Fair. Not sure what it’s like getting tech talks approved through comms these days, but this would be fascinating to hear about at a SF or SouthBay Systems meetup.
[on a salary of 70k] “I am not building up a nest egg from my salary”
You are robbing from your future to live in the present.
This might be ok for you specifically as you are making a gamble on your ownership of the startup paying off. Perhaps you have a family safety net. Or Perhaps you are ok with taking the risk that you don’t have enough money in your older years.
It’s not really ok for standard employees to live that way. The USA social contract is that each person must self-fund their own retirement. Deferring that savings to “later” has truly staggering costs in compound-interest-years lost.
This is called “revenge bedtime procrastination” in the literature.
The reply above’s point is that you’ve don’t have data to say that your phone usage is not affecting your sleep. In fact you have anecdotally the opposite data, an implication that it does affect your sleep.
$200k is quite achievable both remote, IF you have experience. If you are brand new to the industry things have shifted and new grads are having a very tough time.
Double or triple that was easily achievable remote from 2020 to 2023, but now likely requires going in-office in NYC, SF, or Seattle.
The work life balance is not significantly different at different pay levels once you get to true tech companies (leaving aside companies where the tech doesn’t bring in the money)
The regulations referenced are prohibitive zoning regulations. These dictate that you are only allowed to build single family homes on the property you own, and that the homes must be very low density, have huge setbacks from the property lines, etc.
The regulation changes are not related to the quality or safety of a dwelling.
This illegal collusion and wage suppression in our industry still occurs, it’s just kept better under wraps now as the executives have learned how to not write things down and use signal disappearing messages.
Seriously, customers don’t care about the internal nuance of how things are organized. They care that a very foundational piece of a cloud service provider will suddenly be not available.
I don’t know how to cultivate this kind of community. It’s not something I grew up with. I moved around a lot, and have recently realized that post-Covid I have nearly no friends.
While I don’t miss commuting, or open offices, I do deeply miss the sense of community that used to exist in the tier 1 tech cities.
The answer is to socialize and make friends at work.
People who try to “Network” artificially won’t see great success.
People who are genuinely take an interest in what others are doing, and are intentional about meeting once or twice a year for coffee to catch up, are the ones who can call in a favor in the way described in the blog post.
If you are skilled in being the chief of staff at google maps, it is likely your highest market value is in that particular niche.
Restricting your employment opportunities to those where you don’t have the highest market value through the use of non-competes is absolutely unethical and needs to be banned.