jeffFrom18F

The advertised battery life appeals to me, if it does indeed work as advertised. I have a 3-year-old Oryx Pro, which I probably over-indexed on performance on. Everything about it is great with the exception of the battery life which is usually < 1 hour (surfing the net or programming, nothing crazy). I would have gone with a different offering if I had known this.

Probably being wildly naive here, but wouldn't it be better if there were an open-source solution for this sort of thing that could be used by both parties?

It really comes down to the money.

I don't want to live in the Bay Area, I find almost nothing I like about it--with one exception: 2-5x what you are going to make in most other cities for work that is often easier.

Almost any city in the Northeast and large parts of the Midwest have better transportation and housing.

If SO was just about maintaining the community and running a useful Q&A site then it would be very strange that Sara Chipps still has a job right now.

I can only guess it's because there is something else going on with SO the business and she is executing exactly according to plan.

I hope Stripe and similar companies that are mostly SF-based plan on more expansion to San Jose. There is an article practically every day in the Mercury News about some new office or residential site that is coming soon.

They can't move their HQ at this point for reasons others have mentioned.

It does seem like they are taking a balanced strategy, however. I remember a story a few months ago about how their latest team is all-remote. They might have better incentives to open more offices in lower-cost locales after going public (see Uber's new Dallas plans for example).

> decent public transportation

Nope

For me, it's the somewhat selfish but defensible idea that open source is a good way to get experience with technologies that I don't get to use in my day job. I get some amount of pride in seeing my name in release notes etc but that is about it, I don't do Twitter, don't have followers, and am not high-profile in any way.

I realize a university is not going to pay in-line with a FAANG company, but I am surprised somewhere like Columbia which is definitely not hurting for money doesn't pay at least a little bit more than this, like 110-130.

I have noticed that LinkedIn added a lot of addiction-forming "hooks" in the last year (maybe a little longer?), similar to other social networks. The most prominent among these that "liking" will repost to your connections' timeline.

I don't have a problem with this necessarily; after you have worked a while and have several hundred connections+ it is a great way to keep up with what people are doing, so long as they are posting something substantial (new job, press release, etc) and not reposts of empty quotes about innovation from Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Vishnepolsky, etc.

I usually unfollow rather than disconnect. Disconnecting means I don't want to have anything to do with this person professionally, and you never know when a connection to someone might be useful.

I was going to make a reference to "Hardcore Visual Basic" but you beat me to it. Fantastic book, it's hard to find a tech book that is that useful and fun at the same time.

My first job started out with mostly Visual Basic 6. One of the modules written in VC++ by a bunch of guys who were looking to get that on their resume (they had since departed). It probably should have just been in VB as well and was always a nightmare to debug and enhance.

Once .net was prominent we mostly moved to C#. There didn't seem to be much of a reason to go with VB.Net, C# seemed more "legitimate" and without the hassles of Visual C++/MFC.

Decades later and I still find myself writing an Excel macro in VBA now and then but I've largely moved on.

Lunch/beer are certainly above nat'l average, but they do not cost that much in the bay area. It's mostly the housing (Childcare also up there).

I've had a lot of similar thoughts. If VCs here want to tell their startups they have to be here, that's one thing, but I don't see why some of the tech mega-corps don't open more offices with a few hundred positions in places across the country. A few MBA-types I've talked to told me that just won't work but they didn't offer much of an explanation beyond some mumblings about looking for "only the best talent".

This is why I'm looking with anticipation at the plans to develop downtown San Jose. Nothing is "sacred" there, so you avoid all these discussions and get on with building.