It would be newsworthy if Linux laptops could compete with MacBooks on performance and quality. Maybe reconsider Windows if you feel the need to switch?
I would expect Windows to have better battery life than Linux, just because Linux is so much worse than MacOS on power consumption, but I also haven't run Windows on a laptop in over a decade so I really don't know.
If you have a coin: Heads and tails represent bits. Flip a coin three times and add up the result to emulate a six-sided dice roll. e.g., heads, heads, tails = 3. If you get 7, then try again.
Being broadly against AI is a strange stance. Should we all turn off swipe to type on our phones? Are we supposed to boycott cancer testing? Are we to forbid people with disabilities reading voicemail transcriptions or using text to speech? Make it make sense.
Arguably you shouldn't trifle your argument by decorating it when fundamentally it is rock solid. I wonder if the author would consider just walking away from tech when they realize what a useless burden its become for everyone.
What do LLMs have to do with typing on phones, cancer research, or TTS?
Deciding not to enable a technology that is proving to be destructive except for the very few who benefit from it, is a fine stance to take.
I won't shop at Walmart for similar reasons. Will I save money shopping at Walmart? Yes. Will my not shopping at Walmart bring about Walmart's downfall? No. But I refuse to personally be an enabler.
I don't agree that Walmart is a similar example. They benefit a great many people - their customers - through their large selection and low prices. Their profit margins are considerably lower than the small businesses they displaced, thanks to economies of scale.
I wish I had Walmart in my area, the grocery stores here suck.
It is a similar example. Just like you and I have different options about whether Walmart is a net benefit or net detriment to society, people have starkly different opinions as to whether LLMs are a net benefit or net detriment to society.
People who believe it's a net detriment don't want to be a part of enabling that, even at cost to themselves, while those who think it's a net benefit or at least neutral, don't have a problem with it.
There is not a single person in this thread that thinks of swiping on phones when the term "AI" is mentioned, apart from people playing the contrarian.
You take a pile of input data, use a bunch of code on it to create a model, which is generally a black box, and then run queries against that black box. No human really wrote the model. ML has been in use for decades, in various places. Google Translate was an "early" convert. Credit card fraud models as well.
The industry joke is: What do you call AI that works? Machine Learning.
counter example: me! autocorrect, spam filters, search engines, blurred backgrounds, medical image processing, even revenue forecasting with logistic regression are “AI” to me and others in the industry
I started my career in AI, and it certainly didn’t mean LLMs then. some people were doing AI decades ago
I would like to understand where this moral line gets drawn — neural networks that output text? that specifically use the transformer architecture? over some size?
When Stable Diffusion and GitHub Copilot came out a few years ago is when I really started seeing this "immoral" mentality about AI, and like you it really left me scratching my head, why now and not before? Turns out, people call it immoral when they see it threatens its livelihood and come up with all sorts of justifications that seem justifiable, but when you dig underneath it, it's all about their economic anxiety, nothing more. Humans are not direct creatures, it's much more emotional than one would expect.
The immoral thing about gen-AI is how it's trained. Regardless of source code, images or audio; the disregard of licenses and considering everything fair-use and ingesting them is the most immoral part.
Then there comes the environmental cost, and how it's downplayed to be able to pump the hype.
I'm not worried about the change AI will bring, but the process of going there is highly immoral, esp. when things are licensed to prohibit that kind of use.
When AI industry says "we'll be dead if we obey the copyright and licenses", you know something is wrong. Maybe the whole industry shouldn't build a business model of grabbing whatever they can and running with it.
Because of these zealots, I'm not sharing my photos anymore and considering not sharing the code I write either. Because I share these for the users, with appropriate licenses. Not for other developers or AI companies to fork, close and do whatever do like with them.
I find copyright itself immoral. Intellectual "property" is a made up fiction that shouldn't exist and only entrenches existing players, see Disney lobbying continuously to get higher and higher copyright durations all to keep Mickey under their control, until very recently; patents too are not filed by individual inventors anymore, it's massive corporations and patent trolls that serve no useful purpose. There is a reason many programmers like open source and especially copyleft, the latter of which is an explicit battling of the copyright system through its own means. Information should be free to be used, it should not be hoarded by so-called copyright holders.
I believe I failed to convey what I'm trying to say.
I'm a strong believer on copyleft. I only share my code with GNU/GPLv3+, no exceptions.
However, this doesn't allow AI companies to scrape it, remix it and sell it under access. This is what I'm against.
If scraping, closing and selling GPLv3 or strong copylefted material is fair use, then there's no use of having copyleft if it can't protect what's intended to be open.
Protecting copyleft requiring protecting copyright, because copyleft is built upon copyright mechanism itself.
While I'm not a fan of a big media company monopolizing something for a century, we need this framework to keep things open, as well. Copyright should be reformed, not abolished.
Consider regulatory capture though. If we have such entrenched copyright that only big companies can afford to pay the licensing fees, then we'll never have actually democratized open source models. It's actually a method of entrenched players of a market to want regulation because they know only they can comply with them, effectively turning it into a de facto monopoly. That is precisely why I want all information to be free, and to allow anyone and everyone to copy my works. And also because copyleft exists only as a response to copyright, otherwise those that favor copyleft would just prefer no copyright at all; many only prefer it because that's the only way to enforce their wishes to have copyright be abolished. In my mind, I see the higher order effects of only allowing big players to pay for copyright, because it's not as simple as licensing it to them. Hopefully I have changed your mind as to copyright, otherwise I'd be happy to continue the conversation.
Yes, copyleft exists as a response to copyright, but it builds something completely different with respect to what copyright promises. While copyright protects creators, copyleft protects users. This part is generally widely misunderstood.
Deregulation to prevent regulatory capture is not a mechanism that works when there's money and a significant power imbalance. Media companies can always put barriers to the consumption of their products through contracts and other mechanisms. Signing a contract not to copy the thing you get to see can get out of hand in very grim ways. Consumers are very weak compared to the companies providing the content, because of the desirability of the content alone, even if you ignore all the monetary imbalance.
Moreover, copyleft doesn't only prevent that kind of exploitation; it actively protects the user by making it impossible to close the thing you get. Copyleft protects all the users of the thing in question. When the issue is viewed in the context of the software, it not only allows the code to propagate indefinitely but also allows it to be properly preserved for the long run.
Leaving things free-for-all again not only fails to protect the user but also profits the bigger companies, since they have the power to hoard, remix, refine, and sell this work, which they get for free. So, it only carries water to the big companies' water wheels. Moreover, even permissive licenses depend on the notion of copyright to attribute the artifact to its original creator.
Otherwise, even permissively licensed artifacts can be embedded in the works of larger companies and not credited, allowing companies to slightly derive the things they got for free and sell them to consumers on their own terms, without any guardrails.
So abolishing copyright not only will further un-democratize things, but it'll make crediting the creators of the building blocks the companies use to erect their empires impossible.
This is why I will always share my work under strong copyleft or non-commercial/share-alike (and no-derivatives, where it makes sense) licenses.
In short, I'm terribly sorry to tell you that you didn't convince me about abolishing copyright at all. The only thing you achieved was to think further on my stance, fill the mental gaps I found in my train of thought, and fill them appropriately with more copyleft support. Also, it looks like my decision not to share my photos anymore is getting more concrete.
Intentionally or not, you are presenting a false equivalency.
I trust in your ability to actually differentiate between the machine learning tools that are generally useful and the current crop of unethically sourced "AI" tools being pushed on us.
LLMs do not lie. That implies agency and intentionality that they do not have.
LLMs are approximately right. That means they're sometimes wrong, which sucks. But they can do things for which no 100% accurate tool exists, and maybe could not possibly exist. So take it or leave it.
No way to ever know in which condition that being somewhat accurate is going to be good enough or not. And no way to know how accurate the thing is before engaging with it so you have to babysit it... "Can do things" is carrying a lot of load in your statement. It makes the car with no brakes and you tell it not to do that so it makes you one without an accelerator either.
How am I supposed to know what specific niche of AI the author is talking about when they don't elaborate? For all I know they woke up one day in 2023 and that was the first time they realized machine learning existed. Consider my comment a reminder that ethical use of AI has been around of quite some time, will continue to be, and even that much of that will be with LLMs.
You have reasonably available context here. "This year" seems more than enough on it's own.
I think there is ethical use cases for LLMs. I have no problem leveraging a "common" corpus to support the commons. If they weren't over-hyped and almost entirely used as extensions of the weath-concentration machine, they could be really cool. Locally hosted llms are kinda awesome. As it is, they are basically just theft from the public and IP laundering.
>Consider my comment a reminder that ethical use of AI has been around of quite some
You can be among a a swamp and say "but my corner is clean". This is the exact opposite of the rotten barrel metaphor. You're trying to claim your sole apple is so how not rotted compared to the fermenting that is came from.
There's a moral line that every person has to make about what work they're willing to do. Things aren't always so black and white, we straddle that line The impression I got reading the article is that they didn't want to work for bubble ai companies trying to generate for the sake of generate. Not that they hated anything with a vector db
FWIW, I get on the order of $40/hour as a senior with almost 10 years experience, and it allows me not to worry too much about spending (with a wife earning about a third of my salary and two kids). I think I could easily earn at least 50% more if I wanted to work for some rich but soul-crushing corp, but for obvious reasons I don't do that. I guess US cost of living is just insane. (I live in central Europe.)
> FWIW, I get on the order of $40/hour as a senior with almost 10 years experience, and it allows me not to worry too much about spending (with a wife earning about a third of my salary and two kids)
How much do you pay annually out of pocket for health insurance premiums and other healthcare expenses?
In the US that expense is very high, and is a major source of worry for working families.
> How much do you pay annually out of pocket for health insurance premiums and other healthcare expenses?
Very rough estimation: $9000. I'm not sure how much my wife pays - this is paid by the employer and she usually doesn't bother to check. (This is mainly insurance, we seldom use public healthcare.)
My wife is a full-time-mother and is currently uninsured because we'd be looking at doubling the cost of insurance, and paying close to 25k a year for insurance. It is a completely broken system at this point.
I'm similar salary band, I pay 9% of my annual salary for mandatory medical insurance, but it's usually hard to get an appointment in reasonable time so you are going to pay extra 50-100€ for a visit to the same doctor, but in private clinic. And also vaccination and dental is not covered by that 9% payment.
For most white collar jobs like tech here in the US, your out-of-pocket as percentage is income doesn't play a role in how we decide salary bands.
For a family of four, the average health plan is around $10k out of pocket from the employee along with around $20k in employer costs [0]. Yet the median American SWE salary is $187k [1] versus $66k in Poland [2], $93k in Canada [3], and $111k in the UK [4]. Either way an American ends up earning significantly more after healthcare costs and insurance.
The issue is salary expectations at the lower performance band haven't kept up with what is expected at that salary band.
> In the US that expense is very high, and is a major source of worry for working families
When benchmarked against similar peer cities in Canada [5] or the UK [6], CoL is roughly at par yet salaries are significantly higher in the US, especially when comparing peer tech markets like SF [7] versus London [8].
This is the crux of the issue - demanding 100% WFH well past the end of COVID made it hard for us to justify domestic hiring when
1. Async was successfully proven to not impact business operation
2. A reverse brain drain of all nationalities in the US during COVID meant it was easier for employers to work with them to open a hub office or GCC abroad
3. A new grad is demanding salaries that simply don't make the economics of training and hiring new grads work. At $70k-$110k it does, but not beyond that.
4. Companies have now adopted the Netflix model - by cutting low performers, we can actually give higher pay bands to employees who actually have a business impact, as can be reflected in the rise in 75th percentile tech salaries.
I think you make some solid points, but there are major tradeoffs some of the data is not totally convincing. If US workers are so much more highly paid than foreign workers, then we can reasonably expect the best workers to migrate to the US whenever possible. It's pretty easy for Canadians to cross the border. So one reason to hire American developers is for quality. The other is simply that these companies exist in the US, which means collaboration needs to be done in US time zones, which makes overseas workers far less efficient, not to mention the major negative impacts on worker morale. So there can be reasons to hire out of country, but the tradeoffs are significant even when well executed.
> If US workers are so much more highly paid than foreign workers, then we can reasonably expect the best workers to migrate to the US whenever possible
Not really.
No one wants to leave their families, and the upper tier of salaries in alternative geos are high enough to capture the higher talent tier because their salary expectations are based on their domestic condition.
On top of that, the US immigration system is severely backlogged. It can take decades for Chinese and Indian nationals to become green card holders, and we as employees increasingly expect foreign nationals to pay the filing costs - not us.
> other is simply that these companies exist in the US, which means collaboration needs to be done in US time zones, which makes overseas workers far less efficient and having major negative impacts on worker morale
Not anymore. WFH proved async work models can ensure business continuity.
On top of that, the bulk of layoffs during COVID were workers on work visas who were given the option to return to their home countries and open an office there.
This is what Google did in Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Warsaw, Databricks in Bangalore, Amazon in Canada and India, and Nvidia in Bangalore.
Furthermore, we as employers don't really sponsor VPs, Engineering Managers/Directors, Product Managers, and Staff/Principal Engineers on O-1 visas. Most are stuck on some form of EB1/2 or L1/2, and those who apply to O1s who aren't founders or extremely critical to the business are being sponsored but filing out-of-pocket.
It just isn't attractive to immigrate to America long term anymore as a white collar employee in most cases now aside from unicorn roles which employees then use to boomerang back to executive roles or demand US salaries in their home country.
Ideally we need to build a domestic talent pipeline, but universities failed severely by watering down curricula in an attempt to compete with bootcamps, which burnt a lot of employers disincentivizing them from hiring early career, and state and local jurisdictions in the US just don't give us the support or pipeline needed to build a competitive early career hiring pipeline.
For example, in cybersecurity, I can hire someone in Israel who has done offensive security work for a couple years in a military, police, internal security capacity or someone in India who participated in one of the dozens of Police Force, Army, or Home Affairs cybersecurity internship programs. Similar programs like Cyberpatriots and the Cyber Incentive Program (approx $100M) were mismanaged as was found in a 2023-25 investigation by the DHS OIG [0][1] and an entire generation of students of cybersecurity scholarships quit in 2016 when the Trump 1 admin cut funding for cybersecurity scholarship programs.
> No one wants to leave their families, and the upper tier of salaries in alternative geos are high enough to capture the higher talent tier because their salary expectations are based on their domestic condition.
For 2x the salary young men have proven time and again they are willing to take the risk.
> On top of that, the US immigration system is severely backlogged. It can take decades for Chinese and Indian nationals to become green card holders, and we as employees increasingly expect foreign nationals to pay the filing costs - not us.
A challenge for sure. This and what you go on to describe could certainly shift some junior labor from H1B to remote contract. I would expect that shift to have a mostly net zero impact on other American exployment.
> > other is simply that these companies exist in the US, which means collaboration needs to be done in US time zones, which makes overseas workers far less efficient and having major negative impacts on worker morale
> Not anymore. WFH proved async work models can ensure business continuity.
Every non-US team I've worked with and everyone I know that works with offshore still have meetings. It would be incredibly dysfunctional to not have any collaborative time.
> Ideally we need to build a domestic talent pipeline, but universities failed severely by watering down curricula in an attempt to compete with bootcamps, which burnt a lot of employers disincentivizing them from hiring early career, and state and local jurisdictions in the US just don't give us the support or pipeline needed to build a competitive early career hiring pipeline.
Is that really what is happening? Because based on everything I can see, hiring standards are the highest they have ever been. As we get older, we have a bias towards underestimating the capabilities of younger generations, because we can see them making familiar mistakes in real-time.
> For 2x the salary young men have proven time and again they are willing to take the risk
First, sexist, and secondly in 2025 there's no guarantee that you would be able to live in the US long term on a work visa (but it's been this way since the mid-2010s), and if someone really feel the urge to immigrate to the West, then Australia, Canada, Netherlands, and Germany are all easier and (excluding Germany) Anglophone (yes, NL is de facto Anglophone now).
The US just isn't as attractive a location to immigrate to anymore for a large amount of people in white collar roles.
For the cream of the crop who primarily target American BigTech (GAYMAN) or HFTs like Citadel or Jane Street, in India the salary and ESPP grant can afford you household help, a nice condo, and make enough money that you can invest in building generational wealth or angel invest. It was a similar story for Chinese over the past 10-15 years as well.
For Europeans and Canadians, both are extremely turned off to America due to the Trump admin, and at portfolio companies we've seen a significant amount of requests from employees to shift away from the US as a result. Even Israelis increasingly don't target the US anymore because of perceptions and have begun choosing Germany, Czechia, or remaining in Israel.
> I would expect that shift to have a mostly net zero impact on American exployment
A lot of senior managers and leadership in tech companies are in the same boat with work visas as I mentioned before. All visas categories go through the same backlog for naturalization in the US - be you a manager, VC, factory worker, or SWE. Heck the creator of PyTorch is himself on one of these visas despite being employed at Meta.
> Every non-US team I've worked with and everyone I know that works with offshore still have meetings. It would be incredibly dysfunctional to not have any collaborative time
Absolutely, but everyone makes time for Zoom meetings and finds a way to make it work, or people like me will hire someone else who can get it done.
> Is that really what is happening
Yes in cybersecurity and a large portion of databases. I even explained why in other HN comments [0]
This is why most of our dealflow is now in Israel, Eastern Europe, and India. Look at recent exists like Wiz ans PingSafe.
Even recent cybersecurity companies that IPOed like Netskope and Rubrik have overwhelmingly hired in Israel or India and with leadership being Israeli or Indian either in origin or nationality.
> Absolutely, but everyone makes time for Zoom meetings and finds a way to make it work, or people like me will hire someone else who can get it done.
So we are in agreement that work cannot be fully async.
There are clearly some forces at play that are changing how immigration works in the short-term. I think where we differ is mostly this: our anecdotal experiences are radically different (I would say competency is increasing not decreasing as a general trend) and I would never bet against the momentum of the US long-term, nor do I believe that quality tends to remain steady or increase with offshoring. Maybe things are different in your niche. I appreciate being given a view into a different perspective!
> For most white collar jobs like tech here in the US, your out-of-pocket as percentage is income doesn't play a role in how we decide salary bands.
Most people here in the US don't have white collar jobs nor compensation of a software engineer. They work in retail or other blue and pink collar professions.
A Canadian retail worker has much more affordable access to healthcare than their US counterpart.
> A new grad is demanding salaries that simply don't make the economics of training and hiring new grads work
This is just me, might not be representative, but as an indian CS graduate, I was willing to move to the US temporarily if it meant I could make FIRE money and return to India and basically chill out and work at interesting jobs without worrying about needing MNC/unicorn money to live well. I saw broadly two ways to do this - the startup scene, and the ridiculously high new grad salaries (which would enable FIRE in india after a few years) in the US back in early 2020s - when I was graduating. By the time I finished though, those salaries dried up like you are saying, and startup exits are easier in Blore these days and I can get funding from the usual bunch by just domiciling in Spore like flipkart did. Note that I did not expect the current AI bubble to last this long. Potentially could have cashed out on that. My impression is that if you know nvcc exists, you get money thrown at you in the US today... All in all, the idea fizzled out. Among my peers too, the people who went there for the usual M.S at a UC --> california job market pipeline are all people who are sure they want to settle in the US long-term, through the visa troubles and all. Others didn't go.
Point is, those high salaries were a big draw to a lot of people here including me. And in the absence of that companies now need to move here to get access to the same people. I think it is happening, unicorns/GCCs here are now paying quite well. I mean I had almost the median EU tech salary ($60K - 52LPA) for india cost of living at my _starting job_. So without the US starting salary being 150K-200K (a salary unattainable in india anywhere) like it was 5 years ago, it's a hard sell. Senior salaries are still high of course, but if you have to stay there 10+ years, you have a family there, kids there, loans there, and it is basically committing to settling in the US. Meaning that without the added security of the backup plan "return and you're either FIRE or super comfortable", its much more of a commitment to move. My circles have a selection bias of course, and for people who did not manage to get top 10% salaries here, the risk/reward is completely different.
My reply was primarily about American new grads - who overwhelmingly don't do grad school.
And your anecdote is exactly what I am trying to explain on HN.
We as employers are fine paying high salaries to mid-career talent, but it's hard to justify hiring a middle of the pack new grad from CSU East Bay for a $130k base salary new grad role when I can hire a mid-career US returned FAANG dev in BLR or HYD for $70k-90k TC.
We will still hire new grads in the US for a $130k-$180k base, but they will have to actually be worth it. The brutal reality is, if you didn't attend a target CS program for your Bachelors (Stanford, Cal, MIT, UIUC, CMU, UT Austin, GT, UMich, UW, Cornell, Harvard, Columbia), at this point you probably aren't landing a high paying CS job - just like how in India if you didn't get a good JEE score, you're essentially relegated to being stuck at WITCH because you didn't get into a good BTech program, and it's an employer's market
A lot of people on HN assume Indians (and other foreign nationals) only do b*tch work like legacy springboot crap (and ofc plenty of people do), but an equally large cohort is doing legitimately competitive and innovative work.
> The brutal reality is, if you didn't attend a target CS program for your Bachelors (Stanford, Cal, MIT, UIUC, CMU, UT Austin, GT, UMich, UW, Cornell, Harvard, Columbia), at this point you probably aren't landing a high paying CS job
But what about after masters? What are the expectations there? Now of course there is the research path which is publishing well in your masters, working at deepmind or nvidia etc,. But I am talking about people doing non-thesis MS and then entering the job market. Is the base salary for those people still high?
> But what about after masters? ... and then entering the job market. Is the base salary for those people still high?
Not really especially when you factor in international tuition and loan servicing.
While it does depend on the program they attended, their past work experience in India, and their ability to land internships, in general I'd say salaries tend to be at the 25th percentile and below of what is shown on levels.fyi nationally.
But in all honestly, newly graduated masters students would be in the same boat as domestic undergrads if not worse becuase there isn't an incentive to hire an international student domestically and then go through the jumla of filing their H1B while they are on OPT unless they are a unicorn but if you are a unicorn, why would you even do a course based masters?!?
In fact, most of the complaints on HN about "H1Bs undercutting American salaries" tend to be these kinds of students because of how desperate they are to pay off a 1.5 to 2 crore loan with double digit interest rates despite having almost no scope of getting hired here in the US.
> for people who did not manage to get top 10% salaries here, the risk/reward is completely different
Yep.
Personal anecdote wise, I had a cousin who was working at Tech Mahindra in Chandigarh so on the lower end of salaries and got the US MS fuwara and they ended up attending UF (which is expensive and not a target).
We warned him not to come, but he didn't listen.
After spending almost $150k/1.5 crore getting the degree, the only SWE roles he could get could only pay $70k-80k in the NYC/NJ area which meant their take home after tax was rent was a little under $30k a year and this was during the 2022-24 period so no one wants to sponsor and he had a massive loan/EMI to pay off that was in the $17k-22k range a year.
He basically burnt through an extreme amount of family net worth (which was significant as they owned a house in Chandigarh) just to service a loan and basically remain in the same spot as before.
Another cousin did something similar to go to Canada despite us warning them not to do so either and their career is functionally screwed because it's even harder to find a role in Canada, but at least they attended a "college" so the tuition hit wasn't as severe.
In both cases it did not make financial sense for either to leave India for North America - their families had enough money in India that they could have bought significant property in Chandigarh and NCR and build generational wealth despite not necessarily working in the best jobs, but a lot of capital was basically burnt in loan repayment.
Like, let's be honest - the only people coming to the US to do a masters have a significant amount of capital because no one is going to guarantee a 2 crore loan without significant collateral, but at that point there are just better asset classes to diversify into.
From a financial standpoint, if you are Indian, it honestly isn't worth it doing some random coursework based masters in the US because in most cases you just aren't going to be hired by good companies anyhow, because none of us are willing to spend the capital to sponsor for an H1B after OPT unless you somehow ended up at a GAYMAN.
Interesting. Well, hope my friends get into GAYMAN companies then... whats the Y in there anyway? And is microsoft still excluded from the acronym? lol.
Ok, not asking in the context of this thread but in general: why do you think so? With their stake in openai especially and github being a good place to sell AI code assistants (one of the clear revenue streams for LLMs thus far) they seem quite well placed. Is it all their big "enterprise" and government contracts that bring them a lot of money now losing value?
1. Operational work is difficult to justify extremely high TCs
2. Other aspects of the business such as Cybersecurity just lack domestic talent in the US. That's why much of the MS Security portfolio engineering team is in Israel or India or people who are brought in via an L1/2
3. Vast swathes of MS employees from line level ICs up to Engineering Directors were stuck in immigration limbo because of the GC backlog or because of older parents, so a large number began returning to India with a slight shave on TC.
London and Toronto have a similar CoL as the Bay Area and $45/hr is a mid-career tech salaries in both Greater London and GTA.
Edit: can't reply but every single white collar job provides an employer healthcare plan that is equally as competitive as the public healthcare plans in Canada and the UK.
And especially if you were being paid $50/hr as a new grad in 2014.
Edit 2:
> And I was in Michigan.
All the more reason I would have pushed back severely. It's easier to find talent at scale in London or GTA - metros there have a population larger than the entire state of MI, and with a breadth of options beyond UMich Ann-Arbor.
$45/hr is low for GTA. I was making about that in Toronto in 2017 with two years experience, one year vocational degree, and a bachelor's in a completely unrelated field.
The vast majority of jobs in America give healthcare. The quality is vastly superior to London and Toronto, although we pay far more (and our medical professionals are upper middle class rather than middle / lower class). However this is a huge hidden portion of salary that most are not aware of, about $25k for a family of 4, which increases labor costs greatly.
On sheer metrics of access and quality, America kicks the shit out of Europe and Canada
> I was making $50/hour fresh out of college back in 2014. And I worked remotely.
Same for me, except out of high school, and a decade earlier.
That's the sordid tale of the industry. Outside of a handful of FAANG high flyers, pay, in real dollars, has been very steadily decreasing over many decades. But it took high inflation for us to notice.
Now we're in a difficult spot because we feel we need to make more to make up for the considerably higher cost of living, but there is no market willing to pay more — and never was.
The market can bear to pay high salaries for the right talent.
If you can show me you have tangible development skills and can think about the product or feature you develop as a business (eg. Can you justify to me in financial terms the net benefit doing a refactor does versus keeping the status quo) you will be fine.
We aren't going to pay you $300k-$400k TC just to be a code monkey. We expect you to be able to help inform actual business decisions and not be a PITA when thinking about the core metrics that matter for a business - NARR, FCF, and COGS.
So, being a developer who is specialized in a business domain (eg. Being a fullstack developer but with a decade of experience working on Cloud Security products) makes it easier for hiring managers to decide whether or not to hire you. And as a former PM, those kinds of Engineers are the best to work with becuase they understand the pitfalls that exist in a subdomain and have opinions and the ability to justify them.
Those who can upskill or show the ability to upskill are also worth their weight in TC.
And finally, you will have to be located in Tier 1 tech hubs now (Bay Area, Seattle, Austin, NYC). The 5-7 year blip of satellite offices in RTP or Denver or Portland or being 100% WFH in a cabin in Montana is over. The roles at these kinds of offices are the ones that get offshored first.
> And finally, you will have to be located in Tier 1 tech hubs now
Exactly. Adjusted for cost of living, $300,000 in SF or NYC is about $170,000 where I lived back then, so ~$80/hr. Which is, after adjusted for inflation to that time... You guessed it: $50.94/hr!
And you're pointing at high quality talent with considerable experience, not some kid out of high school. Said kid out of high school like I was back then isn't going to find that much in today's market. As you point out, the market has tanked big time — and has been tanking for decades.
As before, we're only just now starting to notice how far behind we’ve fallen because of things recently becoming exceptionally more expensive.
> Adjusted for cost of living, $300,000 in SF or NYC is about $170,000 where I lived back then, so ~$80/hr
I've lived in SF over the same time period as well, and my CoL hasn't changed aside from rent - I've kept the same consistent savings rate - but even rent was largely manageable for me because of job opportunities and a mix of local and state rent control.
That said, I do think being Asian or Latiné means having different buying preferences (eg. the bulk of my shopping is at ethnic grocery stores and my "white people food" is primarily sourced from Costco or TJ).
Ofc, looking visibly ethnic also gives me the ethnic discount at most places I shop at.
> Said kid out of high school like I was back then isn't going to find that much in today's market. As you point out, the market has tanked big time — and has been tanking for decades
Oof, that is actually a good point. Sadly, you are right about that. I don't think hiring managers in the US would take a risk on hiring a HSer even if they have the right skills and domain experience.
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That said, I am starting to come around to your argument.
Jeez--I was making $50/hr in 2004 in one of my first jobs after I finished my PhD and opted out of academia. That pay didn't go that far back then!
This is what upsets me about my career--that logistic pay curve. You initially grow fast and then it tops out and never gets better, but your costs keep rising, particularly as you have a family. I'm paying for one kid's college tuition right now, she has 1.5 years left, and will then enter a dubious job market. My son is 15, so if he goes to college, I won't be paying tuition for him until Fall 2028.
The problem is, I'm no longer a developer. I'm currently a nothing working on figuring out "something." I have a lot of skills and talents, but seemingly not many that will pay. I'm looking at any 2yr. training program that can get me certified to do something useful. It's so freaking bizarre to be sitting here with a degree in CS/Math, an MS in Computer Engineering from a very reputable university, and a doctorate in Information Management, also from a very reputable university, and looking at basically doing blue collar work! My nation has utterly failed me in every possible manner.
I should add that we are looking to move out of our fairly high-cost of living state for a possibly lower cost of living state, but there are complications to that plan, too. My wife doesn't really want to move our son out of the high school he is in. I'm saying that other imperatives need to be addressed before they become full-blown crises. I'm being taxed to death, and costs like insurance are rising fast.
If I were you I'd be tempted to rewrite my PhD as a multi-year "special project". Reason is that hiring a PhD is controversial unless you're a university or a research division of a corporation. In contrast, the CS/Math & MS will always be solid & saleable.
> My nation has utterly failed me in every possible manner.
We've failed ourselves too, though. If I was some random person with endless money burning a hole in my pocket, what would I even do with a CS/Math/Computer engineer/Information manager? It is in no way clear how life is improved by working with such a person. Other industries put a lot of effort into marketing what function they serve. Said random person knows exactly when and why they'd want to hire a plumber, electrician, structural engineer, lawyer, accountant, physician, etc. But us...? We've rested on our laurels thinking Google, Microsoft, and Meta will forever want us, putting no effort into expanding our market.
You have to be able to get the prescription. HMOs (Kaiser specifically) will generally not provide any sort of preventative care in this area unless your numbers are very high. You can’t get access to a cardiologist unless you’ve already had an adverse event.
If you can get time off work and have a PPO, you can get the preventative care.
$10 is the cash price. Your doctor diagnoses, not insurance, and you don't need a specialist to get diagnosed regardless of what your insurer wants. Even a nurse practitioner can prescribe you a statin.
They are all like this to a degree because controversy creates engagement. If a platform is not making you money, is not making you smarter, and not helping you form IRL connections, then I highly recommend disabling it.
Managed hosting is expensive to operate and self-managing kafka is a job in of itself. At my last employer they were spending six figures to run three low volume clusters before I did some work to get them off some enterprise features, which halved the cost, but it was still at least 5x the cost of running a mainstream queue. Don't use kafka if you just need queuing.
Cheapest MSK cluster is $100 a month and can easily run a dev/uat cluster with thousands of messages a second. They go up from there but we've made a lot of use of these and they are pretty useful
I've basically never had a problem with MSK brokers. The issue has usually been "why are we rebalancing?" and "why aren't we consuming?", i.e. client problems.
It's not the dev box with zero integrations/storage that's expensive. AWS was quoting us similar numbers for MSK. Part of the issue is that modern kafka has become synonymous with Confluent, and once you buy into those features, it is very difficult to go back. If you're already on AWS and just need queuing, start with SQS.
Is it arrogance or is it experience combined with a different perspective? One developer may love React because of the component ecosystem and talent pool, and another developer may dislike it because they're writing custom HTML/CSS anyways and React requires them to write way more JS than their preferred approach. Would I ever choose backbone? No. But many developers may be surprised by how little vanilla JS that it takes to build modern web apps. More than ever the tradeoffs of different frontend stacks need to be evaluated on a project-by-project basis.
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