wayne-li2

I really don’t think that’s how people interpreted this post. I left one of those relatable comments but I skipped over the 10x comment. In general, if you are consistently above average (which I would argue a large crowd in HN could be) you will end up with similar feelings as OP.

Coming back to this thread now after a few hours, people seemed to have fixated on their 10x comment. It seems like a weird fixation to me.

I felt this way somewhat recently. Switching companies to a place that had top tier engineering talent put me in my place pretty quickly. Now I sweat like the rest of them — and trust me this is a good thing. You want your peers to challenge you, trust but verify, question assumptions. You want to cover each other’s backs. I’ve never been happier than I am now, because even though I’m working harder, I’m able to trust and lean on the people around me, and that’s so valuable.

The market as of last year couldn’t be divided by bulls and bears. It was more like “mega bears, bears, bulls, mega bulls”.

You’re talking about mega bears and they’re gloating because the mega bulls talked so much shit in the last 3 years.

But most people are just regular bears and bulls. We don’t comment on the market. We understand the cyclical nature of it. Some of us may have rebalanced portfolios according to our beliefs. That’s about it.

Thanks for the well wishes. These are questions I’m constantly wrestling with, and I’m a liar if I said I had life figured out.

I didn’t try to assume anything about the blog post author. But it’s irrelevant — I was commenting on the comment calling people in general soulless for maximizing compensation.

I agree there’s a point which that moral inflection point occurs, but I think the number is complex to come up to.

I’ll give an example. I make a pretty obscene salary that falls within your definition of “needing to care”.

But I live in a VHCOL city. I would love to move and work remote, but my partner has a career that’s in tech, but much less remote friendly.

I’m into personal finance, so here’s my projection. Assuming I want to own a home and have kids in this VHCOL region, I will need to work about 20-30 years to achieve this goal. And it’s 1 poorly timed recession from derailing. You know what I really wanted to do in life? Teach high school chemistry and own a cafe.

Am I better off than many many people? Yes. Do I have enough to take 30% pay cut to work at <arbitrary good place>? Are we saying I don’t deserve to live in the region I grew up in, and I should have to move to the Midwest, for the good of society? Force my partner to give up their dream career? Should I give up my dreams of an early retirement from tech into a field that “does good”?

My parents have nothing saved up. 2008 made sure of that. Should I sacrifice the planned war chest I want to build for my parents’ eventual long term care?

And finally, if I do all of this, how much does the world improve by me doing this? Will <evil corp> collapse because I’m not there? Will my wage be distributed to the service workers or Will they go to the next eager applicant? Will my CEO pay more taxes or lose money because I’m not there?

Reading judgmental comments like this also upsets me.

It’s not selling your soul. It’s called being disillusioned with your impact on the world, a feeling that more and more people are feeling. Long gone are the days where you believed an individual could make a difference. At big corp, you are a small cog in the big machine. You are replaceable.

I’ve volunteered on political campaigns. I’ve volunteered for non profits as a developer. I’ve worked at startups that align closely with my moral views. Guess what? It’s all rotten. Nothing of meaning ever gets done, and the pay is pennies to boot. In the case of my volunteerism, pay equates to the pay of my full time colleagues that worked for those organizations.

So when faced with the choice of doing nothing on something you believe in for very little versus doing nothing on something you don’t for a lot, the choice is extremely easy. The choice is even easier if you factor in the level of privilege it takes to turn down generational money for someone else’s moral compass.

I’ve tried my best not to pass judgment onto you, but ask yourself — what kind of privilege affords you to think that the twenty year old second generation immigrants of today with no family wealth or financial lifeboat should give up their chance of securing generational (not even multigenerational) wealth in the richest country in the world just to achieve the same impact but feel better about themselves?

Wait, you can’t see it either?

This is our bias seeping in. On HN, I’m willing to bet a substantial proportion of people are willing to pay for an anti-ad/tracking browser for privacy reasons. But there will be no value for the outside world.

I think us “nerds” dramatically overvalue how important privacy is to the general public right now. Even ignoring the developing world, most people will agree that tracking is bad, but most will continue to use legacy browsers because they don’t think it’s 100/year bad. And the growing population of young and tech savvy people who are one Google away from installing uBlock Origin will not pay for your product either.

Not to mention —- even the proportion of HN readers can take other measures to approximate anti tracking anyways. uBlock Origin + Pihole + a good VPN is enough for even most of us (personally, it is enough for me).

I only have 3 years of experience but with three job hunts, the last one I just completed recently.

My new grad job hunt, I received minimal responses cold applying online.

My second job hunt was a one and done poach.

The most recent one, I received a substantial percent of follow throughs. I cold applied to 6 well known SV companies and received a response from 5 of them.

I don’t have any other insight I just wanted to provide an additional data point.

I don’t doubt that sexism and anti-LGBT sentiment was much more prevalent back then. But can someone fill me in on the landscape nowadays? I’ve hopped around a few notable companies and have seen nothing but acceptance at minimum. Many of them have gone above and beyond with dedicated groups and communities within the company for identity. Out of three employers I’ve had two female director of engineering, and only one cis white male direct manager. I’ve made some non-straight friends and while they still face challenges, they’ve never talked about being uncomfortable at work.

Sorry if it seems like an aside. Reading this article made me curious.

That's the problem though -- it will skew the data towards friendly and helpful people like yourself. But it doesn't capture reality.

To be honest, I don't know how you get this sort of analysis done without poisoning the intent and maintaining integrity.

Oh wow -- I knew Ross as one of my TAs during my undergraduate time at Berkeley. Regardless of the issues here, I recall him as a friendly and bright person.

I really don’t think this is a rich or poor issue. It is possible to have public transportation that can transport rich or poor equally, while maintaining safety and cleanliness.

For example, public transportation that has locked “cabins” for people who want to feel additional security. For cleanliness, constant sanitization of seats and floors. Trash bins available on the train, with workers replacing them as needed during station time.

No one is kicking a poor person off MUNI but if a homeless person pees on the seat, it gets cleaned up immediately. People that feel unsafe can go into the cabin. Unarmed security guards can be placed at every station, not to hassle riders, but to give assistance to people that ask.

This is not some foreign concept — some Asian countries do this quite well.

I struggle to label it as character flaws because it implies that it is an immutable property of the person. In reality, a lot of the no-stakes cheaters are compensating for something else. People often use video games as a means of escapism. There’s no reason not to think that people cheat in video games as a means of experiencing success, while living in a world that increasingly becomes difficult to succeed in.

There’s another group of “cheaters” and that’s just people who like pushing the game to the limits. Most video game speed running nowadays involves exploits and bugs. There’s often a fine line between labeling something as “cheating” vs “a whole new way to experience media”. I wouldn’t label those people as people with character flaws, even if they use these exploits maliciously. Some people don’t see the video game as something holy and untouchable. They see it as a testing ground, like how a pen tester might see a company’s infra. And their innovations sometimes produces great benefit for the gaming society, for example advances in speed running, etc.

I think the people that cheat in online chess probably fall in the first category. But I wanted to produce the second category because they might also be labeled as “cheaters” with character flaws.

If devs aren’t unionized, there’s no such thing as scabs right? Blizzard can just terminate all the disgruntled employees and hire other devs, perhaps more desperate or entry level or morally ambiguous, whatever.

Of course the institutional knowledge lost will be drastic.

DNAnexus | Backend Software Engineer | Full Time | Mountain View, CA / Remote Friendly

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DNAnexus is the leading cloud-based SaaS company serving the global life science community. DNAnexus’ health informatics platform serves customers across a spectrum of industries — government, biopharmaceutical, clinical diagnostics, healthcare, and academic research in 33 countries with compliant protection of data, privacy, and intellectual property.

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DNAnexus | Backend Software Engineer | Full Time | Mountain View, CA / Remote Friendly

Technology: Node.js, Typescript, MongoDB, AWS, Azure, Docker

DNAnexus is the leading cloud-based SaaS company serving the global life science community. DNAnexus’ health informatics platform serves customers across a spectrum of industries — government, biopharmaceutical, clinical diagnostics, healthcare, and academic research in 33 countries with compliant protection of data, privacy, and intellectual property.

We just received 100M of funding and are hiring rapidly! You will have the opportunity to interface with AWS a lot and design scalable systems with us. We're all remote currently, and plan to stay remote-friendly in the future.

Full description: https://www.smartrecruiters.com/DNAnexus/743999744427241-sof...

I actually agree with you here, our incentive structures are flawed for sure.

The problem is, hiring is expensive, hiring mistakes are expensive, and new grads are a combination of “lack of signals” and “need lots of time to pan out”. The result is companies look for any possible signal - this more or less becomes a degree, and within the degree, the GPA. Thus incentivizing the student to get the degree with a high GPA by any means necessary, and companies will still give you a year to ramp up.

The cynic in me believes without any disincentive to cheating, “few cheaters” become “almost all participants”.

I was a TA in a prominent CS university. We used software that would compare everyone’s submissions to see if things were copied. The penalty for getting caught was high, and we made it clear to everyone that this software was, while not perfect, capable of detecting simple tricks (like copying code and renaming variables).

Nonetheless, after every project, I would go and have to manually review all the cases. There would be 10-20 severe cases, about 30 moderate cases, and then about 50 cases where some things might look suspicious but there wasn’t enough proof to act.

Overall, we would penalize about 20-50 people per project (granted this is a class size of over 1000). But still, 2-5% would still cheat despite our repeated warnings that we could catch them.

I shudder to think what would happen if we had no way to detect.

While TAing there, I was also a student. Cheating was pretty much the norm. I was always a cynic after those experiences.