US software engineer. I have 24 days of PTO, 15 company holidays, and 9 sick days. 10 weeks for parental leave (16 for moms). $240K salary, $400-600K in annual vesting equity. That’s private paper equity, but I’ve already been able to cash out $700K and buy a house with cash.
Fully remote. I can expense $120/month for phone and internet, and a few lunches each month, too. I can get a new laptop and/or monitor sent to me just by asking.
When I do visit the office, the trip is fully expensed. Free daily lunch. Coffee and drinks and snacks everywhere, free. Private desks in a semi-open office with couches scattered around. Lounges with hundreds of board games, nearly all of which have seen table time during work hours.
Primary projects are tracked in a knowledge-sharing system, but I can mostly work on what I want to. I’m encouraged to merge small fixes and refactors without any ticket-pushing at all. Yelling by managers or anyone would not be tolerated.
“At-will” is more FUD than reality in my experience. Most companies, when firing or laying someone off, give something like 2 weeks of severance for every year of service.
That compensation is better isn't in dispute. My question is about worker rights, how much of the stuff you posted is just your company vs US law? Are you protected better by law than someone here would be?
What is more important, the law, or the typical employee experience? If you're in a strong market where workers are in demand (evidenced somewhat by higher compensation), then workers will tend to be treated better for fear that they will leave for another opportunity (remember: "at will"). If workers have fewer opportunities, then how much can the law really help?
Are there specific protections that are lacking in the US that you would expect to result in worse employee outcomes?
I'm not sure what any of that has to do with my question. The person I replied to said that from what he knew worker rights were somewhat better in the US so I asked for examples. How an employer treats you is of course important, but can't really be considered worker rights if they can decide to change that depending on market conditions.
Again, I'm not arguing about who has it better. I am asking a very narrow question about worker rights differences between the two countries. If you want me to say that US software workers have it better, then sure. But that's not really what I'm asking.
I work at more typical software job for an AUS company operating in the US ... AUS workers make less money than the US office but they can rollover PTO indefinitely, right to log off, etc. I think the main reason people come to the US to work from aus is the cost of housing anywhere near the cities is exorbitant and the australian version of the american dream is unbelievably dead.
I wish I could suggest something for you. My path was moving to the Bay Area 13 years ago to work for a small startup, helping to grow it, then going remote after a few years. Startup is a B2B with an ethical technical founder, and it had a credible business model from day 1.
In the past, I would have also found it strange to see tech blowing up in a tight job market. After a decade on the team-building side, though, I feel different.
Interviewing and onboarding are a huge distraction. Interviewing and onboarding done well require hours of attention from the more senior folks on your team.
When a company is hiring, the senior folks involved might be spending 6 hours a week interviewing. For example, I might have 4 45-minute interviews, another 15 minutes prepping for each interview, 15 minutes writing up feedback for every interview, 30 minutes in hire/no-hire discussions for candidates who are close, and another 30 minutes in hiring or interview meta-discussions.
Onboarding takes even more time. If I'm a new hire's onboarding mentor, I'm likely spending their first couple of days close by to answer any and all questions. After that, my work is frequently interrupted for a few weeks as I help them through issues (totally legitimate issues, BTW). We'll be spending extra time pairing with the new hire during the feature development process. Code review for new hires' code takes a lot longer, too.
When you factor all that in, a hiring freeze can realistically free up 10 or more hours of experienced employees' time every week. These are some of the most productive employees on the team.
In that context, it's not especially surprising to me that giving the most productive engineers 33% more productive time would lead to rapid improvements for tech companies, in the short term anyway.
Of course, in the medium-to-long term, a company that's not hiring is building up a huge "personnel debt" that is going to come due eventually. The product improvements will lead to new business, more clients will require more support, the new business will lead to more feature requests, and some employees will move on. The company will find itself without enough personnel to make headway on their product. Then they will have a hiring blitz where they wreck everyone's productive time and the team culture. The new, bigger team will make some headway, but they will still look less productive than the team was during the hiring freeze. The business will stagnate. The company will enact a hiring freeze, or perhaps even lay off team members. And then we're back at step 1.
Perfect explanation of the problem - and if I may suggest the solution is to carve some of those experienced people off as military do into a "training role" - where experienced people rotate off projects onto R&R and then onto training - creating a mini bootcamp that also has knock on benefits of building standards, tech stacks and tooling that "we have always been meaning to build".
Someone recently pointed out that we should learn more from
how militaries grow and survive over the years - this is probably the biggest lesson.
Anti-speech pro-corporate-authority advocates always try to put these monopolistic, unescapable megacorporations in the same category as some local mom-and-pop operation. It's a massive intentional category error; megacorps are not little companies you can just walk awawy from. There is a point where a corporation's influence becomes so unescapable and so capable of greatly degrading your life that it must be treated in some ways like a government, for the same reasons we treat government differently from just another company or citizen.
The same reason that the phone company or a company that owns all the local roads or water mains can't decide to "stop serving" you because they don't like your religion.
>The same reason that the phone company or a company that owns all the local roads or water mains can't decide to "stop serving" you because they don't like your religion
Because it's hard to impossible to get alternate services for roads, water and electricity, i.e common carriers. But there are plenty of neo nazi forums, Gab, Truth Social, Parler, 4chan for racists to express and spread their views.
There already are common carriers for communication, see email services.
These are unmoderated, just spam filtered. Forums, social sites and video sharing sites are typically not one of these, and the distinction is important. The most important distinct piece is ownership. Shen you signed the Terms of Service with say YouTube, you granted them rights that vastly exceed ones a common carrier has.
Email is not carrier and is not regulated as such. I can create a private mail server, invite users and keep any email from being delivered that I so choose.
Ridiculous idea. Sure, you can run your own private email server... and watch as your messages go to everyone else's spam. It does not matter what SPV, DMARC bullshit hoop you jump through. Ultimately google gets to decide what email providers live and what email providers die.
It is analogous to creating your own postal service or phone company that only lets you send letters to users of the same postal service or phone company. The service is only useful due to network effects.
But it actually is almost impossible to truly start your own phone company, in terms of running wires to people's homes or putting up towers. The capital expenditures and regulatory hurdles are near impossible, save for extremely well financed and well connected people.
I've had SMTP servers which have extremely high deliverability rates hosted for <$100/mo for over a decade.
The capital expenditures are nowhere near comparable. The regulatory burdens are nowhere near comparable.
Email providers are not common carriers. Its very easy to just sign up for a different email provider. Its easy to buy a domain name and update MX records across literally hundreds of commercial providers eager to have your business. And even if every single host bans you (you really should then question what you're doing if nobody wants your business) its still technically possible to go it on your own. And once again, as long as you're not being generally abusive its possible to have good success.
Comparing getting banned from Gmail might as well be the same as comparing getting banned from McDonalds. McDonalds isn't a common carrier no matter how much you like Big Macs. There's plenty of other restaurants available.
"Because it's hard to impossible to get alternate services for roads, water and electricity, i.e common carriers."
You are omitting telephone service, which is also a common carrier despite being arguably more competitive than the Big 3 cloud providers.
That's where I personally would come down. This decision is ridiculous; social media companies are highly competitive. But I am much, much less comfortable with AWS kicking off Parler.
Those places should allegedly be held to the same standards in suppression of speech. Only they don’t have numbers to withstand the destruction of their platform if, say, numerous other people suddenly showed up to disagree with them.
Facebook doesn't own all the local roads or water mains though. They're one website. It's just as easy to go to twitter.com as it is truthsocial.com or mastodon.social.
If Comcast owned practically the only ISP in my area then yes they should be considered a common carrier and shouldn't be able to discriminate traffic that isn't trying to break their stuff. In that case they would be the company that owns the roads or the water mains. Facebook isn't like that in the slightest.
Facebook, Twitter, etc. are not even close to inescapable. It's remarkably easy to leave those sites for one of the hundreds of other social media sites out there. We're using a nice one right now.
Yes. A handful of megacorps acting together (and they all act together generally) can take away your property by banning you, which makes it impossible to have a normal career in fields as diverse as academia, creative media, journalism, tech, and many others. If you're running a small business and trying to promote it, being banned from social media is a huge hit as well.
They already have taken away your liberty to speak your mind in the common public square of our society - social media - because you know they'll ban you if you say any of a wide variety of things, leading to the consequences described above.
The common public square is just that - paid for and maintained with public money.
Trump doesn’t seem to have any issue getting his message out or getting people to come to his rallies.
Before the internet existed, the entire civil rights movement was organized by leaders going to churches - even though the locations were actively being bombed, leaders were being arrested, water hosed, lynched, bitten by police dogs, etc.
Cry me a river that some conservatives can’t post on Twitter.
Okay, but how are they “inescapable”? I hear this argument a lot, but no one can seem to dot that very important i.
If I can’t use Facebook, I can use Reddit. If I can’t use YouTube, I can use Vimeo. If I can’t use Instagram, I can use TikTok or Snapchat. If conservatives get banned from Twitter, there’s a bevy of conservative-leaning Twitter clones. Plus Mastodon, which you can’t get banned from because you can just set up your own instance.
> The Texas law forbids social media companies with at least 50 million monthly active users from acting to "censor" users based on "viewpoint," and allows either users or the Texas attorney general to sue to enforce the law.
> This chapter applies only to a social media platform that functionally has more than 50 million active users in the United States in a calendar month.
> It’s to protect teachers, staff, peoples families...
The article says otherwise:
> “We need to make sure schools are safe so that all parents are comfortable sending their children to school,” said Pan, a pediatrician whose legislation has strengthened oversight of vaccine exemptions in previous years. “And we want to keep schools open.”
> There's already a long list of required vaccinations for school... is this one any different?
To me, the answer is a clear Yes. Every vaccine on that list, to my knowledge, results in a much more complete immunity profile than the COVID-19 vaccine. The diseases on that list also impact children in rather devastating ways.
COVID-19 vaccines seem to be more similar to the seasonal flu/cold vaccines than to any of the vaccines on that list. Respiratory diseases circulate around schools every year, and we haven't mandated vaccines for those.
Do we have scientific models showing clear benefits for mandated COVID-19 vaccines for school-age children?
Do we leave vulnerable teachers out of this equation? (Yes, many teachers are vaccinated, but still can be vulnerable, and some might be unable to take the vaccine.)
I have a relative (not a teacher) who can no longer have vaccines due to Guillain-Barré and another friend's relative currently intubated in the hospital with a single J&J shot (no booster unfortunately.)
Kids while not very vulnerable seem to be a carrier into the home.
For vulnerable teachers, we need better mitigations than mandated vaccines for their students. Vaccinated individuals can still catch and spread COVID. Even if the rate is lower, we might be talking about a teacher who is in close proximity (same classroom) to 200+ students every day, and more students than that in the building.
I don't believe mandated student vaccines is enough for these people (or for the parents of vulnerable students). Instead, we have to do the hard work of allowing appropriate accommodations for high risk individuals. Unfortunately, vaccine or not, much of the responsibility for derisking will inevitably fall to vulnerable individuals themselves, ideally with as much societal support and backing as possible (e.g., plexiglass enclosures for vulnerable employees? I'm not the expert here).
Nothing else we've done so far seems to move the needle much. The stakes aren't personally high enough for everyone else in society to maintain the necessary vigilance for years on end.
Seasonal colds don't result in potentially months of "long-cold" symptoms, nor do they significantly increase the risk of diabetes, nor do they regularly hospitalize and kill people on a large scale.
I am operating from an assumption that COVID-19 is bad and kills people. Unlike the other mandated vaccines, though, vaccinated individuals still catch and spread COVID at high rates. But the reactions to me very much sound like, "We must do something, and this is something."
I'm only asking for models here. Is the CA legislation based on scientific models showing that mandating COVID-19 vaccinations for all school-aged children will meaningfully impact health outcomes at the society level? Or is it motivated by a desire to overcome COVID by all means necessary, even ineffective ones?
My 10-year path at a 4->400-person startup has been Lead Software Engineer -> Director of Infrastructure -> Principal Software Engineer. I’m making more total compensation today than ever, with no reports.
I lead complicated initiatives and advise a lot of feature work. This means a lot of meetings, document-based collaboration, and process-oriented thinking. But I still program, and I don’t feel accountable for others’ work output or behavior or morale the way I did when I was a manager.
1. For a person who just lost their job, you can already search for such an opportunity yourself quite trivially by getting a resume, editing it locally with notepad, and then using email to send it. From Windows or Mac, this resume could be accessed through built-in software.
2. It doesn't actually replace a new job prospect. Most people I know choose to promote their startups themselves or promote them somewhere online to be able to gather users, but they still carry pre-formatted advertisement in case there are opportunities. This does not solve the employment issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
I’m confused by this comment. Are you arguing that the GP is engaged in unethical behavior, engaged in bad business, being insensitive, cluttering the thread with a low-value contribution, or some door #N that I’m failing to see?
The poster seems to be trying to draw a parallel between his comment and an infamous post that I made nearly 15 years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224), or maybe just to make me feel bad. I personally don’t think the tones of the two posts are comparable at all. My post has been quoted out of context for the last decade or so, though, so it’s not surprising to me. (Ask yourself, what did “app” mean in my comment?)
Several people seem to expect that I would be embarrassed by my comment or regret making it, but it honestly doesn’t bother me at all. I, HN, and even the world have changed a lot in 15 years.
Anyway, I’m pretty satisfied with where life has taken me. I’m certainly not going to sweat someone combing through my post history in a vague attempt to dunk on me after pointing out that they’re being a bit of a shithead.
Wait, what's the implication with this comment? I feel like you haven't thought through this satire completely.
The "joke" (deserved or not) with Brandon's comment about Dropbox is that it's widely perceived by a lot of people to have turned out to be wrong. So why are you formatting your argument to look like it's the same comment? You want to overlay the other person's argument into Brandon's comment if you're trying to mock them or make them seem out of touch; you accidentally executed this all backwards.
Doing it where you're pushing back against the offers to apply instead makes it seem like you're making a joke criticizing yourself for being out of touch with job searches.
Fully remote. I can expense $120/month for phone and internet, and a few lunches each month, too. I can get a new laptop and/or monitor sent to me just by asking.
When I do visit the office, the trip is fully expensed. Free daily lunch. Coffee and drinks and snacks everywhere, free. Private desks in a semi-open office with couches scattered around. Lounges with hundreds of board games, nearly all of which have seen table time during work hours.
Primary projects are tracked in a knowledge-sharing system, but I can mostly work on what I want to. I’m encouraged to merge small fixes and refactors without any ticket-pushing at all. Yelling by managers or anyone would not be tolerated.
“At-will” is more FUD than reality in my experience. Most companies, when firing or laying someone off, give something like 2 weeks of severance for every year of service.