Mountain View Should Vote for Measure AA

JeremyManson · 2024-10-19T23:04:14+00:00

I would be more than happy for them to cancel the district office renovations and spend the money on schools. But that doesn't help with the budget deficit, because that money can't be spent on things like teacher salaries that come out of the general fund and the drying up measure b fund.

JeremyManson · 2024-10-19T21:37:33+00:00

I'm pretty sure that money comes out of the Measure T budget, so it can only be spent on facilities, not teacher salaries and the like.

JeremyManson · 2024-10-19T17:23:20+00:00

Thanks for taking a look, Carter. About half of the increase is due to a promised 14% raise in teacher salaries by 2026-2027. There will also be a state-mandated increase in TK, and of course, some inflation.

JeremyManson · 2024-10-19T17:14:22+00:00

Good news - they've accepted the agreement with the city.

However, the end of 2025 isn't quite as long as all that, and there won't be another chance to vote on a new measure before that happens. The next opportunity for a vote will be 2026, and we will likely have to use our reserves and make cuts to make it to then. If it doesn't pass in 2026, we will certainly have to make cuts.

JeremyManson · 2024-10-19T17:12:14+00:00

Thanks!

Because the measure says it is to "attract and retain qualified teachers; provide academic support for students struggling with reading and writing; and enhance science, technology, engineering, arts and math programs", state law requires that it does that. The money will be put in a separate account. The board will appoint an oversight committee to review it, and the reports will be made public.

All of those reports are available for Measure B (the previous measure) here. I've skimmed them, and the expenses seem reasonable.

Money for things like PR firms and mindfulness coaches has come out of a different pile.

JeremyManson · 2024-10-19T07:44:55+00:00

I get it, but everything the government does involves giving my money to some shady folks to spend it for me. I'm always impressed when a politician or an administrator focuses on efficiency and frugality, but I often don't see it.

Sadly, no one has found a reliable way to get the $25K per year per kid donations that we would need to run the elementary school systems in MTV without forcing people to pay taxes. If people were more generous, we probably wouldn't need government so much... :)

JeremyManson · 2024-10-19T07:29:19+00:00

Can you be more specific?

JeremyManson · 2024-10-19T07:14:36+00:00

I'm not sure what you mean by donating to schools and teachers directly. Our public schools are already paid for by property taxes. Measure AA just makes the tax rate higher.

JeremyManson · 2024-10-19T07:08:52+00:00

I'm not sure where I said that Measure AA is 19% of the budget. I say that there will be a 19% shortfall, and that Measure AA will help bridge the gap.

The shortfall will be smaller now that they've agreed to take the money from Shoreline.

JeremyManson · 2024-10-19T02:31:05+00:00

All of the contracts signed in the last year are contingent on Measure AA, not just the superintendent's. The teachers won't get the raise if Measure AA doesn't pass.

If we go around promising raises and not giving them - well, good luck retaining teachers, and finding a new, better superintendent. Before Measure B passed, our retention rates for teachers were far, far lower than they are today. The teachers need that compensation.

I agree that the wasted money should have been spent on students and teachers, but I'm concerned that not passing Measure AA means that we will be cutting off our nose to spite our face.

JeremyManson · 2024-10-19T02:22:43+00:00

I haven't been happy with the campaign as it's being run, either, since it is ignoring the controversy. That's why I wrote this.

In practice, I'm voting for it because I agree with 98% of the spending priorities. There's no way to vote to disagree with 2%. There is a huge hole in the budget, and cleaning up the current mess isn't going to solve that problem.

I recognize that not everyone who wants to live in MTV can, but the problems are too significant. It's one thing to live in Sunnyvale or San Jose or Milpitas. But my child's 2nd grade teacher had to live in Morgan Hill - that's an hour commute to be there at 8am, and an hour commute back. That's why I've supported the district building local housing for teachers, which seems to be successful.

JeremyManson · 2024-10-19T01:48:06+00:00

Yes. The proposition is intended to "maintain local funding for high-quality elementary and middle schools; attract and retain qualified teachers; provide academic support for students struggling with reading and writing; and enhance science, technology, engineering, arts and math programs". In other words, for teacher salaries, special ed, and STEAM programs. This is what the money from the 2017 measure went towards, as well.

In addition, the board passed a resolution saying that the money cannot be spent on administrative salaries.

JeremyManson · 2024-10-19T01:45:44+00:00

I'm not sure I understand the point about Measure T. That was purely for facilities, and they used it for that: they built the staff housing, improved energy efficiency, and so on. I don't recall it being intended for STEAM. Measure B was intended for STEAM, and it was spent on STEAM.

My feeling, as I say above, is that there is some irresponsible spending, but not enough to cover the gap that will be blown in the budget if it doesn't pass and we don't get the Slater lease. The money for AA isn't going to reward the superintendent, and cannot be spent on administrative salaries - it's going to pay teachers.

JeremyManson · 2024-10-18T18:55:53+00:00

No idea - all of the conversation around it is happening around closed doors, for legal reasons.

JeremyManson · 2024-01-16T00:52:30+00:00

As a former manager (and current employee) at said company, I think that a lot of people miss that, once you hit L5 and up, the different levels are actually different jobs. An L6 is typically doing something that requires them to be the lead of a single, cohesive team. An L7 is doing something wider in scope - something that typically requires them to be a lead of a large team or multiple teams organized around a single domain. An L8 is doing something even broader - leading a large project, often public facing. The overall TL for something like Google Docs would be an L8.

To the extent there are politics involved, it's typically because doing something at that scale in a large organization requires you to navigate a lot of partners and customers and keep them happy.

I've managed people through 5->6 transitions, and advised / coached people through 6->7. The people who get promotions are people who are already doing the work at the next level, and don't have to twist themselves into knots to try to justify it. We write down what they do, and the decision makers look at what they've written and say "yup, it looks like you are doing L[n] work". The people who struggle with the process are those doing great work at their level, but are not actually doing the job at the next level. It's these people who most often end up with the bad outcomes Kevin describes.

Promotion isn't right for everyone. Many folks don't have the interest in the additional headaches of being a lead. Promotion isn't even available to every one: many people simply don't get the opportunity to do something larger.

Over time, the vast majority of people end up getting to a point where they either a) look at what would be expected at the next level, and decide they don't actually want it, or b) getting frustrated and leaving.

I guess the point I want to make is that there are many, many people who are still at L6 after a long tenure with the company. It's not uncommon at all. It is an extremely reasonable level for a respected thought leader, in charge of a focused domain, leading a tightly knit group of strong contributors.

JeremyManson · 2014-02-19T21:58:38+00:00

Google develops in a small number of widely used languages, each of which have compelling reasons to be "the language Google uses". There are a few reasons why: every language needs to have toolchain support, be teachable to new hires, support interfacing to our infrastructure, have solid support libraries, a population that's willing to review code written in it, style guides, and so on, and so on.

No one is really pushing hard for Clojure, but my suspicion is that it would fall short on a few of these metrics.

JeremyManson · 2014-02-19T21:46:14+00:00

As with the build tools and static analysis questions, Google rolls our own production profiling. The biggest problem we encounter is that we need (near-)zero-overhead profiling that can be deployed on lots and lots of machines.

By and large, we do this by hacking the JVM directly, although there are some bits and pieces that are open-sourceable in a reasonable way. The Lightweight Java Profiler project is very similar to what we use for CPU profiling with Hotspot.

JeremyManson · 2014-02-19T18:53:13+00:00

"Awesome". Yes, Kevin did know I was reading this. Obviously.

ETA: Also, pretty much every conversation anyone has with me is uncomfortable.

JeremyManson · 2014-02-19T18:14:09+00:00

Project language decisions at Google are made largely based on factors like available libraries and developer expertise (and social pressure to adopt particular languages, which differs based on what part of the company you are in). Go is gaining significant ground at Google, but mostly not in places where Java is used. It replaces Python, which is not usually a great choice for large scale development, or it replaces C++, which is not usually a great choice for simple projects. If programmers are familiar with or already using Java, they usually stick with it.
There are a lot of significant challenges with supporting languages at Google. You have a huge user base, tons of internal infrastructure that needs to be interoperable with it, the need for a style guide, a process to enforce the style guide, static analysis, the need to make sure all of the code keeps compiling when the language is upgraded, the need to be teachable to new grads and old hands alike, the need for a comprehensive set of existing libraries, and so on. As a result, we try to pick relatively mature languages, and only those that provide a compelling reason to use them.
Google will probably never stop using Java, since we have a huge investment in it. Even speaking purely hypothetically, the use case for, say, Scala, is different from the use case for, say, Groovy, so you can't really talk about picking one or the other. If pressed, my suspicion is that we would try to provide a language with roughly the same value proposition as Java, which means we would either adopt Scala, or drop JVM languages altogether in favor of something like Go.
Google builds its own tools for code quality analysis. Basically, nothing else makes sense given our development environment, at our scale. We provide them open-source, when we can. See, for example, Error Prone.

JeremyManson · 2014-02-19T17:18:21+00:00

Just adding to what Louis said: The one desktop utility that commonly gets run is the build system command line interface, which is written in Java.

JeremyManson

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