If a person is walking north, about to walk past a parking space, and a car is heading south and signaling left, it's very surprising to see the car pass the person by, then suddenly reverse and try to enter the space. Once the car is past, most people assume it's signaling to turn farther along, instead of about to go backwards.
EDIT: To be clear, I'm describing a perpendicular-parking scenario, where people usually make a right angle turn going forward to occupy the space.
Watch out for bikes and pedestrians please. Few people expect a car (especially on the other side of the street/lane) to drift by a space then reverse into it after passing it by.
You're not working for "less than what someone thinks your worth", you're working for a price set by the market and an assessment of what level of quality your work is.
A developer gets paid before the salespeople have anything to sell. It's up to the company and its salespeople to try to not lose money on their deal with their R&D people. Considering the context of the article (Google engineer) and how much people in that market get paid, making money after you pay them is a tall order. Most businesses fail.
When you hang yourself with C, at least you're hanging yourself with something real. It's more embarrassing to be done in by a misunderstood abstraction in a high-level language than a concrete memory overwrite in C.
I wish it wasn't true, but Firefox seems heavier on low-spec Linux laptops. A while back I was writing code on the road on a $200 HP Stream running Ubuntu, and I needed multiple tabs open with audio to debug. Switching from Firefox to Chrome was a noticeable improvement, where the UI remained responsive in all the tabs.
If a more productive team emerged naturally from incentives available to everyone, and that team collected large bonuses as a result of proven success, I think the company and the team would both be better off.
If a team is designed from the beginning with a different set of rules than the rest of the company, it has a lot to answer for before it even begins, and its achievements will be accordingly discounted.
In the long run, having a company dependent on a handful of highly-paid superstars is an incredible risk. Moreover if one team's hiring practices create a "class system" where there are vast disparities in how engineers are paid, there are going to be resentments.
If you build a special team in a company that has different norms overall, everything that you accomplish is going to be discounted according to how much it makes the rest of the company harder to manage, and how vulnerable the company becomes to a small number of superstars leaving. There's a bigger picture than just what the team gets done.
EDIT: That said, if the results are markedly better than the company's general performance, the company as a whole might need some re-tooling. But a special team isn't going to stay special for long, either way.
Because when someone builds a hugely popular exotic system in the future, because it is one (1) cent cheaper, you'd end up with code that has to check to see if it's running on such a system.
Indeed, that's why I specified putting the members of the C structure on the wire, not the structure as a whole, so it's just basic types in network byte order (i.e. consistent endian-ness) being sent.
This is a fantastic post, and it looks like this blog is full of fantastic posts. When I have some time I'm definitely going to play around with that code.
This is going to sound sarcastic but it's not: Can we get back to just putting the members of C structures into network byte order and sending that over the wire in binary, à la 1995?
> Written by a VC trying to get engineers to join the startups he's invested in.
Actually for most of the piece he was pretty straightforward about making sure you get equity if you want to get paid upon company success.
What has changed is that genuine equity in startups isn't being offered as readily as it was ~15 years ago (and it is notable that the missed opportunity he describes is that far in the past).
> Don’t work at startups to make $200M. Work at startups because you’ll work with people who have risk profiles that are much more likely to generate outsized returns as a group.
What's the point of that if those "group returns" are allocated almost entirely to the founders and the investors?
If you think it's not about the money, it's worth checking to see if you're being suckered by someone who realizes that it is about the money.
Albuquerque isn't a major destination though. Flying to provincial cities is always expensive.
A better comparison with about the same distance in the US is New York to Miami, which can be done nonstop for under $200 on Delta, or $135 on whatever "Frontier" is.
EDIT: In fact you can go from New York to Las Vegas for under $200, round-trip, which is considerably farther.