skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Get married, have kids, and move to a low cost state. The median married couple with children in Iowa makes $79,000 a year, and in Minnesota it’s $91,000. As to health care, the large majority of Americans who aren’t eligible for Medicare get their health care through their employer. Median out of pocket costs for a family with employer provided insurance are around $7,700, which is affordable on those salaries, especially since it’s pre-tax. Also, on average, Americans’ social security and 401ks cover 70% of pre-retirement income, one of the higher figures in the OECD.

The real issue are the 15% or so of Americans who make much less than the median, don’t have employer provided health insurance, etc. I think there should be a strong safety net for those people, particularly subsidized or free health insurance. But we should pay for that safety net the same way every other OECD country does: through consumption taxes and income taxes where the top rates kick in around $70,000.

The whole “tax the rich” thing is a distraction. The rich don’t actually make enough money to pay for all the things people want to pay for. If you want European style welfare, you have to tax the 80% of income earned by the bottom 99% more heavily. Note that even under Warren’s Medicare for All Plan, the vast majority of the cost will be paid for with middle class taxes. The wealth tax will pay for less than 10% of the extra spending. But the amount of time spent talking about wealth taxes and 70% rates on super millionaires is much more than the time spent in talking about the new payroll taxes that will actually pay for the bulk of Medicare for All.
PDF says Seattle, CA, should be WA.
Netflix only has one tier for all engineers (equivalent to Senior Engineer III).
Loneliness works as a motivator.

The point where you get tired of being lonely is the point where you actually try to fix it. That can mean working to improve yourself and your social skills. It can mean joining local groups to meet people, make friends and do good work.

I watch people who are older than me and I see so many more habits that lead to consistently strong social lives.

Golf is huge. Guys who join a club and go play once or twice a week, then hang out together afterwards. I don’t play but the older I’ve gotten the more I’ve respected the benefits.

Church is another. Easy to get involved, totally free.

Family is another and one that I think causes the biggest loneliness issue because so many people move away for work these days. So many people I know who are older have most of their family in one city and get together constantly.

I’m sure there’s more, but the short of it is: use loneliness as a motivator to decide you aren’t going to be lonely anymore and find ways to fix the problem. It might been a combination of self improvement, forced courage or effort but you can do it.
> This blows my mind that in the US one can make such insane money in tech while still being a slacker and retire early with a dream house bought and paid for while in Europe devs are slaving away through SCRUM powered meat grinders burning themselves out for a 3% salary increase on a pitiful 40-80k/year,

I've been in this industry here in America for 20+ years and most software developers don't enjoy such a easy time.

Burnout is common. I personally feel like I have been in a "meat grinder" for about 22 years.

Working at Google is VERY different from working at most companies.
At Facebook, Google, and Snap, at least, the RSUs start vesting immediately (no cliff) and are as good as cash as the stock is liquid. It's not very clear what your distinction is.
It's true, but for most people they consider the yearly (or monthly) bonus and liquid RSU vests as equivalent to salary, so it's mostly apples to apples. RSU can go up or down, but you take the value at current market price as part of the offer.
That took me by surprise too. One hypothesis could be that so many companies that levels.fyi tracks have grown so quickly that they've chosen to stuff themselves full of relatively junior SWEs. I think there are lots of reasons people in strategy positions would choose to do this, whether I agree with them or not.

But re-read the description of "Software Engineer (II)" closely:

> Typically 2-5+ years of experience. [...] At many companies, this is considered a 'career-level', as in you
can spend the rest of your career operating at this level without being pushed out for not being promoted.

So, it doesn't suggest it caps out at 5 years, and this could be where people who do "good, but not outstanding" work end up. Also the next level says "Role shifts more towards design rather than implementation depending on size and expectations at company.", so maybe the big break isn't "seniority and how good you are at your job" but rather "can you, and do you want to, work at the next level of design abstraction?"
> but what is the value of the land if it's not the improvements upon the land?

Following this line of reasoning would suggest that all unimproved land is always worthless, which is obviously not true given that people buy unimproved land all the time. Moreover, it would suggest that knocking down a building on a piece of land is never a correct decision, since land with a building on it would always be worth more than that same land with the building removed, which is also obviously not the case.

> Is it the value someone else would've paid?

Yup, the market value of the land were it unimproved. There are various ways to estimate this value.
Random Access Permutations
I started working at FANG recently, after spending 15 years in a different field. The very first thing I noticed was how young the average employee is. It was a little startling. I've heard different theories:

* Today's big tech companies are still relatively young, so the workforce is young.

* The companies have grown exponentially in recent years, and they've hired many new grads to meet hiring targets. This would also shift the average employee age lower.

* The people who joined these companies 15-20 years ago would likely be very well-off financially by now, so they don't need to keep working. They've retired early, created start ups, left the Bay Area, etc.

I think there's likely some truth to these claims. But Silicon Valley also has a reputation for ageism, so who knows.
I know. I get paid lower than an entry level engineer while managing, developing and maintaining the entire web presence for our company - public site, e-commerce store, etc.

I get paid 1/50th of what the company made in e-commerce sales (similar amounts through other channels).

I can’t quit and prepare for a job interview as I need to maintain visa status. And my workload averages ~60h/week.
Assuming this is the levels.fyi dataset, it is “what I’m getting paid now” rather than offers. Levels.fyi doesn’t seem to filter based on offer vs ongoing salary, and the submission form doesn’t include flagged offer vs ongoing.
Do those once and you’ve done them a hundred times.

Vast majority of software engineering is tedious and boring. Almost no developing cutting edge optimal algorithms. Occasionally interesting design/architecture problems but the majority of the time spent on those is on writing docs, consensus building/communication, and implementation. It’s hard to find the motivation and force yourself to spend week after week chasing down bugs through poorly written code, but almost no task itself is challenging.
Yep. This battle was lost way, way back in the 90s when we collectively decided that everything on the Internet should be free.

I think it's one of the great lost opportunities in human history.

I don't know what the "correct" course of action would have been, instead of making everything ad-supported and mostly terrible. Some kind of very very seamless micropayments? Maybe there was no "correct choice." Maybe "free, but awful" always would have won no matter the alternative.

But man, this outcome sucks. The internet turned out to be just one more way to squirt advertisements into our eyeballs.
5% is not a safe withdrawal rate for "in perpetuity". 3% is much more realistic if you want to be conservative.
Yeah it seems to be an incomplete comparison.

I know some companies like Facebook have crazy signing and relo bonuses ($50-100k+), however the base may be much less (Taxes are also different as I recall)

Also a couple of the companies listed (Airbnb and stripe) have yet to go public so those RSUs are not exactly liquid cash like with goog/FB stock
Proven Ways to Significantly Reduce Your Cloud Costs
This applies to males in general in the bay area. Not just the white ones. I got fed up with the loneliness and left the country entirely. Had a girlfriend a month later after picking from several whom were interested.
It's important to straighten the rest of your life out first before dating. Exercising everyday will help you feel calmer, more confident, and have more energy. Once you exercise for about a month (5+ days per week), you will start feeling stable again and even extroverted. At that point, find a core group of really good friends (probably at work but online works too -- Discord is great).

If all else fails, I can tell you that leaving the Bay Area really helped me re-gain my perspective. I recommend Singapore. Just transfer offices, and don't look back. People here know how to work but not how to live. They also view every social interaction as one that might opportunistically build their own network, almost pathologically transactional in essence. Meanwhile, the resource contention here has everyone stressed out about money (even if they don't outwardly act like it), and long-standing communities don't exist because everyone here has been transplanted elsewhere, so nobody has any firm standing with where they live, nobody has each other's back.

I disagree that gaming is necessarily a form of escapism per se unless it is one of the sole uses of your time. If you use gaming as a social outlet, it is actually great (play games with your IRL friends online, get some friends together, organize/participate in gaming events in real life, etc.).
IMHO, its not that great to work at a IT company than working at a Software Company like Google !!!
That's not true. New hire offers are roughly around these numbers.
$175,000 at Oracle for an entry-level engineer?

I mean... just... wow. You could retire at 35 and not have to work for the rest of your life.

How hard is it to get these jobs?
The intention of a land value tax (as this is called) is to zero out the component of property taxes based on improvements, but increase the component based on the value of the land itself. Whether this ended up being an increase or decrease in the tax rate would mostly depend on how improved the land was. If the land is very improved, this should end up being a reduction in taxes, and for mostly unimproved land it would be an increase in taxes. The intention is to encourage people who own unimproved land to either improve it or sell it to someone who will.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
Attendees List: Aging in America Conference 2019 – ProDataLabs
What I'm taking away from this is that many (most) companies are grossly underpaying their engineers. I've been through the SF/NYC Senior SWE interviewing gauntlet twice in the past three years, and received 10+ offers at half this rate. Levels claims to be checking offer letters, which is great IMO. It's really hard for people to know they're being undervalued when the employers are low-balling and the self-reporters are lying.
> A Trump loss would be presumably be to one of the avowed socialists running

Oh bless, the tendency in the US towards labelling people still right of the centre by most countries' standards as "socialists" for being left of the Republicans is cute.
I know a number of people at Oracle, senior engineers mostly. They are not the online forum aficionados. They do their work, get paid go home to their family, plan vacations just like most other folks out of the tech industry. Very industrious and well deservedly compensated, if I do say so myself. Not just Oracle folks either, there are plenty of companies that are not buzzing or on everybody's lips but treat their employees ridiculously well. Look at SAS for example. Some of the happiest and most well compensated people I know.
great time to buy devices supporting Wi-Fi 5, because of Wi-Fi 6 devices arriving in the US market.

But I say that with some sarcasm, because it's actually a bad time to buy Wi-Fi 6 devices, as Wi-Fi 6E was just announced.

Wi-Fi 6E will require new hardware to support the new frequency - as stated by a previous comment.

BTW, The Wi-Fi Alliance's naming schemes are confusing and poorly timed (Cellular carriers are pushing 5G..and they launch 6E??? Will they bring out 6F and 6G next year?)
Most of these numbers are including RSUs, which are treated like regular income. It is usually wise to sell at vest, in which case you can then buy food or pay rent.
You know what else is an interesting fringe idea that had some famous adherents?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit

...I have never really looked into it, but I happened on a paragraph that makes it sound like it might be an approach to dealing with the problems people complain about a lot these days:

"Douglas proposed to eliminate the gap between purchasing power and prices by increasing consumer purchasing power with credits which do not appear in prices in the form of a price rebate and a dividend. Formally called a "Compensated Price" and a "National (or Consumer) Dividend", a National Credit Office would be charged with the task of calculating the size of the rebate and dividend by determining a national balance sheet, and calculating aggregate production and consumption statistics."

"Based on his conclusion that the real cost of production is less than the financial cost of production, the Douglas price rebate (Compensated Price) is determined by the ratio of consumption to production. Since consumption over a period of time is typically less than production over the same period of time in any industrial society, the real cost of goods should be less than the financial cost.

For example, if the money cost of a good is $100, and the ratio of consumption to production is 3/4, then the real cost of the good is $100(3/4) = $75. As a result, if a consumer spent $100 for a good, the National Credit Authority would rebate the consumer $25. The good costs the consumer $75, the retailer receives $100, and the consumer receives the difference of $25 via new credits created by the National Credit Authority.

The National Dividend is justified by the displacement of labour in the productive process due to technological increases in productivity. As human labour is increasingly replaced by machines in the productive process, Douglas believed people should be free to consume while enjoying increasing amounts of leisure, and that the Dividend would provide this freedom."
Yeah. I'm not debating the specific case here. I generally think this is good advice. My back yard is 100 foot maples and artificial grass because normal ground cover will not grow under that canopy.

But broadly speaking, I'm skeptical of taking advice from a domain expert rather than some form of generalist who synthesizes understanding across the board.

I want to know what the civil engineer has to say. I want to hear from the urban planner, the child psychologist, the sports medicine expert, etc. My yard is used in a lot of ways.
Sure; my point is that we can imagine email/phone-like systems that would work the same way.
I wish they had one for the product managers too. I remember their website had that data as well.
Face of a Hollywood Secret Cult Revealed on Camera
How do you think major enterprise customers are formed?

Also GCP already does have some large enterprise clients. Some of them have had a symbiotic relationship with them, working closely to create the features they need as they scale. That kind of treatment is hard to get with AWS where most enterprises would be small fry by comparison.

There are also enterprises that don’t want to be on Amazons stuff for reasons.
Georgists and others who support land value taxes generally oppose conventional property taxes because property taxes are usually based on the total value of the property, not just the component of the value that comes from the underlying land.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
TikTok claims to have more than 400M daily active users in China
Your pension and benefits are not immediately liquid and wouldn't be included in this comparison.

RSUs from publicly listed companies, on the other hand...
How trustworthy are the numbers in levels.fyi? Who verifies numbers entered by anyone?
Setback laws are usually about not building a structure too close to a lot line. On the front, a minimal setback keeps the street from becoming a canyon. Larger setbacks are more of a look and feel thing for a neighborhood. Front setbacks may also be governed by adjacent houses to encourage all the fronts to line up. It’s tidier that way.
Good advice. Just one nitpick: The 4% rule, which states you can as a rule of thumb safely withdraw 4% of the starting capital per year in real dollars (IE increase it each year to account for inflation), is intended for a standard retirement period (65+) and does expect the principal to decrease.

There's more debate as to what would be a safe withdrawal rate over the long term without depleting principal, but I expect 3% would be a bit on the high side, although not unreasonable if one has a backup like part-time work.

Of course, that's assuming you withdraw 3% of the initial amount each year and adjust for inflation. Obviously if you only withdraw 3% of the current amount each year you'll never run out, by definition, but you might end up with shrinking spending money.

Still, just a nitpick. I agree with you in principle for sure.
Many companies hope that engineers don't know their value or that they simply aren't willing to relocate near one of the tech hubs. A trick of startups is to woo you with stock options which almost never amount to any value. You also have to watch out for REMOTE work where many companies seem to place an excessive $ on the "privilege" of working from home.
Being interested in something makes it “of interest” to you.

For something to be “in your interest” we mean “for your health and well-being.” In this case, there is no reason that a person’s involvement in porn is of any interest to the children and parents involved. In fact making them aware of the fact is acting against their interests by directly harming them.

If you consider that people with different tastes to yours are a hazard to children, where is the line? Is a teacher allowed to moonlight as a bartender?
I find this argument to be tantamount to saying English is fine, but nobody really needs it when there is French. Yes, French is perhaps older and much of English draws from French, and yes, English is more complex than it needs to be. But in the end, pretty much anything you need to say, you can say it in both French and English.

Most problems don't need a modern solution, but that isn't an argument against modern solutions for those problems. In the end, it comes down to, which would the group of people writing the code rather have, an old-style solution or a new-style solution? If both are equivalent, there's no reason not to choose the option that looks like it will be the future.
These numbers aren't including benefits (medical, dental, 401k match, etc). These are salary, RSU, bonus.
Hah...you can't even get rid of the possibility of confusion by switching to wavelength instead of frequency to talk about the bands.

5 GHz is 6 cm, and 6 GHz is 5 cm, and so using wavelength would probably actually be more confusing.
Here in Canada entry level SWEs are getting paid 60k-70k CAD (45k-55k USD). It's worse in Europe.

These numbers are absolutely mind boggling. Even with a higher cost of living and California income taxes, you still have at least 100k of free money to invest.
It's no wonder so many people apply for jobs at FAANGs. A job at a FAANG is practically a ticket to early retirement.
Really? I’m surprised. Every offer I’ve gotten in Canada has been 20-30% of US offers (and this is in high CoL cities like Vancouver and Toronto)
...are probably working in a particle acceleration lab or something. I know the quote.
> The real victory for humanity would be the end of copyright itself. Too much time is wasted on trying to understand and work around this fundamentally broken system.

That would also bring about an abrupt end of license wars of permissive vs. copyleft, I suppose.
Most of the comp is RSU and bonus. If you’re working for one of the listed companies and aren’t in the pay band you’re getting screwed.
hahahahahahahhahaha are you fucking serious? /r/niceguys
I am not lonely. I'm lucky enough to have had the same group of close friends since we were like, 5 years old, a girlfriend, and family about 35 minutes away.

That being said, we live in a relatively rural place and I see a lot of people struggle with loneliness. It's not as simple as "joining a group" when there aren't any around. Maybe you could go to a bar, but the people at the bar are mostly older townies (we're mid-20s to early-30s). Plus, going to bars is less fun when you have to think about driving home. They could go to church, but most people around my age aren't religious, and the few people who do go to Church around here tend to live very faith-focused lives.

I guess the ultimate solution is to leave their hometowns. I've pushed several of them to go back to school as a method of getting out of their situations and meeting people, and it's honestly been kind of successful. We live in NY, so school is free if you meet certain economic requirements. It's been great to see them flourish.
Huh? Paul Dirac did it quite some time ago.

I guess he meant general, not special, relativity.
I steer clear of tidyverse as well. At some point I used to like ggplot but this is because I didn't know lattice yet. lattice is a lot like ggplot but it doesn't come with "strings attached" and the plots look a little nicer.
Not that hard depending on your natural cognitive ability. Just grind leetcode questions. For higher level interviews, also study up on systems design questions.
> the self-reporters are lying.

I think it's less that self reporters are lying and more that there's a selection bias among self reporters. Engineers with average salaries probably don't bother to report.
A brave Microsoft guy who calls out bullshit like it should be. Respect and good luck
Sticking to incrementing integer major revision may not be as much fun, it makes ordering much easier. Case in point, a roadrunner hunting a rattlesnake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwLspcdm0Bs

I own some Apple hardware but I couldn't tell you the order of OSX/MacOS releases off the top of my head. It's something only brand enthusiasts memorize, while every school child learns the ordering of integers.
If it's any consolation, most engineers here are not senior/staff engineers and they make less. Rent here is very steep (~$3500/month is the median price for an old 1-bedroom in San Francisco), but the home prices are really insane.

Also, there are many companies and start-ups up here that pay much less. Lots of people scrape by, and lots of people move away.

I personally really like LA (which is not something I can openly admit up here) and hope to transfer there or to San Diego.
> 802.11af

You have to admire the poetry that 802 doesn't just go to 11 but it's as 11 AF!
Algorand – The Year 2019 in Review
How did you get to $15m? 500k per year x 7 years into index ETFs is still like $8m ish
It is the most relevant thing when judges started disagreeing with Google's take on the law. Sun wanted money for X, Google didn't want to pay for X. (And IBM didn't want money for SQL.)
They violated his right to privacy. You don't get to use one right to violate another without consequences.