eldavido

20 ms·

121.
by eldavido 6y ago
Yes and no. Most companies I see using H1-Bs are startups looking for people to get technical work done as cheaply as possible. These are the same people who give employees 0.1% of a series A company and whine about how there's a &quot
122.
by eldavido 6y ago
This is called being pragmatic. pg is excellent at this. If the rest of the world operates on credentialism, you either go with the flow and just play along, or refuse to acknowledge how the rest of the world works, and get caught up in a l
123.
by eldavido 6y ago
This comment reflects a broader problem in our discourse: why can't it be both? Why can't we acknowledge that some of the US constitution's framers were great men who also owned slaves? They weren't perfect. You can be g
124.
by eldavido 6y ago
Cost and type of capital. Office buildings are funded with mountains of cheap debt. Pinterest is funded mostly with equity. Maybe debt later when the growth is more stable but mostly equity. Financially, equity is jet fuel. It's expens
125.
by eldavido 6y ago
Not quite that simple, Amazon tried to buy Whole Foods last year and has basically failed to get traction on groceries. Not saying you're completely incorrect but there's room for a lot of companies in retail doing a lot of differ
126.
by eldavido 6y ago
Show me another place with 100,000 100k+ jobs. There aren't many markets like this in the US and they're all expensive. NYC, Northern Virginia/DC. Overheated, maybe, but not by much.
127.
by eldavido 6y ago
It really isn't hilarious. This is how the US loses its long-term reputation as a level playing field for business, a great place to work/set up shop, etc. This whole process has been unbelievable. The president dusts off some obs
128.
by eldavido 6y ago
Came here to say this (mostly). You mentioned a bunch of computer science stuff. There's a lot in pure software development/engineering that's rather permanent, as well. Was working on a project 7-8 months ago where we had a
129.
by eldavido 6y ago
I'm pretty hardcore capitalist but I also have started to think more about the ideas that go under the heading "market society" -- namely, that everything has its price, that we'll trade away all kinds of things, family
130.
by eldavido 6y ago
This sentiment expresses something I'm starting to see a lot in our discourse. I call it "third-party outrage", where you (bystander) get mad because you think some "aggressor" did something bad to some hypothetical
131.
by eldavido 6y ago
Yes. I'm genuinely surprised how timeless this is. You watch it today, in 2020, and it's shocking that it was made 20 years ago. This tells me that Judge and the other writers managed to latch on to some very timeless things. Not
132.
by eldavido 6y ago
This is why services like Google Apps or managed exchange hosting exist. Most people are terrible at IT management. So bad they're far, far from realizing how bad they even are. When you consider you're getting like 1000 of the
133.
by eldavido 6y ago
This hasn't been my experience, but would love more info if you could provide it. I'm actually surprised how slowly most tech companies shed staff. In general, it seems the industry is pretty hit-driven, and if you're attache
134.
by eldavido 6y ago
I feel like there are basically three ways to lose your job in tech. In one, the company cuts an entire business unit, or a company shuts down, or something else cataclysmic happens. This is where you have dozens/hundreds of people let
135.
by eldavido 6y ago
A lesson I learned too late. You have to be willing to do the work, yes, but also figure out what you really, really like doing, and then do it -- a lot. Over, and over, and over, for years or even decades.
136.
by eldavido 6y ago
You say that, but I'm not so sure. At some point where you live matters a lot. You can be rich, but if you can't get things shipped because the roads are bad, you can't get clean water, there are no local services around (hai
137.
by eldavido 6y ago
This reminds me of a quote from my international econ class in college: "You can take our tomatoes, or our workers. It's up to you to pick which you want" - Mexico to US
138.
by eldavido 6y ago
Unintended side effect of this is to prevent competitive entry. No other TNC will be able to achieve enough density from day 1 to run at the wage floor without huge amounts of VC. That alone should make people suspicious of this legislation
139.
by eldavido 6y ago
Not only does it permeate, but this particular issue touches on a much larger, and more timely discussion: the extent to which companies should be loyal to a nation, and its citizens. In one view, the one I had for a long time, companies ar
140.
by eldavido 6y ago
Everybody's talking about the cost side of this and not the benefit: customer intimacy. India is a huge market for many tech companies, and having more on-the-ground presence means they'll innovate in ways more appropriate to the
141.
by eldavido 6y ago
This is kind of a contrarian viewpoint but one I happen to agree with. As a single person, you can live a great life on $100K. No, maybe you aren't going to $100/plate restaurants every night or living in a $5000/month luxury
142.
by eldavido 6y ago
"College for adults" captures the feel a bit better imo. (Wife's phrase.)
143.
by eldavido 6y ago
McKenzie (original article's author) worked probably a decade outside a major center of tech R&D before taking a job at Stripe. A lot of his advice is written from that viewpoint. It's valuable because a lot of the world opera
144.
by eldavido 6y ago
I like this. It's flexible enough that it could be used in times of true crisis, but it's also super-simple, a major under-appreciated aspect of policymaking. One thing you definitely DON'T want is a California-style "we
145.
by eldavido 6y ago
Great question. It's not that cut and dried. You could probably ask ten Americans what either the balance of power between the federal government is, OR what it should be, and get ten different answers. The reality is that, today, the
146.
by eldavido 6y ago
I think the psychology of spending actual cash, in a bank account, that could theoretically be spent on anything, is completely different from using debt to fund projects. A lot of my views come from operating perhaps the lowest level of &q
147.
by eldavido 6y ago
Reading articles and seeing situations like this really makes me question whether public agencies, as a rule, should be allowed to use debt to finance projects. I'll begin by saying I have no aversion to debt whatsoever as a private in
148.
by eldavido 6y ago
I do this and it works, with the slight tweak that mine's on s3. But yeah, zero running code is a really great thing.
149.
by eldavido 6y ago
OS API sets have evolved toward more sandboxing. Things are more abstract. Fewer files on disk, more blob-store-like things. Fewer INI files in C:\Windows, more preference stores. No registry keys strewn about. .NET strong naming rather tha
150.
by eldavido 6y ago
I think the other major, major thing people discount is the emergence of viable sandboxed installs/uninstalls, and the accompanying software distribution via app stores. Windows 95 never had a proper, operating-system supported package

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