It worth noting that the power of the neural engine doubled between the A16 and A17 chips (17 vs 35 TOPS, according to Wikipedia), while the A15 to A16 was a much more modest increase (15.8 to 17 TOPS). So it does seem like they started prioritizing AI/ML performance with the A17 design.
There's power in bargaining as a collective, whether you're a collective of ten or ten thousand. Either way, it helps with the power imbalance between employees and management.
There's also cost in coordination and agility--this is fundamentally true of any new bureaucracy, company, system or process.
I'm reading this as a sign of cultural stress unless we have evidence to the contrary. (EDIT: I didn't realise Fastmail has almost 1,000 employees, with many remote. That comes closer to where structure is merited, though I'd still argue that this points to dysfunction in the U.S.-HQ bridge given only the Americans are unionizing.)
> kind of coordination that requires less representation does not have your interests in mind
Take this to an extreme: a start-up. A union is overly bureaucratic. I’d wager a union doesn’t start making sense until the lowest-ranking employee ceases to have on-demand access to senior management.
That's quite small. Having worked at a few companies in the 30-50 employee mark, while it is true that I could speak to management almost any time, it was also obvious that they were very busy.
> companies in the 30-50 employee mark, while it is true that I could speak to management almost any time, it was also obvious that they were very busy
Sure. But if you had a grievance, you could voice it. And if you needed to pull some like-minded coworkers together to underline it's shared, that could be done ad hoc. If a 50-person company needs a union (because e.g. management refuses to listen) that's a problem. That's my point.
I don't know where the delineation is. But there is very obviously a point below which unionization is a sign of dysfunction. For the same reasons a middle-management layer or expansive C suite, below a company of a certain size, is a sign of dysfunction [1].
> But there is very obviously a point below which unionization is a sign of dysfunction.
FWIW I don't think that's obvious at all. Even a small group of happy employees could form a union to set the current policies everyone is happy with in stone and protect themselves and future employees against potential changes in ownership or a downturn in company health.
> Even a small group of happy employees could form a union to set the current policies everyone is happy with in stone
I'm not arguing it couldn't be done, nor that it doesn't have benefits. Just that it has costs, and those costs at a small level should outweigh the benefits. While they're doing that, and maintaining that structure, they could be doing something else. (Something more enjoyable and lucrative.)
Sure, but now you've changed your point from "very obviously" to "it's a cost-benefit analysis." It's not hard to imagine how someone else's analysis might end up different from yours (say, based on their previous experience, or experience of others in their industry).
I've stopped using Uber in my city (Vancouver) and gone back to traditional taxis because they're providing a more reliable service at equivalent or cheaper prices.
The last few times I've tried to use Uber, immediately after matching with a driver they'll message me telling me to cancel the trip because they don't want to go where I'm going. When I refuse, they'll play chicken and drive around in circles refusing to come pick me up and refusing to cancel themselves if they don't want the job, trying to make me pay the cancellation penalty rather than them. When I fly into YVR, it's so much more convenient to walk to the taxi stand and get a ride home within a few minutes for $50, than to order an Uber, wait 20 minutes for it to arrive, and pay $60-80 for the privilege.
Vancouver is one of the cities where the incumbent taxi lobby won concessions to allow ride hailing, one of those being they all have to charge the same base rate. While some companies like Uber have checkered growth history, ride hailing in general has been a boon where taxi oligopolies have treated their customers poorly (Vancouver was no exception here). I personally love that Evo car sharing in Vancouver extends to the airport, so I have a real option to both.
I've heard so many people say that Ruby is really easy to pick up and work with and for some reason I've had the exact opposite experience. I have tried to learn Ruby at least three or four times and I bounce off it every time. There are a bunch of other languages that I've learned and worked with effectively, but for some reason my brain just refuses to grok Ruby.
Experience between people differs. Problems they want to focus on differ. The environment changes.
Maybe in hundred years or so software development will somewhat settle, but just look at something trivial like a hammer ... there are so many different kinds and some have their favorite brand.
That's funny, I tried Go for Advent of Code last year and got through the first 10 days or so without any real difficulty, having never written a line of it before.
Just as there are different spoken/written languages and people find different ones easier or harder to learn based on a huge number of variables, I believe the same is true of programming languages. Sometimes it's the syntax that makes a language difficult, sometimes it's a different paradigm, sometimes it's an unfamiliar memory model or type system -- there are lots of things that can make your brain throw up a block when trying to dive into a new language.
I am a US citizen who moved to Vancouver from the Bay Area three years ago.
I took a small pay cut when I moved (from ~135k USD to ~125k CAD, after a few years of raises I'm over 140k CAD now), but certainly not cutting my salary in half. Yes, Canada has its issues, but I'm overall happier living here than I was in the Bay. We have a regional train system that runs every 3-6 minutes instead of the 15-20 you get from BART and better accessibility to the outdoors (I can get to a ski mountain on the bus). I had better accessibility to healthcare in California, but here I don't have to worry about being out thousands of dollars for healthcare if I get laid off.
I work for a smaller tech company founded and headquartered in Vancouver, but I've seen the big tech companies making huge investments in this city over the last couple years. Amazon is in the final stages of building a new tower that will house 6000 employees [0] and Microsoft recently moved into 75,000 sqft of office space and is working on another 400,000 sqft [1]. The tech industry in this city is booming and it's certainly not all driven by companies stashing employees who can't get US visas.
Can totally understand wanting to leave the Bay Area for a Canadian city or any other developed place. Personally I went to San Diego instead, and I'm happy with that.
Yeah it's definitely an A-tier part of the US. I would've settled for pretty much anywhere outside the Bay Area, but SD is even better than the nice parts of LA I used to live in.
> I took a small pay cut when I moved (from ~135k USD to ~125k CAD, after a few years of raises I'm over 140k CAD now), but certainly not cutting my salary in half.
125k CAD is 94k USD. Going from 135k to 94k USD is not trivial, and Vancouver is pretty expensive as well. Skytrain is pretty awesome though.
The relative costs didn't change for me significantly, I was paying 2600/month USD in rent in the Bay and 2700 CAD in Vancouver, so while it was a significant paycut if you look at the value in USD, the day to day wasn't noticeable.
So in absolute terms, you took a paycut, and in relative terms, you still had to pay more? I hope you really like Canada, because that sounds like a bitch slap to say the least.
My mother was a teacher before she retired to a different state than she'd worked in. She now has to file income taxes in the state she receives the pension from and the state she currently lives in each year.
Because the rules are different for federal and non federal government.
I have never seen a US state or smaller jurisdiction be able to tax an entity that does not perform work or reside within its boundaries, so I am curious which one it is so I can look it up.
See this federal law prohibiting states from taxing non residents:
> (a) No State may impose an income tax on any retirement income of an individual who is not a resident or domiciliary of such State (as determined under the laws of such State).
Based on the answers to this question, what I suspect is happening is to morvita’s mom is erroneously having state income taxes withheld for a state she does not live in, which she is then filing a non resident tax return to get a refund.
