What company are you at? I’m at a company who people consider 2nd tier among the FANGs in a senior developer role and my salary + stocks are > $300K this year in Seattle.
Also be careful what you wish for. I’m not sure if the stress and personal impact are worth it. I have constant anxiety. Some of the people I work with are really smart but manipulative and generally not great human beings.
It’s not for everyone. I’m just trying to get to $1MM in my after tax account before I leave this company for something more sustainable.
> Some of the people I work with are really smart but manipulative and generally not great human beings.
Amen to this. If anyone here believes that those who possess high intelligence are naturally more ethical or good-hearted than the average, try getting between any of them and their next bonus / promotion at a FAANG or in academia and you will rapidly learn otherwise.
> Some of the people I work with are really smart but manipulative and generally not great human beings.
It was really shocking to me to learn how disgusting some very intelligent people can be. It rewrote some of my philosophies of life in the first half of my twenties. Turns out we don't all have cathedrals in our heads when we have the tools to build them.
Not a fan of googles hiring process. I interviewed in 2015 and never got past the phone screen. I was given a contrived programming problem, which I solved and explained runtime complexity.
The interviewer called me for the screen about 15 minutes late and then he was upset with me because the google doc link I was given to write code was not the one he was opening. Miscommunication on his end.
He struggled to speak English, which I’m fine with, but his inability to communicate made him get more and more frustrated.
The recruiter never called back. Even if they weren’t going to move forward, a simple courtesy call wouldn’t have been so terrible.
This interview was for an entry level engineer. In less than 4 years, I’m a senior engineer now at another top tier tech company. I don’t think my interviewing skills or coding skills were the problem.
I'm not justifying extortion, just reminding people of Bezos hypocritical statements.
He was piling pain into Theil but now the shoe is on the other foot his tough talk has a different tune.
He should have supported Peter / Hogan against the "everything you do in private is in the public interest" mentality. Especially when he owns a newspaper and a media network!
There’s no hypocrisy here. If you have a personal issue with Bezos or his success, that’s fine. Expecting Bezos to tell newspapers or media what to report sounds like something Donald Trump would do. Good on Bezos for not doing that.
Ocasio-Cortez is almost always being mentioned on Fox and some of the conservative forums I visit.
They’re genuinely terrified of her.
Imo, we need fresh people with new ideas. I’m tired of the Pelosi's of the world running the show. I see them right of center and opportunists whose policy views shift just to get votes, not because they’re acting in the interest of constituents but because it’s good for optics and to get votes.
I would love to see more debate on proposals such as increased taxes on folks earning more than $10MM. I support this if we can figure the np hard problem of how to spend that money. Seattle for instance has spent hundreds of millions on homelessness without any progress. It’s only gotten worse.
My spouse and I were wanting to visit NYC last spring. A hotel + flight package for three nights was listed as $800 per person because of a last minute sale. Okay so $1600 plus maybe another 10% in tax?
Nope. By the time you’re really settled on this is where you’ll stay and this is when you’ll fly out and return and your spouse is excited, the final price is more like $2500, not counting a daily resort fee of another $35 that will go directly to the hotel once you get there.
So from $800 a person to $2600 for two people. Yeah no thanks.
Burnout is real. I was promoted from an entry level to senior level engineer in three years at one of the top tech companies. My compensation is great, and I’m saving heavily. Also, I’m exhausted. As in... I’m wondering what to do next with my life and work. Burn out is an understatement. I don’t talk to my spouse about this because this person has a lot of stuff to deal with, and my family relationships have wined down after they found out what I get paid and basically just wanted me to hand over everything because they believe they are entitled to it. So who do you turn to? It doesn’t solve my problems but it at least helps reading threads like this to see others perspectives.
The wage gap is real, although I feel like I see an anti ${insert_tech_company_here} article on NYT just about everyday attacking Facebook, Amazon, Apple, etc.
None of these tech companies are on a moral pedestal but also, none of these media outlets are on any moral pedestal. These are the same folks who championed the Iraq war. Look, I’m not saying there isn’t a significant wealth disparity, but I do think people should consider the NYT motives.
It couldn’t be that thry hate tech because these large tech companies are direct competitors in the advertising space?
Ha! I work with some talented engineers at a big tech company. This topic sort of came up at a happy hour event.
Their culture is different. In the west, we think you’re really something if you invent or innovate something on your own. Their view is it doesn’t matter if you take something from someone because you still have to work to do something with the concept or technology.
I get their perspective. On one hand, yeah it sucks if you work hard or invest massive capital to innovate in some area. On the other hand, if your economy is at an advantage, others in the emerging world are left behind and they’ll always be playing catch up, paying royalties, or locked out completely.
Well, the same can be said to "I invented it, it's mine" behavior. A rather convenient rationalization for poor behavior -- in favor of the profit of the inventor (and usually not even that, the patent holder, which can easily be a patent troll or a rent-seeker) -- rather than the society at large or those that can put the invention into practice.
It's as if it's a matter of worldview, rather than some fixed idea that this is good or this is bad. It's also as if their version is closer to the "information wants to be free", "down with patents" etc spirit.
(Not that their companies do it out of altruistic ideology. But for the spirit of the culture at large, that can be said, as it is more communal and less individualistic, e.g. see Confucianism).
Then there's the "We stole foreign IP by the truckloads when we didn't have many inventions of our own to bootstrap ourselves with, but now that we're the ones inventing stuff nobody should do it anymore" rationalization...
Isn't the "effort and risk" usually what those in favor of patents propose? Lest there's no compensation of the inventor for their effort, and we stop having inventions or something?
Or sell the wheat to someone else for less than market value because you don’t have to own land, equipment, hire people, learn to grow it, plant the seeds, look after the crop, deal with insects and other issues, manage regulatory requirements, pay property taxes, provide health insurance, carry liability and property insurance, deal with the losses during a bad season or failed experiments, have a financial buffer to deal with market fluctuations...and more.
Yeah, aside from that stealing something from someone who created it takes the same effort as that expended by the rightful owner.
Except this analogy doesn't make any sense, because what's "stolen" here is the IP. So it's not like stealing wheat from a farmer. It's like a farmer stumbling upon a plant useful for food production, calling it "wheat", figuring out how to plant and harvest it, and then demanding that he be the one who controls who can or can not grow or use this new "wheat" thing, and that he gets paid by all other farmers who grow it. And then someone else (the "thief") calls bullshit, and grows this "wheat" anyway.
Applying language for material items (like "stealing") to IP only muddies the waters. There's plenty of cases where one could find moral justification for compensating the "inventor" (e.g. countless of hours invested in try-and-error search, use of expensive equipment), and there's plenty more of cases where the purported "inventor" is just a greedy asshole trying to get rich by abusing the society (e.g. patent trolls, DMCA abuse, speculative patenting by companies and individuals alike). In times where IP frameworks are both misaligned with the nature of information, and frequently abused to prevent the very things they're ostensibly meant to promote, this whole space needs a total overhaul.
China's approach may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but taking a global view of technological development, it's probably for the better.
The issue here is that the addition of work later in the process, does not mean there is no work -- and thus no claim to value -- earlier in the process. It's a response to it doesn’t matter if you take something from someone because you still have to work to do something with the concept or technology.. Just because people have to work to make something saleable of the concept or technology, doesn't change anything.
You might argue that "finding" or "discovering" stuff is not work and in naive cases you are right. Regarding wheat, though:
* There is a lot of work that has gone into virtually all edible wheat varieties. We don't eat wild wheat.
* Finding stuff you can actually eat was at one time a lot of work, and sometimes dangerous.
* Saving seeds and saving the knowledge of identifying characteristics of food stuffs was at one time far more difficult than it is now.
If people do work, and we benefit from it, and they don't benefit from us benefitting, that's crooked.
I'm not arguing discovery is not work. I'm arguing about the limits on returns on discovery, because those need to be balanced with the rest of society.
In this particular example, from a more global point of view, it would be best if the farmer who discovered new food was incentivized to share the knowledge without restrictions, as widely as possible, because not doing so means lots of unnecessary people sick or dead.
> If people do work, and we benefit from it, and they don't benefit from us benefitting, that's crooked.
I agree, but there has to be diminishing returns on that benefit. Otherwise, each discovery is forever holding the civilization hostage. You can't run an economy based mostly on rewarding the estates of inventors for their past inventions. At some point the discovery has to be owned collectively, by everyone, and become a building block for next discoveries.
Current western IP systems sorta recognize that, at least in theory. In practice, we're dealing with a) protection periods not reflecting the reality of modern industries, and essentially putting a brake on progress; b) a system that's thoroughly gamed, and no longer serves the interests of society. Between ridiculous copyright extensions, vague patents, obvious patents, speculative patents, trolling, rights trading, MAD via patents, the system legitimizes rent seeking, and does not incentivize people to create/discover things in order for them to benefit the whole.
well to be sure - to add some details in your analogy for it to be an exact comparison, the farmer "stumbled" on this plant in someone else's nursery. a nursery that person nurtured for quite some time and expects to get a return on
A lot of ideas at home are stolen in one fashion or another. We just happen to have a legal system that allows you to reap the benefits of your innovation alone or license out and get royalties or some combination of the two, assuming you’re the first to patent it or assuming you have enough political or financial capital to pursue litigation.
Imo calling it poor behavior is subjective. If your culture doesn’t value being the first to discover or invent something like the west, then any notion of it being poor behavior falls apart.
To be clear, I’m not defending the behavior. If my invention was stolen, I’d be upset. I am, however, presenting the other side the way it was explained to me.
Stop what? Pointing out the reality of rampant anti-Chinese sentiment on HN?
Even with:
> We moderate HN to mitigate the worst aspects of this, but there's no hope of eliminating it. HN is controlled by its community. All that moderation can do is adjust the margins.
it's still rampant. You mitigate the worst aspect of it but you're still left with a anti-Chinese circle jerk.
When people make critical observations about how my country is run and my government, I don’t assume they’re anti-American. Why would you assume that my critique of how a relative handful of elites run a country of over a billion translates to “anti-Chinese”? I don’t trust people who conflate how governments operate, with the populace itself; they are usually trying to gain some rhetorical advantage dishonestly.
Let's be honest here. HN is only open to _certain_ dissenting opinions. If you hold others, people will flame you and then dang will time you out claiming a rules violation without any clarification as to which ones and despite honestly not knowing which ones.
Other users flagrantly violate the rules without issue because they hold the prevailing opinion.
Why would mods care? The Chinese hold some uniquely unpopular positions, I'm not sure why the mods should defend them from that. There are plenty of things Western countries get roasted on here for as well.
