the article touches on it here, Microsoft was able to avoid venture capital because it was highly profitable from its very early days. They turned their first profit in 1975, the same year they were founded.

It seems like more companies spend longer amounts of time being unprofitable and growing. How much of that is a zero interest rate phenomenon or the new normal?

Isn't this based on letter frequency? In languages like German, Z is a fairly common letter. Y not so much. Whereas in English it's the opposite. They put the more commonly used letter in the center.

Is there a more Amazon word than "table stakes"?

I know several people that worked there back in the growth days of the company. They had all drunk the kool aid hard on the work connecting people and making the world a better place. Several of them became very disenchanted when scandals like Cambridge Analytica or the manipulation of the public during 2016 election occurred.

Zuck and the leadership there had really spun a positive, world changing narrative to employees.

Leetcode performance isn’t going to be representative of 3am incident response though. If that matters, you’re probably better off asking a classic “tell me about a time you responded to a page in the middle of the night” type question.

It's a business, not a jobs program

I agree with you that most American cars are junk. I hate all these same features plus others like the weird headlight controls, parking break on the floor in non-trucks, not to mention the loose feeling brakes and steering.

Traditionally, GM sold other models overseas through brands like Holden or Opel, but these have all been sold off or shut down over the past decade or so except in China. GM now has a much heavier reliance on trucks and SUVs in the North American market. They sell some of those same product overseas still, but in much smaller quantities than before.

You can more smoothly interpolate a function for points on a surface using hexagons than with squares. For Uber, think about things like surge pricing. If you compute a surge % for each hexagon, you can interpolate it for each rider location.

> Growing up, making friends was a breeze

This is why I already feel doomed in my 40s. It was hard enough when I was younger and it was supposedly easier.

Nobody is checking their email on vacation in an internet cafe in 2024. Losing your phone is a real pain these days.

Also timing the media cycle with the Republican convention just finishing up. No time for much of a convention bounce

That’s because their “products” are internal but used to make all their revenue. They’re not selling products to customers in the traditional sense.

When I looked into it and talked to some hiring managers, the big names were offering cash comp similar to total comp for big tech, with stock (sometimes complicated arrangements that were not options or RSUs) on top of that. I’m talking $400k cash for a senior engineer with equity on top.

It's cheapest overall for an employer to pay market rate for new hires and give existing employees small, regular raises.

If you need to hire someone, you're going to have to pay market rate for a particular hire. You can pay less for less skill or in certain locations. You can try to offer below market and wait for a candidate with few options to accept. But you can't really get around this. If market pay is going up, you're going to have to pay more than for existing employees. If pay is going down, you can pay less than existing employees. Usually it is the former, but there are absolutely companies right now in the declining wage situation where they are paying new hires less.

As for existing employees, most will complain if they are being paid less than new hires, but only some fraction leave. Usually bringing everyone up to the new hire pay level costs way more than the cost from backfilling positions where someone left for more pay or to give counter offers for those you want to keep from leaving.

> Why should someone living in Indiana make less money than someone living in NYC for a remote tech job?

Because on average they'll accept less money. Someone in NYC is more likely to have other options with higher pay. If a business wants to hire them, they have to offer more. Simple as that.

Crazy reading about this here. I just had this problem. Spent a couple hundred bucks for the local mechanic to track it down to parasitic drain from the SOS module (“Starlink”). He just disconnected it since I don’t pay for the subscription anyways.

I feel like going into eBay, I expect it to be the bargain basement race to the bottom. There’s no veneer. It is what it purports to be.

Meanwhile Amazon is full of fake reviews, counterfeits, sponsored listings, and other scams that are passed off as legitimate or even premium.

Plenty of states don’t have a tipped minimum wage right now. It hasn’t changed tipping culture there at all.

It seems pretty revealing to how some people view work from home not being actual work

WARN requires certain employers in most circumstances to give 60 days notice or pay at least 60 days of severance when laying off

Companies absolutely take perf and years of service into account for layoffs. It’s not always the same process or formula but those are popular terms in such a formula, along with pay, location, role.

I agree the processes are almost random. There’s really very little correlation between a rating and value produced.

I’m increasingly convinced the best systems are those that spend the least amount of everyone’s time. If they’re going to be dysfunctional, they might as well not waste precious time or prolong the agony.

Reading this article brought back all the things I disliked about being manager. My anxiety shot up as I was reading it. I’m glad I prematurely ran out of text at the subscribe to keep reading button at the bottom.

> I don't understand what activists expect to achieve from blocking roads.

The goal is to get attention for their cause. Seems to be working successfully considering this is in the news.

Everyone's not the same. They don't have the same motivations. For the first decade of my job, I worked a steady, stable job that paid decently. It wasn't bad, but I was bored. Bored as in counting down the hours until the end of the work day each day, booking out all my vacation months in advance to the day.

I switched over to startups and have not looked back. Yeah, I work more, but I enjoy it a lot more. I can't do it forever, but the financial rewards have been better too, so I probably won't need to work to 65 like when I had the more stable, boring job.

Netflix's competition changed. They were one of the few players in streaming. Now, there are infinite streaming platforms, all angling for their cut of the pie. For Netflix to continue to be profitable, it decided it needed to spend more on original content. Then I suppose the cost cutting came for other expenses. Hiring a bunch of very experienced engineers does not come cheap. Netflix was known for having the highest cash comp in the valley. They've started hiring new grads again, because it's cheaper to hire one senior engineer to lead a bunch of junior engineers instead of a few seniors to do everything themselves.

I agree the conspiracy theories don't add up. The potential benefits of WFH for employers are substantial. Lower real estate costs is direct money saved. Ability to recruit from a much larger candidate pool means they can hire faster and for lower salaries than otherwise.

There have to be meaningful downsides that CEOs and the like believe is outweighing all that.

The conditions aren't the same. When COVID caused many workplaces to go full WFH, most employees had nothing to do except work and hang out with those in their household. A lot of the increased productivity came from working instead of doing other things. Once things opened up, in aggregate they stopped working as many hours. Ultimately, it was never sustainable.