noisenotsignal

Sorry, I didn’t remember the start of the thread by the time I got here. But in later comments you said “in addition, if you are 400k+ you'd probably enjoy the privilege of skipping the interview and even having a position opened for you” and “or you are in the > 400k camp where you don't have to worry about job availability”, both of which I disagree with and provided counter examples for. So, one being in the 400k+ camp does not make it any easier to find an equally well-paying job, hence toleration for being treated like a child.

>400k and fully remote is still not easy. Most of the obvious high payers in big tech (e.g. Meta) have required days in the office, and I can think of very few high-paying companies that don’t have N days RTO at all levels (literally only Netflix off the top of my head).

It is also not the case that such people get in without interviews. Senior+ (though largely staff+) is generally when you can make 400k and there are definitely still grueling interview loops at those levels.

Sorry, I meant replay really broadly because I could not come up with a better term in the moment. For example, a password can be leaked in many ways (guessed, by a breach if the website has poor password storage, etc) and be “replayed”, as in the attacker just enters the password themselves. A code does not have that problem because it is temporal.

That’s the trade off being made for convenience. It’s still somewhat multifactor though (I’ve seen people call it 1.5FA); authentication codes have the benefit of being resilient to replay. So, you’re not pwned even if someone steals your password somehow.

Even if someone steals your phone, you should have a passcode. If they know or guess your passcode, well… someone could steal your house/car keys too, and we still carry them around anyway :)

My university had lecturers that were precisely this (masters in CS, focused on teaching intro undergrad courses).

However, I think there is still a lot of benefit from having researchers teach upper level courses. Firsthand experience in research brings an additional dimension that can be appreciated by students who are beyond the introductory level.

There are also tenured professors who are good at both research and teaching!

4 engineers for an entire phone company sounds scary. I’m sure your engineering is robust enough such that outages are minimal, but that still sounds like a lot of on call (rotation of 4 = once a month?). Even if you only get paged once every few months, you still need to worry about getting paged until your shift is over! Even if you don’t worry in the psychological sense, you still have to schedule around it.

Years of study are definitely not required to get up and running! I attended a 3 day workshop for TLA+ and spent ~2 weeks modeling a new project that my team was working on. I found lots of potential edge cases that would result in data inconsistencies without even having to write tests or think about how to articulate the issue in the first place, as the model checker is able to output the exact program flow that results in the error.

You still need to make sure your implementation matches the spec, but that’s an easier task than squashing concurrency bugs, let alone figuring out how to repro in the first place! The hope is that by writing the spec you avoid a good chunk of errors from the start instead of encountering them one by one.

Ok, I’m sorry for not enumerating all possible itemized deductions when we’re talking about charity specifically.

However, charity is probably the most well-known deduction that you can control (in contrast to stuff like state taxes, which are more or less predetermined). And even among the deductions you control, those deductions require some spending. Can a non-rich person really spend enough to itemize beyond the standardized deduction? If you know how, please let me know because I’ve never gotten close to the standard by itemizing! Even when I’ve had large purchases to compute sales tax for I’m still far away.

Otherwise, it’s pretty clear that, generally speaking, charitable donations aren’t helpful for reducing one’s taxes. I’m sure people donate because they want to, but the tax benefits are not part of the calculus.

You can’t deduct charitable donations unless you don’t take the standard deduction. Instead, you must itemize your deductions. In practice this means you take the standard deduction because most people don’t total more than the standard deduction when they itemize (you have to be decently rich to afford to donate that much!).

Last year you could deduct up to $300 in donations on top of the standard deduction, but I didn’t see it this year.

Right, and further not being perfectly financially rational is quite fine! Finances aren’t the only factor in any decision, nor do they need to be the primary factor.

This seems a bit extreme. If you can afford to move, does interest rate really factor in? If rates get worse you’ve still locked a better rate, if rates get better you refinance. Besides, there’s plenty of reasons to move besides for a job (and not everyone can work remotely or get a remote job with comparable compensation).

Yeah, you’re going to pay some more interest if you get a new mortgage, but don’t you just adjust your monthly finances and eat it? As long as you can hit your long-term financial goals, the “once in a generation” rate doesn’t seem so important.

It makes sense why someone who is good at LC via pattern recognition might not be as good at competitive programming. However, it’s not clear why the reverse would be true. Surely someone good at solving unencountered algorithmic problems would be good at LC?

Are those “with a track record of making a difference” also ok with interview tests, white boards, and/or take homes? I don’t know if viewing excessive tests with disdain is a characteristic solely exhibited by ex top tech; I feel like that’s a universal sentiment among top talent regardless of their background. Not wanting to be burdened with unnecessary burden is a good thing!!

I also don’t think people generally have a problem with interviews. You have to be assessed somehow, obviously, and people at top companies still get interviewed when jumping to other top companies. I’ve really only seen serious complaints (that is, beyond mild grumbling) when interviewing is a huge time sink for a specific company, especially when that company’s compensation is lower and/or the communication process is poor (e.g. ghosting).

Why in the world would anyone interview with you if your company offers less than top tech for equal or harder interviews? (Spinning your rhetoric back at you for added effect. I don’t know what your hiring is like.)

This isn’t necessarily a useful anecdote though. If your previous payment processors weren’t using a bank that failed during that time, then you getting paid on time isn’t a sign of redundancy; they were just fortunate!

It might be fair to say that Rippling failed by choosing the wrong bank, but that’s a very different argument than saying that Rippling didn’t have a good backup plan. If all you’re going by is that you’ve always gotten paid (vs say knowing who your payment processor banked with and what their Plan B in case of bank failure was), for all you know your previous payment processor had no backup plan either!

Can we assume that Facebook did a good job onboarding remotely? I guess maybe the argument is that given poor onboarding, in-person is better than remote, and going back to in-person saves having to invest in better onboarding. But that’s just an argument that the status quo is easier - of course it’s easier to keep doing what you’re used to, and of course traditional onboarding is geared towards in-person! And that’s quite unfortunate because you do have companies onboarding remotely quite successfully so there’s possibly nothing inherent to remote onboarding that makes it strictly worse.