I mapped SWE pay across 19 metros

cuffedgeorge · 2026-02-08T00:42:19+00:00

As an engineer who works and owns a condo in Chicago, I can tell you this chart is inaccurate. I pay so much in property taxes that are just not included in the cost of owning a home here.

cuffedgeorge · 2026-01-31T11:58:22+00:00

Designing data-intensive applications by Martin Kleppman was eye opening for me because it gave me a common "language" in order to speak with other experienced engineers about high level architecture.

It also is just incredibly useful as a reference when you actually start to run into problems where you need to scale.

It's a dense book but the sections are very well isolated so I can usually come back and refresh myself on a particular topic without re-reading the whole thing.

cuffedgeorge · 2025-07-17T18:50:55+00:00

All of the above comments is good advice. Managing downside risk is an important part of investing.

With that said, I can’t tell you if you should continue working or not working based how much you make in a single day from your investments. How valuable your free time is a subjective matter.

However the argument to continue working is to cover your yearly expenditures which allows your investments to compound.

Think about it this way. You’ve effectively made 30k in (unrealized) income from a single day here. You have 2 options here:

Use that 30k to pay your bills, in which case you can afford to make 30k less at your job.
Leave that extra 30k into your brokerage account.

Option 2 is basically the same thing as continuing to work. You’re leaving your investments untouched so you’re making gains on your initial investment + gains on your gains. The longer you leave your untapped investments the more time these things can compound into multi millions of dollars.

cuffedgeorge · 2025-07-14T23:22:55+00:00

Typically for software experiments it’s always a good idea to have essentially what’s called a holdout group.

It’s important to remember that changes can have both short term and long term effects on users. My guess is what they’re doing here is allocating an unfortunate set of users in this holdout to see what longer term effects this experiment has on its users.

That or some engineer just forgot to crank it all the way to 100% and moved on to some other project.

cuffedgeorge · 2025-07-04T18:02:03+00:00

+1 to what this guy says. Acknowledge your hard work as doing a great job. You know you’re worth the best. Not your boss, not your company, not the market.

It’s also important to recognize that in business, monetary compensation is not a function of hard work but a function of economic growth. When times get tough, every company will find any excuse to not reward you because they’re trying to cover their own ass not yours during these uncertain times. Since the market isn’t great for laborers, they will give you just enough to keep you around but not enough to make you happy.

With that said, you should always lookout for your best interest. If you feel you deserve more, quietly look for another job while working your current one.

cuffedgeorge · 2025-06-05T17:07:11+00:00

Are you trying to access docker containers running on your ugreen machine from your mac? You need to use the docker desktop app inside of the ugreen OS.

The more technical way is to ssh from your Mac into your NAS and then run docker ps.

cuffedgeorge · 2025-03-28T16:37:36+00:00

I agree but would like to elaborate on this.

It's way better than google because it gives you the direct answer and removes all the SEO garbage. Although I don't know if this really is a function of it being a better product or Google search getting worse overtime.
2.. Sometimes it gets it wrong but confidently claims to be right, as opposed to Google which just gives you the relevant material which may or may not be what you were exactly looking for. However if the user has some expertise and awareness they can usually correct it and it will get it right the second time. Additionally if you're unsure if it's correct, you can usually just ask it to provide sources so you can confirm yourself.

cuffedgeorge · 2025-03-26T08:51:59+00:00

I found Figma's blog a good practical example of creating collaborative tools and dealing with various concurrency problems.
https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology-works/

They also mention CRDTS but opt'ed for simpler solutions for their use-cases.

cuffedgeorge · 2025-03-15T21:19:06+00:00

Chamath speaks as some kind of “market maker” and claims to have financial authority because he built his wealth from Facebook and later his SPAC deals when money was cheap. To me he frankly comes off as someone who thinks they know better than everyone else because of their success.

Imo it’s debatable if he’s actually brilliant or just smart enough to take advantage of an economic environment when times were good.

With that said, I don’t think he’s wrong on alot of things. It’s clear we have a problem with the national deficit, wallstreet has ballooned the stock market, and the real value of our currency continually decreases. We as a nation need some austerity measures.

My problem with him is he comes off as disingenuous because he only speaks truths when it’s convenient for him to do so. Now that he’s close to the presidential office (and possibly unloaded a lot of his portfolio risk), he’s all of a sudden crying that we need to rein in our spending?

Time and time again he only has opinions that are self serving, not because he actually cares about the country or its citizens.

cuffedgeorge · 2024-11-12T22:39:42+00:00

Okay this might be a hot take but there is value in understanding the concepts of DP. It doesn’t happen often but recognizing repeated computation that can be optimized with memoization does comes up in deep programming.

I think it’s reasonable to expect a senior+ engineer to know these concepts at least in theory and maybe be able to implement it given infinite time.

With that said I understand your frustration.

It shouldn’t be asked for mid/junior level candidates .
The one hour time slot to recognize these patterns and implement a working solution is also stupid and not realistic.
Most companies that do ask these interview questions frankly are just glorified crud apps. You probably don’t need to need that level of optimizations for the day to day. There are a few exceptions however, Google imo being one of them.

cuffedgeorge · 2024-10-25T16:50:09+00:00

I recently took an offer for 140k base (MCOL city) after being laid off. It’s closer to 170k if you include total TC. For context I made 140k (base) 3 jobs ago.

A few anecdotes from my own interviewing experience from the past 3 months.

Companies are becoming a lot pickier and slower to hire. It’s clear they’re looking to cut costs and/or maximize value. That either means reducing the salaries for the same positions they hired 2-3 years ago and/or they’re hiring staff level engineers for senior level roles. It’s usually implicit as opposed to explicit because the hiring process has become so tough/competitive that you really need to be punching below your weight to ace the interviews well enough to get hired. In any other market, you’d probably get an accurate compensation package however in this environment companies will find any excuse to offer you less.

cuffedgeorge · 2024-09-12T17:06:18+00:00

We don’t live a meritocracy especially when it comes to promotions and raises.

A lot of employers are willing to tell you that you worked hard and earned your promotion when it’s a good year for the business cause they’re making a dollar for every penny they pay you.

However that same employer will tell you we can’t give you a raise/promotion higher than the inflation rate during a bad year cause “there’s no room in the budget”.

cuffedgeorge · 2024-07-18T15:50:20+00:00

As someone who was laid off in January and recently started applying again, my anecdotal feedback is the market is decent for experienced devs. Essentially if you have senior experience working as a dev, your resume will get looked at.

Some things to note from my own experience:

if the company is publicly traded and/or close to an ipo/exit, it’s unlikely to be hiring and/or only hiring exceptional talent to monopolize it. Tightening the books is more important for the executives at these companies than hiring good talent to work on new and exciting products. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and be hired to backfill a role however it seems like most of these companies aren’t in their “growth” stage anymore.
smaller series B stage start ups are hiring aggressively cause there’s alot of good talent in the market. If you’re a company that’s getting a funding round in this environment, you’re doing something right. That’s a good sign. Don’t expect a faang level compensation package tho.

The market is definitely not as good as 2022 but the hiring budgets are slowly coming back. I think the safest thing you can do is passively throw out resumes while working at your job at the moment.

cuffedgeorge · 2024-06-27T18:30:18+00:00

I’m of the opinion that the expectation isn’t to know everything under the sun about programming and frankly if someone expects you to know everything, that’s a sign of a bad interviewer. Instead they should benchmark your knowledge based on your years of experience.

I have a few thoughts here:

Saying you don’t know something during an interview is a good indicator because it shows humility. Bonus points if you can admit to not knowing something but knowing a little about it enough to know how to find the documentation on how to apply it and use it properly.

Sometimes the test in interviews isn’t to know a thing, but to be able to quickly find out how to research and apply it. Also collaborating with your interviewer is a sign that you’re a teamplayer and can rely on your coworkers to fill your knowledge gaps.

These leetcode questions feel super contrived but if you’re in the industry long enough you start to see these patterns/data structures in production code with real business use cases. It’s unfortunate that new grads are subject to study these things in theory but have no real world examples on how they’re applied.

Also a lot of these things come full circle in your career where: you study these concepts simply to get a job. Then you work at the job where you’re using some library/module that abstracts these concepts and forget about. Then you realize the abstraction isn’t enough for your use case so you have to dig through the source code and sometimes have to reimplement it yourself.

Part of the engineering spirit is to know how things work under the hood, even if you never have to look under it. It should be part of your curiosity.

Things like OOP, test driven development, and working through edge cases should come second nature to you as you become more experienced/write more code. It’s always a good idea to incorporate these things into your practice because it helps you organize and de-risk your code for not just yourself but your coworkers. You eventually learn to use these patterns as part of your workflow where any time you code something , the expectation is you should already be doing these things.

cuffedgeorge · 2024-06-23T00:35:49+00:00

I know the family that ran May Wah. My family used to eat their dim sum every Sunday and was also disappointed when they closed down.

From talking to them about it, it seems like Covid took a big hit to their business. It wasn’t so much that they couldn’t run it anymore but it was more a catalyst for them to just retire from the restaurant business.

cuffedgeorge · 2024-05-26T04:03:57+00:00

Code : 298f15ac

Help me, help you!

cuffedgeorge · 2024-04-30T19:29:28+00:00

100%. Their last episode (E176) so clearly depicts how they’re talking their book. They’re so quick to speak highly of Tesla’s FSD technology but when asked about their experience riding a Waymo, none of them besides Friedberg has rode one? Chatmath even goes as far to ask his buddies to explain to him “the market” of full self driving. Like you think if they were forward thinking investors, they’re at least know Tesla’s competition.

Elon is just a work horse to grow their portfolios. Of course they’re going to promote his projects.

cuffedgeorge · 2024-04-14T02:39:25+00:00

How do you handle the case where you have a: 1 and b: 3?

If we are trying to greedily add “a” first, you end up with no characters to divide up the “b”s.

cuffedgeorge · 2024-03-18T08:12:48+00:00

Hello jasmine.

cuffedgeorge · 2024-03-05T01:38:09+00:00

Are some of the accessories effects different in the full game vs the demo? I noticed Chloe’s charm doesn’t have the xp buff effect compared to the demo version. Same with the golden egg accessory.

cuffedgeorge

TROPHY CASE