Can’t see the article (paywall), but this isn’t a surprise. You have Democrat candidates open to or advocating for the notion of increasing taxes on the elite classes. For the rich, it’s a tiny investment to support the opposing candidate... not to mention the poor and uneducated classes who are convinced democrats only want to take their freedom and turn America into Venezuela.
On a personal note - with money supposedly being free speech, it’s absolutely critical we increase estate taxes, especially for billionaires. Personally I don’t want to live in a world where our opinions and politics are shaped by dynasties, whether that’s the Trumps, the Clintons, or anyone else.
I’m highly paid ($300K+), so before anyone says - I’m not trying to steal from anyone. But having a billionaire class that laws don’t apply to or that can essentially do whatever it wants makes no sense to me. It’s a bigger threat to democracy and freedom than any terrorist or religious extremists.
Is this the right way to hire? Not saying it’s wrong but I’ve taken a different approach which has generally worked out.
Even if I was hiring for a specific role (front end), I care less about familiarity with specific bundlers or frameworks and something more like - “Can this person problem solve and deal with varying levels of ambiguity? Do they seem capable of figuring something out without a ton of direction?”
That is exactly the thing I select for. I recently had to hire 4 developers, and I was not all that interested in how many years of experience they had in javascript or typescript (our main language), and even less if you know Vue or Express (our stack). I mean, it's good to know javascript, and certainly ES6 or typescript, but I'm much more interested in: can I discuss stuff with you, do you have interesting opinions, can you make clear decisions in the face of unclear requirements, are you creative, and can you fix stuff and build features without anyone having to hold your hand? In case of doubt, knowledge of ES6 or Typescript or any relevant front-end framework (Vue, Angular or React) can make a lot of difference, but I'd rather hire someone who knows a dozen languages we don't use than someone who only knows exactly the one language we do use.
And then when you need to ship now you have a bunch of dead weight while you wait for them to ramp up. Also, since now you are taking time from your devs who do know the stack to mentor your new hires and code reviews because you can’t trust them to do good work without messing up your code base. They are now doing “negative work”.
That's why I don't hire dead weight, or people who require handholding, but people I can trust, who can pull their own weight, and know how to learn. Someone who merely has X years in technology Y means little to me. Plenty of people manage to still be bad after years of working on the same technology.
But if you're in a secondary employment market as opposed to startup heavy SV you might work with this person for a very long time or have a high chance of working together in the future. So the right, right now isn't always what people are optimizing for.
After spending 10 years at one company and suffering from not learning anything new but just as importantly salary compression, for the next 8 years, and 5 jobs, I learned the best way to make more money is to do Resume Driven Development and change jobs. While your market value goes up tremendously, HR departments insists on giving 3-4% raises to existing employees while being forced to bring in new employees at market rates.
This is the “secondary employment” market where HR policies aren’t optimized for in demand fields like software development. The immediate managers are usually helpless to do anything about it and see employees they spend time training leave for greener pastures. Being that is the reality, what other course is there but to find people you don’t have to train?
It’s “bullshit” to open req to hire a developer because you need to ship a product within the next six months and you need more bodies? Why are you hiring if you don’t need the extra people? If you didn’t need the extra people for a year until they ramp up, wouldn’t it be better just to take your time hiring until you found someone that didn’t have to spend a year learning on your dime and then leave in two years?
I’m not sure what’s the point of your comment. As an American I’m also lucky that my country isn’t facing the issues innocent people in Syria, Iraq, etc face being caught in a civil war. I’m lucky we have vaccines, clean water, contracts, courts, cops, etc etc.
None of that excuses Boeing’s gross negligence and lack of accountability.
I’ve dumped them from my portfolio although I still - unfortunately - have exposure since they’re in the SP500.
There should be an S&P500-N fund where you can select up to N specific companies you want to exclude, and they give you a dynamic ticker which tracks that sub-set.
I wonder if it’s technically feasible without absurd transaction costs, to either explicitly or effectively net out specific company exposure from an S&P500 basket.
Even just a calculator which could tell you, for every share of SPY of you want to not have Boeing exposure you need to short-sell X shares of Boeing.
Not a finance expert, but I don't think the transaction costs would factor would they? You would own "units" in the fund, rather than the underlying security itself. The makeup of the unit however, would be dynamic
A fully realized s&p 500 ex-FOO fund for every company (or every combination of two or three companies) would probably not have sufficient demand to make it efficient.
You would need to have some sort of clever accounting to make it work, although, while retail commissions are at zero, and fractional shares may become available, assembling your own index fund may be possible with only a significant time cost.
Maybe they could implement it with S&P 500 and tqking a short position to cancel out ownership of stock XYZ. This way they don't have the demand problem you alluded to. Then they can charge customers an additional fee for this customization, which would cover the cost of the short. I imagine some would pay this additional customization fee since it's a small price to feel morally consistent.
None of the heads rolling will count unless they are from the very top. Make no mistake, there was a willful and calculated structuring of incentives and punitive pressure that originated from the top that had a decisive hand in establishing the culture that enabled all the combinations of poor decisions to pass through, like many air vehicle accidents. If only middle management heads roll, this will simply eventually repeat, with even more deniability accruing to the top as they vaccinate themselves from lessons learned out of this.
It is long past time that Henry II of England-style management ("Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?") by euphemism-laden punitive measures be scrutinized for their actual effects as structured cultural edifices, and not the legalistic interpretation of words designed for maximum deniability while indirectly pressuring for ridding the corporate body of turbulent priests.
Go to where the real power sits, and change why and how it is wielded to make lasting cultural change. Into this group I also lump in major shareholders who share in the accountability of crafting and maintaining a culture.
At Google or FB you’d earn upwards of 300-400K in a senior role. I don’t think being on the shiny stuff t your previous company will help unless you’re known in the industry, as in you’re brought out as a Distinguished engineer or similar VP/ equivalent IC role - source: I interview at a FANG.
These numbers are self reported so I wouldn’t index on them that much - most numbers I see there for Amazon are on the higher end and give the appearance the higher end of the scale is the median... which is inaccurate given that some of the pay bands are pretty wide.
I've found levels.fyi to be pretty accurate. For hard numbers you can compare with salaries reported on green card PERM applications (which exclude stock amounts.) Netflix pays all cash and only hires at senior and above so should be comparable:
I wouldn’t trust online, voluntary, self-reported salary “data” even a little. No more than any other form of e-bragging. Everyone who posts online makes $350k, drives a Ferrari, and has a supermodel romantic partner.
Netflix is known to pay at the top of market, so the highest few compensations there being >$350k make at least a little sense.
> I wouldn’t trust online, voluntary, self-reported salary “data” even a little. No more than any other form of e-bragging. Everyone who posts online makes $350k, drives a Ferrari, and has a supermodel romantic partner.
Filter the visadoor results with job=software to see only the software developer salaries. These range from $280K to $850K, have a mean of $373K, a median $370K, 24 of 66 are at $400K and above.
This is very much the same ballpark as the self reported average salary of $433K on levels.fyi (I'd expect PERM figures to be slightly lower than average for the company as a whole since I presume they would normally be filed in the first year of employment.)
This strongly suggests to me that the levels.fyi self reported salaries for other companies are also ballpark correct.
> Netflix is known to pay at the top of market, so the highest few compensations there being >$350k make at least a little sense.
47 of 66 in the visadoor figures make $350 and above. While I would expect Netflix's average to be higher than other comparable companies this is because it hires only at Senior Software Developer level and above. Facebook and Google certainly pay their senior and above developers in the Bay Area similarly, albeit with a different RSU/salary mix.
I get the sense that those numbers might include the value of stock increasing, but that's the only site that's had numbers within 10% of the offers I actually got after negotiation.
> $320K at Amazon this year. I’m 32 and have been here 7 years.
If you don't mind, can you please share how much net you project to save this year after all taxes and expenses? Sorry if this is a little weird but as a poor person I'd imagine expenses to go up with higher income for ordinary people resulting in not that much (proportionately) savings.
My salary is $160K (that’s the max your salary can be at Amazon). The rest of my compensation (remaining ~$160k) is in restricted stock unit vests. I save 100% of that $160K after taxes. I max out my 401K from my salary. I also save 30-40% of each paycheck.
My husband and I don’t eat out 11 months of the year. The 12 month is a vacation where we travel within the US for a week vacation. Even then, we don’t go to expensive restaurants and will look for good deals... I mean my husband will open the McDonalds app on his phone to get a buy 1 get 1 Big Mac coupon. We don’t spend eating out... it is unhealthy and a bad habit.
We don’t have a car - so living in downtown Seattle, no expensive car tabs or parking. Also no fuel costs or car insurance payments. We paid off student loans and so there’s no debt. We pay for that with high rent ($2400/month excluding utilities).
Our only splurge is we have Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify, and we might get Disney’s new service. Our apartment is upscale (by our standard). Our furniture is nicer.
You called yourself a poor person - I’m sure you know this, but income is not a measure of wealth. We’ve built up some investments and liquid savings over the years, but I know coworkers from previous teams and other friends who earn just as much or more than us but also have $15K/month mortgages and are house broke or have expensive drinking or general spending habits where they end up saving practically nothing.
You don't sound like you have children which means you save a lot of money that way and you guys together make a metric crap ton of money compared to the average person. Sounds like you're trying a mustachioed lifestyle. I wish you all the best. $2400/mo isn't a huge housing cost btw. Especially when living in a city.
I’m not the grandparent commenter, but my total compensation this year is roughly the same, so I thought I’d chime in with my savings:
$28.6k - 401k contributions & match
$112k - RSUs after tax
$14k - Monthly emergency fund contributions from paycheck (yearly total)
~$16k - Bonus after tax
My expenses really haven’t increased in line with the compensation. The picture would look different if I had a family, but I’m in my late 20s. I suppose I could eat high quality sushi daily, but I’ll settle for weekly.
I work at Amazon. Ellisons assessment is trash meant to fool maybe Wall Street analysts, but as an engineer, his claims are laughable. In reality, database migrations are hard. Removing that factor entirely for a moment, engineers don’t want to work on lift and shift projects. They come to Amazon to build interesting shit. Now imagine database migrations are easy and your engineers love this work - well, now it turns out you’ve basically stopped real innovation in your organizations to do this operational work for cost savings.
I could go on... there are so many factors why it took Amazon a while to get off Oracle. Ellison is a heaping pile of dog shit fraudster. Before you dismiss me as being biased, look at my post history. I’m critical enough of Amazon.
You might hate the console or CLI tools, but people at Amazon have real data telling them the CX is good enough and their capital would be better spent investing in other features. Source: I work there. :P
What’s your problem domain? You shouldn’t be locked into AWS. No offense, but sounds like bad design or more generally, you or your engineers don’t know what they’re doing.
As a percentage of offerings, how much of the AWS portfolio is portable between clouds? 5%? 1%?
Of course we could re-write on a different cloud, just like Amazon can move off Oracle, but it would take time and we would put up with a lot of abuse before it happened, just like Amazon no doubt did with Oracle.
Which is what you were just bragging about: your numbers show that your customers are locked in enough that you can abuse them plenty before they can effectively retaliate.
You didn’t answer my question and deflected, only responding with personal attacks. Nice.
I still think that your notion of intentional vendor lock in is misinformed at best and poor design and architecting from your side (at worst). I do happen to work at Amazon but my post history will show you how critical I am of the company.
But nothing you’re saying is valid, and I don’t see any parallel here with the migration from Oracle. If you’ve used Oracle DB or have familiarity with its one off special “features”, there’s no parallel between that and using something like RDS or Dynamo. RDS is replaceable. Dynamo is a key value store first and foremost.
There are also enough third party abstractions that let provide you their own configuration and syntax for spinning up resources on AWS, Azure, GCP, etc or mix and match.
DynamoDB is not directly portable, Cassandra is closest, and it's a bear to roll your own. Are you an Amazon employee outright telling people to not use the fundamental datastore of AWS?
S3 also is fairly proprietary, are you, an Amazon employee, outright telling people to not use the fundamental file storage of AWS?
You just wrote that I’m abusing customers and then say it’s not an attack.
S3 is blob storage. Dynamo is a key value store with support for additional indexes. Neither technologies are particularly novel today or provide specific features that would lock you in. You could use comparable technologies on Azure or Google Cloud. Like I said before, you can’t blame Amazon or any cloud provider for poor design/architecting on your end.
Your questions are written as sarcastic personal attacks, which you write instead of posting something of more substance. It seems like you’re just trying to incite a response from me aka trolling. I won’t engage with you anymore. Good luck.
How so? Op is correct - you shouldn’t be using the console to actively manage your infrastructure. The consoles primary purpose is to let you quickly spin up resources while you explore. If you have a real business use case, all your infrastructure should be defined in configuration and deployed out to AWS. That way, you always know what you need to spin up and it’s exact, specific configuration, all stored in source control.
Because when you do that nothing ever needs tweaked on the fly? Because issues of load and scale aren't often times emergent?
I am not making an argument against what you are saying. I am saying that a common interface between the two would be the sane and rational decision. It should be trivial to use the console and turn that back into your new behavior for committing back to your repository.
"The consoles primary purpose is to let you quickly spin up resources while you explore."
And it's pretty bad at this.
I'm not saying the interfaces are the worst ever invented, just that they are a step above internal enterprise software, and despite the fact that AWS makes almost 8 BILLION DOLLARS there appears to be less that 1/1000th of that revenue invested in improving it.
On a personal note - with money supposedly being free speech, it’s absolutely critical we increase estate taxes, especially for billionaires. Personally I don’t want to live in a world where our opinions and politics are shaped by dynasties, whether that’s the Trumps, the Clintons, or anyone else.
I’m highly paid ($300K+), so before anyone says - I’m not trying to steal from anyone. But having a billionaire class that laws don’t apply to or that can essentially do whatever it wants makes no sense to me. It’s a bigger threat to democracy and freedom than any terrorist or religious extremists.