- several employers other than Google have policies to adjust pay based on location
- the calculator they developed is to help make employees make data-based decisions (this is in contrast to other companies where no such calculator exists and one is left to guess and/or initiate talks with their boss that may or may not end awkwardly)
Another unspoken thing: there's such thing as salary negotiations and exceptions. "If I take a 10% cut, I'm leaving" is a perfectly reasonable thing to say in such a negotiation, and maintaining current salaries is something these types of employers are not culturally against (the way some middle management thinks of performance notwithstanding).
The general goal of the policy is to make things "fair" in the sense that they already have employees in lower-pay locations and it's unfair/potentially problematic to have two people in that same location doing similar work but being paid vastly different amounts. The "why don't they just pay everyone SV salaries everywhere" argument is obviously from people who never ran businesses and are just disguisedly wishing they made more money: saving money on salaries is done for the same reason companies do tax-related shenanigans. In Google's case, even the employees are kinda in on the scheme, as bottom line affects quarterly reports, and thus their equity compensation...
Nand2Tetris, the book, and actually coding the entire project. It earned me a prestigious internship, from a no-name school, which subsequently lead to a FANG position.
Never Split the Difference - a negotiation book by famous hostage negotiator.
It's so immediately useful and practical, my entire team used it to collect massive amount of debts and enact other business changes. It was invaluable, and I make everyone I know read it.
1. Capital Gain taxes are delayed until you actually sell the stock.
2. Corporate taxes are being reduced because companies are moving profits to foreign jurisdictions.
3. Estate taxes & income taxes are being avoided by the creation of charitable foundations.
The 2nd and 3rd points are very valid, and I wish the author had spent more time on them. Unfortunately instead, the author spends much more time on point 1, conflating wealth with income, and avoiding the obvious argument that capital gains are eventually taxed - the rich are not escaping that.
...unless point 3 (foundation) occurs. And that should be the main story.
Squabbling over a wealth tax is not useful. The real issue is that the super rich create these personal "foundations" that act as never-taxed income holes, and then use them as personal and political tools.
In total, there's nothing very revealing about this article. It's everything we've already known. IMO, we need to curb foreign tax havens, and severely limit tax exemptions for charitable donations.
A more interesting question is how did ProPublica get a copy of Jeff Bezos' tax returns. Seems like a leak at the IRS?
I am working on an open source non-profit project to facilitate loan-free education that will also help education institutions and its staff increase their income. More details of the project idea is at: https://loan-free-ed.neocities.org
Critic, feedback, improvements to the idea are most welcome.
One reality of moving abroad from the United States (emigrated in 2011): keeping an American phone number and mailing address (with a relative) for all of the antiquated business and government relations that cannot accept foreign equivalents. While you can technically forgo having this communications mooring, you’d be nuts. Try managing the credit reporting bureaus without this. Try keeping a driver license (in case the new domicile doesn’t provide reciprocity). It goes on, and it’ll bite you in weird ways when you can’t afford it to.
It is better to avoid the giants (Amazon, Microsoft, Google etc.) for small projects as they are too much of a hassle (trying to figure out what you will be billed for) and even expensive. Someone on HN had mentioned once that these large providers make sense, and are affordable, only if you are spending more than $5000 on your existing hosting already. I feel that is a very apt advice.
As for which host to choose, this was the advice I had got 10+ years back, and it still holds true:
1. Check how long they have been in business: You want to look for stability in a hosting company. Older hosts means they have a more stable business and more experience.
2. Check their reputation and support: Do they take their security seriously, have they ever been breached? How is their support - will they respond quickly to your needs?
3. Verify if they run their own data centres: Many small webhosting companies are resellers that just hire servers or instances from other larger providers and manage the software. Or some just resell a white label service while everything is managed by the larger host company.
4. Check if they "oversell": A server can serve only so many instances of a VPS or website. Many webhosting companies oversell the resources they have on the gamble that not all their clients will use the full resource they are buying. If you are running a business you don't want that kind of uncertainity when you expect to scale.
5. Check if they offer the tech you need: FreeBSD servers used to be really popular once, now Linux servers are the rage. Or you may prefer Windows for your .net app. Or even an Oracle DB (if you have money to burn unnecessarily). Or you may prefer a specific version of an OS / DB / software for a particular web app or SaaS you have developed. Different hosts offer different technology. Verify your requirement with the webhost before you commit to them.
Apart from these, other things one may want to consider - if you want "managed service" (where the hosting company manages your software - installation and updation of system software, monitoring your servers etc.) or "unmanaged services" (where you are the system and db admin and monitor and manage the server instance). Or if you want data centres in a particular geographical location. Or if they offer the kind of billing cycle you want and so on. You may also want to find out how generous they are when you hit the server limits of your paid plans - do they shut down your instance without warning, or do they allow an exception for the rare unexpected peak in traffic and resources when your website is slashdotted or appears on HN?
The usual US based hosts that were then highly recommended, based on these ideas, for small projects were:
- Pair (www.pair.com - one of the oldest competent small-to-medium webhosting companies)
- Linode (www.linode.com - came much later, but gained a lot of reputation with their affordable unmanaged VPS hosting services and the easy platform they offered to manage them.)
Having tried all 3, I still personally prefer and recommend Pair and Linode.
Later Digital Ocean (www.digitalocean.com) and Vultr (www.vultr.com) arrived on the scene with more competitive pricing and better hardware and tech than Linode (for a while). DigitalOcean is also good and seems to have gained a good reputation so far. Rackspace lost the interest of the hobbyist crowd when they started focusing more on corporate clients.
I wonder if they considered Flutter. I joined a startup that’s using React Native and I have to say, I dislike all the complexity around state management, styling in separate CSS files, JSX syntax for components, etc.
I much prefer the unified approach of Flutter (everything is in Dart and not scattered in 3 different places) and batteries included component library.
Not to mention, if you have a small team, Google Cloud Firestone plus Flutter is a very productive and elegant way to launch an app with a small team ... or even solo.
There's a fabulous book called:
"BEING WRONG Adventures in the Margin of Error"
It's an entire book about the cognitive experience in the moment of being wrong. It's dotted with examples of how humans hate to be wrong and how they deal (for better or worse) with their aversion to being wrong.
I don't have a problem admitting I'm wrong (I think I did when I was younger, but I've been wrong a lot since so...). However, I find that this type of deep, cerebral meditation on what it means to us to be "wrong" really helps later on when you're dealing with it in real time.
Craft’s technology helps enterprises be smarter, and our vision is to build the digital intelligence layer of the enterprise technology stack. Our approach to delivering this vision starts and ends with the team we can attract, and how well we can empower the most creative and effective team of people in the technology sector.
Craft is a Series A startup with B2B and Consumer products with a simple and beautiful UX. We use React, TypeScript, GraphQL, Node, Postgres, AWS. We're a rapidly growing 80 person team across the US (SF, Seattle, SLC, LA, etc), Europe, and Canada.
Note: Studies have shown that women and people of color tend not to apply for jobs unless they feel they meet exactly all items in the job description. We believe that high-performing teams include people from different backgrounds and experiences who can challenge each other's assumptions with fresh perspectives. We encourage you to apply, even if you don't match everything listed in the job description.
Whatever backend tech you are most comfortable with and https://htmx.org, which is backend agnostic and has almost no learning curve and requires very little code.
- pay stays the same if WFH is from same city
- several employers other than Google have policies to adjust pay based on location
- the calculator they developed is to help make employees make data-based decisions (this is in contrast to other companies where no such calculator exists and one is left to guess and/or initiate talks with their boss that may or may not end awkwardly)
Another unspoken thing: there's such thing as salary negotiations and exceptions. "If I take a 10% cut, I'm leaving" is a perfectly reasonable thing to say in such a negotiation, and maintaining current salaries is something these types of employers are not culturally against (the way some middle management thinks of performance notwithstanding).
The general goal of the policy is to make things "fair" in the sense that they already have employees in lower-pay locations and it's unfair/potentially problematic to have two people in that same location doing similar work but being paid vastly different amounts. The "why don't they just pay everyone SV salaries everywhere" argument is obviously from people who never ran businesses and are just disguisedly wishing they made more money: saving money on salaries is done for the same reason companies do tax-related shenanigans. In Google's case, even the employees are kinda in on the scheme, as bottom line affects quarterly reports, and thus their equity compensation...