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Blinkz0rz posted:I understand, however, that companies make money by paying their employees less than the value that they produce. You presume that capital investment and entrepreneurial ability has no value.
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Dec 15, 2014 05:01
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They also return to the investors, founders, and whatnot, less than the value they produce, too.
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Dec 15, 2014 06:08
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That companies value the marginal dollar less than their employees' labor is news to nobody -- the same is true for every factor of production. The value of your product has to be greater than what customers are paying for it, from the customer's perspective, and vice versa. This is how trade works.Misogynist posted:The disputed premise is true for non-scalable commodities, like car tires produced by laborers in a factory. Not true there, either. It is fallacious to say that an employee provides "X" value and thus the company pays X - Y where Y is the profit for that employee. What you could say meaningfully about an individual employee is the marginal value that they add -- the difference in production if you removed that one employee. But companies do not make money by the formula, "We pay each employee more than their marginal value, thus we make profit." The math doesn't work that way, and you can see this from a few scenarios. For example, suppose superheroes exist, and you have a city with no superheroes. Adding one superhero will decrease property damage from vandalism, theft, etc, by $1 million a year. You might expect this superhero to get paid a really high salary, such as $900000, or $500000, depending on how well it can negotiate -- are there other superheroes willing to work for less? But suppose there's two superheros willing to work, and the property damage decreased with their combined labors would be $1.1 million. Suddenly, you might see each superhero paid only $100000. The reason is, if either of them walk off the job, the other one will still be willing to work. They're no good at mundane jobs, being superheros, so they have no other options, and the city's at most willing to pay $100000 for the marginal superhero. Maybe they could unionize and get paid more, but superheros aren't good at working together. Here, the marginal value of a superhero is $100K but the total value them is greater than the sum of their marginal values! But another scenario is where crime can only be stopped by a coven of witches. It takes 7 witches to make a coven, and then they can do a spell which cuts property damage by $1 million. Here, if you've got 7 witches, the marginal value of any witch is $1 million. But the total value of all 7 witches is much less than the sum of each witch's marginal value. But suppose earth-type witches are extremely rare, while fire-type witches are pretty common. The earth-type witch could negotiate a better salary. It is the same in the "real world." So it is utterly ridiculous to talk about the "value produced" by a single employee, even if you choose to privilege the company's perspective of what the labor is worth. The notion does not exist. Your marginal value and how well you can capitalize on that in your negotiations depends on how much your situation resembles a superhero or witch situation, and whether there's a ready supply of replacement labor for your position.
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Dec 15, 2014 08:20
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Those peer reviewers were, what, people in the social sciences? That's not exactly reality-based thinking going on there. You're arguing against a strawman of cackling evil anyway. Any non-cackling evil company also wants to minimize its costs too, and behavior between the two is not easily differentiated.
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Dec 15, 2014 18:11
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Yeah, if you want to have X on your resume, just learn it, don't be learning it. It's not like the process is (1) spend a month learning something, (2) start using it. Especially when it's like, an API or library or framework with concepts you already know about. So if you get a resume that says that, it means that either the line is B.S. or if not that the person most likely takes forever to learn things.
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Jan 30, 2015 04:28
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Lord Superchrome posted:I actually left my last job because it got boring, so my new job hunting approach was supposed to have this theme of "I want to be constantly learning new things" but now you're making me second guess my approach. Should I tone it down? Only mention it in the interview? Not at all? I don't want to get stuck in another boring job where I can't learn new things. In fact I'd dread it. You have to understand that I might form opinions from tone and word choice in writing that might not be the same as other people's and maybe I tend to "read between the lines" and notice subtext in places where other people would not, in ways that do not necessarily map to reality, so any advice I give where I'm paranoid that somebody might interpret things a certain way should be processed with skepticism. I tend to approach resumes that I look at as an interviewer, not a sifter and filterer, with extreme cynicism. So you're seeing my cynical reaction to somebody "learning" something -- a line I've tried to use sometimes. Also if I see somebody trying to come across as a "go-getter," naturally my reaction is, "oh, so this person's trying to make up for other deficiencies!" And now you're down the path of thinking, what if this is read by a third-level thinker instead of a shrughesian second-level thinker? This is insane and a horrible criterion for filtering resumes but it's the sort of thing that would make me want to be precise and exact with tone when I say that I'm learning backbone. Like, by not saying I'm learning backbone, but to say it in a way that says yes, I'm actually using it to make whatever, and I'm not just putting this line on a resume and I get your worldview while reading this information and am totally with it, and usually the desire to convey this results in the choice of a certain word or punctuation. This is totally mental but anyway you should definitely have he word backbone.js on your résumé, just say you've been using it to do X or whatever instead of "I'm learndning!", as Ralph Wiggum would put it
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Jan 30, 2015 23:28
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Also, at a startup it's a good idea to know your employment law poo poo, because they won't. For example the place I worked at didn't know that CA law requires paying out accrued vacation time when the employee leaves, and when I started they accidentally the whole health insurance for all the employees. Also a goon hacked the HR contractor's website and found out how much money I made.
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Mar 6, 2015 00:21
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Munkeymon posted:E: also the coding test was an RPN evaluator, which turned out to be a pretty fun and easy. Was this your answer? perl -ape 'eval((q[push@s,$_],"\$s[-2]$_=pop\@s")[/^[-+*\/]$/])for(@F);$_="$s[-1]\n"'
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Mar 17, 2015 22:15
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That's not an ethical dilemma. Tax avoidance is a perfectly moral thing to do.
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Mar 18, 2015 06:03
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Generally speaking if you're a developer, I don't think it makes sense to sweat the small stuff like your SSDs lasting only ten years instead of twelve. The mindset that everything that you use for work must be tracked and expensed or else you lose doesn't really make sense when it's like, you could negotiate your phone/laptop being expensed, or you could negotiate your salary to price that in. That kind of reasoning doesn't minimize combined taxes paid, I guess.
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Mar 22, 2015 04:09
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Word doesn't give you the control you need, use WorfProtect.
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Mar 24, 2015 00:56
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Show up in morning dress just to be safe.
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Jun 7, 2015 21:48
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Don't folks in the murdering-brown-people industry lose their clearance if they don't use it for a while? So that could plausibly temporarily depress wages to sub-market or near-market levels. $130k seems pretty good for a place that doesn't have an explosive cost of living, which I assume suburban Baltimore to be (compared to California, anyway).
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Jun 25, 2015 01:09
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wwb posted:( increasing to 15 at 5 years and 20 at 10) lol
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Jun 30, 2015 22:57
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Losing a single well-paid employee will cost you under $10k in accrued vacation time, so the money is a non-issue. Startups like "unlimited" vacation because that means they don't have to worry about accurately tracking employees' time off (and they already weren't doing it anyway).
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Jul 1, 2015 20:46
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Vulture Culture posted:Also, they only hire people who have the patience to get jerked around by their recruiting process for five months before being given an actual yes/no answer. Never seen this happen to people I know.
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Jul 3, 2015 19:34
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Pollyanna posted:Is Twitter like Google in its coding exercises/interview questions? Or is it closer to startups in that sense? How are Google interview questions categorically different from startups'?
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Sep 17, 2015 20:06
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Pollyanna posted:speakerphone Headsets, i.e. the headphone/mike combo that comes with every single phone ever sold, are the thing to use here. Pollyanna posted:There's no way I'm figuring that out in an hour. Then whatever problems you see in the administration of their interview didn't really hurt them.
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Sep 17, 2015 21:14
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A* isn't the right answer anyway, the search space is already linear in the size of the input, so you might as well just use ordinary BFS.
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Sep 18, 2015 04:47
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One thing that always annoyed me when interviewing people is that there's no non-buggy shared programming text editor website. Actually, for some time, etherpad was OK. But then it started getting glitchy.
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Sep 18, 2015 05:24
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Also if you want real-world data, you can record it and play it back in the tests.
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Sep 18, 2015 21:59
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For GPS tracking it's totally tracktable.
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Sep 18, 2015 22:58
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Imposter syndrome does go away, it's generally situation-specific and is easily cured by objective evidence of your skill or accomplishments, or by sufficient observations of your colleagues.
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Oct 1, 2015 07:34
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Blinkz0rz posted:I've got stock options at my new company but really have no idea what that means or how I take advantage of them. What sort of stuff should I know? Anything I should be careful about? Taxes, AMT, 83(b) elections.
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Oct 20, 2015 13:29
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Blinkz0rz posted:In either case, be a human being instead of a beep beep boop boop what are feelings robot. Watch it. Someday a robot might read this bigoted filth and torture a hundred thousand copies of your personality as reconstructed from your postings.
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Oct 24, 2015 00:30
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I'm confused. What does your coworker not showing up for work have to do with your negotiations for maximal income? Also does your immediate boss not have to negotiate his income too or is Team Labor just the leaf nodes?
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Oct 25, 2015 19:55
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Blinkz0rz posted:Do you believe there's a difference between you and a cashier at the grocery store beyond your salary, education, and skill? Is it that you can easily afford the means to production and can start your own company if you feel you're not getting paid enough by The Man?
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Oct 25, 2015 20:08
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Pollyanna posted:Now that this is my second job, I need to start thinking about developing myself professionally for the long-term. Are there good books to read in this vein? How To Win Friends And Influence People I read it and look what it got me.
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Dec 14, 2015 18:14
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Ithaqua posted:New Jersey is awesome outside of the NYC-adjacent northeastern parts and the Philadelphia-adjacent southwestern parts. You forgot the circle around Atlantic City. Also the circle around Camden is too big.
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Jan 26, 2016 06:07
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Xerophyte posted:This morning I was offered to relocate to San Francisco -- alternative: find another job since my office is closing -- at pretty minimal notice. SF seems neat, but isn't quite my dear, dark, dreary Sweden What's your visa situation, how much will you get paid?
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Feb 5, 2016 01:02
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I know a guy with wife and 2.0 kids who came in from England through an L-1 (I think) and got his green card, lives in Los Altos, he seems happy about it. I mean I would assume so, considering that he got a green card, anyway. So, uh, so there. Anyway, if you're not sure what the best decision is, that doesn't mean doing nothing is the best decision. Status quo bias (and Stockholm syndrome?  ) is a thing. And you can always go back after N months or years. It might be worth doing for the information acquisition even if you think the EV is negative.
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Feb 5, 2016 09:56
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On the other hand I've seen people with what you might consider to be a substantial project on Github end up bombing technical interviews too. To be fair something like "made a package downloader" or "made a kernel" might just be glorified "take data out of the database" skills with a different knowledge set. On the other hand these might be people that are perfectly capable of thinking precisely and they're generally useful for a large swath of development, but some other mental deficiency -- either from being bad at thinking on the spot, or a general lack of problem solving creativity -- prevents them from doing well at interviews.
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Mar 2, 2016 23:59
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My brother was an Eagle Scout, I wasn't impressed. My neighbor founded a Boy Scout troop in South America when he was 16 but didn't get Eagle Scout because he couldn't swim. So in solidarity I couldn't hire you. Honestly an 800 verbal on the SAT of 30 years ago is drat impressive. But that's really just a fancy way of saying you were too stupid to get 800 on the math portion. e: If you do that as a male I'm pretty sure it means you're gay. Or it did in the 80's/90's. e2: Actually I'm told an 800 math SAT was also really gay back then. 
sarehu fucked around with this message at 02:47 on Mar 16, 2016 |
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Mar 16, 2016 02:41
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Just going by what I was told at the time. I can only assume those young men were experts on the topic.
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Mar 16, 2016 15:47
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I think I got burnt out twice in my life. The first time I noticed was after graduating from my last semester of undergrad, after an intense semester. It wore off after a week or so, it wasn't that bad, and it was only a semester. The second time I noticed was after leaving a job. After giving 2 weeks notice I was still motivated to go to work and get stuff done, unlike in my previous job's 2 weeks. But I knew overall the job was making me gradually go crazy. Anyway, after leaving, for about 2 months, my brain basically turned off. I could only think about one thing at a time -- you know how you keep a stack of stuff on your mind while thinking about stuff? I had a stack of depth 1. And it wasn't, like, 1 big thing, it was 1 small thing. Like imagine your cognitive ability, when coding after spending 24 hours awake. It was like that. I can only hope the brain underwent a useful refactoring. Then it got better, and a month or two after that, I started getting weird urges to go apply for jobs. Like, imagine, you could have a job! Think how fun that would be! Way better than your boring, lonesome life. Edit: Also, do not try playing a round of golf in golf shoes that you know are too small for your feet. Not even at a relatively flat course like Shoreline. Your toenails will be ruined. sarehu fucked around with this message at 04:46 on Jun 9, 2016 |
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Jun 9, 2016 04:41
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I had a coworker that saw me reading YOSPOS with its color scheme on my phone and started calling me "Cyberpunk Sam."
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Jul 22, 2016 18:46
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oliveoil posted:How dumb does it sound if I want to quit my job and do nothing for a month or three? Would that be career-suicide? I did it, 1.5 years into my first job. I had a year or so of living expenses saved up, and went 10 months before I started looking again. Found one no problem, though I focused on small startups probably in part because I thought it'd be easier. The resume gap was not a complete void, though, and I had very objective evidence of me being worth interviewing on there that most people wouldn't have. On the other hand the economy was worse. So YMMV. Make sure you go outside. sarehu fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Jul 31, 2016 |
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Jul 31, 2016 21:05
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I know somebody that went to work in finance in Chicago straight out of college, he bought a Bosendorfer as a graduation present for himself. That was in 2009. He seems to have friends.
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Aug 16, 2016 04:52
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Analytic Engine posted:Why aren't more people outraged at the wages of average companies? What's there to be outraged about? You're a crazy person, basically.
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Aug 23, 2016 06:01
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:You sound like you subscribe to the Great Man theory of innovation. I see where you're coming from, but also think you're dead wrong. More like, the competent man theory of innovation.
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Aug 24, 2016 00:09
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