I think Sam's point about strength in numbers is really critical. The tech community sometimes has a little fear of being first that can rapidly shift into fear of being last, so I wonder what will cause a critical mass of tech leaders to take a stand. I think Sam is right that employees will have to provide some of the push, the New York Times article I read on this earlier mentioned an Iraqi Facebook employee in Seattle who can no longer go to Vancouver BC to visit his family for instance, so this effects us and our colleagues directly, not abstractly. I would suggest we all try and start bottom up pressure within our organizations to denounce the immingration ban, tech has always been pretty pro immigration (not always for noble reasons) so this shouldn't be a difficult sell.
Impeachment is done by the congress. We currently have a republican congress as we did in '98 when Clinton was impeached. However, this time there's a republican president, so it's much less likely.
I once worked at a place that basically just used perl server side. In this decade (2010s). The codebase was just one tangled mess.
They told a story of a guy who failed the cultural interview because he told a VP "you can't write a large web app in perl", and of course they had done just that. With the reflection of hind sight I think despite the obvious empirical counter factual, he was on to something. It really was an uphill battle against the language to do things large scale.
I think it's probably much truer that big tech companies are optimizing for false negatives because they do have a really deep, talented applicant pool. Some start ups do but it's definitely more of a risk. I completely agree with you that in general you're better off optimizing the F-measure, but I'm not sure it's empirically true that lots of companies thought of as good do this.
It's hard to read this and not get the impression that firms used to lucrative government contracts are simply not keen at new competition and are lobbying to protect their privledged position. Despite the fact increased competition benefits the government and tax payers.
The article does mention advances in supercapaciter design as one of the enabling technologies, but I suspect just charging the things requires a ton of power. Let's do some back of the envelope physics with what we know (and reasonable ball park guesses when we don't)!
It's traveling 4K mph or about 1800m/s, let's assume since its 24in long and largely tungsten it has a mass of around 60kg. 1/2 * mass * velocity ^2 means it needs 97.2 megajoules of power. That's about 4 seconds for a 25MW reactor, so I guess you're right something smaller could fire it less rapidly, though the one every 6 seconds they cite as desired would require that much power.
It's been a while since I took chemistry and physics so I could be wrong, but I think you may be incorrect due to quantum effects. Specifically, the quantum in quantum mechanics refers to various phenomena which are quantized, a very common example of which is an electron moving to a different energy level. It's entirely discrete what energy levels an electron may orbit an atomic nucleus at, it's not a continuum, and for an electron to receive enough energy to be free of the nucleus (causing the atom to become an ion) requires some minimum energy level. Energy is directly proportional to wavelength in the case of em radiation, so there in fact is some minimum energy required for something to be "ionizing".
It is possible that other mechanisms cause cancer, but your conjecture is almost certainly false. Someone who does this for a living please let me know if there's clarification needed.
> It's still the densest area of the US outside of Manhattan
Do you have a source for that? Wikipedia (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...) seems to suggest the incorporated city is the second densest major city after New York, but not that San Francisco is the most sense place in the us after Manhattan. It's often cited that Brooklyn is twice as dense as SF for instance. Cambridge Massachusetts is more dense than San Francisco.
Very true about this being a regional problem. San Francisco is doing a poor job building more housing but the suburbs are actually far worse, such as mountain view allowing more office space to be built but no new housing.
This really hits the nail on the head. The problem with onsites is really the "quick prove to me you're smart" type of tests that both are time intensive and also very frustrating to a lot of people in that they're often calibrated with a heavy bias towards avoiding false positives with nothing to even track the amount of false negatives. Success with something like start fighter provides a reasonable benchmark for the latter which is in itself pretty valuable.
The thing to consider though is that it would be crazy to take a job without going in to meet your potential future coworkers. It's also a quicker and less unpleasant process (and more of a two way street) to try and make sure it's a good cultural match. Thus, solving a bunch of the problems with technical interviews shouldn't actually eliminate onsites, it should rather make them more effective and less awful.
> Large number of top tier universities within 3 hours
I know in Texas driving 3 hours is a moderate commute, but UT is literally in another metro area. If you read the article, PG mentions Stanford and Berkeley not being downtown as a liability compared to CMU and they both have reasonable public transit options to downtown SF.
Invest it or save it and avoid debt. You will thank yourself later. If it makes sense to, consider buying a primary residence, but don't spend too much on a car, or eating out, or anything like that. Make sure you have some nice toys and are generally not wanting, but also make sure to max out your 401k and then some.
!00% agree that a lot of the suburban communities are worse than SF, but SF still has a shocking amount of unwillingness to build given that it's a large city.
Yeah this is the one that I don't understand, his argument about wet css being more readable doesn't even make sense in the case of "#ec3f5d" vs "$red", let alone the fact that in a big project not having one place to change this can be a nightmare.
I suspect also many of the homeless in San Francisco, especially the ones being complained about here, have pretty bad mental health problems going on treated. Government probably needs to step in and help on that front as well.
We're still a long way off from drought relief, but more concerning is how long away we are from decent public schools or relief in insane housing prices in the Bay Area. Until the whole region builds a lot more housing it's only going to get worse sadly.
I do too but I wonder if Lafeyette is as much to blame as say Mountain View. While they're almost certainly not building new housing as fast as the area population grows, it's not clear that they're building office space instead, whereas many of the communities in the South Bay are doing just that. Still, it sounds like this is meant to be a more general attempt at proving the concept.
Yeah having lived (and worked in tech) in both Austin and SF, there's really no comparison as far as the number of opportunities here as well as the breadth. It's absolutely not irrational that people want to live in the Bay Area, that's the problem.
I'm with you that the tactics used here seem a little bit scummy (though I've seen plenty of bullshit from the other side of the table more consistently), but the author does at least claim to also be working hard to improve their craft as well, so I'm not sure your initial concern is really relevant.
Seriously, read this post, listen to this post. I am a terrible negotiator (as in I have taken pay cuts because jobs seemed interesting and paid sticker price for cars) and hate it like 95% of the rest of software engineers but it's how the game is played and we're both ourselves individually and ourselves as a group a disservice by not protecting this information.
Yeah, the dentist analogy was really interesting because there's no way in hell you'd have the receptionist and hygienist and dentist just throwing things over a wall to each other and not coordinating carefully on patient care, yet without DevOps that's all too often what happens.
I think there's a difference between a moderate downturn and a cataclysmic crash, and since 2000 was especially bad for tech and 2009 especially bad for everyone we're not used to mild to moderate downturns around here. A downtown doesn't mean people stop using technology, just that the market conditions change.
It's got to be the position in the market at this point (though probably started out as human capital to get to that point). They're seeing most of the good deals for early stage companies because they're so far ahead anyone else in the space, which is obviously in your best interest in something where the best deals are several orders of magnitude better than a merely good deal and the average case is failure.