worker767424

I get that employees have the right to organize, but this guy was recently out of prison, living in a shelter, and his last job was a transitional job cleaning up trash by the freeway. You have to understand that when you organize, you're painting a target on your back. The guy just finished a prison sentence for robbery. Shut up and keep your head down. Let the middle class kids without police records do the organizing. Not saying this is OK or right, but it's the reality of the situation.

> a lot of engineering work of dubious to negative value

Part of this is that FAANG is often willing to spend $20M to try to move the needle 1%, or $100M for the next big thing, even if there's only a small chance it works.

> Big companies have essentially become centers for identity politics

Whenever I see something about "blacklist" or "master vs main," I wish I could ask the people behind it "don't you have something better to be working on?" It got to the point that "blacklist" is a trigger for me, not because I find the term offensive, but because I don't want to deal with the flamewar that's soon to follow. I go out of my way to not name things "blacklist" or "blocklist" just to avoid this.

I've been at two FAANGs. They're all different and it varies by company and team.

Some the more general reasons to not work at one are

- The tech stack is idiosyncratic

- You won't necessarily be exposed to the same breadth of experience

- You won't know most people at the company

- Less agency as an engineer

- More organizational overhead

- You're not good at leetcode or don't want to put in the time

- Your work is often less connected to a tangible problem

- You're a cog

Reasons to work at one

- The pay

- It lends credibility to your resume

- Higher ceiling for star performers

- Stability

- Learn how things work at scale

- Better perks

Oh, one huge one: different people are better at different stages of a product's lifecycle. No time for tests, monitoring, alterting, or code reviews? An early startup might be a better place because they don't have time for those, either.

I've seen blatantly discriminatory hiring practices favoring women at tech companies I've worked at with names you'd recognize. I was expecting some of this to surface when Trump was in office and get investigated, but it never did.

It did with one lender I talked to (Rocket Mortgage). I'll check with another (probably First Republic).

> hold onto a good number of RSU's in your brokerage account as these can be used to show you are holding assets

Would they really care if the asset is cash or stocks?

> very nice low mortgage rate

True, and my credit score is higher than 760, so banks love me.

The amount down changes if I'm playing with my money or they bank's. There's a cutoff where you can default on the home, wreck your credit, but if you have enough in the bank to buy a replacement, come out ahead.

> With rates so low, it seems better to invest the down payment in the stock market and putting the minimum in the house.

I'd agree that it'd be better to put the minimum possible down, but remember that I'm limited by my salary, not my down payment, so I'm expecting 40% down so I can afford something nicer. I also think that stocks have done will because there's no alternative, and people buy the most expensive home they can afford the mortgage for, so if interest rates go up, both stocks and real estate will go down (or up less quickly).

I'm in a bizarre place financially. I'm single, in the Bay Area, and work for a FAANG. I have enough saved for 40+% down for a lot of decent things, so I'm limited by my salary, not my down payment. It's extra weird because RSUs don't necessarily count towards salary for mortgage purposes, but they're (for now) a significant chunk of my net pay.

I'm also a little worried about putting a lot down because prices might go down when interest rates go up.

I realize this isn't normal. Most people are somewhere cheaper, lots are married, and most have nowhere near as much cash.

> There are many Republicans and Democrats who want to scrap Section 230 entirely: President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump, Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) have all denounced [Section 230's] protections for Big Tech companies.

That's a scary list of people to agree on something. I think all their arguments boil down to "big tech isn't censoring people the way I want them to."

Do you think it's a propaganda campaign, or maybe it's just a logical extension of longstanding talking points. What happened with Trump and the vaccine (he got booed for saying he got boosted) shows that the movement has outgrown even him, so it's basically self perpetuating.

Comparing customer service of Facebook to a mortgage servicer is tricky because of the value and the volume. Facebook has orders of magnitude (I'll get 10,000x more) content to moderate than a mortgage servicer where they really only answer questions when something goes wrong (3x every 5 years) the stakes are a million times higher.

The options for social media are really free (or cheap) to use and occasionally bad moderation or pay $5 per post or comment ($10 for risky ones) that see multiple human moderators to limit abuse and false positives. Or no social media. My point is the amount and quality of moderation people say they want is more expensive than they'd pay for these services, but there's still a lot of value to them, so we're left with imperfect moderation.

Those 2 types sound a lot like software engineers.

The notion of "black spaces" is one two two logical jumps from Jim Crow. I don't see how more people don't realize the implications of that term.

I'm surprised more SaaS offerings don't have clauses setting out generous migration times in the event of acquisition or bankruptcy and funds set aside to keep the service up during this time. I'd also like to see terms that limit data use so that these companies can't just be bought for their data.

What if you tell them that in order to protect others' data, you need a separate laptop. As long as the client is happy to shell out 1500 euros, they you'll install all the spyware they want on it.

They actually tried in the Yishan days. Someone was working on JS blockchain vaguely meant to be something like but not really an ICO. It was bizarre.

Probably should send the man a postcard.

> private equity firms

Well that's clever.

PE is known to do interesting things. I would not have thought that part of the value they saw in dying newspapers is a well-timed lawsuit against big tech. Even if it only has a 25% chance of winning, I could see PE taking that bet and baking it into the value of the scraps they bought.

Here's a good, long read about what's been going on with newspaper ownership.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/alden-g...

But it cues your brain that it might not be safe to turn left.

I wonder how many accidents and fatalities are due to poor layouts (that are hard to fix), inadequate signage, and unique designs that are "safer," but add enough mental overhead that you're paying more attention to where you should be so you're not in a bus-only lane rather than looking out for pedestrians. Driving in SF can be complicated when you're not familiar with the streets. Intersections feel like multiple clever solutions stacked together.

> It is incredibly hard to see people trying to use the cross walks

This is only an issue for right turns (on two-way streets, anyway). Recently, walk signs have started illuminating a few seconds before the green light, and I assume it's for more pedestrian visibility. I wouldn't be surprised if the most dangerous thing in this scenario is a right on red while jaywalking. The driver knows they have a red, they look left for oncoming traffic, but not right for jaywalking pedestrians.

Adding a blinking yellow left arrow could help.

For me, it's actually the rear view mirror. I can miss a car at a 4 way stop because of it.

Some of the modern Atom CPUs might fit the bill.

> If you do business in a country, you have to accept that you're going to be subject to the laws of that country

Yes, but between actions like this and privacy regulations, being multinational is looking less and less workable. This isn't to say the regulations are bad, just that you can't have 100 jurisdictions with different policies trying to manage your company.

What would happen if they just disabled Giphy in the UK?

I don't know what Giphy's financials looked/look like, but it felt like the type of startup that could only ever run on VC funding to eventually be bought up by a larger player. I'm not convinced there's a self-sustaining business, there.

It's because a thief is more likely to steal your ipad than your password notebook, if you're raided by the US government, you probably did something pretty bad (and know better than to use a book for those passwords) or didn't, and whatever minor stuff they find wasn't on the warrant. Or someone more motivated than the official government finds you and extracts your passwords through more physical means.

> old printer they don't want to replace

I had good enough luck getting a PCI-E parallel port controller for an ancient HP black and white laser printer. I'm mildly shocked the whole setup was fully supported in Windows 10.