110k pre tax in the USA is 80k post tax per year-- it is often helpful for us to think in terms of both numbers when comparing money making methods. That's my guess at least.
Yeah you’re right, I just multiplied by 7 days. Then again you don’t work 5 days every single week (depends of the location) but 80k is definitely closer to the actual figure.
I used to name projects of funny names, but then I started realizing that I had no idea what other people's cute names were for their projects.
We have one in our company named right now named Harbinger, neat name... but wtf is it? Boring names are boring, but they tell other people, and future you, what they are or do.
My favorite interview experience was when I passed a live coding exercise on Monday and had time to optimize, then completely failed the exact same problem on Friday with a different company because my nerves hit me.
I feel for you man, I drove 4 hours from Sacramento to Palo Alto for a great start up job. I nailed the phone interview and thought all was going to go well. The first onsite interview went pretty well. The second part went south and my nerves got me. I really wanted the job but I blew it. I got good feedback and I'm working on interview problems. It was my first interview in 20 years but again I really wanted the job.
Its employee choice. People get bored, they get tired of processes, and there are plenty of companies willing to hire them that will allow them to try something new, do something different, and deal with different processes.
Please don't move the goalpost. My comment was responding to your comment about average tenure, not unions specifically. You didn't raise any questions on how unions played into average tenure or provide any example of how they could help.
No goalposts were moved. I questioned the premise of OP's comment on whether unions can exist in a world where employees choose to switch jobs every 2-3 years.
You responded with an authoritative answer backed up with zero evidence or supporting data. That it was about unions is an embedded assumption based on that fact that the entire discussion is about unions.
There is no help needed. People are perfectly happy switching employers, and companies are perfectly happy paying to get or retain talent. This ecosystem has made Silicon Valley what it is today.
==This ecosystem has made Silicon Valley what it is today.==
I assume this is referring to the technological innovation and corporate profits of Silicon Valley. I would ask you to consider, from a broader perspective, what Silicon Valley is today. Specifically, in relation to elevated levels of depression [1], suicide [2] and inequality [3].
Isn't it worth exploring whether the same working conditions that benefit the top 10-20% are having a negative effect on the other 80-90%?
Maybe unionization needs a disrupt? I'm not against unionization in a lot of industries, but it just doesn't make sense in its current form for the tech scene or any other high demand position. It feels like an outdated mechanism used for people who were happy to sit in the same role, doing the same thing, for 45yrs.
Modern unions that only represent one type of skill or workers in one company (or both!) are far less effective than historical unions that aimed to unionize as many workers as possible under the same umbrella. Being able to represent your members even if they switch companies gives you a lot more opportunities.
Unions are (at least supposed to be) democratically run, so if tech workers don't want to sit in the same position for 45 years until they can collect a pension, their union doesn't need to negotiate for that. They can use that leverage for something else.
Putting that together, your modernized union might be an industry-wide organization that acts both for collective bargaining and as a placement agency. They could bargain for making switching companies easier - maybe employers need to support specific benefits providers so workers don't need to switch. And they could use their network to improve bargaining - a big part of strike preparation is making sure everyone is taken care of ahead of time; the union could secure job offers for workers who can't afford to go on strike.
That's the difference between a craft union and an industrial union. A long time ago, there was the American Federation of Labor, the group for craft unions, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the group of industrial unions. The AFL had the Plumbers, the Electricians, the Machinists, etc. The CIO had the United Auto Workers, the Steelworkers, the United Mine Workers, etc. They merged in 1955.
Nobody cares much about that any more.
If you want to see a modern union, check out The Animation Guild.[1] Local 839, IATSE. They represent most of the major studio animators in Hollywood. Although they've tried, they have not been able to organize game developers.
It's about fear. Try to organize a union in the US and you will probably be fired. Even though that's illegal. WalMart has closed down stores that voted in a union. Uber workers have a strike scheduled for July 15, but it probably won't do much in the US.
It's hard for me to envision unions in a white collar environment when there's a pretty high likelihood of individual contributors being promoted to management. In factories, there's usually a separate management class of people who are engineers or college grads who are brought in to lead, so the whole worker vs management dichotomy is much clearer.
"pretty high likelihood of individual contributors being promoted to management"
1. Everybody's complaining about how they don't want to be promoted to management after a certain age and remain an IC.
2. Very few people, proportionally, are actually promoted to management.
3. Management vs worker is alive and well in all domains, this can be seen as the years pass in the attitudes of those promoted to management. It's the nature of the job, not the education.
Unions exist in high demand positions too - sports, entertainment etc. Can tech unions be modelled closer to those, and less on the style of jobs you mentioned?
Yes, and professional athletes don't get promoted to management at all. Some do become managers or other executives but that requires them to retire as a player and then negotiate an entirely separate contract for the management job.
"professional athletes don't get promoted to management at all"
Neither do most employees either, what does that have to do with anything? We can't organize because there's a 5% chance that we're promoted to management?
We can't organize because the people with good leadership qualities and other important organizing skills tend to get promoted to management. It's very difficult for people to spontaneously organize without a leader.
To me it seems that we can't organize because we're selfish and naive. I don't see anyone except you fretting because of our collective organization skills :)
Startup idea: an app for employees to organize anonymously. Not a legal union. But an app that can send to an employer this message: "95% of your employees disagree with this issue" Basically centralized communication through voting without the need for union bureaucracy.
The app can optionally take the next step and help employees become a legal union but before that it can function as basically anonymous Slack with polls that allow for majority opinions to be discussed openly and safely.
Even issues like "95% of employees think the coffee machine is shit we need it fixed" can be addressed more quickly.
2 issues have to be solved to get this to work. The app and idea itself is trivial.
First I need a full updated roster of employees of a company to confirm that an anonymous user is actually an employee of said company. Not sure how to do this in a fully secure and updated way.
Second user engagement. If I can figure out how to get one full company to use this as aggressively as they use slack, we'd be good to go to launch this in other companies.
Both are hard questions that I'm not sure how to answer or execute.
Blind already solves the first by mandating you use your company email to register. Of course, that means privacy is paramount, and you'd have to prevent situations where say management floods your system with dummy accounts. But that's at least a starting point.
The second point is definitely important. The problem too with having an anonymized place where users can vent and gossip, is that it can quickly become a toxic dump of FUD, similar to how Blind is now. And the smaller the organization is, the less likely people will want to speak out, for fear their anonymous words will be traced back to them.
I don't know how to feel about it. There are some really bad employers out there. Tech culture is fairly liberal and new. I remember reading a book long ago where managers would sit on a higher chair in negotiations. It was a different atmosphere.
I agree. I think the answer is to improve salary transparency to help alleviate the information asymmetry between employer and employee. Things like https://levels.fyi are making good progress here.
I have no interest in joining a union but I absolutely take all of the salary information I can get my hands on into account when negotiating my pay.
There was an up and comer a few years back called Blue Mars, that was shaping up to be something really cool. It allowed content creators a great deal of control over their virtual landscapes.
But, for some reason they abruptly changed direction to some kind of weird mobile avatar creator on mobile and shut down shortly after.
That could have been it, but when they pivoted they had a very complete beta product. Probably more to do with investor pressure or something along those lines.
I think Blue Mars was started when there was a huge surge of them after Second Life took off. Even Google and others were developing something in the space.
Can you please suggest some ways how to fully embrace this? I don't think offices are going away at least in my fang world.
I saw a note about everyone headphoning in - I can try this, but am skeptical because those people are still going to be more present than me (I mentioned this in my op). There are going to be side conversations, notes, glances, eye rolls, sighs I miss - the things I definitely need to get the full presence. Not to mention the walkie talkie nature of this - with everyone muting / unmuting and feedbacking.
I am open to other ideas - but am looking for ones that don't make the human interaction a lot more measured and artificial. As much as I like to be Spock, my xp points at emotions driving 90% of real decisions because the logical ones pretty much are a lay up in a sane group.
Well, we went through the transition at my last job so I kind of have some incite. We had 3 or 4 people on my project who had came over from Invision, who are a fully remote company and I have a good friends at other well known fully remote companies that I gleamed things from to help us transition from 0 remote company to a fully remote project team (50ppl-ish).
1. Every meeting should be video first. Going without video should be extraordinarily rare. Even if that's just an impromptu meeting with 2 or 3 people. Kill conference phones completely. Get used to screen sharing. Good reliable tools like Zoom are invaluable. You miss a lot from body language and facial expressions if you use audio only, which will fix your major issue. It also makes people feel more included and that the people working somewhere else are actually real people and not just voices. Make good use of Slack video
2. Every meeting should be able to be taken as remote, even if that means just from your desk (or personal meeting room if you're in an open office). This means that the people who are in a conference room must be on video with an open mic, unless there is uncontrollable excessive background noise or something. No cross the table talk on mute.
3. Don't be afraid to make temp rooms with multiple people when you have conversations on Slack (or whatever you use), it'll help more people get involved as if you were talking at someone's desk.
The first 2 things are extremely important. Invision has recently released some blogs about cultivating a good remote culture that are pretty good. I don't have any links handy, however but it's worth a look if you're interested.
I feel like saying in a decade also attempts to lay a bunch of things at the current administrations feet by implying it's worse than anything that happened during the previous adminstration.
For the record, my honest opinion is that both of these (and other, yet, previous) administrations share fault.
This sort of headline writing is for cowards and weasels.
Is it amazing that they can't do them at all, or they can't do them in the spotlight in a totally unfamiliar? I have a strong feeling that most of the people you think fall in the former are actually in the latter.
Yes, the solution might be a couple nested for loops. But if it's a new question to the interviewee, then they don't know the solution yet.
If you can't find the solution, and you can't work in a slightly unfamiliar situation which is undoubtedly supposed to be your core competency, then I don't see why that's a job you should get.
If you're bad at taking tests, being able to make a vague excuse for why you failed one is not an acceptable substitution for passing it.
If you ask questions that are relative to the job and something you might run into or someone asking you for help, then that is different.
But, I've personally never been asked these kinds of questions in a live coding/whiteboarding session. It's always brain teasers or some sort of algorithmic problem. Usually they are things that aren't necessarily hard, but are about as far from everyday work as you can get.
