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At least the article mentions that it is contingent on bonus targets. All too often articles skip that and say "Y was paid $$$".

Notably, go look at Intel's Pat Gelsinger. Prior to his firing, lots of articles talking about how he was one of the highest paid CEOs (citing numbers in excess of $150M). They'd fail to mention that it was over several years and only if he met targets.

Well, he didn't meet those targets. His actual compensation was about $10M/year.


I'm willing to fail as Intel's CEO for the low, low cost of $5m/year, and I can get it done in a year.

Sorry, we’re only considering applicants with a proven track record of failing as CEO

Can't risk hiring an amateur and he accidently succeeded.

I've heard it's called falling, er, failing upwards.

If someone's actually willing to pay that for you, you should take the job. If no one is, then you are not even as good as Pat Gelsinger when he doesn't meet his objectives.

I'd do it for free, just for the lulz.

I'll do it for $1m/year. Come on, shareholders, you could save a fortune.

Indeed. Many of my technical undergrad courses were very exam heavy. Typically 3-5 midterms and one final. Sometimes the final was as little as 10% of the grade. The idea was that if you'd done well throughout the semester you can relax during finals weeks.

Homework was assigned but not graded.

Periodic tests is the way to go.

I hated courses where the final was more than 30%. Forget 100%.


> But they don’t make up the majority of the context. Someone refusing to travel because of these low-probability events (note: because of fear of them, not out of protest, which is separate) is almost certainly behaving irrationally.

Statistically speaking, it's very safe for a white American to go to Dubai/Doha these days.

Would you fault them for not going?


Except lots of vacation, travel, etc.

In big tech the benefits are the same, except you save more in 10 years in WA than people in London save in 30.

> In big tech the benefits are the same,

Depends on which big tech. 15 days of vacation, BTW, doesn't even come close to comparing with much of Europe.

And I didn't mention London. London is crap. Probably all of UK is.

Most Europeans I know in certain countries travel a lot more than Americans at big tech.


What if i told you some big tech jobs let you earn $300k+ a year, while take 4 weeks+ time off, and working 40hrs a week?

My first SWE job was at an older fortune 500 company where tech was not its main focus. You started with 14 days of vacation and slooooowly worked your way up to 4 weeks after like 20 years of service lol.

My point is, in the U.S. your experience varies WILDLY based on your employer. Not saying the U.S. is perfect or does things the right way. Just pointing out that you’re off base with your “15 days of vacation for big tech” comment. That’s a false generalization for big tech. Accurate for white collar jobs in general though!


> while take 4 weeks+ time off

What if I told you, that even mentioning this shows how little free time people get in the US?

There is actually no SWE job (and I do mean actually 0 positions, I watch job postings way more than average person) in CZ that offers less than 5 weeks of paid vacation. When you look for companies that give actually nice benefits you can get 7-8 weeks, big chunk of it being sick days that you can claim whenever you want.

And that all is on top of MUCH longer parental leave, often shorter work week (lol @ 40h a week being noteworthy), much more leeway given to people with health issues and generally shorter commutes.

Not even mentioning difference in cost of living . . . The values are just different here.


> What if i told you some big tech jobs let you earn $300k+ a year, while take 4 weeks+ time off, and working 40hrs a week?

Acknowledged in my original comment. The key word is "some".

And my point is that people earning half that in Europe tend to go on more vacation travel than those earning the same amount in the US.


Then you'd be laughed at because apart from the salary, that's the legal minimum requirement in much of Europe. "Our company is so great, we do what other countries legally require all companies to do!" yeah okay buddy

What about everyone else in society? What happens if your skill set is no longer in demand and you become one of "everyone else"?

Even working in "tech" but not FAANG this is so true, 10 days is still the norm at many white collar businesses for your first year of employment, sometimes 15 days if they're generous.

Skill up.

Oregon is on the other end of the continuum when it comes to income taxes ;-)

If you're not too high an income earner, the Oregon income tax is worse than California's.

And no, Washington's sales tax doesn't come close to the Oregon income tax.


Disclaimer: I last used it years ago.

My experience was that while it was great with all the features, the photo quality simply was worse than the stock manufacturer app in newer phones. Only in my old Samsung Galaxy S5 was the quality on par.

Yes, by all means, everyone should try and compare.



I would expect nothing less from the BOFH Task Force.

Are people getting so many FF crashes? Mine rarely does. I leave it running, opening and closing tabs, for weeks on end.

Same, been using it for over 20 years and probably only a handful of crashes in that time. But I mostly look at dead simple web stuff (like hn) and run aggressive ad blocking so I might not be representative of the average user

I run FF on Mac laptop, Windows/Linux laptop, and Windows desktop and can’t remember it crashing in years.

Naively, the more stable a piece of software is, the more likely that its failures can be attributed to hardware error.

Its pretty stable for me, except it has some memory leaks. Generally I gotta leave heavy pages open for days at a time to notice, but if I don't close it entirely for over a week or two it will start to chug and crash.

It really depends on what you're doing with your hardware. Overclocking, overheating, unstable power supply, and things like that increase the likelihood of memory bitflips.

Slack caused frequent FF crashes, until I realized Slack has (had?) a live leak. Added an extension which force-reloads the Slack page every 15 minutes and that stopped the crashing.

The only browser I’ve crashed in the last decade is mobile safari, and that’s probably because it runs out of memory

Months in my case. But I have ECC. Every five years I build a new development workstation and I always have ECC.

I can also go months and don't see crashes (though occasionally I'll hit a memory leak where closing tabs doesn't release it so I'll restart firefox then), but unless ThinkPads come with ECC I don't have it.

Does "Weeks on end" = 4? Or do you not take the latest update every 4 weeks?

I run Gentoo, and compile FF from source. I don't think the Gentoo repos update the FF version that frequently. And even if they do and I compile the latest one, I don't automatically quit the existing running version.

That's easy to ignore.

How many DRM-heavy websites do you use? Widevine is a buggy thing.

macOS crashes more than Firefox for me.


Heh.

Just today I went to a watch repair person because the keeper on my strap broke. He said the only option is to buy the exact strap from the manufacturer.

The strap costs $120.

My watch costs $340 (although I got it on a discount for $220).

This is the most expensive watch I've ever bought. I typically would pay $50 or less (with the exception of one G-Shock that cost $80). I finally decide to buy something "pricey" and the darn thing breaks in less than 2 years - something that never happens with the cheap watches I've bought.

No thanks. I'm not paying $120 for a new strap. I'm getting a cheap watch that will last me over a decade (as most of my watches do).

I had the same experience with fountain pens. Every fountain pen I've paid more than $50 for has been worse than my favorite cheap ones.

If I were to plot quality on the y-axis, and price on the x-axis, I think I'll find a U or V curve, where on the very cheap end things are reliable and last long, and likewise on the very expensive end. But in the middle, you're just paying extra for crap.

Arguably, you could say I'm not paying enough. A $330 watch isn't expensive. I should have paid $3000. A $90 pen isn't expensive. I should have paid $250.

No thanks. When the <$50 products perform as well as the expensive ones, I'm not paying more.


While I wouldn't call them ugly, I agree that they look just like, well, watches to me. I wouldn't pay a premium for any of them.

Since I'm not into luxury watches, a common occurrence is:

Me to a stranger: "Wow, cool watch! Which one is it?"

Stranger: "Random cheap brand I found on Amazon."

If you've never heard of Omega, Rolex, etc, chances are you won't be able to distinguish a cheap watch from an expensive watch. It's just the brand.

(OK, OK, chances are the material is a lot better - scratchproof, etc - but probably still costs less than 10% to make than what they sell for).


Of course, they look like normal watches, that’s the point. However, if you paid for, you would get an extremely polished watch, rares/high-quality materials, hand-checked for every imperfection etc. as opposed to an almost the same looking watch for a brand, say Orient, which you would be able to find minor imperfections even as a non-enthusiast.

I dunno. Having looked at cheaper watches, I don't see imperfections. I'll grant that over time they'll show up (quicker wear and tear).

Here's the thing: Ever since I was a kid, the following features were basic:

1. Tells time

2. Tells date

3. Stopwatch

4. Alarm

5. Chrono (yes, I used that a lot for years).

All this for $50 or less.

I'm assuming the >$100 watches have all this? If not, IMO, the watch is simply failing at the very basics. It shouldn't even be called a watch.

Then Tier 2:

- Timer

- Multiple alarms

- World time

I pay extra for these (and use all of them).

The next tier (Tier 3):

- No batteries and/or solar. Definitely no manual winding.

The next tier:

- Stuff like GPS, sunrise/sunset, etc.

Personally, only after Tier 3 would I consider paying extra for all the things you mentioned. But paying $300+ for a watch without a timer or world time? You've been scammed.

How much have you paid for a pen? Montblanc ball point pens can exceed $1000. Apply everything you said to a (ballpoint) pen - one that most likely will write poorer than a good $50 fountain pen - and you'll see how people view what you are saying.


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