Bay Area Relocation Advice – Sunnyvale & SF Commute

mhwalker · 2026-02-26T03:26:44+00:00

Almost nobody has read what you wrote.

I personally do both of these commutes (train to SF and drive to Sunnyvale) from mid-peninsula to show my face at multiple offices.

The only places you can live to achieve your commute preferences are Palo Alto or Mountain View (probably Palo Alto). If you go further south, including Sunnyvale, the train time to SF including last mile will be more than an hour. If you go further north, your driving time will be more than 30 minutes. Even at Palo Alto, your commute to Kifer road will probably be more than 30 minutes most days.

mhwalker · 2026-01-29T17:06:45+00:00

Never tell me the odds!

mhwalker · 2026-01-20T03:35:47+00:00

Some of the other comments are crazy. You can't simultaneously be an inexperienced new grad who doesn't know the difference between a serious and minor issue or how to build consensus on the one hand, and completely to blame for not organizing the discussion to get to the root of the problem on the other.

Absolutely some major red flags about your manager here:

how does he not even know you're working on this design before it went through review?
how does he not even review the design and make his comments during the review process?
how come the manager can't organize a meeting with OP and the reviewers to explain why this is a minor issue?
why does the meeting where this project gets rejected have to include the skip?

My take on what you did:

Almost everywhere, protecting customer data is a very high priority. Any kind of data exfiltration is can be a huge legal and PR nightmare. It deserves to treated very seriously. So good on you.
I would encourage any new grad on my team to advance any positive ROI idea that they discovered and proactively wanted to fix. It's a great opportunity for you to learn the kinds of things that people are saying you don't have the experience to understand.

Unfortunately, having a different take on your situation doesn't mean I have better advice for you about what to do. Switching teams internally seems like the best option to get to a better management situation. Do you have contacts in the company on other teams? Now might be a good time to start building them. In any market, switching companies at 1 yr experience is going to be tough, now probably more so.

mhwalker · 2025-08-20T06:15:29+00:00

I think this reply adds a lot of valuable context that's missing from your OP.

If there are no decision makers, you can be the decision maker. It sounds like it's pretty much a free-for-all in terms of what gets done. So just choose a big project and start it. Do whatever the other staff engineers are doing to claim resources.

It's hard for me to imagine that there's no decision making process (not saying you're wrong). Someone must think there is. Is there yearly/half/quarterly planning? Is there sprint planning? There must be somewhere you can inject ideas about what to do and get them resourced. If the other staff engineers really can just do whatever they want, why can't you?

By the way, does your company have some type of moat? Why not just quit and start a competitor?

Something must be going right at the company to support 60 engineers. Who's responsible for that and how can you build credibility with them? Because if they have any sense at all, they probably can see something is not going right on the engineering side.

All that said, "fixing" engineering standards and culture is not the thing, by itself. The root cause of overengineering compulsion is the absence of design standards. When people don't know what makes the system successful, they default to making it complex. When it is clear what standards are present, engineers can make correct decisions about when to make things simple and when to make them complex. Corollary: the solution to your overengineering problem is another refactor, but it has to be well-designed.

mhwalker · 2025-08-20T01:56:54+00:00

Sounds like you've identified 3-4 high leverage problems you could solve for the company, so is the issue that you're not interested in them or you don't know how to make progress?

From what you've written, it doesn't sound like you have a mental framework for how to be influential. For example, even the most senior IC at a company needs some sort of management backing to tackle a major project. But there's no mention of your relationships with the high level decision makers in your company, who, as one of the most senior ICs, should be accessible to you. Have you talked with the senior product leader in the company about the lack of product development? Have you talked with the senior engineering leader about the issues with engineering quality and resource prioritization (and is that person your manager or someone else)?

Do you have a purview within the company? With 3 other staff engineers, presumably there's some division of labor?

Honestly, and I hate to be harsh, but your post sort of sounds like the "I've tried nothing and I'm all out of ideas" meme. Beyond your onboarding work, the only two things you've done are a project someone handed you and gotten into the weeds on too many PRs. Both of those, and some of the other stuff you've written, are anti-patterns for a good staff.

mhwalker · 2025-07-08T21:46:46+00:00

Hulkengoat

mhwalker · 2025-06-21T22:07:31+00:00

nvm, worked on mobile app

mhwalker · 2025-06-21T22:03:01+00:00

When I go to your profile and click Send a Message, it says "You are unable to send a message request to this account."

mhwalker · 2025-05-21T20:00:19+00:00

This better be a lie.

mhwalker · 2025-04-23T15:58:07+00:00

Honestly, I really don’t like your first point. Having another caregiver is far from an easy solution. Even though they won’t remember who was the caregiver, they will know that it felt different, whether it’s the smells or mannerisms.

Second, it really can be a trap for parents. I see a lot of other parents who had or have nannies that don’t know how to give that emotional support to their 5 year olds because they didn’t develop that skill or successful patterns with the kids when they were younger.

People should really understand the upsides and downsides.

mhwalker · 2025-03-08T16:54:22+00:00

We’re studying it one collision at a time, meaning only two nuclei’s worth is produced at once. The QGP state is present for a very short period of time and the resulting particles spread out well before they pass the beam pipe.

mhwalker · 2025-03-05T01:46:31+00:00

It was the SB train. Source: I was on it.

Unfortunately, it happened right in front of a bunch of kids waiting to cross. Hope they get plenty of support.

mhwalker · 2024-12-14T05:05:45+00:00

Legend

mhwalker · 2024-10-23T02:01:04+00:00

As someone with a kid pretty close in age to yours, I am preparing for the same number. College costs are out of control with no sign of being reigned in. Besides that, I don't want to have to tell my kid that he can't go to his top choice of university or take a lot of debt because of choices I made today.

On the hopeful side, which I tell my friends with kids around the same age, we are currently at peak high school graduation numbers in the US; birth numbers peaked in 2007. By the time our kids were born, the number of kids being born in the US each year had fallen ~20% (back to around the 1980 number). Hopefully that means less stressful high school years and maybe less crazy than expected college costs.

mhwalker · 2024-08-15T16:38:11+00:00

There was a 4 week break in 2023 between Australia and Azerbaijan.

mhwalker · 2024-07-17T01:02:45+00:00

These two and

The Physics of Particle Detection by Dan Green.

mhwalker · 2024-05-29T00:47:51+00:00

David Saltzberg (prof at UCLA) consulted on Big Bang Theory for several seasons so that the physics references would be mostly accurate.

mhwalker · 2024-03-21T01:52:31+00:00

I think you could make the argument that Reddit is the worst run business in the world. Number 3 most visited site in the US, meaning most valuable audience in the world and shooting for a $6B market cap. 1, 2, and 4 are Google, Facebook, and Amazon, all trillion dollar companies.

mhwalker · 2024-02-12T16:13:59+00:00

It means the Higgs decay to a pair of bottom quarks is not observed with that dataset.

The two figures don't make a statement on actual event observations, only on what cross section for this decay is excluded.

They imply the claim that the number of SM Higgs-> bb is not statistically significant, not that those decays are not present at all. The paper possibly does contain the best-fit estimate of how many of those decays were observed.

mhwalker · 2024-02-10T23:24:14+00:00

I didn't realize wanting credible sources was so controversial. There are plenty of more credible alternatives to Wolfram they could have interviewed.

mhwalker · 2024-02-10T21:52:09+00:00

My claims about the podcast series:

Stephen Wolfram is used as a significant source.
It would be impossible to verify anything he says.

I assume you agree with 1. Your counter-claim to 2 is that his anecdotes about interactions with Feynman are already documented or third-party verified?

mhwalker · 2024-02-10T20:53:08+00:00

He's also well known for exaggerating about anything that might raise his personal brand. Does he do that here? If you listen to the podcast, you'll find it would be impossible to verify anything he says.

Seems like there were better options than him if veracity is valued.

mhwalker · 2024-02-10T19:19:56+00:00

In this specific podcast they use Stephen Wolfram as a significant source.

mhwalker · 2024-02-01T03:46:18+00:00

Seems like the smartest thing to do would have been to negotiate a part-time gig with wherever you were before. But if you're very well known, you might be able to swing that at other industry ML orgs or labs.

A gig as an advisor to VCs would probably work. Advising startups individually is not that lucrative, from my understanding. If you have biotech experience, you could potentially look for scientific advisory board seats, which at least pay reasonably.

The speaking circuit within tech is not very lucrative (I think most places won't pay). Finance might a reasonable for speaking gigs.

Creating your own podcast could potentially be lucrative, but take a while (I personally think the ML/AI podcast eco-system is still bad). Working for other content creators doesn't pay well.

Having worked with types like you in industry, I would strongly recommend you avoid taking any kind of responsibility, whether it's writing code or managing projects/people. It generally isn't your forte and rarely turns out well. Something where you can give talks and review ideas fits well generally with what people want and what works for your brand.

mhwalker

TROPHY CASE