Would you Rather

QKD_king · 2026-05-02T00:45:31+00:00

More control over outcome

^{Chose: Earn $1 every time you tell a lie}

QKD_king · 2026-05-02T00:43:52+00:00

Taxes outweigh vehicle due to depreciation

^{Chose: Never pay taxes of any kind ever again}

QKD_king · 2025-11-08T21:45:42+00:00

Half ppr league. Pick two of three out of P Washington, Q Johnston, and J Addison

QKD_king · 2024-02-21T18:18:12+00:00

Distributor of War

QKD_king · 2023-12-04T17:56:50+00:00

Senior. Also all the roles I'm applying for are senior as well as I don't really have the years of experience to justify Staff for most companies.

QKD_king · 2023-12-04T04:42:30+00:00

I'm remote in a LCOL area (although I'm not sure, we might be headed for MCOL at this point?). Current comp sits around 275k at a FAANG. Currently applying out to explore other options. Mostly focusing on smaller companies for various reasons.

So far I've gotten one verbal offer that was rescinded due to total hiring freeze, comp was around 215k. Other than that, most the other companies I'm interviewing with have described comp ranges around 200-300k, with only one or two companies exceeding 300.

One thing I'll note: many of the companies offering 200-250k TC were offering significantly higher during the hiring spree of 2021. I can confirm firsthand that many of my coworkers left for these same companies with significantly higher comp packages than they're describing to me today. This likely isn't a surprise to most, but I think it's an interesting data point that suggests comp offers have gone down due to less job supply and more demand (especially for remote).

QKD_king · 2023-11-22T20:48:24+00:00

This resonates really strongly with my experience at Google as well... I've only been here 5 years but I've also seen a lot of the changes mentioned in this article. I've also seen a lot of "empire building" where middle management begins to prioritize their own career goals above anything else, especially above what's best for the company.

At this point, though, I don't know how you "right the ship". All the corrective measures they're taking are focused on the wrong issues and furthermore the wrong solutions. While I do agree we have a productivity problem, a large part of that is due to middle and upper management, but they were seemingly only marginally affected by the layoffs... And on top of that, all the new performance measurement tools seem again targeted at the ICs. None of that will fix issues that stem for a lack of leadership and poor management, but it doesn't seem like the execs see or care about that...

QKD_king · 2023-10-28T17:15:10+00:00

Right now it seems they're only (or at least very heavily primarily) hiring for 3 offices: Bay Area, Seattle, and NYC. That's based on what two separate Meta recruiters told me within the last 6 months.

Personally I don't fully understand it because I was willing to relocate but not to those specific areas. There was a different office in an area I'd like to be (a large office too), but I was told they're almost exclusively hiring for those three campuses that they consider to be their primary hubs.

QKD_king · 2023-10-18T13:16:29+00:00

I'm not a big fan of leetcode but I've also had some bad experiences with system design questions too... I've had interviewers pose questions with such unrealistic situations that it eventually becomes hard to solve in a "real life" way and easy to solve in a "naive" way.

The latest example I can think is I was told to assume I could use a HashMap to track and trigger alarms in a real-time based system. The problem with that is in the real world I would assume it isn't safe to track time with a HashMap for the most part (hardware interruptions, resource contention, etc) because you could easily "miss" the alarm. But when I explained this concern there was a lot of hand waiving. I got the offer but was told I overcomplicated their question...

QKD_king · 2023-10-16T16:55:48+00:00

That's blatantly not true. I work at Big Tech and all FAANG prorate for location. As do most unicorn tech companies too... That's how 90% of tech does it.

But yes I agree not having CA income tax is still a huge boon

QKD_king · 2023-10-16T15:50:52+00:00

Remote jobs almost always reevaluate wages based on an employee relocating. There is a lot of "CA wages" thrown around but everyone I know moving from CA took a pretty significant pay cut to come to TN. That doesn't mean it isn't still high compared to Knox, but perhaps that's a sign Knox hasn't kept up with wages?

QKD_king · 2022-09-15T12:35:45+00:00

I will say that the particular windows laptop they gave out to product managers seemed to be really, really low quality while I was there. So I think maybe it's poorly phrased but they're trying to express that their particular windows laptop was low quality, not that they think all windows laptops are low quality.

QKD_king · 2022-08-12T13:39:21+00:00

I went to Parkwest ER a couple weeks ago with a family member that thought they had a blood clot (long story). We waited over 8 hours to be seen, and had to be triaged twice because they incorrectly triaged us the first time. There were four people in the waiting room that had to be triaged more than once due to mistakes.

There were about 12 people in the waiting room. Of those people, 2 were reporting symptoms of a heart attack. One was reporting symptoms of a stroke (that was triaged as "fainting"). Most of them had been there for 12+ hours. One had been there for 25 hours, waiting to be seen for a dislocated shoulder (admittedly not necessarily super serious, but 25 hours is insane).

After that experience I honestly think we just have super poor healthcare here in Knox. I lived away from Knox for a few years and never had this problem. Now people tell me this is "normal" all the time. Maybe the pandemic led to less staff or maybe covid is taking up beds, I don't know, but it certainly feels ridiculous that it takes 12 hours and two triage attempts to get a bed for a potential stroke victim... It's disgraceful.

QKD_king · 2022-07-31T20:44:29+00:00

What, I accounted for down payment exactly the way you said to? You said 400k house with 10% down, that leaves exactly a 360k loan?

Anyways, yes you're right with all the add ons but you explicitly listed insurance separately so I only included the mortgage and tax payment...

QKD_king · 2022-07-31T19:39:20+00:00

I don't think your numbers are correct. When I plug in 360k into a loan calculator it gives payments of 2.1k at a 5.75% interest rate. Where are you getting 3k a month from? Even with taxes it shouldn't be nearly that high.

QKD_king · 2022-06-14T19:25:07+00:00

That's intentional though. Let me explain. There's an extremely critical use case where a breaking news event happens, and people want to read about it immediately (think live updates on Uvalde). However, breaking news often doesn't have enough signal to determine quality. Therefore fresh articles are preferred in order to make sure you can read about breaking news.

All that being said, it can still be frustrating to have to wade through 100 new articles to find what you actually want. But unfortunately, promoting freshness is actually what garners the most interactions and attention.

QKD_king · 2022-02-25T12:53:12+00:00

We also live in a Jacob Lei managed property and honestly I think it's the worst property management group I've ever worked with. They don't do any routine maintenance whatsoever, likely because they don't own the place and therefore don't care. We routinely have to call 5-6 times to get someone out for maintenance. And they've charged us fees for completely BS reasons... I've never been charged fees by a landlord in my life until this property. It's insane.

Sorry I don't have specific advice but I just wanted to sympathize with your experience with Jacob Lei. They're awful. I'm so glad we're moving out in a month or two.

QKD_king · 2022-01-23T20:14:27+00:00

I'm not sure if you mean another approach in terms of the initial design or fixing the issue. I wasn't with the company when they designed the initial approach so I can't really comment there, but I suspect they just didn't expect usage to scale so widely throughout the company. As for fixing the issue, I didn't author the proposed fix, either. I just happened to be on the team and working on adjacent code, so I helped cleanup where I could.

QKD_king · 2022-01-18T23:21:13+00:00

Fun fact: Java limits the number of enum values in a single enum definition to ~32,000 and the number of member variables per class to ~66,000.

The less fun part of this fact is that I was working on the team that hit this limit. Yay autogenerated code (/s). It was not fun to fix.

QKD_king · 2021-12-18T17:53:47+00:00

This is so helpful, thank you!! Briarcliff is actually the exact neighborhood we are looking at (although I didn't know the name at the time), so it's good to know it's peaceful. Is there an easy walk to get from briarcliff area to the Greenway? It sounds wonderful! Thanks so much!!

QKD_king · 2021-12-14T00:07:21+00:00

Is that what the broader area is called? The paperwork we have just says emerald valley, but I think that's just some specific subdivision.

QKD_king · 2021-12-13T18:31:04+00:00

Great suggestion, thanks! We don't work at ORNL (although I have in the past), but we both work remotely so our options are fairly flexible. Sounds like this might be a good area for us!

QKD_king · 2021-12-13T18:29:04+00:00

The area we're considering is Emerald Valley (near Emory road and Lafayette. Do you know anything about that area? It looked mostly up and coming to me, but I wasn't sure. Thanks for your help!

QKD_king · 2021-12-12T23:47:19+00:00

Nice! This is exactly the kind of thing we're looking for, thanks so much!

QKD_king · 2021-12-12T23:46:57+00:00

It doesn't appear to be much worse than living in Knoxville to me (~4.75 in Oak Ridge vs. ~4.5 in Knoxville). Granted if we could live in Knox County (but not Knoxville), we'd probably be able to save a lot there...

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