> It seems like they are on a better track to profitability if their revenue rebounds a bit - i.e. if they get up to 80% of their previous revenue they will be operating that level of revenue with underlying profitably rather than operating unprofitably at their previously larger revenue figure.
No they won't, because there are an additional ~1.5 billion the company has to pay in interest, as a result of the takeover. Twitter has fluctuated around profitability the last few years, now they have an albatross in interest payments around their neck. The only way Musk can lead them to a "better track to profitability" is if he unlocks significantly more revenue. He's been going in the opposite direction so far.
Sorry but you’re completely wrong about both your 5 years comment and your income range. For a more realistic look at physician income see https://www.offerdx.com/
Those are income numbers for specialists (cf. GP's comment "Unless they specialize")
The time to acquire a fellowship seems to be a couple years.
During that the time it takes for a doctor to go through med school, residency and specialist training (after which they would have the income numbers you cited), the FAANG careerist would probably have risen through the ranks and have comparable income numbers anyway.
Again, you are just mistaken - I'm not sure if this is a tech industry coping mechanism, or what. General practitioners are in the above dataset, and make an amount comparable to an L5 Google SWE.
If you want to make an argument that the overall career arc of a software engineer is better off than that of a physician, then that's a very different statement than GP made. (My personal view - strictly from a monetary standpoint, medicine in the US is more lucrative than big tech over the course of a ~40 year career, when you take into account lifestyle and personal flexibility, tech comes out looking better).
To me this is an important difference between these two careers. Ageism is a thing in tech and in corporations in general. Of course, a few winners can climb the ladder and have a lucrative corporate career or earn enough money to retire early. But lots of SWEs get pushed out in their 50s or don't manage to work in fast pace / high pay environments for decades.
I don't see which row. Levels.fyi says L5 Google SWE is 350k. The left column in your link has a header saying specialty. "Family medicine" is 270k in your data set. Nothing in the 350k range vaguely resembles general practice.
> If you want to make an argument that
I'm not trying to make any argument, except to counter yours.
> not sure if this is a tech industry coping mechanism
Heh. I can't speak of the industry as a whole, but I don't think I'm coping in any way. I'd say in medicine you know the demand for your skills is going to be stable, worldwide. In tech, there's no way to project 20 years into the future.
The company exists for less than 20 years and since then, they have hired 10000s of SWE. Their selection process is heavily biased toward younger people, and so is their performance evaluation process. Their demographic is totally not representative or the workforce, and it's not just a coincidence.
And the email purported to have been written by Andy Stone (who does not seem to be Indian) is rife with indicators that it was written by an Indian English speaker:
* How the hell <report> got leaked? (non-standard conjugation)
* Why didn't anyone of you bother... ("anyone" for "any one")
* Put <names> on watchlist. (dropped article)
* Send me ... for last one month. (dropped article)
While "to link up" is an idiom in American English, "to link <someone> up" is not. The phrase is intransitive -- even if the referent were a person, one would usually say "to link up with <someone>". Moreover, the phrase implies a casual social encounter, which wouldn't be appropriate here; a more formal introduction would be implied by a phrase like "get me in touch".
Given the history of Facebook, there are high chances that the leaks are true. The tweet that you linked claimed the leaks to be fabricated based on following 3 points and imho, none of the 3 points make much sense.
>>
1. "http://instagram.workplace.com" isn't a URL that exists lmao
2. any emails sent from andy et al would be "
@meta
," not "
@fb
"
3. a source just confirmed there's no email alias called "Internal"
If a url is not available to public that does not mean that the url does not exist “Lmao”
(Of course, it is possible that Meta has done something special to make their Workspace instance behave exactly like a nonexistent one. I can't rule that out. But it would be very unusual for them to build in a confusing special case just for themselves.)
The Axios article links the SpaceX letter to Elon "slowing down" on Twitter - but the event that correlates to the hard stop is Elon's oldest child publicly transitioning gender and changing their last name.
I have always been fascinated by Elon and how his psyche works. Even being at the top of a pile of wealth, he still deeply craves and seeks validation, always coming off the rails for a while when the next love interest relationship implodes (Talulah, Talulah again, Grimes).
I cannot imagine what one of your children disowning you does to the self, nor if any amount of wealth paves over the pain. It is the ultimate rejection. I hope he takes it as the call it is to re-evaluate his values, priorities, and actions and improve as a human, if only for the sake of the relationship with his kids.
Why the feeling of failure then ? There is nothing there that is not in your company now. You are not a graded apple to be sold at a store. If you are intelligent you will recognize these are human constructs, and nature/problems don’t recognize your degree - they are available for everyone
> Instead of a high-stakes and all-too-often arbitrary interview every single time you want to change jobs, you could prove your basic competence to practice through an exam, and elect to fulfill your continuing education requirements however makes sense for you, within a framework decided upon by workers themselves.
with how the barriers to medicine/law actually work. A single Amazon interview is not particularly high-stakes - if you bomb it you have a dozen+ companies that can offer similiar comp, and you can always re-interview after a year.
If you bomb the LSAT, or the MCAT, or STEP 1, you will effectively be branded for life. All your future applications to school/residency will include this information. How is emulating that going to get us closer to your stated goals?
> If you bomb the LSAT, or the MCAT, or STEP 1, you will effectively be branded for life.
I don't think this is true. I've heard anecdotally of people bombing the LSAT/MCAT, retaking, and entering elite universities.
But in any case, the analogy is not with exams to _enter_ post-secondary school training, but with exams to certify vocational skills _after_ such training and/or real world experience (e.g the bar exam, the F.E./P.E. in engineering, "masterpiece" evaluations in the skilled trades).
Private enterprises like TripleByte/codility try to perform a certification function of the kind I want to see workers handle through their unions. In fact, it might make sense for a union to simply contract with TripleByte/leetcode/codility to implement examinations. TripleByte has no real incentive to make its examinations a single-shot affair. Why would a worker controlled equivalent have such an incentive? There might even be a perverse incentive to encourage people to take the exam multiple times (as, for instance, the College Board does) that would have to be guarded against.
> exams to certify vocational skills _after_ such training and/or real world experience (e.g the bar exam, the F.E./P.E. in engineering, "masterpiece" evaluations in the skilled trades).
I think what needs to be considered with this is three things:
1. Tiered credentialing & scope of credentials
2. On-boarding / grand-parenting those who are already practicing
3. Studies on what interviewing in non-software related technical fields looks like. I see lots of anecdotes (probably data now) on what software interviewing is like, but mech / civil / elec, actuary, etc. interviewing isn’t something I’ve seen discussed as openly.
I hope I’m not misrepresenting or coming across as negative here or in what follows.
- - -
1. The F.E. and P.E. exams seem to be aimed at people with engineering degrees, so it’s the interaction of both education and practical experience being certified.
For the F.E. exams from [1], “It is designed for recent graduates and students who are close to finishing an undergraduate engineering degree from an EAC/ABET-accredited program.”
For the P.E. exam from [2], “It is designed for engineers who have gained a minimum of four years’ post-college work experience in their chosen engineering discipline.”
Even after passing those exams, there is still annual education and training requirements to maintain certification. Yes, it’s not nearly as rigorous as whiteboard coding that people are currently subjected to, but it’s not a one time activity either.
In both cases there is emphasis on college.
I’m Canadian and it’s pretty similar for P.Eng. There are some exceptions, but they do require a college education.
This leads to tiered credentialing in the Canadian system. There are:
- technicians (1 year education)
- technologists (2 years of education)
- engineers (4+ years of education)
There is a defined scope of work for each of these professionals. To move up the tier requires education, exams, and apprenticeship. To switch between specialties, I’m not sure if it’s possible.
Not everyone in the engineering profession needs to be an engineer. It is entirely okay to have tiers. However, tiers become very restrictive and could be perceived as gatekeeping, among other things.
2. I think there will have to be a dividing line of some sort to keep those who have valuable experience without an CS education in the field.
Something like: All people who can prove work experience and practical experience are under this one assessment and credentialing method. All others after follow a different credential evaluation method. Or the tiers allow math, physics, self-taught, etc. to be credentialed as such.
3. Technologist interview anecdote. When I was interviewing as a manufacturing engineering technologist the assessment has been:
- read a shop drawing and tell me what these symbols mean
- jump on a computer and start producing a 3D model in the software used by the company. Produce a 2d shop drawing from that model
- explain how you would come up with an inspection plan to show the product has been manufactured correctly
- solve statistics problems. Set up a control chart. Interpret what the points mean and explain the next steps. Design an experiment. Tell me the hypotheses, tell me how you would calculate sample size, how do you know that’s a good sample size?
- go on the shop floor be handed an inspection sheet and inspection tools. Check if this part conforms to standard
- whiteboard ladder logic for PLC
- handed some print outs of CNC code and asked to explain what the lines meant
Those are technical questions I’ve been asked in a series of interviews for manufacturing technologist jobs. It’s not one 8 hour day of interviews like some tech companies. It’s usually 2-3 sessions x 2-4 hours each session. That line of technical questioning is not a substitute for education. It’s on top of having education and certification in the field.
My point is I don’t think software is unique in asking technical questions. I just think it’s not as widely publicized in other fields.
Getting into any US med school is definitely harder than getting into FAANG. [0]
Part of it is things like the MCAT and organic chemistry are hard, part of it is there's a whole "hidden" component of med school applications related to volunteering, shadowing, research etc, that is opaque to most. This is part of the reason 50% of med school students already have a parent working in medicine.
For a more detailed critique, see Robert Lund, Revenge of the White Swan, The American Statistician
Vol. 61, No. 3 (Aug., 2007). Accessible through your favorite Russian website.
If you want a better book on heavy-tailed randomness, I like
Didier Sornette's
Critical Phenomena in Natural Sciences (subtitled
Chaos, Fractals, Selforganization and Disorder: Concepts and Tools).
This is an interesting post in that it’s complaint is totally different than the usual gripes we see about interviewing on HN.
I totally expected to see complaints about DS+A style questions, some discussion about how leetcode is useless for actual job performance etc. When people who make those complaints are pressed for alternative interview styles, a common response is to suggest a presentation very similar to the one described in the OP.
I’m somewhat skeptical that this style of interviewing is any better than the standard leetcode method, but I’m interested in hearing if there people who have the opposite view. Would anyone prefer an hour long presentation over an hour long algo heavy white boarding session?
It very much depends on what type of position the interview is for, IMO. If it's for a SWE position and the company is asking for a PowerPoint presentation about the SWE's background and past projects, that seems tangential at best and doesn't seem like the best use of interviewing time. But if by presentation we are talking "pull up some code you wrote and tell us what it does and why you coded it this way", I can understand that more for a SWE, and I think that would possibly be even better than a standard whiteboarding session (but it assumes that the candidate has some public code available they can talk about, and not everyone does).
OTOH, if it's for a position like a consultant or solutions engineer, which are positions where you are likely going to be giving PowerPoint presentations and training sessions to customers, then I think such a presentation during an interview is actually very useful, even though I personally hate doing them.
The entire issue with DS&A interviews is that they test skills that insignificantly correlate with performance. It takes months of time to reach the level of remembering how and when to use every foreseeable DS&A topic within a few minutes. The rest of the time is needed for clarifying questions and writing it all out. It only adds more randomness and stress to an already very random and stressful event.
His interview would be better than a DS&A interview except there is a presentation to an audience instead of a 1-on-1 conversation. This would make sense for a sales or upper-management position, but not a line SWE position. The reason for rejection is also suspect as that should have been caught in resume reviews. My guess is that he wasn't picked for whatever reason and they gave him a general rejection. Either way, I would much rather my career rest on my actual work experience than my ability to solve DS&A trivia on a clock.
No they won't, because there are an additional ~1.5 billion the company has to pay in interest, as a result of the takeover. Twitter has fluctuated around profitability the last few years, now they have an albatross in interest payments around their neck. The only way Musk can lead them to a "better track to profitability" is if he unlocks significantly more revenue. He's been going in the opposite direction so far.