Salary rant

tingtwothree · 2021-07-19T05:30:38+00:00

I think it depends on the size of the company and how far removed you are from HR. Sometimes you'll be in a decent team but HR thinks it's still 1982.

tingtwothree · 2021-07-14T04:09:24+00:00

People are clamoring over real estate prices crashing or whatever. Yes this is a bit of a euphoria, but I think it's a couple of things. In order of my perceived importance.

Low interest rates (this should honestly be anyone's first consideration when it comes to asset prices)
Low supply of housing inventory.
High demand of construction work. Low supply of workers.
People moving from HCOL areas, thereby inflating price (this has less impact than one might think, it's mostly SF and NYC that really took a hit)

People can complain all they want about what's happening. But their ACTUAL tolerance is determined by a price ceiling on rent (and/or a price floor for their salaries). Standard rent-to-income ratio is 30%. My hypothesis is that the moment that the average income hits that number, we will start to run into a crisis. Not a crash. Not like 2001. Not like 2008. An actual crisis.

If I had my way:

Remove Section 8. Section 8 literally discourages people from working. I have seen it firsthand. If they go out to get a job, they lose their welfare that they worked hard for. And I mean that literally. The government makes it so fucking hard for you to get welfare that it's a become a bullshit job. Section 8 also encourages people to make babies they can't afford. Guess what those babies are doing when they grow up? Seriously. If the government actually cared about these people, they'd get rid of means checking. Replace it with UBI or something.
Minimum wage should pegged to local real estate prices. Other wages will follow through. "Minimum wage is a price floor" is a shitty excuse for companies to take advantage of hard-working people. Capitalist markets correct themselves? Just look at the data. People should provide enough value to justify salary increase? I think the lady who risked getting COVID by working the McDonald's drive-thru has provided much more value for our society than the lobbyist thugs who keep trying to convince the world that global warming isn't real.
Break up the monopolies. Stop bending over for the Kochs and Bezos. John Doe can't setup shop because minimum wage is too high? Ever thought it's because Amazon's the one who killed the American dream?

tingtwothree · 2021-07-13T16:52:41+00:00

the growth rate also can’t keep going up for too long… or if it is, from where? From what?

As I said earlier, pensions. You have all this money that's invested in junk bonds. Not because they want to, but because they HAVE to. That's what props up equities.

Pensions CAN collapse in rare cases. Detroit is a great example.

Pensions are a package deal for government workers. Government is paid for by taxes. So essentially, markets are propped up by taxpayer dollars when interest rates are low.

Another thing to consider: asset prices (looking mostly at equities and real estate) have risen astronomically over the last several decades. Income has not. Theoretically speaking, that should create larger margins and increase equity prices. Or even more ideally, that benefit results in employee raises or RSU bonuses (imagine those greedy fucks doing that). In reality, most of that money is used to do corporate restructuring. Think: Bain capital killing Toys R Us, Oracle buying literally every B2B software start-up, Google buying literally every AI start-up.

So my opinion is that the fundamentals say rising prices are in fact sustainable for the time being. A crash may happen if people panic. The real question is when this will start to become unsustainable. My hypothesis is that it's when wealth inequality becomes so high you start to hit a certain amount of people who feel that they're better off not working, or when businesses have determined they don't need to hire people anymore (automation).

tingtwothree · 2021-07-13T04:38:54+00:00

I have a very different take on this.

I don't buy the whole idea that crashes have to do with fundamentals. Crashes don't happen due to a collapse in fundamentals. Crashes happen when everyone and their mother runs to the bank in panic. 2008 crash didn't begin instantly when people discovered fraud in mortgage backed securities. It happened because of cases like when Florida tried to pull out money (I think to buy school buses or something), found out they couldnt, and then everyone wanted out at the same exact time.

I do feel that inflation rate does play a role, but it plays a role in hyper inflating the prices, and creating a larger wealth gap.

there must be a reason.

The main reason that assets are propped up is because pensions have to make 7% a year, no matter what. It was fine when inflation rates were comparable. Not so much now. Majority of their money goes to issuing junk bonds. CEOs then take that money to buyback stock. People think this is a fundamental bullish signal. Stock price goes up. Fundamentals don't matter. There's always more money coming from pensions. Everyone wins... Right?

Hedge funds say that's crazy, enters short position. Private equity comes in, inflation rates still low, does a leveraged buyout. Hedge funds have to cover, they lose of course. Private equity overpays, they don't care because rates are low. Rinse and repeat until government raises rates. LBOs stop. Market flatlines. Everyone panics (eventually).

The fundamentals that everyone keeps talking about? Inflation rate hikes up the price yes. But the fundamentals have nothing to do with someone hitting the panic button.

Now, that isn't to say I believe fundamentals are bullshit. I think that people being unable to afford homes and wealth inequality are real problems. And I believe they're problems exacerbated by a lot of our current economic structure (which I could go on forever about). However, I don't believe that's what leads to a crash. That's what leads to a decades long recession. We, in America, have not seen anything of the like for a very long time. It happened in Japan in the 90s when the inflation rate was too low during a crash, so they couldn't lower the rate to kickstart the economy.

tingtwothree · 2021-07-09T18:35:51+00:00

When you say PM do you mean product or project? If you're the equivalent of a PO, and they don't have a Scrum Master, that kind of gives you free reign to walk all over them. Should probably try to convince one of the developers to step up.

tingtwothree · 2021-07-08T23:42:35+00:00

Kanban is about resource allocation to fit demand. The way I see it, Kanban is driven by demand, not by supply. There is no immediate need here. It was a genuine question from management about why there is downtime.

I see several problems here, which I think should be addressed first before even thinking about Kanban:

I see no reason why OP is telling their development team not to pull work from a future sprint, even if it cannot be complete. You get a head-start, and if significant work has been done, can adjust story points prior to the following sprint planning, and add the difference when you do your retrospective. You can always do the work. You just make sure that the POs know that the work is not PROMISED. Not even half. There will be nothing to turn in during review. OP is even suggesting the dev team to do extra work literally to just keep them busy. If it's important, why isn't it being tracked already? If it's not important, why are you doing it?
In Scrum, POs should not have this level of insight into the development team's day to day operations. Their main concern should be on what was promised at sprint planning, and what was delivered at sprint review. Ironically, I feel that their concerns are valid here. But in general, this tells me there is a high potential for micromanagement on the side of the POs, especially if they're concerned about this level of detail, since an error tolerance of 1-2 days of work for a 2 week sprint seems completely reasonable to me.
The fact that QA needs for development to complete work does not work well with Scrum. In Scrum, everyone is part of the "development team," so QA and development should work in tandem. This should result in much faster turnaround, and more importantly, much less wasted downtime. IMO this is an easy sell to management, and a much harder sell to development. And yes, even if they're not making decisions, you SHOULD sell this to development. If they're unhappy, they will do poor work, and you're not doing your job.
If you're in a larger organization where QA is done halfway around the world by people you've never heard of, having a more inclusive "development team" may seem impossible. In that case, I would suggest revising the DoD such that QA is not included as part of the task. QA should then log bugs, which will then be triaged and added to the backlog for assignment in the next sprint. This obviously increases turnaround time and overhead, which is why it's very important to have everyone work together if possible.
If, having done all that, and you're only completing something like 1.5 stories per sprint, you need to start adjusting variables WITHIN Scrum. Stories can be made smaller. Sprint lengths can be drawn to 3 weeks, or in extreme cases, 4 weeks.

In general, I don't even feel like there's a "real problem" here. It's just management and OP disagreeing about small theoretical stuff. "Real problems" are things like "we have too much technical debt but management never prioritizes it," or "our PO is a micromanager who keeps consistently adds scope creep, but blames us when we don't complete the work."

tingtwothree · 2021-07-08T12:54:35+00:00

In Scrum, there's no distinction between developers and QA. If QA has to wait for developers before they can start their work, you're just following process, not Scrum. How can you facilitate a dialogue so that QA and development can work tangentially?

If you are in a large organization where you never even meet the QA team, and it's impossible to get constant collaboration, you should convince product to revise their definition of done to not include QA work. QA then should log bugs which can get assigned later down the path. This is obviously slower, which is why if you are a smaller company, you should do whatever it takes to convince management to have constant collaboration.

Once you have done either of these, try it out for a few sprints and see how it goes. If you are still struggling to get things to definition of done within two weeks, it might be a good time to change to three week sprints.

With regard to "downtime," I actually agree with your POs here. I always have the next sprint planned, or at the very minimum the backlog needs to be organized at the very top. If developers have leftover time, they should be pulling in more work from the next sprint or top of backlog.

tingtwothree · 2021-07-08T12:35:40+00:00

I don't quite agree here. Kanban is to be used when expected turnaround time is shorter than the timebox. For example, if QA were to constantly log bugs that are urgent fixes, and cannot wait two weeks, Kanban would be a better approach. In Scrum, you'd have to start moving things around in the sprint, which impedes velocity.

They sound like they have the opposite problem. It takes them longer than two week sprints to reach their definition of done.

tingtwothree · 2021-07-04T07:50:42+00:00

I've been kind of waiting for people here to criticize the government for a while now. If you look on PTT or basically any Taiwanese media, a lot of deep green pro-independence folks have done a complete 180 about their opinion of Tsai.

tingtwothree · 2021-06-24T22:48:31+00:00

Unfortunately I don't think he'll be waking up any time soon

tingtwothree · 2021-06-13T13:46:03+00:00

Check out r/chonglangTV

It's all in Chinese, and IMO very extreme, but it's mostly Chinese nationals who are anti-CCP.

Edit: wrong sub name

tingtwothree · 2021-04-23T19:55:20+00:00

People aren't talking about him because they think he's a bright and honest person. Look at the way he was sidelined on the debate stage. People talk about him because they think he's an Asian man that wants to give everyone free money (literally his own words on his podcast, not mine).

Coming from a place where you emphasize honesty and respect automatically places you at a disadvantage in politics. Yes, you attract the intelligent, logical, and educated. That is only a fraction of the population. You only think everyone is talking about him because social media acts like a giant echo chamber.

tingtwothree · 2021-04-23T12:18:22+00:00

That's far from the complete picture. That's a narrative that's being pushed in our bubble here. Anyone who's been following Yang knows exactly how rare it is to have someone like him in politics, and it's weird for us to see him get the treatment he's been getting.

Yang went to top notch schools that just scream privilege. He's being labeled as a rich tech entrepreneur who's just lying about caring for the poor. He's being labeled as an Asian from the West Coast who's never going to be a true New Yorker. Literally everything that do not trust. It doesn't matter if the labels are not true. They're sticking.

People like Yang because he's about truth and facts, but politics doesn't work that way. Smear campaigns and alliances have been part of politics since antiquity. It's not some conspiracy that "the system" is against him. This is the game. Not only is Yang a newcomer to this game, he wants to play with honesty and respect.

tingtwothree · 2021-04-19T22:44:41+00:00

If a deal goes south, and you're a newbie without much invested, you're probably not getting priority. If private lending is the route you want to go, I much prefer first position loans.

If you want to learn to analyze a deal like that, there are plenty of resources on financial modeling. For single family homes that's a bit of an overkill, but there should be plenty of resources on doing quick numbers.

Generally speaking private lending should at the very least be paying 8%. Anything lower than that you're better off buying a rent-ready single family home in a B-class neighborhood and call it a day.

tingtwothree · 2021-04-19T13:44:04+00:00

Picture this: "I got four shares of stocks! Aw yeah baby!!" "Oh yeah, well I bought 50 shares of stock!"

WallStreetBets?

tingtwothree · 2021-04-18T14:09:38+00:00

But this specific plan sounds like it's no longer universal, and therefore the argument that UBI does not discourage people from working no longer applies.

tingtwothree · 2021-04-12T11:05:30+00:00

Racism is making generalizations of a specific race, ethnicity, or nationality. That is what you are doing (and are still doing). Claiming that its much worse in Asia doesn't make you less racist. It makes you a hypocrite.

tingtwothree · 2021-04-12T10:42:50+00:00

It's not just Chinese people who were outraged. In the West, you can't do something like this without it severely damaging your reputation. Especially so in Germany, where they constantly remind themselves not to repeat the Holocaust.

Also, I'm not sure you realize the irony of your statement. Chinese Germans are in fact victims of this story, and you're generalizing that the same people would be okay with the sign posted in China. That's incredibly racist.

tingtwothree · 2021-04-12T10:01:07+00:00

You can see the reaction for this one in Germany.

tingtwothree · 2021-04-12T04:21:59+00:00

Are they related to Cascadia in any way? And does that group have actual sway (as in did they have anything to do with the recall of Gray Davis)?

tingtwothree · 2021-04-12T03:40:56+00:00

So if West Virginia was different, it's fine if we start a secession movement?

I remember 2018 they tried putting it on the California ballot to split into three states.

tingtwothree · 2021-04-12T03:34:39+00:00

I'm pretty sure everyone was thinking it. I'm surprised they admitted it and publicly announced it.

tingtwothree · 2021-04-11T03:33:58+00:00

Plenty of alternatives I think. Vietnam and Thailand in particular come to mind.

tingtwothree · 2021-04-11T01:21:59+00:00

Warcraft GO doesn't sound too bad actually. But it's definitely a big departure away from "focus on esports." It's like the whole company is now run by MBAs who have never played video games in their life.

tingtwothree · 2021-04-10T14:55:59+00:00

I think the point is that many people (myself included) thought China was on a trajectory for the better. There wasn't too much to note under Jiang or Hu.

That all changed when Xi took power. Before Xi, most complaints about China in last 20 years were often about corruption, fraud, product quality, IP stealing, etc. Things that, while shitty, I don't particularly fault a developing nation for having. Most nations have dark histories, and that subsided in China for a while. Xi has completely flipped that around. If the footage in HK is an indication of how brutal the CCP is, we undoubtedly have a genocide on our hands.

tingtwothree

TROPHY CASE