What makes me most sad is that fostering the web tracking industry - tech + marketing - is so lucrative. I have such a hard time understanding this world - it does not make much sense any more. This lying and scheming around collecting all your data and activity for the next VC funded ad playground.
And I'm kind of irritated, how people can spend their lives working for mostly investors, who benefit much more than every (even well paid) gear in the machine.
Aren't we as a society smart enough to start treating humans with a bit more respect and not just seeing them as wetware to extract value?
because consumers don't want to pay for anything. It's easier to extract private data, and sell that to a corporation for a lot of money, than to extract a small premium from each user (which is like squeezing blood from stone).
I think it's one of the great lost opportunities in human history.
I don't know what the "correct" course of action would have been, instead of making everything ad-supported and mostly terrible. Some kind of very very seamless micropayments? Maybe there was no "correct choice." Maybe "free, but awful" always would have won no matter the alternative.
But man, this outcome sucks. The internet turned out to be just one more way to squirt advertisements into our eyeballs.
See error code 402 in the HTTP spec: https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec1...
It just doesn't pass any kind of common-sense test. People don't really want to spend large portions of their lives wearing goofy headsets, seeing things nobody else can see. Even if (when) we shrink the screens down to the size and weight of regular eyeglasses, I don't see it. It is not compatible with anything else... you have to completely cease all other activities and utterly devote yourself to your VR experience, sealing yourself off from the world.
VR definitely delivers a pretty awesome experience when done well, don't get me wrong. I think it will hang around and have its fans. But, game-changer? Never.
I'm currently at $160k (as a contractor, assuming 5 weeks of per year). Could have had more, but I'm currently in low cost of living country (former soviet block), so any move would be offset by increase in taxes and costs of living.
You can make good money in Europe, it's probably just harder here than in the US.
I'm able to work 10–18 most days, but I do have to have some results eventually. I know of people in this office who got dismissed for not having good enough impact.
For them, $160k is for sure more than they've intended to pay when they opened offices here, but there are just no qualified people who would do that for less (as qualified people f off to London, Switzerland etc. and get paid even more), so in the end they hire me and people like me. We're still cheaper than equivalent talent in company's home country.
You get 6 weeks of vacation, and don't have to worry about going to the doctor.
Compare that the the US, where you can be earning nearly 200k, get a few weeks vacation, save some money but everything feels temporary. Go to the doctor too much? You're let go for not meeting deliverables. Need more time on vacation? No. Don't have time to enjoy living where you're living because you're at work dawn to dusk? Well thats the price of not having to worry about rent.
If you want to coast, you generally don’t work on teams that ship new product. Apple’s a big place. There’s totally teams that are good fits for people who want to have less direct product impact and be off the critical path, but I wouldn’t say that’s the common case.
The best analogy I’ve heard is that working at Apple is a pie eating contest.
And the reward is—more pie.
Each person has different feelings about how much pie they want to eat.
Just that from what I can tell talking to many FAANG workers (and working with a bunch of them who came from other FAANGS), Apple seems to be the easiest place to get away with slacking if you want to, Google also being an easy place to do it.
It's why most of the people I worked with left those places -- they got tired of the slackers.
I've never met anyone who talks about how ease it is to slack off at Facebook or Amazon. And I never saw anyone get away with slacking at Netflix.
> Apple seems to be the easiest place to get away with slacking if you want to
You are the first person I’ve heard this one from! I’m almost pleased to see some balance? I worry we have the reputation of being too grindy too often!
I think this can be very org dependent. I wonder if most of the people you know are clustered in a specific part.
> I've never met anyone who talks about how ease it is to slack off at Facebook or Amazon.
Weird. I have. We seem to have very different experiences.
Also whenever I’ve talked to people who work inside Facebook I just. I just couldn’t. I’m certain I’d go stark raving depressed so quickly there. The froyo on campus is nice though.
Acronyms really need to be phased out, as I highly doubt you mean Functional Annotation of Animal Genomes. I'm guessing it's the 2nd result?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook,_Apple,_Amazon,_Netfl...
What is "IT", by the way?
Facebook makes you demonstrate your impact to the company twice a year. You would be hard pressed to be a slacker long term there.
The work does appear different because at that scale you spend a lot of time tracing out what's there, figuring out context, and trying to figure out how to make a change without bringing down everything else. If you're used to a small company or a small codebase where you spend most of your time writing new code it seems less productive, but it's mostly just different.
The quote is from “Howl” by Allen Ginsburg, a poem about burnout (among other things). That’s applicable to a report of people working a 9-9-6 schedule, a recipe for burnout.
Rather than being the centerpiece of intellectual activity as you put it, it would seem the vast majority of the "best minds" are employed in the field. Rather than more necessary pursuits, more people are applied to making us click advertisements and applied to the surveillance of our browsing habits and other activities. It's not just the FAANG companies. The city I live in is flooded with small ad-tech startups who are going to "revolutionize the world". On top of that, to hear the ad-tech teams are probably the only teams at FB that are working a crazy schedule speaks loudly. Very loudly.
"I'd love to retire to South Africa but I'm allergic to something in the air - bullets."
Don't feel too bad. As far as I know, only Google and Apple lets you get away with this kind of slacking. Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix certainly don't.
Also, SWE out of college definitely aren't making enough to buy much more than a condo.
That being said, you're still right. I go to a lot of international software conferences, and I when I talk to devs about their work, they are just as smart, passionate, and hard working as the people I've talked to here in the states, but they are getting paid a lot less.
I read a salary report in South Africa and they asked me what I thought, and my first thought was, "You guys need to get paid a lot more".
I hope that with the rise of remote work, this evens out.