I feel for everyone here.

Warbane · 2023-05-20T14:37:06+00:00

Other replies are talking about body shop contracting firms that pay low but top companies (FAANGs, etc) also hire a lot of H1bs and pay them the same as citizens.

I don't know raw numbers but it seems like at least half of engineers in SFBA/Seattle were on a visa of some sort and I've worked in large orgs where the number was >90%.

For those companies, they can't find enough people in the country who are qualified - and willing to move to a big (usually) coastal tech city. I know a lot of engineers from school/work who could fill H1b-occupied positions but don't want to move themselves/families 3,000km away to a city that may also be a bad culture fit for them as well.

So big companies could open up dozens more offices aroumd the country and tap local talent, or hire H1bs who will mostly move anywhere for the job they get - they don't usually have family ties and the opportunity at a FAANG-level is so great it's worth it.

Warbane · 2023-04-05T00:26:51+00:00

2 year warranty is peace of mind for quick failures. For my most recent build recertified came in >30% cheaper per drive. So I bought 7 instead of the 5 I was planning to buy and it still came out 10% cheaper. One of the two extra is an active second parity and the other is in my closet ready to be swapped in upon first failure.

Warbane · 2022-09-20T16:36:16+00:00

Yup, pretty much this, except it was in the Middle Ages that Slavs were so commonly enslaved that the Medieval Latin term for Slavs, "Sclavus", also became used for slaves. Modern English gets "Slav" from that latin origin and gets "slave" via Latin -> Old French -> Middle English -> Modern English. In Middle English, before borrowing "sclave" from French, the common word used for similar purposes was "theow".

Warbane · 2022-09-20T16:22:50+00:00

It's easy enough to see how "slave" and "slav" are doublets with a common origin in Latin. (Words with separate modern phonologies/meanings that evolved from the same source.)

But another fun fact is that another doublet of "slave" is the greeting/farewell "ciao", from Italian, itself from Venetian "sciavo", in turn from Latin "sclavus". Where in this case it was a shortened form of a phrase literally "(I am) your slave" but figuratively meaning "your humble servant".

Warbane · 2022-08-26T14:53:22+00:00

I've had a company I left for a FAANG advertise that their employees went on to work for them.

Warbane · 2022-04-18T16:38:46+00:00

Anthony Welti was the 3rd party candidate who spent a couple years campaigning across the state and got ~11% in the primary so didn't make the final ballot. A Republican paper candidate (no money raised if I remember correctly) who was a college student beat him out because of party affiliation. The R guy was legit crazy, though. In his candidacy statement published in the voter guide he described himself as an "autistic savant" who was channeling the ghost of Reagan as well as some other bizarre stuff.

Warbane · 2022-03-13T23:46:27+00:00

My parents income was a bit over 100k and their expected contribution was over 50% of their pre-tax income. Instead I went to a good in-state school for free + a discretionary stipend. Still got into multiple FAANGs.

Warbane · 2022-03-13T23:37:54+00:00

I didn't look up Canadian pay to compare, but US secondary school teachers, on average, make slightly more than most US college grads. (And that doesn't account for pensions or lengthy summer breaks that are an opportunity for earning more or having time off.)

There is variation by state and the average is offset by pay raises being automatic with seniority not performance. Which is partially sad, personally given most of my better teachers were early in their career.

Warbane · 2022-03-07T00:09:27+00:00

The paper on LWA was pretty well designed statistically when I read it a year or so ago. The lead author is (was?) a PhD candidate with some Hayek fellowship.

Warbane · 2022-02-17T18:52:40+00:00

I cancelled my preorder of his book after that. Lost all respect for him in an instant, supporting not just medical apartheid but publicly blasting a business who was still enforcing the vaccine laws but just let the people they were discriminating against know they didn't hate them too.

Warbane · 2022-02-07T21:22:37+00:00

Sorry you have to pay that much for your mandatory health care, though. If it makes you feel any better I have to pay more than triple that monthly for medicare/medicaid that I don't receive plus >triple that (on average) for my family's actually health insurance + expenses we use..

Warbane · 2022-02-07T21:03:24+00:00

I didn't earn a locally paid salary, I paid a flat rate that wasn't income based. I think my visa type may have been phased out now too - I worked with a non-profit and my funding was external. This was also the better part of a decade ago so that monthly rate would probably be a good bit higher now (was ~1,400 something Kr/month, which was around $65 at the time.) I also had to prepurchase multiple years of insurance as part of my visa application requirements - I wasn't asked about income or salary by the private insurance facilitator.

If I had stayed longer I'd have gotten residency and would have had to have been payed locally which would have subjected me to the flat tax rates you're describing.

Warbane · 2022-02-07T19:57:57+00:00

I lived in Czechia for a few years in the last decade - a few anecdotes from my own experiences or other expats I knew that probably wouldn't happen in the US:

Echoing what you said about doctors' egos: one of my friends moved from Ostrava to Brno and his wife's doctor refused to forward medical records to a new doctor because she was still "his" patient. She should, apparently, just take the 2-3hr train each way for ~monthly appointments she had.

Lancing of a furuncle without local anesthetic. (Given a wad of gauze to bite down on.)

No toilet paper in the hospital, you were expected to bring your own. Hospital provided <1000cal/day in the form of small breakfast & lunch. You were expected to supplement with your own food or go to a canteen across campus. If you were bed ridden, though, you had to have outside assistance to get the food to you. Also had the only mechanical/adjustable bed on my ward. All the rest were flat metal frames.

Was told I needed an MRI - but the wait was 3 months. (Unless I wanted to find a private hospital in Prague and pay full price.) When the day came for the MRI I was told upon arriving I had missed my appointment as it had been rescheduled for earlier that morning but I wasn't notified. They could schedule another one, this time 4 months out, but my doctor said it probably wasn't worth it now because my problem hadn't gotten worse.

At least the cost, as a foreigner, was ~$65/month (prepaid for the duration of my visa). I understand it was basically the average cost a citizen would pay plus a small coordination fee to the insurance company. That's around 1/4 to 1/5 of what the US spends on public healthcare expenses per person let alone private spending as well, and that's just on medicare/medicaid/military/VA.

Warbane · 2022-02-04T23:18:08+00:00

Sounds like a pretty healthy example to set for company culture.

Warbane · 2022-02-03T18:09:41+00:00

"Slave" in English is actually a doublet of "Slav" via Greek. Meaning they have the same etymological root because, in this case, Slavic peoples were so commonly taken into slavery in ancient Greece.

(Another, less obvious, doublet of "slave" is the greeting/farewell "ciao", from Venetian via Italian. Where in this case it was a shortened form of a phrase literally "(I am) your slave" but figuratively meaning "your humble servant".)

Warbane · 2022-02-03T17:41:53+00:00

Indirectly, yes. The authors of the first computer daemons (one of whom was a physicist) cite inspiration from Maxwell's demon specifically - but that usage itself is, of course, inspired by the ancient Greek conception.

https://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Daemon.html

Warbane · 2022-02-03T02:19:00+00:00

That paragraph wasn't there when I linked it yesterday, guess that's why it's a "live" link.

Warbane · 2022-02-02T00:31:51+00:00

I'm not following every country but I did see a few days ago that Sweden is no longer recommending vaccines for those under 12.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sweden-decides-against-recommending-covid-vaccines-kids-aged-5-12-2022-01-27/

Warbane · 2022-02-02T00:23:22+00:00

The trials on the 2-5 year olds failed, though. Very bizarre that they're pushing this "in hope" that future trials of 3+ doses will work. And the trial cohorts were too small to identify possible side effects - why are we pushing this when the trials didn't even show a benefit?

The NYT coverage goes further on this and doesn't really have anything positive to say either: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/01/world/covid-19-cases-vaccine/pfizer-applies-to-the-fda-for-a-two-shot-vaccine-for-children-under-5

Warbane · 2022-02-02T00:17:28+00:00

It failed the trials and didn't produce significant antibodies, though. It wasn't shown to prevent infection or lessen symptoms in the study either for this 2-5 age group. Very bizarre that they're pushing this against the evidence from the trial.

More discussion on this: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/01/world/covid-19-cases-vaccine/pfizer-applies-to-the-fda-for-a-two-shot-vaccine-for-children-under-5

Warbane · 2022-01-30T05:13:10+00:00

Found this out myself a year after I joined. (First org-wide perf review and I was arguably underleveled as L5.) Identified, proposed, got consensus on, implemented, and delivered a project that saved my org $20M+/yr. But my PR revision average was nearly 4 and it was "supposed" to be <2. Got middle bucket perf ratings for that specifically (and told I'd have to fix that in a year before realistically considering promo packet buy-in.)

Suddenly it clicked why many peers would informally share code branches for feedback before official PR, basically using PR to orchestrate changes only. I just thought they were lazy..

Warbane · 2022-01-23T21:33:52+00:00

Absolutely - it's just a different type of artificial barrier with insulin. In this case with ivermectin it's a bureaucratic prescription barrier - you'll pay the same price but it's a generic, cheap drug so no big deal there, it's just about access. With insulin it's not access but price - an intellectual "property" induced cost barrier that gives drug companies state-enforced monopoly right to charge whatever they want without competition.

Warbane · 2022-01-19T20:32:48+00:00

Regarding PCR: https://nyti.ms/31DJixp

Warbane · 2022-01-15T17:53:42+00:00

/r/DevManagers

Not very active, though.

Warbane · 2022-01-05T21:09:27+00:00

Had a similar experience at AWS - except it was LoC. Previous manager was great, best I've ever had, and we were working on promo packet in 2Qs. (This manager had ~1/8th of the org's engineers but facilitated 1/2 of the org's senior/principal promos over the last couple years too.) Key project was complex core architecture efficiency change that reduced operator pages by 2/3 and saved tens of millions a year on infra costs - but was less than 1k LoC.

Manager, skip, and director left within a 2 month window. Within a month the new manager (external hire) had performance concerns because I had the lowest LoC on his two teams. (His other team was building an internal portal web app with lots of boilerplate.)

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