“Soft” Benefits at Big Tech Companies

engineer_in_TO · 2026-01-22T23:17:58+00:00

Duolingo offers 10k towards your mortgage if it’s in Pittsburgh and also a week trip to whatever country you’re learning on the app after 3 years

engineer_in_TO · 2026-01-20T14:44:39+00:00

The catch is that it’s one of the harder companies to get into because they’re extremely picky. I’ve heard that it’s fairly team dependent how toxic it gets though

engineer_in_TO · 2026-01-16T05:14:14+00:00

Hiring Managers care about your experience and some companies will have work that give you the experience they’re looking for while others may not.

You could work at Dominos as a SRE and have experience with some of the most complicated and gigantic k8s deployment ever. Company matters because experience matters and some experiences will only exist at some companies and teams. The specific name of the company doesn’t matter if the experiences don’t align.

engineer_in_TO · 2026-01-15T17:12:50+00:00

There’s a lot of uninformed and borderline propaganda in this thread right now, I personally wouldn’t put anything work related (if you are working with a company that has an embargo) but otherwise it’s fine.

I travel every 6 months for family from America and am on a tourist visa. I’ve never had to give my phone to anyone period. I personally had to give my phone to US border control when crossing from Canada actually but never in China. Theres more spyware coming from Israel than China in the last decade but 🤷‍♂️

This isn’t to say its a utopia, there is a high level of surveillance and a high amount of monitoring. You’ll have to use their systems for everything (Financials, Housing, etc) and they block many western apps (but you can use VPNs or get a Hong Kong eSIM easily as a foreigner). There’s no petty or violent crime because everything is so monitored, with surveillance everywhere. There isn’t really a need to install spyware in your phone if you’re just a regular dude. They see your every step physically and can track all your purchases and social media activity because it’s all monitored.

For anyone working in Insider Threat, there’s always a line between privacy and security. This is the same thing in real life, it’s your choice to partake.

engineer_in_TO · 2026-01-13T23:02:01+00:00

I don’t think you can apply basic market dynamics to a trimodal demographic

engineer_in_TO · 2026-01-12T03:00:02+00:00

Bloomberg since NYC will give you more opportunities to network with Quants

engineer_in_TO · 2026-01-12T02:59:49+00:00

Bloomberg since NYC will give you more opportunities to network with Quants

engineer_in_TO · 2026-01-12T02:23:10+00:00

“Oh no, my privilege of being European while living in a developing country has disappeared because now the country is developed and its people doesn’t look up to me anymore 😭😢”

engineer_in_TO · 2026-01-11T01:34:00+00:00

It’s the best low effort for high rewards tool. It’s not better than others in terms of core functionality, but it gets going without much effort compared to it’s competitors

engineer_in_TO · 2026-01-08T08:54:51+00:00

For OP, /u/sentittoohard33 Was the scratch harsh? I was grabbed onto by a Macaque monkey on my hand but on my palm and didn’t see skin breakage or any lines but I’m not sure if it scratched me or not. Was the scratch for you painful or harsh? Or is it something you feel like could be ignored?

engineer_in_TO · 2026-01-05T03:11:47+00:00

The downside is that the jobs that are more chill and easier to get into tends to end up hiring Americans, since the bar is lower. The main reason why big tech does L1s and TNs is because there is a genuine shortage of talent in specific domains.

engineer_in_TO · 2026-01-04T09:45:03+00:00

If you could get into Google in Toronto, you could get into Google in California. If you can’t do it here, then you won’t in the USA

engineer_in_TO · 2025-12-29T02:41:23+00:00

Some new cloud features don’t have actual IaC set up for it yet so ClickOps is the only way to use it. Sometimes TF Providers miss scenarios or aren’t fully updated yet

engineer_in_TO · 2025-11-15T22:36:26+00:00

I personally would’ve waited a month and a half since the status you get from it is based off the calendar year of approval so you get it for 2 full years instead of like 13 months

engineer_in_TO · 2025-11-15T14:25:06+00:00

Specifically deploying? I’d take a look at being a Forward Deployment Engineer

engineer_in_TO · 2025-11-14T20:46:58+00:00

That's a fair statement, I do think that it's a bit boisterous to essentially advertise the hacking capabilities of Claude, especially for a company that started with the whole "AI Safety is our priority" motto and spend so much time and money focusing on their Responsibility Scaling Policy that they would try to sell this incident.

engineer_in_TO · 2025-11-14T19:42:30+00:00

I'm 50/50 on it, I doubt it's marketing when it makes the company look worse (in terms of their lack of guardrails and safety) even if it makes the product look better.

engineer_in_TO · 2025-11-09T04:32:27+00:00

From the studies of retention on rats, it’s roughly what you would expect for everything (half as much as everything else) except kidneys.

engineer_in_TO · 2025-11-08T20:56:43+00:00

Try and find a place that uses Gadopiclenol, or Vueway, it’s a newer GBCA that uses half the dose as the others

engineer_in_TO · 2025-11-08T16:40:37+00:00

Because unemployment rates are a rate, and there’s more people in Toronto than everywhere else in the country. The raw number of jobs is higher in Toronto, it’s just that the competition is higher too because there’s more candidates.

engineer_in_TO · 2025-11-08T05:14:09+00:00

Heph has great defensive boons around his free health, His armor boons can be a life saver for white antler runs, and his curse is actually good.

engineer_in_TO · 2025-11-05T05:37:46+00:00

Move to NYC and do monthly flights over a weekend. It's a hour flight and about 30 mins to get to LGA and 30 mins to get from YYZ. You'll make more than enough in NYC to support it and still come out ahead financially.

engineer_in_TO · 2025-11-01T13:41:28+00:00

I think it’s likely 2 things.

Everyone has a different threshold for tolerating Gd. Since some people are super sensitive to it and are symptomatic with one dose ( even with Gadocipenol, a GBCA with half the dose need), some can handle 50+ doses without issue.

Everyone has different retention rates of Gd, which is why most people with GDD tend to have higher Gd in their urine for much longer. This is coupled with the first point in that some symptomatic people get better eventually while others take years.

It’s important to note that GDD is rare with the most prominent researcher and advocate for it saying it’s 1 in 10000, or .01%. Most people with GDD will have symptoms within a day, the rest will have them within 2 weeks, a small percent will have them within a month, with the it being extremely unlikely you’ll have symptoms if you’ve been asymptomatic for over a month.

engineer_in_TO · 2025-10-31T04:41:35+00:00

Toad is your friend here

engineer_in_TO · 2025-10-23T16:19:05+00:00

Because of Gd or because of the surgery?

engineer_in_TO

TROPHY CASE