justinchan

Great read. Couple thoughts:

1. Wonder what professions SWEs tend to dropout to?

2. The average earnings by degree chart is interesting. But software, being so winner takes all, probably has much higher variance than other industries. Would be interesting to see the comparisons at higher percentiles.

3. "The return to being a fast learner is higher in jobs with low rates of skill change because the learnings can compound over time instead of dwindle in relevance." The caveat being that there's a high skill bar for those other jobs. My hunch is that lots of professions (outside of ones that need years of schooling like med) actually don't have that high of a skill bar, just a matter of pedigree/experience/networking/playing politics.

I’ve had similar thoughts. SSC did a thought experiment on this. You’ll enjoy this read:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/30/legal-systems-very-dif...

The article title’s a play on David Friedman’s book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30066446 (I haven’t read this but sounds interesting)

It's an imperfect measurement but I'm not sure there's a better alternative. Some people like to include stock appreciation when discussing compensation, which seems even more misleading since that isn't what was written on the offer.

Recipients have to play investor to price in the risk and volatility of the stock (ie. if Lyft and Google both gave the same offer, Google's is far less risky but with potentially lower returns).

10% cut across the board, 20% for VP+ and 30% for executives. No cut on equity. Lyft has left no stone unturned to save money where it makes sense.

source: news + work at Lyft

That’s neat. Reminds me of this episode of a Smart Cities podcast where someone talked of building (or built?) a Google Maps equivalent that optimized for pleasure instead of time. One thing that was mentioned was a way to crowdsource data on which routes or POI people most enjoyed walking across. Could use that data to help decide the weights on the graph

This would only be true if all the seats in a casino are at or close to fully capacity, which in my experience isn’t true. Also only true for games with a fixed amount to bet

Read Deep Work by Cal Newport. I’ve had problems my entire life up until the past year with self-discipline and bad habits. This book, among other factors, flipped a switch for me.

Other key factors were finding things in life that are worth the short term sacrifice for long term fulfillment. Surround yourself with ambitious folks. I’ve been the degenerate binge- watching Netflix till 5am, skipping college classes etc. And still have days almost that bad, but full-time employment changes people. Build good habits, adopt a growth mindset and we all can do it. Oh and sleep is extremely important. If I get less than 7 hours, I don’t have enough mental stamina and end up succumbing to all the short term desires.

Google does have Fiber though I imagine the extent of that is still much lower than a full Telecoms company. I think the exceptional spending on lobbying comes from the sheer breadth of services that Google provides:

> "Google said it lobbied on dozens of issues, reflecting how integral its services have become to American lives and commerce. The filing cited privacy, data security, antitrust, taxes, tariffs, trade, the opioid crisis, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, autonomous vehicles, immigration, the future of work, encryption and national security."

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-22/google-se....

JavaScript and TypeScript. TypeScript is a superset of JS so you can write vanilla JS in TypeScript code.

Also, having worked extensively with Java, changing types is not as nearly as cumbersome as you describe. In an IDE, you can replace all usages of a type in a project or subdirectory with 3 clicks. Large, statically typed codebases are almost always navigated in an IDE.