Seriously, why do people care about being promoted beyond senior/staff? Even at a smaller company you're making 200k/year, you probably have a good handle on your job, why not just coast? There's a big discontinuity in comp if you can make it to the director level, but being a manager or senior staff seems like a ton of work for no benefit.
I work like 20 hours a week at my job, I almost quit because it's extremely boring and dysfunctional, but then I realized I can just disengage and enjoy my extra free time instead of pushing to exceed expectations. And I still get paid the same.
> 4. Bigger title -> more control in picking interesting problems to work on. People trust you to say "this should be a priority"
This is probably one of the most dominant non-financial factor for engineers. Because if you want to make a visible, critical design decisions for billion-user products you usually want to be at least L6~L7, the level where you're now an owner of a non-trivial product/system spanning across teams.
Do you worry about being hit by a bus before you have FU money? Personally I'd rather work half time for twice as many years than try to race to retire.
A lot of responses seem to be focused on high cost-of-living areas, which is kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. If you want to be a moderately checked out person, living in a smaller city and stretching your giant bay area salary is the way to go. If you want to be aggressively careerist, you have to be face-to-face in the bay networking.
More input and more interesting problems both feel like more responsibility for the same comp, imo, which might be appealing for some people but is anathema to me. The people higher up got there by being more argumentative, or backstabbing, or ingratiating themselves, and instead of going along with them now you get to fight them. No thanks.
My todo list will keep me busy until I'm 3000 years old. I might not be hit by a bus, but I have no reason to think I will ever get to the end of that list. Money can buy things required for the list that are not on the list, but I have to work to get them. In many cases I spend less time working then I would just doing it. I could make a canoe from scrap wood and row to New Zealand, but in a week at work I get enough money to pay for a plane ticket, while paddling across the ocean would take months (people have taking canoes across the ocean so I know it is possible - though I'm not sure how risky it is)
Yes, given "getting hit by a bus" is a probabilistic event that is independent of my working hours, I would rather make 2x for half as many years, all other things being equal. I'd also rather make 3x for a third as many years, and so on, if it were possible. Given time value of money and compounding interest, it's always better to front load your working time and make Nx for 1/N as much calendar time worked.
And for the controversial part: The above is why I think it's insane to, for example, take 1-2 years of not working, early in your 20s, to go see the world and "find yourself." Those 1-2 years, if spent earning, could mean retiring an extra 3-6 years earlier.
I agree with your conclusion, but I think there’s a fair argument to say that an extra week of leisure in your 20s is worth more than an extra week of leisure in your 50s or 60s. That is even more true if you’re working 48 weeks/year in your 20s and zero weeks in your 60s.
I think it's insane to, for example, work at an office early in your 20s, to put a couple grand in your 401(k). Those 1-2 years, if spent exploring, could mean finding a happier and more thoughtful way to progress through the latter 70% of your life.
I think this points out a difference in viewing everything in life as an efficiency problem focused on retirement age and overall wealth. Makes sense for a forum of engineers to see it this way I suppose.
Early on the money is probably the least important part. Momentum seems like a lot more important.
If you finish uni and take 1-2yrs off, that puts you wayyy behind someone who goes straight into a job. If you take 1-2yrs off your knowledge won't be fresh and you'll not really be a new grad anymore.
"getting hit for a bus" is a hyperbolic example meant to stand in for a catastrophic event. It really means you (or a family member like a parent, partner or child) has a major health event, for instance. Some things are random, some things tend to become more likely with age. Even just chronic pain or other health issues might make retirement less fun than travelling in your 20s (speaking as someone with chronic pain from surgical implants).
Besides health there's a lot of reasons why being certain about doing something now might be preferable to putting it off for 10+ years.
> Do you worry about being hit by a bus before you have FU money?
No. I don't work that hard, and my work is generally enjoyable, I've made a lot of good friends, and get to live in the area I grew up in near my family.
> A lot of responses seem to be focused on high cost-of-living areas
Well, my response was to a poster asking "why do you care about making more if you make 200k?" and the answer for some people making that amount of money is that they are only able to find work paying 200k+ in a high COL area.
> More input and more interesting problems both feel like more responsibility for the same comp
The thing driving more interesting problems and more input is a title bump, which in my neck of the woods means a 50% or greater pay bump, so I would say that's not for the same comp. Whether it's more responsibility is variable, but I know engineers two levels above senior who more or less have the same responsibilities as a senior engineer except their project is "harder" and more important to the company (this does not mean the more senior engineer is actually working more hours though).
Perhaps a meta point here is also useful. Once you're senior, most engineering work available is not interesting and does not help you grow as an engineer. Engineering work that helps you grow as an engineer often makes you more valuable. Companies usually give interesting work to their best engineers. If you can quickly climb the ladder to where your job feeds you interesting work you can enter into a "winners-win-more" sort of feedback loop. This is a strong incentive to front-load your career growth by working really hard for your first decade in industry (or at least years 5-10).
In general I agree. It's just that I don't know if salaried job lead to FU money. The only person I had or will be able to say FU is to myself sitting alone in living room.
Depends on who you are and what your growth potential is. I know SWEs getting offers in the 7-8 figure range. That's not in any way typical but if you're smart enough, hardworking, and get the right breaks hitting a 7 figure income isn't something I'd consider weird and is definitely FU money.
At Google specifically, even being promoted to staff is a huge undertaking. And until recently, there was an expectation of forward career trajectory built into the lower ranks, i.e. every engineer was functionally multi-year probationary. If you found something valuable to do but you weren't progressing your career (because, say, the work was necessary but boring, like micro-optimizations, feature polish on a mature product, or documentation / example creation), you'd start to have talks with your manager about your future at the company.
I believe they relaxed that process when someone at the top took a look at their org-chart and realized they've become a big company where they need a critical mass of not-actually-interested-in-progressing engineers to keep the lights on and if they actually followed their policy, they risked churning those reliable workhorses out of the company because they couldn't actually afford to find a slot to promote them all.
I don't know because the change was decided way above my pay grade, but I always assumed that the reason was HR legal.
It is hard to look at people who are objectively doing as well as each other, and rate some lower only because they have been at that job grade "too long".
The fig leaf was always that the ladders encourages keeping up with technology and the company, which meant people couldn't tread water at the lower grades.
But if the "new technology" isn't necessary for the job duties, labor lawyers can have a field day.
Performance reviews in corporate culture often have a "what have you done for me lately?" mindset.
If you're senior or staff and haven't launched anything exciting lately, middle management might become less interested in whether the service is running well and more interested in having "career" conversations about how your role description says you're supposed to be launching cross-functional projects more frequently.
Okay, but the important part is "the five places you'd be willing to live". There are significant reasons most of us aren't moving to the middle of nowhere to be able to afford a home.
Do their budgets balance or do they take on credit card and other debt to manage the deficit ? I am not claiming its one way or the other as I do not know the answer.
I'm going to guess that software developers, especially ones at FAANG, aren't aiming for a median household lifestyle. 200k post tax is easily ~140k a year. A san francisco mortgage is easily 4-5k a month for 30 years. And if their kids don't get lucky on the school lottery, they're going to be sending them to private school. And then there's college savings to account for.
I understand the perspective of people who view their profession as solely a job, checking out after their 9-5 and doing other things with their life. This isn't me. I enjoy the work. Idealistically, I think I can make a large impact on people with my knowledge and experience. Shave off a seconds on a workflow in Google Docs end-to-end, that's a net good to humanity. It's not all about compensation. At some point it's almost only about impact, and impact often requires higher titles and putting in hours due to systems that govern these large companies.
In the boom time there's an unending appetite for mediocre engineers to inflate headcount, making managers look good (more reports) and companies look good (to investors). In the bust time, I don't think even the smartest people will be safe, and the top of the ladder may well be pruned more aggressively because they're expensive. Having positive reviews may protect you, but being high in the org won't.
Depends on how high. You don't want to be in the "off in the corner" research group which is usually comprised of very high level engineers (senior or staff level or higher). You definitely don't want to be high up in the middle tier either. What you want is to be known to your Vice Presidents and above. That's when you reached "high enough" to avoid the great cull.
I witnessed this more times than I can count.
Otherwise its all balance sheet calculations and maybe your manager can pull a punch or two if the product area is critical enough.
I worked at Shopify - Pay is all about getting the Shopify brand into consumer minds. They had a huge problem where retailers used their platform but there was very little stickiness, the customer relationship was owned by the retailer. With Pay Shopify used it's existing install base to collect customer info and intermediate their relationship with merchants, making it harder to move a shop off Shopify.
Of course they need to tell a story about increased revenue to the retailers, because otherwise why would they voluntarily give Shopify control over their relationship with their customers?
That's pretty funny. When I checkout I don't care if it's Stripe, Shopify, Square, or the business owner's nephew processing my transaction. Why in the world would I make shopping decisions based on who the payment processor is? It's like choosing stores based on which point of sale terminals they bought.
If I am on my phone, I am more likely to complete a transaction if I can just hit the Shopify Pay button. If I need to complete some form that looks like it is from the early 2000s, I might wait until I am in front of a computer, by which point I may lose interest. (There is a lot of middle ground between these two extremes though.)
Similarly, I am more likely (when there are multiple alternatives) to revisit a merchant that uses Shop Pay because of the reduced friction.
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
The overton window in america is so far to the right that the prospect of charging rich people for breaking the law is unheard of.
Counterpoint from Jean-Baptiste Henri-Dominique Lacordaire:
"Entre le fort et le faible, entre le riche et le pauvre, entre le maître et le serviteur, c’est la liberté qui opprime et la loi qui affranchit."
("Between the strong and the weak, between the rich and the poor, between the lord and the slave, it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free.")
To clarify without requiring link chasing: the quote is not from the political scientist Frank Wilhoit (1920-2010) but the musician Frank Wilhoit (https://www.broadheath.com).
A remarkable thing about these stories is that many artists end up enjoying lavish lifestyles while they're popular, but having no money (and going on the dole) when their success wanes. The record industry absolutely encourages this boom and bust lifestyle by advancing money and then withholding royalties until an artist is "recouped", which almost never happens thanks to some fun accounting tricks. The result is young people who come from modest means, are showered with cash, and recieved no financial planning advice. They're also a magnet for people trying to get a cut of the money - people who will encourage them to pursue a lifestyle of excess.
One can draw a very similar arc for lottery winners too. Most of them are broke and vagrant after ~2 years of luxury. There's no planning for tomorrow.
The people most drawn to lotteries (and perhaps those drawn to the limelight too) are those that have the worst life and money skills. I think we all know people who live the feast or famine lifestyle of cruises and new TVs when the tax refund comes followed by 11 months of scraping by and complaining about their money situation.
My recollection is the NFL requires financial education for football players because most pro football careers are short-lived and it's the most money most of them will ever make, but they are young and tend to want to behave like this is their starting salary for their career and it will surely go up from here.
See also actors, perhaps especially TV actors, etc. They're young. They're in an environment of people spending money lavishly. And, as you say, they really want to believe that they'll be the statistical anomaly who will have a long lucrative career.
It's also hard because some of those "lavish" expenses are a necessity if you are famous and make your money from things like looks. Very famous people may need security in various forms that ordinary people do not need (bullet proof limo, security guard, housing with security). Oprah has said if she wears the same outfit twice in two months on her show, people have a fit about it and many stars have to pay for personal trainers, expensive haircuts, etc just to keep their "job."
Well, not really. Are college students taking their student loans and blowing it on "lavish lifestyles"? Or are they just trying to scrape by? My guess is that after non-discretionary expenses (eg. tuition and rent), there isn't much left, unlike for pop stars.
Not on the same scale as rock stars and athletes but pretty much every college town is now packed to the gills with "luxury" apartments selling a lavish lifestyle. For many students, their college years will be the peak of quality of life when it comes to their living situation. Compare this to the residence halls of old with one shared bathroom per floor and multiple students sleeping in the same small room.
In the 1980s, the State of Alabama was sued by prisoners who claimed their prison cells constituted cruel and unusual punishment. One of the defenses the state used was that the student dorms at Auburn University were not only more bare than the prison cells, and lacking in basic amenities like air condition that the prisoners were demanding, the students had to pay to live there (the state won). Apartment complexes in Auburn and other college towns now are in wars with each other over the most attractive amenity packages for their residents. Because so many students take the largest loan amounts offered instead of just what is needed, a huge industry has popped up to convert that loan money into the type of experiences that appeal to those in their teens and early 20s. The lifestyle experience of the contemporary university student is nothing like those of the era pre-easy money loans (that is, when the government start guaranteeing and later issuing loans directly).
College life in the US is a massive sink for those who aren't financially disciplined. Getting loans is easy for most who attended, including stipend loans for "living expenses" such as binge drinking on at least a weekly basis.
The lifestyle certainly isn't lavish in the sense that pop star lifestyle is, but taking out many tens of thousands of dollars in an attempt to become a librarian (one friend of mine did just that) is just stupid, financially speaking. Short of having family bail you out or marrying a high income earner, you're a prisoner to loans that's cannot be discharged via bankruptcy.
> but taking out many tens of thousands of dollars in an attempt to become a librarian (one friend of mine did just that) is just stupid, financially speaking
The problem is, society needs librarians and other "non-STEM" science - we're right now, for example in Germany [1], seeing with the cluelessness of politicians on Russia how utterly ignorant it was to cut funding for Eastern European studies back in 2005. And mind ya that's Europe where "student loans" aren't really a thing because we don't have absurd tuitions because the government pays for universities.
We haven't found a way to incentivize people to take up these studies, and we absolutely need to, otherwise we are going to lose so much knowledge over the next decades. My s/o for example has a brilliant master's degree in art history, but funding for positions that match her experience is scarce to say the least, and covid didn't exactly help. She's currently working for the government to help fight the pandemic, but it's a sad waste of potential how many people like her are simply left behind.
It's not a question of if societies needs to have librarians, it's a question of how many librarians society is willing to support and if that's greater than or equal to the supply of librarians being created. Defenders of humanities degrees often imply that those outside of the humanities don't understand the need for it instead of debating the wisdom of using a 'spray and pray' approach to producing the number of people in those areas that society needs and is willing to support. It's not a situation where we have to choose between having no librarians and society supporting an unlimited number of librarians even though some try to present it that way.
I am saying that librarian studies is, economically speaking, a luxury good when a librarians pay doesn't cover the interest on the loans it took to get the job- mind you that in the US, most librarian jobs require a master's degree, so you could easily be paying for 7 years of higher education to get it, and that's assuming that there are even any jobs available that require the degree in the first place.
> Are college students taking their student loans and blowing it on "lavish lifestyles"?
Colleges certainly do. There is no market economy in giving out loans but yet there are no price and quality controls on the receiving end of the money.
>The record industry absolutely encourages this boom and bust lifestyle
It's part of the overall appeal, and that says something about human nature. We like to see the reckless brilliant star careening into the stratosphere, knowing full well that it is unsustainable. It's the human embodiment of life and overabundant success.
I mean, I agree with you, but is it really surprising that rock stars aren't that interested in retirement planning? That is, the type of person that craves the spotlight and succeeds is also the type that is unlikely to max out their IRA contributions.
Dave Grohl is the Paul McCartney of the 90s - survived the breakup of a band that had massive mainstream success, reinvented himself as a solo artist, now gets to be a lifetime musician with more money than god. I like Nirvana and I like early Foo Fighters, but modern Dave Grohl has been churning out hard-rock oatmeal with copy-paste lyrics since Colour and the Shape.
There's lots of python libraries for graph visualization, it's probably force-directed layout or something else similar.
The name is indeed a reference to data warehouse design, where you normally have heavily normalized data in a snowflake schema. The Kimball book is the canonical one on data warehouse design.
Glad to see this perspective. I find the industry in general is full of very confident people who will try to bowl you over with their cursory understanding of topics.
I find that in tech you run across more people than usual where because they are very intelligent and successful within various tech domains they think this also sets them up to uniquely be an expert at other domains. Politics, law, public health, economics, etc. This is not true.
Personally I hate scratch images because once you lose busybox, you lose the ability to exec into containers. It's a great escape hatch for troubleshooting.
There are a few options that help here. With host access, I tend to just use nsenter most of the time to do different troubleshooting. It can be a bit of a pain doing network troubleshooting though since the resolv.conf will be different without the fs namespace.
And kubernetes has debug containers and the like now.
Women should have the option to control their own bodies - that means allowing birth control and abortion.
It's also patriarchy at work that men would never tolerate even 1/10th of the risks women face in preventing pregnancy. Look at the responses to getting a small injection - "nobody would ever do that"! Hormonal birth control is great for some women, but terrible for others. It can also cause suicidality, but the side effects are routinely downplayed because women are expected to "deal with it". There's more research into how to keep men's hair from falling out and keep their dicks hard than there is into the most comfortable way to insert IUDs, or the side effects of hormonal birth control.
Okay. So it seems women’s birth control should be banned until it’s up to the safety standards of men’s birth control. That’ll help end the “patriarchy”, surely.
There are loads of birth control options for women. Various pills. Injections. Patches. IUDs. Implants. Research for better, safer methods is constantly ongoing. Why even pretend that no research is being done and it’s just oppression? It’s weird. Men aren’t actively trying to make women sick. The warnings are pretty clear—women choose to accept the risks and the risks of current treatments are chemical factors, not something to do with “patriarchy.” There are loads of women working in the medical research industry as well.
Honestly, there’s more safe birth control options for women than there are safe options for men to prevent hair loss. Currently, no simple or affordable treatment exists. Either you’re spending years of income for hair plugs that convince nobody up close or using chemical treatments that have mental and libido risks that often are equal to or worse than birth control pills. Boner pills also carry risks and they were basically discovered by accident.
This patriarchy stuff and pretending “patriarchy” isn’t allowing research into birth control is pure conspiracy theory stuff with all evidence proving the contrary. Those injectables men get have a very high risk of being irreversible and causing harm far greater than any modern birth control options for women—that’s why they’re not common. Dudes would love to know they can’t possibly be on the hook for child support. You’d be richer than Bezos in 5 years if you could find a solution. But it has not happened.
> It's also patriarchy at work that men would never tolerate even 1/10th of the risks women face in preventing pregnancy.
Based on what, anecdotes and your projection?
Anecdotally many men have voiced that if they could endure the pain of childbirth in place of their wives, they would. But I suppose that doesn't fit the narrative.
OP is talking about preventing pregnancy not about sharing the pain or risks in pregnancy. Of course a lot of men would share these with their partner.
Women simply have a much higher incentive to prevent pregnancy because they are much more affected by pregnancy. The worst thing that happens for a man is that they have to pay alimony. Women face the risks of pregnancy and birth or an abortion.
> The worst thing that happens for a man is that they have to pay alimony.
You mean child support, but more accurately: men would either be faced with raising the child also, or paying a hefty sum for almost 20 years. I guess that's easy to brush off?
As for preventing pregnancy, plenty of men opt for vasectomies when they know having a kid is off the table. The rate is not as high in the U.S. as other countries in the West, but it's still 1/10.
I work like 20 hours a week at my job, I almost quit because it's extremely boring and dysfunctional, but then I realized I can just disengage and enjoy my extra free time instead of pushing to exceed expectations. And I still get paid the same.