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Edit: add quote since this is such a lovely page snipe Pollyanna posted:Not surprising at all. Looks like tech lost a lot of bets it made during covid. Google, for example, is worrying over all these buildings they bought in Boston that are now mostly empty. Hindsight is 20/20, but it still seems like a pretty obvious fuckup. GE also moved their headquarters to Boston for... Not really sure why, some bid to become a FAANG I guess, they're also working on backing out of that deal as well. Looks like they're pretty close to fully unwinding that decision and heading back to NYC tri-state area where they've traditionally been. I've mostly spent my life in Texas and now California but I've never heard someone say "I want to move to Boston" only "we're moving to Boston for my partners biotech job" I bet Boston is a lovely city but does not seem to be a destination city for tech workers. I can't imagine wanting to live there as a full time remote employee. Not sure what Google is going to do with all this real estate, seems like they have 50% more real estate than they need
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Mar 22, 2023 17:04
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I think VC money drying up is definitely going to have an effect. I keep seeing stuff on my twitter about how founders who have raised $20-30 million and haven't found Product Market Fit are feeling a lot of pressure. For the past decade or so in tech I think it's been possible to work entirely in companies that don't really sell anything and don't make any money. It's a good time to work for a company that has a somewhat traditional business model of making things that people want to pay for.
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Mar 22, 2023 17:12
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Boston is a great town to be a college student in but it always seemed like it'd be significantly less great once you get out of your 20s.
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Mar 22, 2023 17:43
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Hadlock posted:I bet Boston is a lovely city  Plorkyeran posted:Boston is a great town to be a college student in but it always seemed like it'd be significantly less great once you get out of your 20s. I’m almost 33 and have a drat career, it’s high time I hosed on out.
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Mar 22, 2023 17:57
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I mean I'm not gonna put any money down on this but the one block of downtown and that corner coffee shop they used to film Ally McBeal seemed pretty nice. The neighborhoods in good will hunting didn't look amazing and I bet all those houses are worth a million plus now Both times I had planned to go to Boston got cancelled at the last minute, and both times I had an overwhelming amount of not caring
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Mar 22, 2023 18:00
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Plorkyeran posted:Boston is a great town to be a college student in but it always seemed like it'd be significantly less great once you get out of your 20s. its hard to believe how much of a tech hub it was back in the 1980s and how it all just faded away as silicon valley absorbed everything biomed seems to be real strong (and growing) there
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Mar 22, 2023 18:11
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The first reason I’m in Boston is because I came up to MA for college. The second is that it’s a very blue state and I’m highly unlikely to get hate crime’d compared to a good few other states, Florida. It’s also somehow a good city for music. Otherwise it generally sucks.
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Mar 22, 2023 18:16
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Their public transit system is pretty good by US standards. And I like the coffee shops around Cambridge (or did; i hear a lot of them have shuttered since I left a couple years ago) Competitive compensation seemed difficult to find there relative to other cities.
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Mar 22, 2023 18:26
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I think Boston's a pretty good city. I enjoy visiting it. It's got big problems with transit and I hate driving through it. It's a really interesting place that's a collection of smaller towns, each with its own identity, a much different vibe from the mega-cities in Texas. If I was single and not in the whole live in the middle of nowhere phase of my life, I would consider living in Boston. But CoL is as high as NYC while wages are about 30% less. I think, of all the cities in the region, I'd choose Providence as my favorite for living. It reminds me of Austin back in 2005 or so before all the Tech Bros found it. A little bit of investment and it could take off in much the same way.
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Mar 22, 2023 18:33
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Most people who stay in Boston for multiple years are here until they find an SO and move in together, then they leave. Hook up and bail, basically. Providence is cool.
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Mar 22, 2023 18:35
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A cool thing about Boston is that it's less than 2 hours from Portland, a much better city
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Mar 22, 2023 18:54
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And even cooler is that it's not Cleveland.
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Mar 22, 2023 18:57
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An even cooler thing about Boston is that you do not, at any point, ever have to be here. You can be free. Be free.
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Mar 22, 2023 19:17
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Boston rules. Pre COVID, I went to a talk at the bar where folks talked about how they were growing human organs from stem cells, and that's the most Boston experience I've had that didn't involve someone getting stabbed at a St Patrick's parade. It is expensive and unfriendly, and still dealing with pandemic junk, but it is real and not needlessly cruel, unless you drive for some reason.
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Mar 22, 2023 19:40
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Boston is a nice sized city in a blue state with all the amenities you could want without being as crazy big as NYC, LA or CHI or crazy expensive as NYC/SF. It is compact and way more walkable/bikable than many of the made-for-cars cities in Texas or the mid-west. Public transportation is no NYC but its pretty top tier in the lol that is the US. Biggest downside IMO is that the weather can be pretty bad for half the year so depending on your need for sunshine If you want something tech-friendly but slightly more chill I might go for Minneapolis or Madison over Providence.
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Mar 22, 2023 19:58
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I'm visiting Boston next week for the first (and last??) time so excited to see if I can verify any of these generalizations
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Mar 22, 2023 20:18
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Sivart13 posted:I'm visiting Boston next week for the first (and last??) time so excited to see if I can verify any of these generalizations I spoke at a conference in Cambridge a decade ago and a fat Irish guy with bright red hair named Sully asked me if I needed to pahk my cah. Boston stereotypes are real.
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Mar 22, 2023 20:32
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Paolomania posted:If you want something tech-friendly but slightly more chill I might go for Minneapolis or Madison over Providence. Yeah, Providence is way behind for the jobs that are actually in the city. It was a manufacturing town that happened to host an Ivy League school. Manufacturing left, shipping slowed, city went into a bit of a spiral and feels like it hit bottom about 2010. Would have been Detroit except for that aforementioned Ivy League uni. Been bouncing back and has really doubled down as a college city with Brown, Prov, RISD, a few smaller schools, plus URI not far away. College towns become tech towns after a while, and I'm betting on Providence being one of the next tech boom towns... the next time tech booms.
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Mar 22, 2023 20:37
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Vulture Culture posted:A cool thing about Boston is that it's less than 2 hours from Portland, a much better city Boston is a two hour drive to two Portlands. But only one of them is cool.
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Mar 22, 2023 21:18
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Boston's not the best market for a generic dev role but all the universities here mean that there are a ton of commercialization efforts happening and there's plenty of interesting work. The housing market sucks, but that's true in pretty much any major city now, so it's not really a point against us.
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Mar 22, 2023 21:46
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lifg posted:Boston is a two hour drive to two Portlands. But only one of them is cool. Portsmouth also had one of my favorite diners on the East Coast, the Golden Egg, and I was really disappointed when they were bought out by some real estate developers during the pandemic. But I heard the other day that they're going to be reopening in a new location, which is pretty rad
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Mar 22, 2023 21:49
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Boston has those fuckin ding dong trollies that also go underground like a subway... hilarious
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Mar 23, 2023 01:56
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No wait, my most Boston experience was when I went out to a fancy restaurant and the sommelier recommended a white wine that was "wicked dry"
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Mar 23, 2023 02:37
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I was shocked to discover that Alewife is not pronounced the way it seems obvious it should be pronounced.
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Mar 23, 2023 02:46
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Lotta bad opinions on a pretty decent city itt
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Mar 23, 2023 13:27
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Especially lolling that there are posters that think that Providence, Portsmouth, and Portland are better places to live and work
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Mar 23, 2023 13:29
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I am transitioning from swe into a more cross-team technical leadership role at my company because the year long cross-team project went poorly and was an embarrassment for the CTO. The company has about 50 swe across 7 teams that are mostly siloed with their own infrastructure, pipelines, applications and services. This results in a lot of duplicated functionality like multiple applications that are managing accounts with their own concepts of what an account is (which confuses our users and customer support). When applications do need to communicate across teams, the APIs adhere to no real standards, change unexpectedly, and most teams do not build their integrations to be tolerant of that which can lead to disruptions and outages. The VP desires to move the org to a more service-oriented arch which is a pretty big engineering culture shift and causing a lot of friction not just in engineering but for the business to understand how to organize around that. Has anyone been in or seen a similar situation or have any resources to share that may be useful? tia barkbell fucked around with this message at 14:11 on Mar 23, 2023 |
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Mar 23, 2023 13:48
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I'm in the same situation and the advice I'm giving myself is "find a new job" if possible in this economy. The teams don't communicate because their own leaders don't communicate and the CTO also doesn't communicate. Failures affecting the entire enterprise often get handled by DMs among god-knows-who because the leaders in charge of the flakiest services "hate support tickets." My thinking on these things is informed by Stafford Beer's The Brain Of The Firm. If the system was well designed, each of these teams would be capable of taking the signals that come in and responding to them so that other teams can adjust. I suspect understaffing is to blame as much as ill-suited management. Can't prevent fires or communicate about them when you're fighting multiple fires all day every day.
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Mar 23, 2023 14:12
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barkbell posted:I am transitioning from swe into a more cross-team technical leadership role at my company because the year long cross-team project went poorly and was an embarrassment for the CTO. The company has about 50 swe across 7 teams that are mostly siloed with their own infrastructure, pipelines, applications and services. This results in a lot of duplicated functionality like multiple applications that are managing accounts with their own concepts of what an account is (which confuses our users and customer support). When applications do need to communicate across teams, the APIs adhere to no real standards, change unexpectedly, and most teams do not build their integrations to be tolerant of that which can lead to disruptions and outages. The VP desires to move the org to a more service-oriented arch which is a pretty big engineering culture shift and causing a lot of friction not just in engineering but for the business to understand how to organize around that. Are they giving you the authority to make the necessary changes? If not, you're being set up to fail.
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Mar 23, 2023 14:44
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ultrafilter posted:Are they giving you the authority to make the necessary changes? If not, you're being set up to fail. This what I always say, but the managers always say that we shouldn't need the authority: we should be able to influence the org magically with our outgoing personalities (i.e. convincing them to make it a higher priority) Love Stole the Day fucked around with this message at 14:55 on Mar 23, 2023 |
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Mar 23, 2023 14:46
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Does anyone have any advice on whether to early exercise ISOs? As far as I can tell it's just a bet on whether I'll be able to unload the shares for more than I paid for them before I leave the company or it fails; if I'm right, I reduce my waiting time to sell them after vesting and potentially reduce my tax burden (depending on AMT stuff), and if I'm wrong I lose my cash outlay. Do I have that right?
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Mar 23, 2023 15:33
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IMO, ask a tax professional what to do with them. I didn’t and I owed a lot, poo poo’s complicated.Blinkz0rz posted:Lotta bad opinions on a pretty decent city itt it could be better!!!
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Mar 23, 2023 15:38
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cum jabbar posted:I'm in the same situation and the advice I'm giving myself is "find a new job" if possible in this economy. The teams don't communicate because their own leaders don't communicate and the CTO also doesn't communicate. Failures affecting the entire enterprise often get handled by DMs among god-knows-who because the leaders in charge of the flakiest services "hate support tickets." Totally agree. Leaving is always an option and there is a large communication problem. The current VP was running some "architecture working group" that was just a way to delegate tasks that the VP should be doing (setting strategy, API contracts, etc) to the individual teams to figure out (which caused problems of differing solutions amongst teams). ultrafilter posted:Are they giving you the authority to make the necessary changes? If not, you're being set up to fail. It would be a title promotion and associated authority afaik. How that plays out and if teams/leadership respect my authority is another thing. I wouldn't have any direct reports so I'll need to exert authority through other means. I've been successful i the past here at changing process and driving culture change through tooling and services. My initial thought is to focus on API contracts, but I'll have to dig into each teams' apps first to get my bearings. The CTO wants me to take over the working group and use that as a platform for exerting influence on engineering initiatives. Tech leads come there asking for answers already so I think that could be promising. Thanks for all the comments!
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Mar 23, 2023 15:50
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barkbell posted:I am transitioning from swe into a more cross-team technical leadership role at my company because the year long cross-team project went poorly and was an embarrassment for the CTO. The company has about 50 swe across 7 teams that are mostly siloed with their own infrastructure, pipelines, applications and services. This results in a lot of duplicated functionality like multiple applications that are managing accounts with their own concepts of what an account is (which confuses our users and customer support). When applications do need to communicate across teams, the APIs adhere to no real standards, change unexpectedly, and most teams do not build their integrations to be tolerant of that which can lead to disruptions and outages. The VP desires to move the org to a more service-oriented arch which is a pretty big engineering culture shift and causing a lot of friction not just in engineering but for the business to understand how to organize around that. Manage expectations. Folks rarely want to change, and also a lot of the changes to make things really great will just take too much effort and not pay off in a reasonable timeline. Or maybe they will, measuring risk is tough. Get more measurable goals than "make people work better" and be clear that this work will lose the company money in the short term, because you're paying extra to stand still.
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Mar 23, 2023 15:50
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Boston is the only city in which I almost got involuntarily committed for suicidal ideation simply from having to interact with the locals regularly. The place is actively psychologically dangerous to move to.
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Mar 23, 2023 15:54
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Blinkz0rz posted:Especially lolling that there are posters that think that Providence, Portsmouth, and Portland are better places to live and work Note: didn't say that Prov was a better place to live and work. Just that it was my favorite city in the region and one that I think will be a boom candidate the next boom time.
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Mar 23, 2023 16:46
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If you can live in Providence, take the train and work in Boston, you've probably won. There was a podcast "Crimetown" I think, about Providence back when Vincent "Buddy" Cianci was the mayor. That has it all, and its ok to enjoy because the city worked out. It has the mayor getting caught on tape telling a witness "The toes you step on today may be connected to the rear end you need to kiss tomorrow." It describes the mob section of the jail, where people just had whiskey and goats. It has a former mob enforcer who now is just really excited about the ranger he plays in D&D. Classy place, Providence. E: What Crimetown doesn't get into is how Kurt Schilling really hosed over Providence's games incubator. Games in Providence makes a ton of sense: artists from RISD, tech from MIT/Boston, low cost of living. StumblyWumbly fucked around with this message at 16:59 on Mar 23, 2023 |
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Mar 23, 2023 16:56
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StumblyWumbly posted:If you can live in Providence, take the train and work in Boston, you've probably won. Hah, the mob is 100% active in Rhode Island still. They've been mostly sidelined, but politics in the state are interesting.
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Mar 23, 2023 17:30
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gently caress commuting, all my homies hate commuting. Not even taking the commuter rail can fix Boston.
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Mar 23, 2023 17:53
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raminasi posted:Does anyone have any advice on whether to early exercise ISOs? As far as I can tell it's just a bet on whether I'll be able to unload the shares for more than I paid for them before I leave the company or it fails; if I'm right, I reduce my waiting time to sell them after vesting and potentially reduce my tax burden (depending on AMT stuff), and if I'm wrong I lose my cash outlay. Do I have that right? That is basically correct, but this is absolutely talk to a relevant professional before you do it territory. You're gambling to potentially get a better tax situation in the future and it's very easy to gently caress up and risk money for no actual potential upside.
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Mar 23, 2023 18:50
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