Outlier employees is probably an exaggeration. Sure, they may be making above average at those companies but no way those Google/FB salaries are true outliers.
Not just Palestine, but Gaza. The cost of getting anything, medical equipment especially, into Gaza is insanely high and it's usually an unreliable process. Thats likely why theres such a huge emphasis on being able to create the entire unit in the Gaza Strip.
I actually attended a talk by Dr. Loubani this past weekend at MIT and one thing he emphasized was that everything they do has to be reliably replicated in Gaza. So yeah, one could conceivably purchase the Littmann replica from AliExpress but getting it into Gaza? Another story...
It comes mainly from mapping the subdomains over time and analysis of the ASNs. This is key. You will often see a company with perhaps 200 or so subdomains, that only does business in the United States.
But then you will see one subdomain that maps to ASN 4803 or whatever, which then leads to “China Telecom xinjiang”. In fact I encourage you to type:
org:”China Telecom xinjiang” “NSFOCUS” into Shodan.
Also look at the capital expenditures psychz.net claims on their about page. There is no IaaS company in the world that can afford to lay down as much hardware as they are claiming.
Another thing btw is these sites never seem to have job openings. That is common pattern that applies to perhaps 60% of the firms listed.
So you're saying "typical intelligence analyst stuff" is the reasoning here?
Generally analysts produce questions which operations runs down to figure out if what they think is going on, is actually going on.
Correct me if I'm wrong here but you're basically saying that you have done the first part and found some suspicious links but not the second part do develop actual evidence one way or the other, is that a fair assessment?
I am writing this all on a phone and I am more than happy to produce a 5000 word report which will be posted in 96 hours. I will follow up via a comment here and also send to Michael Forsythe at the New York Times for additional review.
Check below for latest update. Wanted to comment so you got notification. My real name is in my profile with my email address so you’ve got me dead to rights on this one.
It’s coming. I’ve got butcher paper on the floor mapping out 2000 ASNs. My wife says I look like one of the detectives tracking down a serial killer with red string. I run my own consulting company, and actually lost my main client due to the above post being interpreted as “anti-China”. That has been an enormous setback.
Anyone can do this research I want to emphasize. Look at any suspicious VPN company. Now look at 10 of them. Now plug some of those names into Shodan.
Bear with me here, but if you then simply Ctrl-F for ASNs with the same name with the same LLCs, you will construct a perfect circle of peering that is an “internet within an internet”. What it seems to be is a poor man’s TOR. While the US gov built a Tor, this is an alternate Dark Web built by someone...you can pass through 1,000 servers on 500 different hosting companies none of which do legitimate business.
(Hope this counts as a mini blog post for now this must be 250 words).
They subcontract their support to India. William Lu is a scammer and a well known liar. He pays people on web hosting forums to keep it quiet about how he scams his customers. The guy has cockroaches in his data center. He has no money and has lost more than half his ip space in the past year. He even got recorded a few months back in a big conference call admitting he lies about everything and charges his customers for services he doesn't even provide. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzHS4E2e8Bg there's also a dope ass diss track about how garbage their service is on there too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZBWd1Z2yY0
> org:”China Telecom xinjiang” “NSFOCUS” into Shodan.
I'm going to admit I didn't try putting this into Shodan because for whatever reason I don't have access to it right now. But won't this just show a list of servers running a NSFOCUS WAF? How do you connect that to ProtonMail or LeaseWeb?
Are you suggesting they are an "open secret"? EG, They are not "covert", but they are secretive in that they only sell to maybe western intelligence agencies, etc. Could be why they never have real "openings", they got a hot pipeline constantly exiting from the intelligence community looking to make some real money.
TBH, someone at this age who has spent 25 years in a pipeline probably realizes that, unfortunately, no one in this market wants to hire older folks -- especially with no relevant experience.
"No relevant experience" is a highly pessimistic outlook. This man has demonstrated an ability to hold down a steady job for decades. That alone puts him ahead of many people that simply lack the ability to hold down a job. Working at an auto plant results in skills with with operating industrial machinery. After 25 years he's probably been put in a leadership position, or at least a mentorship position to train new hires. This demonstrates good communication and teamwork ability. He may have much better prospects if he expands his skills by learning a trade. Someone who worked in an auto plant for 25 years is probably a good candidate to become a construction worker, plumber, escalator repairman, etc.
Another big elephant in the room is location. It looks like he still lives in Lordstown Ohio. Employment prospects will be drastically better if he moves. It's harder to move with families but not impossible. I moved 3 times (each of them across national borders, no less) when I was a kid and while its hard to settle down in a new place it expanded my worldview and likely made a better person in the long run. The sort of static mentality I talk about earlier also applies to moving. People put their self-worth in their location and hamper their employment opportunities by refusing to move.
The subtext of one of the images reads: "Mr. Marsh with his wife, Lindsay, and their daughter, Abigail. The Marshes have spent years fighting to get Abigail services in Ohio. Moving would be wrenching." It doesn't actually say that their daughter's cerebral palsy is preventing them from moving. I doubt it would be harder to get services in an economically vibrant location with more tax funds for services, as compared to Lordstown Ohio. The fact that they "spent years fighting to get Abigail services in Ohio" seems to drive this home.
Overall I would be much more sympathetic if the author spent their words explaining how Rick has tried to find employment in other fields, has tried to find apprenticeships or trade school education, and is willing to move across the country but still can't find a job then I would be drastically more sympathetic. As it stands, the piece can be summed up as, "laid off auto worker who doesn't search for jobs in different fields and isn't willing to move has trouble finding employment and blames NAFTA and Democrats for his situation". It's clear the author wants to paint a sympathetic picture, but it reads like a pardoy.
This sounds like a viewpoint that doesn't wholly consider all the edge cases of what it means to lose one's career 25 years in.
"After 25 years he's probably been put in a leadership position, or at least a mentorship position to train new hires. This demonstrates good communication and teamwork ability"
This is a nice to have, but will absolutely not help a man 25 years into a career to find an equivalent salary to support his family and maintain his quality of life in a completely different field.
"Someone who worked in an auto plant for 25 years is probably a good candidate to become a construction worker, plumber, escalator repairman, etc."
No, this cannot possibly be the case, because all those listed job requirements sacrifice the body. At the age of 25 years in a career, it wouldn't be possible to be able to start again in any labor intensive work- the body is no longer there.
"It doesn't actually say that their daughter's cerebral palsy is preventing them from moving. I doubt it would be harder to get services in an economically vibrant location with more tax funds for services, as compared to Lordstown Ohio. The fact that they "spent years fighting to get Abigail services in Ohio" seems to drive this home."
Moving actually causes one to lose residency status, which means a lot of necessary social benefits are no longer available (in order to prevent people from simply moving somewhere with better state benefits). An example that people would be most familiar with would be in state vs out of state tuition. If another state had better benefits, there would be little to say that they would be able to have access fo them. If anything, Mr & Ms March would probably have to wait several years before they have to begin the several years long fight again to secure benefits for their daughter.
"Overall I would be much more sympathetic if the author spent their words explaining how Rick has tried to find employment in other fields, has tried to find apprenticeships or trade school education, and is willing to move across the country but still can't find a job"
It would be more accurate to say that a man who put 25 years into a career no longer has access to this career, has a wife and a dependent daughter, who may be trapped due to fighting a system that holds tons of bureaucracy to avoid fraud, who can no longer sacrifice his body, and is completely out of options in maintaining his quality of life, which he had built up carefully over 25 years.
Enough people like that along with enough underemployed young people saddled with crushing debt, and you have everything you need for a revolution.
People can talk about what others can or should have done, but eventually it’s going to be better and easier for them to burn this system down than try to work within it. Trump was a warning shot. What comes next after he fails to accomplish anything is going to be worse.
Historically speaking such a population is more prone to support authoritarianism than revolution. A good question to ask is: Is it in Trump's best interest for his base to advance economically, or descend further? I am quite confident that Trump and the Republican leadership knows the answer to this question.
> This is a nice to have, but will absolutely not help a man 25 years into a career to find an equivalent salary to support his family and maintain his quality of life in a completely different field.
These skills are useful in any field. Equivalent salary may be optimistic, but it's still drastically better than zero slary.
> No, this cannot possibly be the case, because all those listed job requirements sacrifice the body. At the age of 25 years in a career, it wouldn't be possible to be able to start again in any labor intensive work- the body is no longer there.
What you're writing is also contradicted by the article. His job at the automobile plant was also physically demanding, "The truth was, he never really liked the work. He found it boring and physically demanding. He worked in the paint shop, wearing two sets of gloves, big plastic boots and a full body apron, while he wielded a sanding tool that smoothed the primer on the surface of the cars. Every night he came home drenched and exhausted."
> Moving actually causes one to lose residency status, which means a lot of necessary social benefits are no longer available (in order to prevent people from simply moving somewhere with better state benefits). An example that people would be most familiar with would be in state vs out of state tuition. If another state had better benefits, there would be little to say that they would be able to have access fo [sic] them. If anything, Mr & Ms March would probably have to wait several years before they have to begin the several years long fight again to secure benefits for their daughter.
Tuition is an exception, as it's a very high cost (often tens of thousands of taxpayer subsidy) over the course of four years. Another commenter made the same point, but did not provide evidence for this to be true when asked. If you can find identify documentation on such policies that explain that states discriminate on the basis of residency for disability services, by all means provide it. But until then, I am not inclined to trust these unsubstantiated claims.
Even if this were true, this represents a couple years of overhead cost that could still pay off in the long run. Even at minimum wage, employment would bring in probably $10k a year at least. This could offset loss of services for two years.
> It would be more accurate to say that a man who put 25 years into a career no longer has access to this career, has a wife and a dependent daughter, who may be trapped due to fighting a system that holds tons of bureaucracy to avoid fraud, who can no longer sacrifice his body, and is completely out of options in maintaining his quality of life, which he had built up carefully over 25 years.
This is contradicted by the article. You say that he is physically not capable of demanding work, but the job that he lost (and would have continued working in) was physically demanding. You say that he is out of options, when he does not seem to be considering the options of moving or working in a different field. The article explains that these other opportunities do exist, "Hundreds of workers have already transferred. His nephew packed up his family and moved to Flint. The alternative, working on natural gas wells in Pennsylvania, paid him $13 an hour, about half what he was making at G.M." $13/hr is close to twice Pennsylvania's minimum wage. It's not a terrible job, and it'd at least put some money in the bank and diversify his skills.
At best, you're taking an overly pessimistic view of the situation. At worst, you're tying to rationalize the thinking that if the current opportunities aren't as good as the ones that existed in the past it's better just stay unemployed.
"The alternative, working on natural gas wells in Pennsylvania, paid him $13 an hour, about half what he was making at G.M." $13/hr is close to twice Pennsylvania's minimum wage. It's not a terrible job, and it'd at least put some money in the bank and diversify his skills."
This is overly optimistic. He is losing half his salary, with a wife and a daughter to feed. He will lose his quality of life. That's a huge deal, and is worth pointing out and have sympathy for.
> This is overly optimistic. He is losing half his salary, with a wife and a daughter to feed.
This is false, or at least a misrepresentation of the situation. He has already lost his salary. And now he is unwilling to work in a job that pays half of his previous salary. He is strictly better off financially with the $13/hr job than he is now, and he will have a job to give himself a sense of purpose (which seems to be his biggest issue) on top of that. I still do not see any barrier preventing him from taking such an opportunity.
But crucially this does not require any duration of residency. Literally all that's necessary is a NJ diver's license. He doesn't need to live for years in NJ to get benefits, he just needs to stand in line at the DMV after moving there.
You have still failed to provide evidence to back up the claim that his daughter's condition is preventing him from moving due to loss of benefits (at least, not for any loss of benefits longer than 30 days). In fact, your sources show that if he moves to another state for a job then he will be able to get benefits either immediately or within a month. If anything you're disproving the claim that loss of benefits are preventing him from moving.
30 says is hardly prohibitive to you. The story is much different when someone is needing to move someone who requires medical care. It may be very prohibitive to someone else, especially given that moving is very expensive, it's well known that benefits are regularly denied the first time, and they're already in a multi-year fight that can become complicated through moving.
Also, I say that this position being made is again failing to consider that 13$/hr may not be adequate. It is not strictly better- one has to pay the cost of moving, then spiral into debt assuming 13$/hr isn't enough to cover the medical expenses and living requirements of one's family. Assuming he's an intelligent man, he will likely already have examined the economics and found it doesn't check out.
I think this position is really unsympathetic and assuming an incompetence that isnt there and is overly gatekeeping. Someone is in a situation in which there are no good options due to little fault of his own, and that sucks. That's all the article is saying.
The article mentions that it took the family years to get these services in the first place. Which indicates that they are indeed capable of living for extended periods of time without care. Your claim that the family cannot make it through 30 days without government services for their daughters remains unsubstantiated. Seriously, trying to say that 30 days of no government services is prohibitive when the article states that they lived for years without these services is grasping at straws.
> Also, I say that this position being made is again failing to consider that 13$/hr may not be adequate. It is not strictly better- one has to pay the cost of moving, then spiral into debt assuming 13$/hr isn't enough to cover the medical expenses and living requirements of one's family. Assuming he's an intelligent man, he will likely already have examined the economics and found it doesn't check out.
How is he somehow going to spiral into debt with a $13/hr job, but not spiral into debt with no job? This makes no sense. You're trying to say that by making more money he is going to go into debt.
> I think this position is really unsympathetic and assuming an incompetence that isnt there and is overly gatekeeping. Someone is in a situation in which there are no good options due to little fault of his own, and that sucks. That's all the article is saying.
I don't think he is incompetent, that's my whole point. He has opportunities, he is competent, but he feels like he is incompetent because there's something holding him back from taking these opportunities. And in the end, this lack of employment is eating away at his sense of self work. This man seems to have it ingrained into his identity that he is an auto plant worker in Ohio, and he will never be able to be anything but an auto plant worker in Ohio. He is aware of opportunities elsewhere. The article explains that hundreds of other plant workers have done this, "Hundreds of workers have already transferred. His nephew packed up his family and moved to Flint". I don't necessarily blame him for his refusal to accept the available job opportunities. I blame the society and culture he grew up in that hammered it into his head that he'll never be anything but an auto plant worker. Feeling sympathy for whatever it was that leads him to make his decisions doesn't mean we need to to try and justify these decisions.
Getting help is tricky. States with good programs don't want freeloaders to move in. They often require you to be a resident for a while before they will help you - the idea being if you come with the intent of not being a freeloader and something happens it is bad luck. It isn't unheard of for states to pay to move someone to a different state just so they to get that person out of their system.
I can see both sides, Mr. Marsh is caught in the middle.
> States with good programs don't want freeloaders to move in. They often require you to be a resident for a while before they will help you - the idea being if you come with the intent of not being a freeloader and something happens it is bad luck.
I've only heard of this for university tuition. If a student starts university in a state school, and their parents move to the state they have to pay out of state tuition for 2 years. States with good programs are usually liberal ones with high taxes. Discriminating on the basis of origin for disability services seems like a good way to piss off liberal voters. If you can find documentation to demonstrate that someone with cerebral palsy would be denied services because they moved there from out of state, I'm all ears, but I find this claim is dubious.
> It isn't unheard of for states to pay to move someone to a different state just so they to get that person out of their system.
Each state is different. There are 50 of them with different programs and rules. States are changing their rules all the time. Depending on the destination state he might or might not have problems. It is a consideration he unfortunately has to face.
AFAIK, the data lake is the next step in the evolution of the data warehouse. Instead of storing data in a data mart/data warehouse, the concept of the datalake (as a design pattern) is that you don't schemas (support for unstructured data), better support for auditing and data governance/democratization, and schema (?) evolution
I wouldn't say you don't have schema's, rather you have schema-on-read instead of schema-on-write, and you use an extract-load-transform pattern instead of extract-transform-load. The data is replicated as-is into the data lake and only then do you figure out what to do with it.
Yes, in my mind this is the key of a data lake. Take all your raw data and store it somewhere, then provide ways for people to access and query the raw data.
This means ingestion is faster (no transformation) and you don't throw away any data that you might want later. If multiple teams want to query the same data in different ways they have the ability to do so. And ideally it prevents data silos because everyone can stuff their raw data into a master data lake and each team has access to all the data but is responsible for doing the work to make it look like they want.
Reality of the above obviously doesn't always match the theory but schema-on-read/ELT are the easiest ways to handle the above. Typically this involves some kind of Hadoop-style technology, like Hive or SparkSQL for SQL-based querying, Spark for non-SQL, etc. But you've always got the raw data and can go back and re-ELT it from the data lake if your needs change.
I don't know much about the strict definition, but that's how I use them. I have had several clients that want to analyze data they didn't capture in their schema. I'd say: disk is cheap. Throw everything in there (medical records, events, etc.). If we need it later, we'll fish it out. Ugly, but simple.
Note that a data lake does not necessarily replace the data warehouse, but rather often complements it. As such, you store your raw data from various sources in a centralised data store (Hadoop-like, NoSQL, etc.). From there, you prune, clean, select, and potentially aggregate data that you would like to provide in a quality-controlled way to your business users, in a data warehouse. This data warehouse most often will be a more traditional relational data store (usually some flavour of SQL database), which allows users to select data from a curated, pre-selected slice of the overall data stored in the data lake, and which enables easier integration with common reporting tools, whether more traditional standard reporting tools or self-service BI tools.
Stocks are a major part of compensation for tech companies. Looking at just salary is an incomplete picture and also isn't fair for job-seekers. Fwiw this page has compensation data with break down by RSU, bonus, etc: https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html
Very true. I work at a non-FAANG, non-West Coast company and my initial job offer was 55/45 cash to stock ratio. Due to stock appreciation, that's changed to 45/55 cash to stock. Including only base compensation makes no sense.
My current base salary is exactly the same as it was at my last startup, but my income has more than doubled.
>>In hindsight, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the riot was probably avoidable — if Batts had had more officers at his disposal, if his officers had been better trained, if there hadn’t been the seeming overreaction to Monday’s swirling rumors.
that's kinda like saying WWI could have been prevented if archduke ferdinand had taken a different route downtown. it might not have happened that day, but the powder keg was already primed and there are a lot of ways to spark it.
Sure, if you're looking at the specific event. But you could consider Freddie Gray part of a trend. Maybe the keg wouldn't have caught fire if we hadn't kept putting gunpowder in it?
I do consider Freddie Gray part of a trend, a trend that's been going on for a long time in this city. All I'm saying is a keg that's been stuffed full of powder for decades didn't go off just because they killed one guy.
This is absolutely fascinating. I don't know how folks are earing this kind of cash when you can go to a recruiter, with more than decade of hands-on startup experience, and when you want more than 200k a year they look at you like you just kicked their cat.
Then you see someone at a place like Lyft with four years of real world experience and one year with the company pulling 300-400k a year without breaking a sweat. And now they’re about to jump onto the IPO rocket ship. I want to clarify that I’m not jealous of these people: it’s great. I just gotta stop and ask myself sometimes what the fuck I’m doing wrong.
Then again this is crowdsourced and might be a load of shit.
If you're serious: get a job at a well-known tech company. You might have to move for this unless you're already in a top-tier tech city (NYC, SF, and Seattle, definitely qualify; maybe Zurich, London, Toronto, and Sydney). Work there for two years. Move to a better tech company. You are now worth $300-400k per year.
If you're not already considered top-tier talent, I think Amazon is the easiest way into this right now. They are hiring at an incredible rate, and their engineers are generally considered good hires by Google, Facebook, etc. The lifestyle and working environment is generally considered acceptable if not exemplary.
Also, invest some time to become an expert at technical interviews. They are somewhat orthogonal to everything else that we do, but they are a near-universal shibboleth at top companies and it doesn't take that much time to get good at them. Most of the questions fall into a few broad categories that you can learn to recognize with practice.
This worked for me. YMMV. The key was relaxing the requirement that I stay in my childhood city, although luckily I only had to move a couple hours away.
Are you sure this number still applies if you're outside of US (London, Toronto, Sydney)? My understanding is that numbers in Europe are nothing like those in the US.
I make $50k-100k AUD less in Sydney compared to Bay Area, with all the same HCOL problems.
A very, very good new grad total comp figure in Sydney is say, $150k AUD. That's $106K in USD, which is less than the salary for a new grad at Google or Facebook in the Bay Area. Throw in RSUs, signing bonus, and performance bonuses, and a new grad is making $50-100k AUD more.
The quirk here is that due to the E3 visa, it's about as easy to hire Australians to work in the US as it is to hire them to work in Australia. So why pay more for folks who stay at home?
What do you mean by this? I could imagine a scenario where the E3 visa puts positive pressure on Australian Software Engineer salaries, causing them to rise.
London and Sydney have insanely high costs of living so recruiting and retaining skilled people means paying high in the first place. In London or Sydney you can make £100k or $140k as a good developer. Google simply pays double that at L5 so you don't think about leaving.
Yes, this! I can second this as an engineer who is now a professional consultant, working directly with engineers on both interview and negotiation prep, as well as technical and people leadership coaching.
You want to make the most of not only the various kinds technical interviews you might encounter, but also the behavioral conversations, founder/exec chats, even cover letters are a chance to set an intentional narrative. When you're in the loop with specific companies you can even prepare for specific interview loops and negotiation expectations, and thus have particularly targeted results.
Ugh. Yeah, I've heard too many of these stories not to believe them. Most of the people I know at Amazon say they haven't experienced toxicity at that level, though, and that it depends a lot on your manager.
In the absence of a strong, healthy company-wide culture, managers create their own islands of toxicity or calm productivity. I don't know a simple answer of how to ensure you end up on the right one.
It's definitely not a load of shit. Source: I work at one of those companies.
You're not doing anything wrong - only a select number of employers can afford to throw that much money at their recruits. It's just a method of recruiting, nothing more; most other smaller companies / startups can't (or won't) match it so they gain a major advantage over their competitors.
I just managed to pass their interview - maybe that counts for something, but I definitely am not a top 5% engineer. I think there are a lot of advantages you get from smaller places that you won't find at a large "FANG" company as well.
Co-Founder here. Data is crowdsourced but we manually check it regularly to filter out spam. We have enough data now where outliers are weeded out. We've gotten feedback from the community that our data is some of the best compensation data for Bay Area tech companies.
> I just gotta stop and ask myself sometimes what the fuck I’m doing wrong.
Don’t know anything about you beyond your github and HN profile, but I‘ll speculate: perhaps getting hired at 200k or less by the right company is the key to earning 300k+ within a year, while getting hired at 300k is unlikely unless you come straight from a corp/position that is known to pay more.
One thing to remember is that these numbers are typically for Bay Area or Seattle -- places where commuting isn't a feasible option unless you don't mind 2+ hours on the road every day. For San Francisco, making $300k/year you're looking at $185,464 take-home pay.
> In San Francisco and nearby San Mateo and Marin Counties it said $117,400 for a family of four was "low income", while $73,300 (£54,900) was "very low income" - the highest figures anywhere in the country. (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44725026)
The cost of living in these areas is high and is still growing rapidly. At the end of the day, working in a tech hub is still a middle class to upper middle class job. You can achieve similar or better results in states like Utah and Texas, with a much better work/life balance.
I'm an ex-Californian and moved to a saner state. Total comp for me is roughly ~$150K, with almost all the bells and whistles you'd expect from Silicon Valley (still waiting for 401K matching). My commute is 20 mins and soon to be 5 mins. Property values for a large home where I live are still floating in the $500K range, with only 0.5% property tax. I haven't even topped out the market here either -- I know people making $170K salary + benefits out here.
There's just no other options; it's still one of the best markets in the EU and going to the US is impossible for most developers so they have to accept the lower salaries.
You would think that some startup in NYC would decide to start hiring in London, then. Instead of struggling to recruit senior developers with a middle of the pack NYC salary at $125–150k, they could offer the same salary in the UK and be standouts in the market.
I also am fairly certain its total comp and not salary...