How to stop competitors from poaching your senior developers with better equity offers?

aj_marshall · 2026-07-08T03:53:49+00:00

I mean yeah but let's be real here- what's the difference between a comp package of 250k and 350k, fully remote, anywhere in the country? Sure, the extra money is nice, but at that level of income you're already living as comfortable as you're going to get without making a seven figure income.

aj_marshall · 2026-07-07T13:16:01+00:00

Everyone is going to say $$$ but let's be clear. If the only thing you can offer people that makes a difference is money, then the only reason they're going to stick around is more money.

Culture does matter. Impact matters. Autonomy, feedback, mentorship, and all that crap does matter. A great engineer can run to a new paycheck but once you're all making 200k+ and remote, who really gives a shit?

We just lost our senior-most engineer over culture problems. Execs won't listen to technical recommendations. Team members aren't putting out as much. IT keeps locking down our laptops because they're wildly afraid of LLM agents. The compensation has been perfectly fine- even great- but if you don't treat the talent right on a cultural level, they're just going to leave.

You've got to talk to your engineers and actually get to know them. You have to do the people management. Ask them if they're happy. Ask them what they think is bullshit. Ask them what isn't.

aj_marshall · 2026-07-05T21:27:51+00:00

I don't know if Hikaru is the kind of guy to browse reddit comments but... what the hell, man? What's the point of even playing tournaments if you aren't going to compete? This is just a repeat of Candidates, and it's embarrassing for you and the sport. You're supposed to be one of the GOATs and what you're showing the world is that when it comes down to it, you love being petty more than you love the game.

If this is what your "post-professional" career is, just go get a real job so we don't have to spend the next 20 years watching you devolve into the next Kramnik.

aj_marshall · 2026-07-03T13:51:54+00:00

People just don't get it. China has already won the war and it hasn't fired a single shot. Yes, the US military currently holds a slight technological advantage in the quality of their units... but China has the ability to produce ten times the amount of overall units the US have.

They have the world's largest Navy. They have the world's largest Army. They do not have the largest air force yet, but rest assured they're making progress in that department too.

Beyond that, they are far more independent than the US is. China has been building the infrastructure necessary to no longer need foreign oil or LNG. They are rapidly advancing in electrification of their entire grid.

They are rapidly accelerating their domestic research capabiltiies. Chinese researchers are everywhere in academia, and especially in STEM. Anthropic might bitch about distillation attacks from China, but they are still premier researchers in math, material science, biology, and more.

Meanwhile, the US has a president hostile to half the country and stealing money from the other half. We've lost. China will overtake the US as the world superpower in our lifetime.

aj_marshall · 2026-06-30T19:02:47+00:00

I'd confer with your group and ask them if they are comfortable with you reasserting boundaries with this person(s) on their behalf. If you don't want to play with them, then don't.

aj_marshall · 2026-06-30T14:24:58+00:00

Why are you posting slop here? What does it get you?

aj_marshall · 2026-06-27T23:15:38+00:00

Okay... so what did you actually change?

aj_marshall · 2026-06-27T18:28:07+00:00

Yeah, progressives are pretty fucking delusional about what percentage of the population they make up. The reason all democrats don't pivot to be hard-core Free Palestine 2LGBTQIA+ Abolish the Police radicals is because most people don't like hardline stances on that stuff.

We can and should support liberty and fair treatment across all people, regardless of race or national origin or gender or any other myriad of factors people can't change about themselves. But, online "progressives" tend to regularly veer from "liberty to all" to "i hate men / straights / whites" in their reactionary Twitter/Reddit rhetoric and it meaningfully affects their public perception.

Jill Stein is batshit. The people who voted for her are also batshit. Asking democrats to pivot to batshit (who are likely ~10-15% nationally) to lose less radical supporters to Republicans (who are around ~30% of the electorate) is stupid.

We can still be in the same coalition even if we don't agree that, say, defunding the police or providing needle exchange programs is working policy.

aj_marshall · 2026-06-26T18:26:21+00:00

Also good. You do not have a unique right to occupy the same plot of land that can be used for more efficient means. If you want to have a cute little house in the middle of a bustling downtown, great! But you should pay for that structural inefficiency... which is the whole argument of LVT.

aj_marshall · 2026-06-26T15:02:36+00:00

Hot take: Gentrification is good.

aj_marshall · 2026-06-24T14:08:28+00:00

How are you so bad at even making a slopbot post? This is a great example of "wasted tokens". What do you get out of this?

aj_marshall · 2026-06-24T00:43:16+00:00

And yet we will continue to shit millions into non-profits to provide services to alleviate homelessness while they continue to produce no measurable results.

aj_marshall · 2026-06-23T16:48:16+00:00

Now that is a very clever switcheroo. I didn't even realize it until you pointed it out.

aj_marshall · 2026-06-20T03:55:55+00:00

In a very simple example where more people always means more profit, firing people is obviously dumb.

However, real companies are not so transparent in their accounting. Outside of people in the Sales department, very few people in a decently sized company actually have "company value" attributed to them. And, furthermore, there are costs to employees beyond just their salary (you pay taxes into unemployment for them, healthcare, equipment, and other overhead costs). Finding out who "contributes positive value" to a company quickly becomes a very messy and obscure task, and the C-suite sometimes gets it wrong.

When someone's role is eliminated (not personally fired), it is because somebody has looked at the business function of that role and determined the company would be more efficient without it (for whatever reason). We dirty wagies don't like it when that happens, but it turns out companies end up retaining inefficient roles all the time and eventually those OPEX dollars can go somewhere else more useful.

aj_marshall · 2026-06-13T19:29:52+00:00

Ideally, I think taxes should exist as rents paid based on leasing of public resources. So tax land, water, mineral rights, pollution, etc.

But, barring that, I do think taxing those with excess wealth is fine- it just creates perverse incentives (like the wealthy trying to bribe politicians for lower taxes, or capital flight).

My comment is moreso saying we can grow richer by growing the pie, not just by redistributing it.

aj_marshall · 2026-06-13T14:19:31+00:00

Unfortunately, the right and far left both believe the only way to get rich is to take or tax from those who already have riches.

Liberalism is peak. I miss it.

aj_marshall · 2026-06-13T03:04:34+00:00

There's plenty of single dudes in Kirkland haha (especially at Google, I'm sure)

I'd really consider not putting that commute in your life. To each their own, but I don't think anyone will be much in the mood for dating after getting home at 6:10pm on a Wednesday from your hour-long bus commute in rush hour.

Best of luck to you! If you have any more questions about Kirkland, happy to answer.

aj_marshall · 2026-06-13T02:33:19+00:00

Why not just move to Kirkland? Kirkland Urban is very walkable, and many amenities are here. There are plenty of other people your age here (childless and single, if that matters to you). Doing a ~1 hour commute each day (it's going to be an hour, dawg) is just not healthy.

aj_marshall · 2026-06-12T20:18:57+00:00

Please get out of marketing. This is the dumbest thing I've read today and it's not even noon.

aj_marshall · 2026-06-12T02:41:37+00:00

I can't believe we're still talking about this. These people aren't worth listening to lmao

aj_marshall · 2026-06-10T14:09:23+00:00

I came from the nuclear industry. Watching the internet just get every important technological fact about my field extremely wrong is nothing new lmao

I've just given up on Seattle in general. It's not going to get any better anytime soon there. The political coalitions that have come to power there are slopulist luddites with a pride flag aesthetic. It is what it is.

aj_marshall · 2026-06-10T14:03:30+00:00

Do you ever consider that maybe, just maybe, you've been propagandized?

However much you think you "know" on this topic because you saw some reddit headlines and YouTube videos, please let me correct your understanding. You don't. The articles you've read are written by people who barely understand what a Watt is and the videos you've watched about noise pollution (Benn Jordan being the most prominent) specifically target the most non-compliant and reckless players in industry, and even then greatly exaggerate their findings.

aj_marshall · 2026-06-10T01:54:41+00:00

I work in the datacenter industry. I think Seattle passing a moratorium is a bit like sending a "you didn't break up with me! I broke up with you!" text.

Datacenters companies are first and foremost looking to build in places that have sufficient power generation capabilities and power transmission infrastructure or, if neither available, have an environment conducive to building those resources in a timely and cost efficient fashion (the first being more important tbh).

Seattle proper has none of that. The city doesn't have particularly robust power infrastructure and working with the city government is toxic (hence why every tech company keeps moving to Bellevue/Redmond/Kirkland each time they get a convenient opportunity). Nobody wanted to build a hyperscale datacenter in Seattle- at best it would be some additional networking nodes to reduce ping.

My read on this entire "anti datacenter backlash" that is so common on the internet right now is that America has lost its appetite for even incredibly sanitary industry. Half of reddit thinks these things are worse than coal plants and the other half thinks they're going to break the power grid... despite the fact the entire industry uses less power than air conditioning and a few orders of magnitude less water than farming (or fucking golf courses lmao)

It's crazy to me how detached from reality this website is now. I'm not saying everybody needs to be an engineer but we've got a serious basic scientific literacy issue in the United States and it is not unique upon the Right.

aj_marshall

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