laidoffamazon

I'll never understand how these cognitive elites live. They're just a completely different kind of human than the rest of us.

Can we squint and say the gut microbiome is kind of like this?

I’ll be honest, I had a hard time getting through the LLM writing

Correct, as he should have

I went to a state school, worked at Amazon and didn’t get a 2300 on my SAT - I definitively am lower caste but the caste/class divergence isn’t well understood in culture I think.

As someone that thinks of myself as a low-caste, middle class American it's interesting seeing all of these people listed in the article making less than me

>btw 99% of MIT people are no different then the rest they just worked hard or paid hefty amounts

I don't think that's true. I didn't get into any elite schools unlike almost all of them.

I genuinely think this is because the elites like the MIT dropouts that started this company think the rest of us observers are stupid.

They have a billboard with the copy "Compliance before you tell your parents you dropped out of MIT"

The problem may not be "intellectually interesting" to them at all, but building B2B SaaS does appeal to them from a lifestyle/prestige/pedigree perspective and will probably get them an exit to become a Venture investor even if they fail.

Major red flag with this should have been that their expensive marketing predicated heavily on them being MIT dropouts instead of any expertise in the space

As someone trying to monitor the situation using Twitter the last few weeks it’s awful and it used to not be!

I don't think he has an obligation to do anything. I just think he's a hack and your friendship is blinding you to this fact.

I frequently follow Patrick's tweets. He hasn't said a single goddamn thing about this corrupt administration but keeps talking about Gavin Newsome's vaccine policy that was in effect for 2 months in 2021

Personally, I’d prefer a slow mode that’s a ton cheaper for a lot of things.

This is genuinely pathetic, Patrick. You want to say it so bad but can’t!

No notes on the fraudsters pardoned by this current admin of course.

All terms are made up by humans

> To the extent that Bits about Money has an editorial line on that controversy, it is this: if you fish in a pond known to have 50% blue fish, and pull out nine fish, you will appear to be a savant-like catcher of blue fish, and people claiming that it is unlikely you have identified a blue fish will swiftly be made to look like fools. But the interesting bit of the observation is, almost entirely, the base rate of the pond. And I think journalism and civil society should do some genuine soul-searching on how we knew—knew—the state of that pond, but didn’t consider it particularly important or newsworthy until someone started fishing on camera.

Does Patrick want to address the fact that this happened during school break and that Nick Shirley didn't prove much of anything?

I don't recall Brett Favre's scam in MS on HN

I’m aghast but numb to this now.

The biggest question for me now is how the usual defenders of this lawless administration will try to defend this or both sides it.

I'm reminded of how 720p Plasma TVs had input resolutions of 1024x768 - the pixels themselves were rectangular

Interestingly I didn’t catch this, I liked it for not looking LLM written!

This is how it works 99% of the time

This is the standard for getting into an elite school. Just getting good grades and generic "activities" hasn't cut it for twenty years or more.

They live in a completely different world from the rest of us and they hate us for it.

It's not a conspiracy theory. It's basically a bribe to Chamath, Don Jr. and Sacks.

At Amazon, level is public. Microsoft, only the title (Senior etc) is visible not the precise level is visible is my impression. At Google, it can be public but apparently can also be hidden. At Facebook it's always hidden.

I'm interviewing engineers right now, it is tough to judge what their current level mapping is especially if they come from Facebook. You can guesstimate from their resume accomplishments and tenure but the rest is just interview performance or asking directly - there are staff engineers that get there from 3 years out of college and there are seniors that are at that level for a decade.

The levels are a real thing, but "navigating the NDA minefield" is not, it's just something Googler's say to make themselves feel more special

Why does OP's linkedin say Senior then?

For the record, I was never laid off from Amazon despite what my username says. I've always been employed, I just switched jobs. I work remote and make about 15% more than the average Google E5 SWE and maybe 85% of a FB E5 SWE according to levels.fyi. We'll see how long that lasts given Google's stock trajectory.

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The UIUC comparison feels a bit misleading given that CS at UIUC has a <10% or lower accept rate, no different than getting into Yale or Duke or whatever generally.

If CS Yalies aren't working at SpaceX or Broadcom or FANG I'm genuinely unsure of where they'd be working. I'm imagining most work at HRT, Jane Street, Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI getting $750k-$1.5m at 29. The "average" ones work at Google and Facebook. If you go to Yale's LinkedIn, Google is the 3rd highest employer of alumni, after Yale and Yale SOM. That is _not_ the case at my undergrad.

I know they aren't working at IBM or Amazon or GE or GM or other lower tier companies.

The accept rate of my university was 50% a full tier below UNC

The only people getting Yale like outcomes from my undergrad is one person with exposure to the SpaceX ipo, one that’s a principal eng at Broadcom, and one that’s a senior or perhaps staff at Facebook. That’s 3 people.

I don’t think you need to flash a degree you simply need to get in to get a life of luxury. It’s not like I can go to the Yale club in NYC.