throwthisawayt

Joined 10 years ago

Karma
350
Submissions
56
Member since
May 6
View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 8 years ago
Fair point !
Comment · 8 years ago
I work in health tech and I genuinely believe that this is an endemic problem that can’t be solved by a startup. It is a social issue approaching a health crisis and we need to have our policy, educator, and parents addressing this. While private industry can help, the ultimate responsibility lies with our democracy.
Comment · 8 years ago
Why can’t it be low willpower along with availability of instant cheap calorically rich unsatiating food? In the past even if you had low will power you didn’t have access to cheap 2000+ simple carb / sugar meals. Now we do.
Comment · 8 years ago
Many cfo actually have the biz dev unit under them. Google and my current company both have the biz dev unit under the CFO. I also worked for CFO at a mobile telecom and he was actually a key executive in charge of the 3g expansion. The role is actually much more than accounting.
Comment · 9 years ago
Did it seem to anyone else that sticking to Python would have been way easier? It didn’t seem like any of the performance gains were through Golang.
Comment · 9 years ago
Ok maybe I should clarify that I’m originally from Texas and work in sf so I have some pretty direct experience and know that there is a big economic difference and the salary differential is not that small.

I completely agree that there is way more to life than economics, but for the young single engineer the business case for Bay Area (and even more Seattle) is very compelling.

To put it in perspective, when I compare myself to a friend with similar skills my net worth is already 2x greater.

Comment · 9 years ago
I went to a bootcamp and myself along with all of my closest friends at the bootcamp hit that 130K number in SF on total REAL comp.
Comment · 9 years ago
Ok, your salary estimates for SF are completely off.

Let me level set by saying I went to a bootcamp and have two years experience. I make 165K (25% higher than 130) and my 3 close bootcamp colleagues all make around the same. I don’t work for some hot company like Google - 95% of people reading this haven’t heard of us. And just to be clear this is all liquid compensation (cash, bonus, and public stock equity).

So yes for me and my closest friends with comparable experience SF is by far the best option economically.

Note as others have mentioned; I don’t think that will be the case when I start a family.

Comment · 9 years ago
No where in the article do they mention how they factor in cost of living into the comparison. As other commenters have pointed out, most studies naively make a linear adjustment; i.e. if cost of living is 2x you need 2x the salary. This makes no sense. Say your cost of living is 30k and your salary is 100k in one city. In a 2nd City your cost of living is 60k and 180k. A rational economic decision would be to live in City 2 since it maximizes your savings. The linear adjustment based on cost of living only make sense if a person is saving 0% of their salary.

The other issue is I don’t buy the 110k vs 130k difference in Austin. They are not considering total comp in which case the delta is way bigger.

Finally, Hired is mostly used by startups and low to medium paying employers. There is a huger salary difference at large tech firms between SF and other cities.

What this study is really saying is “if you want to work at medium size companies, don’t earn anything beyond a salary, and spend all of your salary San Francisco is not worth it”.

Comment · 9 years ago
The fine is for the stats that were on places like their website. They didn't define the stats clearly on their site.
Comment · 9 years ago
You should wait till they cross the intersection instead of timing your cross with the pedestrian. You need to yield to the pedestrian as soon as they enter the cross walk - that's the law and what all road traffic is required to follow.
Comment · 9 years ago
I think people forget that vc backed startups are profit and greed driven (like all free enterprises). We all like to drink the cool aid and think that a startup's purpose is societal impact but really they are engineered to make $$$.

As such, it makes sense that people pour millions of dollars to target the 1%. They've got a shitload of more money than the rest of the country. Seriously, if you've got an product that every rich person wants but that no other person cares about, you will have vcs knocking on your door. We need to think of vcs as building cash machines, not as the money behind "changing the world". Yes occasionally vcs fund companies like Google that have broader impact but that's not their primary aim.

If we want more people building ventures that impact society we need to either * change the funding model * build bootstrap ventures * build non profit ventures * ask the government to step in (a socialist approach)

A good example are institutions like the Gates foundation and WHO eradicating polio in the last few years. Yeah it's not sexy but organizations like that are making real societal impact.

Comment · 9 years ago
This is not how most large companies I've worked with operate. Large IT decisions are driven top down, not organically through the engineering front line. The CTO, CIO, etc. work with vendors that market to them. It's the way organizations like Salesforce, Workday, Cisco, and Concur operate. The consumer/developer first organizations like Dropbox, Twilio, and Stripe can only get to a certain stage before they need to target the big fish. It's this huge cultural shift (focusing on making something users want vs figuring out how to sell to behometh organizations) that will make or break these companies.

If they figure it out, they will own their markets because frankly their products are better since they were user first.

I think it's important part of building a company - recognizing that the heart and soul that led you to say $100M sales can completely differnent from what leads you to $1B. It's almost like a mini innovators dilemma for startups.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton