Yeah I’m not sure why it’s supposed to be so bad. It doesn’t stand out as being far worse than lots of other old books. The Scarlet Letter begins like this and goes on to have sentences so euphemistic and littered with commas that they need three re-reads to understand, but that’s a classic:
“A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.”
"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents. At times it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets -- for it is in London that our scene lies -- rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."
I'm not a professional writer but I personally like this rephrasing.
That happened to me literally an hour ago. I checked out and when the shipping was added the price felt high. I left the cart open and started browsing Reddit. I was waffling on the purchase. Then I remembered to Google for coupon codes and I found one and put it in and at the new price I checked out.
Seriously. I moved out of home with 0 cooking skills and after a few years of having to feed myself I feel like I'm becoming just average. It's amazing how many variables there are to control when doing even the most basic task like sautéing onions:
Sautéing in oil allows you to really crank the heat, using butter you have to be more careful. Cutting in larger chunks is great for some dishes and bad for others. The whole timing thing is probably the hardest to nail, going easy on the heat allows you to get in some other prepwork while the onions are doing their thing, but you also don't want to spend hours cooking so you want to crank it to the point where your prep and the onions will be done at the same time.
How far do you take the onions? How far do you take them if you want to throw in more veggies into the same pan? When do you add spices if you want them to get a bit toasty aswell?
And sautéing large amounts of onion (1kg+) is a whole different calculus.
Cooking is this endless fractal of problems to solve and optimize. Kinda like programming innit.
As someone who cooks a fair bit, I tend to agree that someone could go from how to boil an egg and incrementally add things like organizational skills, knife sharpening, simple sautes, etc. in useful one hour chunks. You can't learn to cook in any meaningful way in an hour, but it's definitely a skill that you can usefully develop on a skill-by-skill/recipe-by-recipe basis pretty effectively.
I'm not sure how many cooking classes are aimed at rank beginners but there are tons of videos these days. It might even be useful to subscribe to something like Cooks Illustrated for a more structured approach rather than wading into YouTube.
I actually don't have too much experience in cooking, but with every meal I make I get better. Cooking is not programming. Some of the best meals I actually made were made without precise measurements, just by gut, sometimes in a hurry. Sure, I might have measured things by the gram the first time I made them, but on next attempt the closest 20g or 30g is more than enough. Oven 45 minutes? Sure, but it looks brown already and it has only been 35, just pull it out.
Cooking is a skill one can develop their entire life, like most skills. But in my opinion it's perfectly achievable to go from zero to one or even a few basic meals in an hour. Even more so if you have a slow cooker and follow a recipe.
I taught all my kids how to cook. You are right, you can't learn _everything_ about cooking. But you can learn one meal you really like.
I pick a new one I want to perfect every few months, look up recipes and try them out over and over until I get it the way I want. (you have to eat anyways) And after doing this for years, I am always told I should open a restaurant. (but that is silly hard work, and everyone can cook)
Sure you can. If you said 10 minutes I'd agree. But if you can learn a bit about programming in an hour, you can learn enough cooking in an hour to make a yummy meal.
The simplest example is a pork steak. Throw it on the skillet and wait awhile. Turn it over and wait awhile. You now have a pork steak. It's delicious.
That's not cooking, that's following instructions. It's like saying that you can learn programming by opening Visual Studio, clicking "new console project", typing in printf("hello world\n"); in between the braces and hitting play is "programming". It kind of is, but you've learnt nothing.
With the pork steak how long is "wait awhile"? 10 seconds? 60 seconds? 10 minutes? All of those yield completely different results, and only once you've had plenty of experience cooking pork steaks, you will be able to judge what "wait awhile" is. Also you missed adding some salt and pepper to the steak - without those it just tastes like....unseasoned meat. Which is ok if that's what you want, but I doubt many people do. But you need to somehow know that salt and pepper are things that you would normally add to a pork steak, but not cinammon or sugar.
I think the only way to "learn" cooking is repetition, repetition and repetition. Not going to do a lot of that in an hour unfortunately.
That's not cooking, that's following instructions. It's like saying that you can learn programming by opening Visual Studio, clicking "new console project", typing in printf("hello world\n"); in between the braces and hitting play is "programming". It kind of is, but you've learnt nothing.
Whoa, that took me back. That's literally how I learned programming when I was 13 or so. (I'm completely serious; I begged my mom for a copy of Visual Studio off of ebay. It was called Visual C++ 6.0 back then, or something. Nehe legacy tutorials were the shit! https://nehe.gamedev.net/)
I think everyone learns differently. The first thing you'll learn is that as long as you're standing next to the skillet, it's very hard to cook a pork steak too long. It'll always end up delicious.
Today, but large scale efforts like city development happen over multiple decades, over which the number of remote workers will almost certainly increase due to new technology.
Undoubtedly. At the same time wages will likely drop for them, as developers buy in to the rather stupid notion that their geographic location, rather than the value of their labor, should have anything whatever to do with their salaries.
Not to mention that the quality of life outside big cities is far healthier and more human scale and human paced. People are more focused on things like children than on Kubernetes — the world needs progress but boy does it take a toll. In the Bay Area I worked with people making $400K who said they decided they could only afford two kids. Meanwhile where I live now it’s very feasible for a schoolteacher couple to afford five kids, and not in privation. I like that Elon Musk exists but holy hell I do not want his life.
Outside big cities, driving 10 minutes to work is more human scale than driving 60 minutes in Bay Area. The choice in the US is not really driving vs not driving, but rather about how much.
Small city: everything is in walking or cycling distance, there's little congestion. Big city: distance between points of interest is large, there's lots of traffic and congestion, people complain about public traffic, and take an hour to get from place A to place B.
This is my experience, having lived most of my life in small places (ranging from a monastery to a city with 25k people) while listening to people in big cities complain about their commutes.
Now I live in a city that isn't exactly small but not huge either. I'm already suffering the consequences of traffic and longer distances. Moving out of small cities is when I started to actually need a car... of course having more people and congestion doesn't show up in traffic only; it's also in the grocery store queues, restaurants packed full, parcels not delivered to home because they're too busy to deal with everyone personally, etc.
I've lived in places ranging from 20k to big cities. All base necesseties were in walking distance where I lived in the cities, and mostly in the smaller places as well.
The thing with smaller places is that you can generally get like 80% of what you need locally, but on occasion you have to go a few towns over or into the nearest city to get that 20%. So you can easily live in a city w/o a car, but it's substantially harder to do so in smaller places.
I don't believe in that 20% being a problem. I mean you can take a bus / taxi / train / buddy to get you to the next town if you need to be there. If you need to transport stuff, then you might need a car, but it's not like you would be transporting that same stuff without a car in a big city. So you need the car there too.
Also, my experience is that the 20% is more like 1-2% (when I lived in smaller cities, I needed to visit other towns or bigger cities a few times a year).
Like I said, I started needing my car only after I moved out. As a matter of fact, I only got a car a year before moving out, and I only got it because it was given to me for free.
people don't realize the enormous difference in living cost of bay area vs midwest. 400K on the penninsula is less than 150K in the midwest. I once calculated the average salaries of the bay area vs mid western cities and adjusted those salaries based on the cost of housing: https://skilldime.com/blog/see-which-cities-pay-the-highest-...
This is commonly brought up but isn't correct simply because what matters more is generally the absolute amount of disposable income you have, not the percentage of your total salary.
If you make 400k / year (typical for a FAANG senior engineer, which plenty of people people reach in their mid-to-late 20s) your expenses might break down as:
- 160k taxes
- 50k housing (luxury 1 bedroom in SF or Palo Alto)
- 10k food (eat at work on weekdays for free, $200 a weekend to eat out at nice restaurants)
- 10k transportation (Tesla Model 3 like everyone else)
= 230k total
So you end up with ~170k a year of disposable income while living very well. If you were willing to cut expenses to the bone (roommates is the big one, cook for yourself, old car) you'd probably end up at around 200k of disposable income. 170k-200k is more than most software engineers can hope to make in gross income in the Midwest. Sure, you might not want to buy a house for $2M, but with just two years of savings you can move to the Midwest and buy a house outright. After 10 years (remember, most of these people would be in their late thirties) you could easily save ~$2M before investment returns and retire to a low cost of living area.
For people who are not tech workers and live in the Bay Area making <$100k / year, there is definitely a great argument that the cost of living is way too high. For software engineers, it's worth remembering the cost of living is so high only because software engineers get paid so much.
Wow, I swear every time I read one of these salary threads the "typical" salary for a FAANG engineer jumps by 50k.
Not doubting it, it's just fucking nuts. I do wonder though what percentage of engineers are making that type of money though? How typical is it really?
I've noticed that, too -- the way the typical FAANG salary keeps going up and up and up and up and up and up and up whenever it's quoted here. I've been in Silicon Valley since 2002, always working for tech companies, either as a technical writer or a web developer, and I have never made anywhere near the "average salary" that HN tells me I should have been making.
Even granting that I'm not very good as a salary negotiator, I suspect an awful lot of software engineers, even out here, are making around $150-200K for their base pay, and are not getting another $100K+ annually in benefits and stock options.
Overall, I'd guesstimate 40% make 400k or more, with most senior engineers making that much. Not at all atypical, particularly if you've been at one for a couple years.
So you're saying 40% of FAANG engineers (not just seniors, but all engineers) are pulling in 400k?
That's nuts... I swear the number being thrown around for FAANG was ~250k not that long ago. Next time I check one of these threads it will be 500k....
Is this really accurate? And even if total comp is somehow $400k, how much of that is equity, and how many senior engineers are liquidating it every year to get $400k in cash? That seems wildly overblown. And that equity shouldn’t be factored into the above breakdown anyway, at least not in the taxes calculation!
RSUs are not the same as private equity in a startup. While they are subject to market fluctuations they can be liquidated immediately on vesting (annually then frequently quarterly). They are taxed just like regular income... because they are regular income.
As to how many engineers are liquidating at vest? It’s honestly the most sensible option to diversify quickly since you don’t want your investment, savings and income all tied up in one company.
The point-in-time percentage isn't the best metric. These companies hire a huge number of recent grads each year, with sub-200k total comps. Need to look at expected 5+ year compensation to get a better picture.
Using FB as an example, engineers are expected to make it to E5 within a set time period (~5 years) or they're fired. So anyone still employed after that time is at least an E5. The E5 comp target is 330-400k. So yes, anyone still employed after 5/6 years is making at least that much.
Its not expected nor required to go beyond that, so that will be the career top for many. E6 is a 500-600k range, and I've no clue about E7-9.
Google is similar, and there are equivalent levels at Uber, Lyft, etc.
And then there's Netflix which only hires senior engineers and has a single level with a huge comp range. Pretty much 100% of Netflix enginners are making 300k+, most 400k+. But, Netflix is also an all cash shop - need to pay for benefits out of pocket, buy stock out of pocket, etc; so not 1:1 comparable to others.
LOTS of grads do not make it to the $500K land. The FAANG companies have also been around a bit, so now google / facebook etc just have a fair number of more senior folks who are making good money. So pay is out of control but these companies make so much gross revenue (check out apple / google financials) that they can afford it.
Totally annoying if you are not in tech! And sometime you are like, do you really need to be spending x billion on comp to run y website?
> Wow, I swear every time I read one of these salary threads the "typical" salary for a FAANG engineer jumps by 50k.
Go look at the 2-year or 5-year stock charts of any of the FAANG companies and you'll see why.
An engineer who started working at a FAANG company several years ago got some RSU grants, and the value of the unvested shares grew a lot since then. On top of that, refresher grants every year or two are pretty common. Total compensation really ramps up after a few years even if you don't get promoted.
So are the RSU grants typically done as a fixed number of shares or is it adjusted based on how much those shares are worth on the market? For example, if the stock price tumbled would new offers be granted more shares to make up for the collapse in value to keep the overall compensation the same?
I'm sure it depends on the company, but my company grants a dollar amount and figures out how many shares add up to that amount. If the stock price tumbled I would get more shares next time I get a refresher grant, because more shares would be needed to add up to the dollar amount the company would grant me.
That's above market rates. You'd have to be on £1350 a day. Most contracts I see are £450-£750. How did you swing agency / big consultancy rates as a freelancer?
I sold myself as a one man consultancy without the land and expand bullshit. I hit £1500 a day, which was the max before you hit a world of bureaucracy. It's a lot easier to sit on about £1000-1200k a day.
The intention isn't to brag, it's just to point out there is a market here that can be tapped even if you can't travel to SoCal.
DevSecOps consulting for a large brand that was hacked and a bank undergoing a transformation. Managed it for about 2 years, before that the standard rate was £700-£800 p/d.
Did have a large transformation under my belt and critical national infrastructure as feathers in my hat.
I have a friend who works for a FAANG company. He moved from California to London, staying with the company.
He took a 35% pay cut, and he tells me that cost of living in London is much higher than what he left behind in California.
It made sense for him, because he had personal reasons both to be in Europe and to take the specific open position he took that he wouldn't have been able to get on California, but he was much richer in California.
How many people (actual number) are "FAANG senior engineers" ? I feel like this comp package number gets a lot of attention but my intuition is that it's a rare thing, compared to the number of people working in tech as a whole.
My napkin math tells me about 100-200k engineers at FAANG proper, about 100k more getting paid at FAANG level outside of FAANG (depends on who you include like Microsoft and if you count high-paying startups with high chances of success like Airbnb). Roughly half the people I work with (including first line managers) are "senior" so I would guess about 100k-150k people.
I would estimate that between 10% and 15% of FAANG software engineers are senior or higher.
It does take a few years of being at senior for pay to ratchet up to the $350k range that is typical of long-tenured senior engineers at FAANG companies. A newly-minted senior engineer will be more in the $300k range
Lets compare salaries on a city by city basis and adjust those salaries based on the Cost of living in dollars per square foot (cost of a house/condo from Zillow). To calculate the location adjusted salary, we simply multiply the salary by 500 (rough average of $/sq foot) and divide by the cost per square foot in that city.
This comparison makes sense only if your salary is spent on literally nothing else but housing.
Lots of truth here. Having lived in both types of places I can say with certainty that yes, housing is a big difference. But otherwise much is the same and the vastly higher salaries lead to much accelerated retirement savings and wealth generation.
Some very expensive places like nyc allow you to factor out automobile expenses making the rent burden manageable.
Food is a bit more, going out is the same if you figure out where to go, and day to day expenses aren’t too far off either.
I’d say it’s about 20% more overall all things considered.
These calculators are highly misleading. You absolutely can live comfortably and squirrel away much more cash at 400k anywhere in the US vs 150k. I’ve lived this experience between “low” COL and high areas.
I’d rather earn $400K for several years, live as cheaply as possible, and when I start to feel fatigued, then switch to one of these slower companies in the Midwest. By that time, your portfolio is decent strong and you’re already set for retirement.
Starting your career in the Midwest at their typical salary levels and given the kinds of problems many of these companies or their IT departments are solving is a very short sighted approach. I say that having been there.
I pivoted my career. My first 6 months I had more impact and learned way more than in working 4 years in the Midwest.
You mean it was just a pretext to exfiltrate him to the US, and that Sweden does not in fact have a long national track record of pursuing rapists across international boundaries without prejudice, using the full arsenal of state power?
I don't know if it was only a pretext, probably not only, but Sweden certainly doesn't have a track record of either pursuing rape suspects using the full arsenal of state powers, or of publicly announcing rape allegations as was done in this case.
The accusations might very well be true, but the Swedish prosecutions actions and statements has baffled me from day one.
His legal representation acted quite strange too. I read some court proceedings from some of the UK hearings, among other things the lawyer had called witnesses that had no business being there, it was rather embarrassing to read.
It’s obvious that the rape charges were a highly selective enforcement action. It would be great if Sweden pursued every rapist as though they were Osama Bin Laden but the fact is they only pursued one.
