eldavido

26 ms·

181.
by eldavido 7y ago
This is such an important point and so widely misunderstood. I feel like most Americans, when talking about the loss of US manufacturing, think of Ohio, Indiana, and other "rust belt" states, when the reality is, a huge amount of
182.
by eldavido 7y ago
Because different environments yield different behavior. Just like in finance or business. I feel like we've grown accustomed to a world where money is readily available (low interest rates), there's relative peace/safety, li
183.
by eldavido 7y ago
Classic case of execution over strategy. I owned a surface pro 3 and wanted to love it, but god, it was just awful. Short battery life, crappy eMMC-based storage, weird foldable keyboard you couldn't use on your lap, display that wasn&
184.
by eldavido 7y ago
Two important points worth making here. First, huge stock market panics are fear-driven. Partly they're responses to fear, partly they create more of it. When fear sets in, people get nervous. First-order, that means more concern about
185.
by eldavido 7y ago
Funny, when I first read this, I thought of school closures in public districts where budget concerns are forcing long-term, permanent closures, not temporary ones due to CoVID-19. Maybe I live in a bubble? I live in the Bay Area now and re
186.
by eldavido 7y ago
Cruise did something similar with GM. I take this as a bad sign. If Alphabet felt the project was going well, they wouldn't want to give equity away unless the price was very, very high. It might be, I haven't looked. I think situ
187.
by eldavido 7y ago
Have to second this. ASP.NET Core is awesome. Probably wouldn't try to learn it as a first web framework (Django or Rails are better at this), nor is it quite as batteries-included as those other two, but it has a very "grown up&q
188.
by eldavido 7y ago
The other thing I also try to keep in mind: you only get one shot at life. You can spend that one shot obsessing over what others have, how unfair things are, and whine away the decades. The other option is to realize some may have it bette
189.
by eldavido 7y ago
I'd recommend writing something you might have used or be familiar with, in bare-metal C. Maybe try writing a simple web server, which is something most people will be familiar with. Try doing it a couple different ways: single-threade
190.
by eldavido 7y ago
It really depends on your starting point. If you know how to write low-level C (i.e. with direct Win32/POSIX API calls), that's a good start. If you don't know what that means, you need to master this first. So much of assemb
191.
by eldavido 7y ago
Maybe people think you're kidding with this response? By far the best way to learn IMO, write C and see how it translates.
192.
by eldavido 7y ago
This advice applies well to commercial landlord-tenant relationships. As an owner, if I negotiate super hard, the tenants will be resentful, and will damage the space, pay late, and cause no end of trouble.
193.
by eldavido 7y ago
This essay feels a little trite. There's a place for expertise and a place to be a noob. You have to keep learning. But I find this constant degradation of work and effort, something I see a lot in Silicon Valley, pretty tiresome. I fe
194.
by eldavido 7y ago
Meta: do you view a product through the customer's eyes or through the eyes of the person making it? That's been an important insight for me to understand. Describing something in terms of its features/how it works, you might
195.
by eldavido 7y ago
I see it a bit differently. A house provides a basic human necessity (shelter) and can be insured. It stands to reason that it can be mostly financed with very long-term, cheap, debt capital. Other than mass-scale depopulation, not much wil
196.
by eldavido 7y ago
I think the portrayal of the lawyer's lifestyle is a little exaggerated, but I agree with the larger point. Pay and work conditions are determined by social status as much as anything else and in the US, at least a lot of it (perhaps n
197.
by eldavido 7y ago
https://blog.shortbar.com/the-end-of-the-country-developer-7... I wrote that about two years ago. There are many parallels between how attorneys and software people work which I think you recognize. One I've brought up
198.
by eldavido 7y ago
I used to run a software contracting company so I'm well aware of the economics :) Just pointing out that tons of skilled trades regularly bill out well over $100/hr, hell, the damn Otis elevator techs charge, I kid you not, $550&
199.
by eldavido 7y ago
You don't seem to be too bothered by this. I've had wild swings in pay myself, worked places big and small. Maybe saying this to others in the thread: there's more to life than how much money you make. I agree SF is getting w
200.
by eldavido 7y ago
All I'm saying is that, if you look at the number of people qualified to do this kind of work (high-end software engineering) throughout the economy, it's vanishingly small. Personal anecdote: I'm in the process of appealing
201.
by eldavido 7y ago
Completely agree. Just not sure what the endgame is. Attorneys and many other professionals are REALLY entrenched. They're kind of in the sweet spot of, enough money to be influential (unlike most traditional trade unions), enough memb
202.
by eldavido 7y ago
It's frankly crazy that software people make only 100K. Yes, I know the industry is huge, and has many different areas and levels of difficulty, and required skill. But it's nuts that people don't bat an eye paying even a med
203.
by eldavido 7y ago
Two thoughts. First, I wish we'd talk more about comp in terms of a tuple of (person, company). There are many companies that will never pay above a certain amount for software because even great software devs just don't move the
204.
by eldavido 7y ago
Unusually personal for me because I worked in one of their offices, but for a different company, after they had moved out. Definitely feels like the end of a larger era. So much consolidation, stuff shutting down. "The end of the begin
205.
by eldavido 7y ago
I think DC is about 85% of the way there. All we need are slightly better defaults in how money is invested. Fidelity already does this, I remember signing a big stack of forms to "take the safeties off" to be able to trade it as
206.
by eldavido 7y ago
No. They're better run because they're more competitive and only the best-run firms survive. There is more pressure toward excellence, and pay reflects this. Can you name me the 10th-best PC operating system maker? No, you can&#x2
207.
by eldavido 7y ago
A 401k is an account, funded by a mix of employer and employee contributions, that's beyond reach of bankruptcy. That part is the same. The only bit that's different is the self-management of assets, of which many companies are ha
208.
by eldavido 7y ago
This already exists. It's called a 401(k).
209.
by eldavido 7y ago
I take the status quo as my starting point. McClatchy just had pension trouble. So does my home state of Illinois. So does this company, apparently. You seem to think it's possible to just magic a large-scale change in human behavior i
210.
by eldavido 7y ago
Have you or any of your friends ever worked in a non-tech, non-finance business? Many of them are incredibly poorly run. Bad hiring practices, little/no investment in operations or process, etc. All I'm saying is, you have to look

More ›