skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your comment so perfectly summarizes what I've long felt is the deep dark dirty secret of data science (at least at a company thats not Google/Facebook/etc). And it flies in the face of all the "top job" lists which are always littered with data-related jobs.

Very few people are interested in making data-driven decisions. They want an employee (subordinate) who will prove that the decision they've made or are planning to make, is correct. Anything else is, as you say, very internally disruptive.

Being a data scientist or data analyst at a startup is (for the most part) a completely miserable existence. You are relegated to doing interesting things that are usually discarded. It can make you feel like your job is pointless.

In the end, one either makes the decision to be (at best) useless, or (at worst) a puppet. That, or you quit.

Thank you so much for your comment - it's refreshing to see I'm not alone in feeling like this.
I could have done without the first half of the post telling me that I (or others) are mediocre, then going on to tell me how the author (and his fellows) are not just because they strive to be the "Best in the World".

This just reads like a puff piece for another valley startup by some guy who's better than you. Oh, and here's how we do it, you should try doing it this way too, because we think it's totes the best.
Meaning they are very selective? Their blog post says they consider anyone who applies.
Would you "fire and forget" other meal items if you could? (disclaimer: building it)
I don't think they need to tackle peak driving time at the start. They still have all of those regular drivers. Surge pricing should still draw out humans.
Or when Barack and Michelle Obama shared what was described by Fox News as a "terrorist fist-jab" a few years ago...
Uber is overrated.
Rafs: Reddit-as-file-storage
I was hired as a "Web Development Engineer I" several years ago (level 4). My base compensation was virtually identical to yours, but my signing bonus and base pay were a little less than half. Stock grants were also very similar at hire. After a couple years my job role changed to SDE, I remained level 4 and was given a better than 10% raise.

In my fourth year my total compensation was estimated to be around 120k.

It's worth looking at the H1B data. I've got some limited anecdotal data, but the H1B data appears to clearly delineate the same salary ranges Amazon gives to US Citizens. (Maybe they will pay citizens 10% more, but the ranges actually look pretty similar to what I've heard.)

http://h1bdata.info/

(I am a US Citizen, English speaker, in Seattle.)

Main moral of the story if you choose to stay at Amazon: don't worry about your level, focus on your job role. You can probably keep doing the work you're doing and become an SDE if you talk to your manager and frame the conversation right.
That's what's vesting this year. It can fluctuate a bit (so far only upwards for me).

Upon hiring and usually each year thereafter we get grants that vest over the following 4 years, varying in sized based on budgets, level & performance scores.
So next we will hear about this amazing new armor (aka. mirrors) on all our enemies vehicles?
For fried rice, yeah, day old is best. But nothing beats stir fry of meats/non-meats (tofu)/vegetables over hot, fresh rice.
I once asked my father (a lifelong auto mechanic) why servicing high end vehicles is so expensive. Roughly from memory, don't quote me on makes/models/etc:

Most cars require special, often model specific, tools to service them. A specific adapter to take off an oil filter on your Honda Civic, or a set of special ramps that get your super low Ferrari on to the car hoist. The shop then has to amortize the cost of tools over the number of vehicles they service with it. So the special wrench used for the Civic can probably be used for 500 oil changes in a year, but the Ferrari ramps are used on maybe 10 a year. Not to mention the specific training required to do the actual service.

In a computer related example, imagine a receptionist that just needs Microsoft Paint to put text on signs around the office. Now compare that to an industrial designer that needs a $10,000 licence for a CAD application and specific training to do material stress analysis on your new iPhone accessory. Each sign has little to no incremental cost, whereas each iPhone accessory needs to pay for part of that licence and class.

If Uber were to buy thousands of the exact same vehicle, they would have a predictable amortization of a spark plug tension wrench, while a dealer might hope to get enough cars in a year to justify the cost.
As bad as the article makes it sound, it's not like Sam's ignoring the problem entirely. Awareness is half the battle. Funding's the other half. In fact, there's an explicit request [1] for startups to solve this problem, check it out:

We want to fund companies that have the potential to
create a million jobs.

There are a lot of areas where it makes sense to
divide labor between humans and computers-—we are very
good at some things computers are terrible at and vice
versa—-and some of these require huge amounts of human
resources.

This is both good for the world and likely a good
business strategy—-as existing jobs go away, a company
that creates a lot of new jobs should be able to get a
lot of talented people.

That's putting money where your mouth is. No, automation and SV2SV startups are not the solution, but you can't put the future on hold until someone figures this out.

[1] http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#million
Yes, somewhat common these days. There is a lot of good and interesting work that can be done with Python (and many other languages for that matter) outside of web dev.
Thanks for your view. I can realize I'm lazy since my project is finished, but I need to execute it. Some call lazyness a programmer's trait.
Previous Salary Discussion:

Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation (danluu.com) 730 points

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10758278

Also see PayScale:

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Employer=Google,_Inc./Sa...
I'm not sure I understand why you're irritated. There's a pox on all of them at HN, and a pox there shall remain.

Controversies about these characters mostly aren't interesting (in HN's sense) whether they're in the key of zeal or the key of critique. Whoever's flagging them is doing us all a favor.
Part of the problem is the name. The late Bob Pease (google him: fascinating character even if you're not an EE) in particular trashed Fuzzy Logic/Fuzzy Control every time he had a chance.

Call it by its alternate name of Multivariate Logic and it seems less... fuzzy.
As others have noted, you could attribute the entire 34% "discount" to the fact that these are common shares, not preferred. A few months ago when I looked into investing in Palantir via EquityZen/Sharespost, the share price being offered valued Palantir at between 25-30% less than their most recent funding round valuation of $20B.

If anyone's interested in acquiring pvt company shares in the secondary market, here's what I learned:
* You have to be an accredited investor (i.e., net worth of over $1M excluding residence; or income of >$200K individual/>$300K married for the last 2 years and reasonable expectation that this income level will be sustained this year).

* You don't actually own common stock of the company (e.g. Palantir). It actually works like a mutual fund. You invest in an LLC that owns the stock. You get shares in this fund/LLC that correspond 1:1 to common shares in Palantir.

* There is usually a minimum investment amount e.g. $50K or $20K.

* EquityZen/Sharespost charge a commission (of about 5% iirc; 1 of them charged more than the other but had a lower minimum investment amount). They are managers of the LLC and investors have virtually no rights even though they are members of the LLC.

* When the company IPOs, your LLC shares are converted to the same number of company shares. This is common stock, and subject to the same lockup restrictions that employee shares are. That means you can't sell until 6 months after the IPO.

* There is no liquidity. EquityZen and Sharespost differ in this a little bit. But basically you can't sell your shares in the LLC without approval from EZ/SP; they can veto it and they can also require a holding period of 1 year.

* While the transaction is blessed by the underlying company, they don't reveal any information about financials or risks like they would in an IPO prospectus. You are investing blind.

In my opinion the biggest problems with such investments are (1) illiquidity, and (2) the fact that shares are subject to 6-month lockup post IPO.

EDIT: formatting.
Working with C unions in Rust FFI
Guessing it was a nightmare to change it in their codebase so they axed it. Also, increasing the limit would probably add no additional value to their business.
Great question! :)

Narrators actually do switch all character voices in real-time. This does not commonly cause issues that require recording to stop, as the narrators are usually very experienced professionals that come from the Broadway stage or from other voice acting professions (cartoons and the like.) I've also recorded and edited my fair share of bad voice actors (for instance, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich narrated his book 'Beyond Outrage' even though he was told that it really wasn't a good idea.)
Yes, we hire new grads, and we offer internships for those who are still studying. Successful interns get an easier path for converting to full-time than grads who apply cold.

Getting somebody you know at Google to refer you is the best way to secure an interview, but you can also apply online.

http://www.google.com/about/careers/students/
> most places asking for only five years' Ruby experience would kill for somebody with the same experience in a similar language

I've yet to see any evidence that is the case (not necessarily Ruby, but in general)
"I think all individuals have to build social skills to bring to towards 'socially normal', and it varies from where on the spectrum they started".

That's my observation, too. When I was a teen I would completely rebel against any kind of conformity, especially against the idea of "socially expected" behaviour.

However by my 20's I ended up learning that sometimes what is socially expected is expected exactly because it's the smartest thing to do in that situation.

Funny how these things work out.
Observability at Twitter: technical overview, part I
I overfeel others emotions. I can be a real pain. I don't know how to observe them without feeling them.

In some ways this makes me very empathic, but it also makes me avoid people expressing strong emotions, so it also makes me very stand-offish.
Hi, I work at Stripe. We are actually now able to support Puerto Rican businesses. (We need to update that support page!) Shoot me an email at edwin.wee@stripe.com and we can get you set up.
NLP is perfect for understanding purchasing requirements, rules, laws, etc.... You right, watson is just a task specific tuned supercomputer, but I see this as a good fit.
I think that the low-end market for rice cookers is already dominated by the primitive on/off models. I doubt a smart model can compete on price with a thermal switch.

I'd disagree with the OP that a $50 smart rice cooker is a luxury. These models also serve as slow cookers, vegetable steamers, etc. so they are quite a value in money and space compared with buying each appliance individually. If you don't have a proper kitchen you can do most of what you need in one.
Apparently this is taking off! come on people, show your colleagues what you are making!
Yep, thanks. It's annoying, tricky, and a bit painful to get right, but you can do it.
So, I'm graduating UW in June, where do I apply?
Are you taking stock into consideration? At current price, 104 shares of AMZN equals $57,408 which puts my total 2016 pay at $130,408.
Yes. That is exactly true. When Oracle started working on Linux it was only useful for print servers - and I created a white paper for Larry analyzing its shortcomings (lots of functionality missing from the kernel.) So we, along with IBM, Sun, HP, and others, committed tens of millions in resources to making Linux an actual competitor to Windows. And we kept improving it until Bill made enough concessions, and then we stopped. But by that time Linux had been turned into a real OS, and over the next few years it became a "success story" for open source. But that misunderstands the reality of the hundreds of people we had assigned to make it work and to turn Red Hat into a real company. After that, it could be argued that we stayed involved in open source in order to keep it from succeeding too much as part of quietly negotiated side agreements.
I don't work for Google either, but I write about and coach people on salary negotiations, so I keep an eye out for these threads (I learn a lot from them).

There's a very similar thread going for Amazon right now:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11312984

It's a mix of salary sharing and salary negotiation advice that could be very relevant to your bigger question of "How much do senior software engineers make [at the big tech companies]?"

Also relevant is this Salary Negotiation For Developers workshop I did last week in Orlando: http://bit.ly/21zFG5q

As I said over there: I love these threads and I hope more of them get started. The more people know about what they're worth, the more tools they have to get paid what they're worth.

Thanks for starting this thread!
> But as I started implementing a GUI, the tests got harder to write and I didn’t think that the time spent on writing these tests was worthwhile.

I agree. TDD has it's places. Testing GUIs is often not one of them.

> You therefore are more reluctant to make large-scale changes that will lead to the failure of lots of tests.

Don't test private APIs. That makes no sense. I find quite the opposite. If I have more tests, I'm more comfortable making bigger changes, because of the safety net the tests give me.

> Think-first rather than test-first is the way to go.

Absolutely agree.

I think the "solution" to the TDD-or-not problem in Kent Beck-Martin Fowler-DHH [0] conversation was that TDD has it's places, sometimes it's really better than other and helps a lot, sometimes it just get's in your way.

[0]: http://martinfowler.com/articles/is-tdd-dead/
But this is still a pretty trifling connection. People voted for segregation so that 52 years into the future, lower income upper class people could live in cheap mixed race neighborhoods? That's really also not something that was very predictable.

None of that is true of well-off white people taking advantage of a market inefficiency caused by decades of segregation....and an incentive along the same vector

Segregation was a "you must discriminate" law to prevent greedy folks like the author of this article from exploiting the market inefficiencies.

It seems like I've got 3 choices here.
(+1) Violate the spirit of that law, reduce the market inefficiency, and make money. 0) Live in Asia. (-1) Make the inefficiency worse by moving into a nice white suburb, pay more money, and obey the spirit of that now absent law.

To me it seems like "guilt follows benefit" implies I need to do (-1).
If you're not cooking for so many people, this model which I got 8 years ago is great: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000G30ESY

It'll do 1/2 to 3 "cups" of rice, the cup specified in their ratings is an old Japanese measure. As I recall, that'll get the minimum serving down to 300 calories from 600 for a full cup.
I'd argue the opposite. With them recently changing Direct Messages to account for 10,000 characters, they know what it takes to make the changes.
A fast and sane alternative to pyodbc – turbodbc
I've been facing the opposite problem. I've been in a lengthy job search and despite being in a situation where I really need a job, I've been forced to reject all the offers that have been made -- because the working conditions are just too unhealthy.

The article mentions that a side effect of exploding offers is that you don't get to see the full landscape of opportunities and trade-offs you're facing before you make your decision.

On the other hand, after a year of job searching, hundreds of technical phone interviews, dozens of take-home & interactive code tests, and a significant number of job offers that I have turned down, what I can say is that I think I have a pretty good picture of the overall tech job market, and it is exceedingly depressing.

For instance, I have a mild case of misophonia, and so being seated in an open-plan office layout is simply not doable for me, physiologically, and listening to headphones obviously doesn't make sense if the problem is misophonia.

Many companies have been excited about my skills, experience, work ethic, and my ability to communicate.

But they have been 100% no-questions-asked outright indignant at the idea of a candidate negotiating the ability to work in a private office.

Even if I explain that it is related to misophonia, and the extreme aversion I have to ambient noises, conversations, small movements, and so forth, they don't seem to care. In all previous jobs, my teamwork ability and my effort spent collaborating was always praised as one of my best attributes. But in today's job market, collaboration == sitting in an open-plan office.

Far from worrying about exploding offers, I am worried about the overall industry shift that has happened to make it so that it is effectively impossible to work in a private space as a developer.

I feel bad for all of the intrinsically introverted people who are nonetheless excellent collaborators and developers -- the very nature of physical workspaces is harmful to their cognitive health, yet employers outright, under all circumstances, refuse to negotiate about it.

I've never been very interested in the idea of a software union. But the egregious lack of privacy in the workspace has made me start to feel like a union would be truly the only possible solution.
Cross-language Best Practices
Perhaps your idea of socialism, but not many others' ideas. That's the problem.

A lot of people who cheer for socialism believe capitalism, in the sense of private property in the means of production, is a problem and should be abolished. Others, like yourself, are advocating fundamentally capitalist states with extensive welfare programs like Denmark or Sweden.

Unfortunately, the word socialism is used in both senses quite commonly, and it isn't always easy to tell the intent from the word.

(Also, I think sometimes the advocates of socialism aren't very clear on what they mean themselves. Which is unfortunate, as the difference between the two meanings is enormous.)

To be fair, it isn't just fans of socialism who perpetuate this. It does not help when right wingers insist on calling Obama a socialist.

Since the fraction of internet socialists who would actually like to try Marxist totalitarianism one more time is fairly sizable, I tend to assume the worst when I see people choosing that word for themselves.

I will say, if you care about distancing yourself from the totalitarian socialists, but you still like the sound of "socialism", making sure to describe yourself a "democratic socialist" does get the idea across. It's not my favorite term but at least it does suggest Sweden rather than Maoist China.
I created a throw away account to answer this but I will say that my teammates at Amazon and I discussed salary openly. We all were making far below market except for the 2 teammates who had been there 4+ years.

I think for lasting that long, Amazon really pays off in equity compensation which they dole out willingly (with 4 year cliffs of course).

I made 90k as an SDE I straight of college. 20k sign on bonus. Second year bonus of 15k. 150 shares of stock with the regular 5%, 15%, 20% cliffs. Biggest raise I got was 4k when I received an exceeds.
I love this site - it just screams everything I associate with GIS from the second you set eyes on it.
After reading some of these comments...

Holy shit, I am under paid.
If I could upvote this more, I would. All companies hide the salaries do they can underpay. Glassdoor under estimates typical salaries and are not meaningful. OP - Please consider opening a simple google doc and let anyone fill in the detail.
Telegram bot to search on Stackoverflow
Only 24 hours in a day, and so much to learn about.
Latest MS SCOM for VROps Released – Free Upgrade for Existing Users
You'll see a few tips and tricks that are useful. Like when a person crosses their arms, they generally disagree with what you are saying, etc.

The most important thing is to pay less attention to the content and more attention to the tone, stance, demeanor, circumstances, likely self-interest in the situation, notice the little things everywhere and that will give you a clearer picture of what you're dealing with. Do this often enough, over and over again, and it'll become second habit.

Content is rarely useful unless you're engaging in a very data heavy conversation, like for example you would when describing requirements for a project at work. During regular conversation, everything is generally geared toward communicating emotional state, so focusing too much on content dulls your senses and you don't pick up what you need to pick up.
SDE, Level 5, four years, started w/ bonus: $126k, ended: $117k
New job: 175k + equity (fuck you amazon)
I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator.  AMA
Applications for YC for Summer 2016 are due next Thursday 3/24.

People often have questions about YC, and I'm happy to answer those (or questions about anything else).

EDIT: Ok, I have to run. Thanks for the questions!
Polish 14yo live coding iOS app in Swift
Because they are going to lease them out to drivers to compete with Lyft, which earlier this week announced a similar program.
I just used digitalocean hosting for a minecraft server for my kid a few years ago, $5 a month.

What are your ping times like?
How Netflix Streams Daredevil: An Inside Look
it is also helps to be a dictator when it comes to big projects - no need to convince/pitch to investors and various levels of government and elected reps, public opinion, obtaining permits, etc... :) You just do it.
Some pots should be stirred and I think this is one of those pots.
From your link:

> There are a few suggested derivations for the phrase. One, put forward in a 1955 edition of American Speech, is the idea that when a jet crashes on a farm the farmer may sue the government for compensation. That would generate a large enough amount of money to pay off the farm's mortgage. Hence, the pilot paid for the farm with his life.

Etymology is tough historic recreation, but it seems as plausible as the others suggested by your article.
A car sharing company accused me of leaving a dirty vehicle. Apparently I had picked up smoking and gotten a dog without knowing it. They were quite adamant about charging me a cleaning fee until I got American Express involved.
Google satellite view of modern-day Benin City shows clear evidence of past earthworks in the countryside surrounding. In particular traces of an earthen structure runs northeast out of the city starting at about St. Savior Rd, through Urhokuosa, Erua and Ethor to Irrua. A distance of 50 miles, and perhaps further.

https://www.google.com/maps/@6.3474921,5.747339,27322m/data=...
I meant that "why is this getting downvoted" is off-topic, for any value of "this".
SoundCloud: Announcing Our Partnership with Sony Music
Well that's too bad, I don't know any people at google. I guess I need to hang around more coffee shops.
Show HN: Charlesbot – A Python 3 asyncio Slackbot
Open Hardware Certification mark: call for ideas
Formula 1 Trackside Simulation on Rescale (YC W12)