deanmoriarty

I am currently in the market for a property in SF and ready to make an offer when the right property comes on the market, I hope by end of year. Also about 15 years of experience. So I suppose I would be the audience you might be interested in hearing from.

It might be helpful to talk a bit about your numbers over your 15 years career: yearly total comp at grant, yearly effective total comp at vest, amount saved per year, growth of invested savings in IRR or average.

With those numbers it’ll be fairly easy to assess if you (1) have been underpaid, (2) have joined companies that didn’t benefit from growth, (3) overspent, or (4) invested your savings too conservatively. You don’t even need to share them, any AI tool would be able to give you the answer you’re looking for.

Unless you don’t have any other options, don’t do it. Your future self will thank you. I wasted so much time being a founding engineer, it’s the worst tradeoff. Don’t do it. Don’t do it.

Once liberated from toil, how are these kids going to pay for rent?

It’s entirely possible that people who are praising this CEO might have to come up with incredibly convoluted mental gymnastics to defend their position soon: “Anthropic chief back in talks with Pentagon about AI deal”.

Source: https://www.ft.com/content/97bda2ef-fc06-40b3-a867-f61a711b1...

I genuinely get bothered when someone talks to me. I am typically rushing through my day to do stuff, whether it is hiking, grocery shopping, working out, or going to the restroom at work, and getting interrupted feels to me like getting an unwanted push notification on your phone.

When someone occasionally engages, I extremely quickly dismiss them in the most polite, but firm, way possible. I also intentionally keep a demeanor that generally signals I’m not open to random conversations (I avoid eye contact etc.), but that often doesn’t work. At the gym it is particularly problematic, I’m focusing on gathering strength for my next set and sometimes people bother you even if I am wearing headphones.

I truly do not have a problem with who I am, I’m comfortable in my shoes.

As such, never in a million years I would approach a stranger to strike up a conversation, it would seem an incredibly rude thing to do towards them, on top of clearly not having any desire to engage from my side.

I’ll talk for hours straight to my wife, close family and the very few friends I have though!

Really hard for me to understand why the average HN commenter has an almost cultish behavior towards Anthropic, they are somehow excused for all their sins whereas everything OpenAI does is taken in the most uncharitable way. It’s a very consistent pattern.

Just wanted to thank you for the Sutro Tower work (https://vincentwoo.com/3d/sutro_tower/), it was truly beautiful and I’ve been looking at it so many times, very nostalgic for me. This one is great too!

I always see a large amount of pessimism about this company on HN, and I accept it might be for rational reasons. What do people think is going to be the most likely outcome for the company, since everything seems to be going so bad for them product/moat/financial-wise? Do people think it will literally go bust and close business due to bankruptcy within a couple years? If not, what else?

But who exactly is going to catch those errors, especially when the outcome of such mistake would be an adjustment in your favor? Not the tax authorities, not the CPA. You’re left to advocate for yourself.

This is a story that really happened, I’m not making things up. A few years ago, myself and other colleagues exercised some ISO in a startup we were working for. The exercise left us exposed to a steep AMT tax, it was a 6 figure tax bill (this was expected and we knew that going in, it was offset by some liquidity opportunity on the side).

Now, if you know what you are doing, it’s possible to get back all that extra AMT tax you paid as credit in future years, you just really need to be aware of the mechanics that enable that via form 8801, it requires variable carryovers for N years until the credit is extinguished. But it’s no big deal, even the TurboTax wizard is fully capable of the functionality! A colleague of mine, with his fancy CPA, completely missed this.

It wasn’t until several years later, when I casually mentioned that I was happy to have finally used up all the AMT tax credit, recouping my full 6 figure bill, that he literally said “what are you talking about?!”, and just there we learned that his CPA completely missed the situation (my coworker being clueless also certainly didn’t help). He called me later that evening to get the name of the form 8801, and confirmed it wasn’t there in his previous tax returns. I don’t know how the situation ended, but it’s possible I saved my colleague 6 figures that day, if he acted fast and painfully amended N years of prior tax returns, and hopefully fired the CPA.

There are more modest variations of this, for example your averagely talented CPA is most likely not going to go beyond the 1099 and, say, go look up what percentage of your money market fund interest was state tax exempt and ensure you get a credit.

For these reasons, I just don’t use CPAs and consider the time I spent to learn my taxes well spent and I’m fairly confident I’m doing a better job than any CPA for my specific personal circumstances, aided by tax filing software and some reconciliatory spreadsheets. I just wish I had a software for the expat situation, since the EU/US taxation is such a nightmare and it’s what I’ll find myself in when I early retire soon.

A TurboTax-quality tax filing service for American expats with American investments who live abroad (particularly interested in a few European countries) and have to file in their country of residence and declare the income from such investments. I would pay $1-2k a year for a service like that, as I prefer to do things myself than relying on a CPA who will inevitably mess things up.

Does that mean that you hope the next generation of iOS will do away with liquid glass so that you can update, or that you’ll never update again (also implying you’ll never buy an Apple device again)?

I always understood the sentiment of waiting until the first dot release for bug fixes, but refusing to update while still being in the ecosystem seems clearly a losing battle not even worth fighting for.

It’s going to take me a lot more to switch to Android, but yeah iOS 26 is not good. Some new UX paradigms are actually useful, like the ability to swipe over controls instead of having to press buttons, or the control bars shrinking during scrolling, but all could have been achieved without the major styling change.

I’m old enough to remember the Windows 98 -> XP -> Vista regressions and inconsistencies in UX, and I expect Apple to be headed that way.

What do you think this will mean for OpenAI, Anthropic and their current valuations?

There’s quite a few people on HN who hold Anthropic on a high pedestal compared to the other AI labs, I’d be curious to hear their opinion after this.

You’ll get downvoted but in my experience, which may not be representative of the entire population, this is true.

A mid-size US tech company I know well went fully remote after a lot of insistence from the workforce, prior to the pandemic they were fully in office.

Soon enough they started hiring remotely from EU, and now the vast majority of their technical folks are from there. The only US workers remaining are mostly GTM/sales. I personally heard the founder saying “why should we pay US comp when we can get extremely good talent in EU for less than half the cost”. EU workers, on average, also tend to not switch job as frequently, so that’s a further advantage for the company.

Once you adapt to remote-only, you can scoop some amazing talent in Poland/Ukraine/Serbia/etc for $50k a year.

> About half the public identify the cost of groceries as a major source of financial stress.

And some other portion of the population, anecdotally much larger than what I would have thought, orders DoorDash/UberEats regularly, what a stark contrast.

I am in a good financial situation, but I still could never stomach the prices of those apps, $30-40+ for any item once one includes fees and everything. I recently got a promotion through my credit card that led me to take another look at DoorDash, and my local grocery store deli sandwich, which is already very expensive at about $10, would have been $25+ on there.

Yet it’s full of people using them, multiple times a week and for an entire family. I had coworkers casually mention that they spend $2k+/mo on DoorDash orders. It’s one aspect of the American consumerism that always baffles me.

While I clearly cannot control who upvotes my comments (though what you suggest seems completely nuts IMHO), I can genuinely say this is coming from an ex startup employee who has seen, and been subject to, many startup equity shenanigans (my comment history very likely touched on those over the years), so I will always applaud companies that generously compensate employees and not only senior management/investors.

Startups I worked before, who lost talent due to FAANG poaching (myself included), did not even have the business acumen to fight that, which would have been trivially possible by offering some liquidity at their “inflated” valuation. Instead, they kept those liquidity opportunities gated to senior management and investors. So I am applauding the difference in behavior here.

When employees are underpaid (see Windsurf), HN be like: investors and C-suites take all the gains, off with their heads!

When employees are generously (and proactively) compensated for the financial milestones of the company, HN be like: it’s a bubble, it’s irresponsible, investors are fools, off with their heads!

I applaude OpenAI and its investors for approving these moves. Even if it’s a bubble, sharing some of it with employees “before it bursts” is a noble action. I worked in startups where management kept employees in complete illiquidity until full wipeout inevitably happened, while many senior folks were able to take some off the table in targeted secondary transactions.

Do you have any hope that either what you are suggesting, or an increase in housing supply, will ever actually happen?

It's clearly interesting to speculate the ideal solution on the Internet, but after having been here 10+ years I worry that it's just never going to get better.

I just did, picturing exactly the situation I'm in right now:

- Rent: $3,500

- Home price: $700,000 (a similar unit just sold for this price a few months ago in my building)

- Rent increase: 8%

- All other parameters left as default, which seem reasonable (and as I said, there might be chances of refinancing over the next 10 years, which would drastically skew the picture, but I'm leaving that assumption out)

The ratio of 0.5% monthly rent/price is common for non-luxury "dated" condos all over the city, so I think my situation reflects well the typical renter.

Once again, in my personal experience, guided by a decade+ of living here, what people miss is the crazy rate of rent inflation. There is always a massive rent increase right around the corner, and God forbid if you are forced to move (because the landlord wants you to, it happened a couple times), then you take a gigantic hit every time.

I am a renter so I don't have a horse in this race, but renting is many times the financially worse choice even in HCOL.

Why? Because rent inflates like crazy over here! In the Bay Area 7%+ a year is completely expected, and 10% is not unusual. I have been all over the Bay Area for more than a decade (San Francisco proper, East Bay, South Bay) and know this well. It's been nuts.

Random example: the 1 bedroom apartment that I lived in 2012 and was then going for $1,500 a month, is now going for $3,800 in the exact same building (with no/minimal renovations it seems, I just looked it up). An ~8% YoY increase. That will do it to any buy vs rent calculator, very easy to break even in under 5 years, and that's excluding the speculative ability to refinance if interest rates go down from the current 7%, in which case it becomes a huge boost.

Renting as a long term choice just works in European countries where normal people can lock in 5+ year leases with no or minimal rent increases. America is too profit-seeking and greedy for that.

I still rent for flexibility reasons, but I definitely see it as a luxury lifestyle choice, the most financially responsible thing would be to buy, even in HCOL.

All this in my opinion and personal experience, totally fine if people see it differently.

Seriously, without joking someone laying me off right now with 6 months severance could be one of the best thing that ever happened to me.

> Over the decades, I have seen too many friends who have fallen for this story, 'hit their numbers' and loose their minds after 'retiring'. This is because the mind just unravels(unable to find meaning), if it doesn't have daily structure and purpose.

What specifically happened to them? I am one of those who cannot wait to quit my job (career altogether really) and I reached a good financial number, but don't have a clear future direction.

> Keep in mind that almost all of the FIRE advice available online has been written in a secular bull market that is almost 2 decades long

Most of the reasonable FIRE advice (e.g. https://earlyretirementnow.com/ quality) suggests a ~3-3.5% withdrawal rate, which has been measured using historical data way before the current secular market.

Is your take that even such withdrawal rate wouldn't work anymore, moving forward?

Where can I real the actual post you are mentioning? The tweet only mentions "had to forfeit all of my vested shares earned over my 3.5+ years at Windsurf", which seems to conflict with your "before his shares were vested" statement.

Do you know what are the mechanics that allowed the VCs to get repayed, but not the employees who did not take the Google offer? Is this an issue with liquidation preference, or was there something more shady going on that truly allowed VCs to make a “big” exit, while the employees owning common shares did not?

I totally agree! Philips diamondclean toothbrush anyone?

The first one lasted literally 10 years, it was one of the best consumer purchases I ever made.

Ever since then each replacement has crapped out within a year or two, despite same usage pattern. I bought one at Costco on sale and after returning it broken after just six months, a record for a $100+ device, the clerk at the return counter said they have piles of those. Crazy.