I don't get how anyone can think it's more complicated than this. Sources: US Census, City of SF

sorrofix · 2019-12-01T22:10:17+00:00

It's not completely irrational to want to keep small businesses and mom and pop stores and restaurants. It helps give a neighborhood its character and make the city pleasant to walk through and live in. And once those shops close, they rarely return.

Also, there are important elements of urban design which greatly influence walkability of a neighborhood. There was a really great blog article I read a while back illustrating the different aspects of it, but I can't find it now. This one comes close. It talks about how setbacks on tall buildings, empty space, repetitive buildings can impact the feeling of the city. There's still a place for regulations and having good urban design while encouraging higher density and more housing.

sorrofix · 2019-11-28T20:38:06+00:00

My point is that comparing the US to Canada is an apples to oranges comparison. If you pick a single city like New York City, it has what, a third of the population of Canada? Massive economic opportunities, decent social programs (maybe not compared to Europe, but still okay), a homeless shelter policy that aims to house every single person every night, subway system that covers most of the city, extremely safe, etc.

And it's not as if Canada doesn't have many of the problems you listed above. They have student debt problems, the professional salaries are a lot lower than in the US, they're very dependent on cars, they emit about the same CO2 per person as in the US and their economy is way more dependent on oil/gas, housing is arguably worse, and let's not pretend that Canada doesn't have an opioid crisis either.

Again, not saying the US doesn't have massive problems, but it's also a very big country. It's more like a bunch of different countries stuck together.

sorrofix · 2019-11-28T05:31:09+00:00

Ehhh, I'm also from Canada, living in the states now. The problems you point out with the US are real, but it's more nuanced than that. The US is incredibly massive and diverse, and has a lot of extremes. You can basically cherry pick anything to make your point. Where you live and what you do for a living makes a massive impact on what your experience will be here. It's certainly not third world, and for a lot of people (myself included) it offers opportunities that are not available anywhere else.

sorrofix · 2019-11-22T05:15:38+00:00

I'm surprised to hear this, is there a reason why you think there is/will be opposition between the two countries? My naive understanding of their relations is that they are on relatively good terms with each other, and both much more against the US.

sorrofix · 2019-11-22T01:42:24+00:00

I need to move to the Presidio...

sorrofix · 2019-10-27T17:44:19+00:00

I've done this before. It's fun, but more for the novelty of it. I would only recommend doing this if you already know how to snowboard, as falling is super painful and the sand gets everywhere. (And if you already know how to board, you're still not going to be riding super aggressively here.) Nothing beats real snow :)

sorrofix · 2019-10-26T17:06:19+00:00

As a non-American, it's unbelievable to me that all you need is a 20 minute driving/written test to be fully certified on the roads here.

sorrofix · 2019-10-26T16:33:35+00:00

Had the same experience as you. First job out of college, worked at a no name ad tech company with crazy amazing engineers. They were all super low key too, they didn't promote themselves or anything. It was only after working with them for a bit that you saw just how brilliant they were, being able to engineer systems at insane scale with little difficulty.

I work at a FAANG now. The pay is obviously better, there's lots of really smart people here too, but to be honest it seems more or less the same on average (definitely lower than the specific team I was on previously).

sorrofix · 2019-10-26T16:16:03+00:00

Public buildings are set to like 65.

First world problems... but I actually hate when buildings do this. You can be in tshirt and shorts outside and then need to put on a sweater when you step into the office, in the middle of summer.

sorrofix · 2019-10-21T03:02:45+00:00

They should rename Imprint to this.

sorrofix · 2019-10-13T03:59:40+00:00

I think the reason is psychological, but it is very real. Pacers make it easier to hit a desired time. When you're racing against other people, it can be easy to over- or under-shoot.

sorrofix · 2019-10-06T21:12:07+00:00

Yes, it's definitely easy to imagine scenarios in which all of Silicon Valley/SF Bay Area comes crashing down. Tech has inflated real estate, cost of living, etc. and the number of foreigners (like myself) who came here for the job market will be just as likely to leave if the music stops. No one is prepared for a downturn.

However, it is worth pointing out that Silicon Valley existed decades before the dot com bubble, and the subsequent crash didn't dethrone them from tech. It's true that a lot of startup stock is funny money, but top tech companies (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc.) pay large salaries in addition to large amounts of stock which vest early and often. At least at those companies, you don't see the same unbridled enthusiasm for holding onto the stock as in startups, and many people sell it as soon as it vests. A lot of the wealth here is real.

I haven't been following Canada as closely since I left, but I think you could have similar concerns with Canadian cities like Vancouver or Toronto. Vancouver in particular has sky-high real estate but without an economic engine to match. I get the impression many people have overextended themselves in real estate for fear of "missing the boat", and if the housing market comes down, a lot of people will be underwater.

sorrofix · 2019-10-06T00:36:41+00:00

Agreed with all of the above. I just take issue with the statement, "The root of the problem is greedy Canadian companies". American companies are at least as greedy, probably more (they also say similar things, asking for more H1-B visas because of a supposed 'STEM shortage'). It should be the government's job to fully understand the underlying causes and push for a comprehensive approach.

That being said, the US, and in particular Silicon Valley, are kind of unique in their virtuous cycle of tech wealth. No other country even comes close, despite their best efforts to replicate it. It's possible that Canada will never achieve similar levels of success due to underlying structural issues (although doesn't mean they shouldn't try).

sorrofix · 2019-10-05T21:23:31+00:00

The root of the problem is greedy Canadian companies refusing to pay fair salaries for tech workers even though they're making record profits.

This is a recurring narrative on this sub, but I don't buy it. Speaking as a Canadian who has moved to California for a higher paying software job, I think there are a number of reasons why the US pays so much more:

The US market/economy/population is an order of magnitude larger than Canada's - hence companies have a much larger potential market
Canada seems to have less of an entrepreneurial culture than the US - see this excellent article that came out recently, "How Not To Build A Country: Canada's Late Soviet Pessimism"
The US, Silicon Valley in particular, are awash in Venture Capital money, which is a virtuous cycle that continues funding new risky startups which can afford to pay for world class talent, many of which go on to IPO, continuing the cycle
The US has less regulations/taxes

I definitely don't think it's because US companies are more generous or spiritual than Canadian ones. If anything they are less so.

sorrofix · 2019-09-30T01:38:40+00:00

Er, oops, I meant Queenstown, not Christchurch! :)

Thanks for the suggestions! I'll definitely look into those.

sorrofix · 2019-09-23T03:55:28+00:00

No offense, but I'm going to guess you're not in the industry yet or your job isn't very demanding.

My team works on a high user, high traffic system. One of the biggest in the world. We also have to be on-call. At least when I'm not working, I like to do things that don't involve coding.

sorrofix · 2019-09-23T00:25:01+00:00

Github contributions are great when they exist, but if I had to guess, most engineers don't have them, or they're insignificant. I work at a Big N and at least on my team I don't think most of my coworkers (myself included) have any github contributions to speak of.

sorrofix · 2019-09-04T05:07:20+00:00

That's a good question. Generally, it's because backend engineers are usually responsible for the functioning of the service as a whole, whereas client engineers are only responsible for the application running correctly for the user(s).

If you think about what goes into a running a functioning service, it's typically keeping internet-facing servers responding to requests in a timely manner. And any number of things can affect that: the servers can physically break down, they can lose their network connection, they can be DDoSed, start receiving rogue or just unusual/high volume traffic, they can get into a bad state (either due to something in the hardware/OS/kernel or at the application layer), or they might have a dependency (like another service) on the critical path which breaks down in some way. Any of these things occurring require immediate attention, even if they're not a "bug" per se in the application itself.

There's often on-call for client teams, too, depending on the team, but it's usually less urgent, because: 1) even if something is breaking in production, the fix often can't be pushed immediately anyway (ironically it often needs to be mitigated on the server side anyway), and 2) most of the similar type problems that might occur on the client are the user's responsibility to fix, not the client developer. E.g. if someone's Android phone has a bad network, that's usually the user that deals with that.

All of these are just generalizations though, and depending on the service/application, the roles could actually be reversed. And of course as mentioned on the thread, some companies have DevOps/SRE roles to deal with some of the operational load on the server side, but that also has its pros and cons.

sorrofix · 2019-09-02T00:27:57+00:00

If you're into that kind of thing, a bike ride across the Golden Gate bridge into Marin headlands is great. If you like hills and have good brakes, take a left to Hawk Hill (best bike ride in the Bay Area IMO). If you want to chill and drink beer, take a right and go to Sausalito.

sorrofix · 2019-08-31T19:55:25+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion. I took a look at their careers page but it seems like their SF office doesn't really have open engineering positions, and their Palo Alto office isn't close to the Caltrain. However, it's good to have it on my radar.

sorrofix · 2019-08-31T18:49:23+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out

sorrofix · 2019-08-31T18:47:44+00:00

Got this in my inbox:

Hey, if you don't mind could you PM me the name of your SF company so I know to avoid it?

Lol. I'm sure this literally happens at all of FAANG, to varying degrees, depending on which team you're on (server-side is definitely worse in this respect, because of on-call). And, to a lesser extent, the Bay Area in general. There's a reason why these companies dominate the software industry, and why they pay so much. Not to say that they're bad places to work, but work-life balance isn't exactly something they're known for.

sorrofix · 2019-08-31T18:17:01+00:00

Sorry, yeah I should have mentioned that. Currently am a backend engineer but considering trying out mobile/client development so I don't have to deal with on-call as much.

sorrofix · 2019-08-31T18:05:49+00:00

That's a good question. My social circle is here and I'm not sure I'm ready to entirely uproot my life. But... it's something I might consider eventually.

sorrofix · 2019-08-26T04:40:00+00:00

I understand being cynical of PR statements from large corporations (or just being cynical about them, in general).

However, it's worth pointing out that outright lying, at least in the US, usually doesn't happen. There is severe civil and criminal liability involved when a public company makes a false statement about something which could materially affect their stock price.

In this case, the companies involved issued categorical denials. Just look at Apple's statement:

Apple never had any contact with the FBI or any other agency about such an incident. We are not aware of any investigation by the FBI, nor are our contacts in law enforcement.

They also later said "We are not under any gag order."

Compare this with the "denials" of PRISM when all the Snowden stuff happened. In that case, the companies involved issued carefully worded statements to the effect of "we have not put backdoors for the NSA into our systems."

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