tiggybear's comments

tiggybear | 8 years ago | on: I have no side code projects to show you

I think the expectation that I have random projects that I'm passionate about to be more disrespectful of my time. I have to compete against an unknown, I don't know what the other people interviewing will be doing for their projects so I have to try and make it more impressive than projects I don't even know about.

It's much less stressful and takes much less time to give me a basic to intermediate coding problem to solve on my own with a pre-set number of days/hours to work on it.

tiggybear | 8 years ago | on: New law bans California employers from asking applicants their prior salary

>What is the reason to not get a salary accordingly to my seniority, expertise and work output?

I've said this many times and will say it again, most people's salaries are more closely aligned with their leverage than their output. Now leverage can be value too, so it's a complicated picture to unpack and I won't get into it too much.

People who are benefitting more so from leverage (which tends to be the people with the best salaries) will HATE this move. Salary transparency would take away their leverage and they would have to focus more on their output to justify their high salaries.

tiggybear | 8 years ago | on: Are rich people meaner? Two teams find errors in each other’s work

Depends how you look at it. I think rich people are more likely to look out for each other. You can often see this in the way our laws work, if the middle and lower classes are screwed over it's a huge fight to bring justice. But if rich people are screwed over, justice seems to come at a swift pace.

I think rich people treat rich people better and poor and middle classes tend to treat each other like trash but treat rich people like they are gods.

tiggybear | 8 years ago | on: Google commits $1B in grants to train U.S. workers for high-tech jobs

Your paid based on your leverage not how much your output is worth. If supply of workers with your skills goes up, your leverage to negotiate goes down and so does your wages.

Labor does not get to share in economic growth, they get to split an ever decreasing share of profits. The more people that are available to sell their labor, the more pieces that shrinking pie has to be cut into.

tiggybear | 8 years ago | on: A Data-Driven Guide to Becoming a Consistent Billionaire

Don't forget about the entitlements of the business owners. Many, many, many believe they are entitled to highly skilled and highly educated workers without paying them enough to afford the shittiest house/condo within an unreasonable commute to the office.

So at some point it isn't the workers that are being unreasonable. And I'm really curious what you think that point is? What defines who is being unreasonable among the business owner or worker? Or is that just dictated by which socioeconomic class you fall into?

tiggybear | 8 years ago | on: Senator to Ex-CEO: Equifax Can't Be Trusted with Americans' Personal Data

Then quit supporting these companies by working for them!

The elite have this country over a barrel, it sucks. All anyone that isn't rich can do is to choose to die before they will work for these companies.

We've got tons of young men and women that sign up to be in the armed forces who happily go die to enrich the already wealthy...and we celebrate them!

So as a society can we start shaming workers that work for Palanatir, Comcast, Pfizer, Equifax? You being on your death-bed and unable to afford food is not an excuse to make the world worse. Die with some fucking integrity.

tiggybear | 8 years ago | on: Survival of the Prettiest

I don't think his basis for rejecting that premise is fair.

That's like rejecting the premise that certain vegetables taste good to us because they are good for us! Our senses evolved to pick out things that are good for us.

tiggybear | 8 years ago | on: Stack Overflow Salary Calculator

Actually we have known for a long time that most people's salaries are completely decoupled from the value they create. I've never seen anyone claim the opposite except for business owners and middle management.

Everyone wages are more so tied to how much leverage they have. Increasing one's output has never been a great recipe for increasing compensation, however, increasing your leverage (get a new offer, get a government certified monopoloy, lower the supply of people with your skills, etc) will do wonders for your wage!

Seriously, though.

tiggybear | 8 years ago | on: The bad new politics of big tech

I mean Googlers tend to be highly socially conscious, independent-thinking, and financially secure employees, right?

Seems like a perfect company to test some new tech collective bargaining attempts. What happens if 80% of googlers organize through an app, stand up and say we are all walking out the door if we don't start acting more socially responsible through A, B, and C initiatives.

So many of them were ready to quit over a coworker with differing opinions, I would think many more would be willing to quit over a company having evil actions. After all, actions > opinions.

tiggybear | 8 years ago | on: Why Must You Pay Sales People Commissions?

Sales can get a percent of the value they generate because they have more leverage than engineers. Plain and simple. They have direct relationships with customers and the value they bring in is easier to show.

This line from the article was pretty gross to read, "Do your engineers like programming? Might they even do a little programming on the side sometimes for fun? Great. I guarantee your sales people never sell enterprise software for fun."

Personally, I don't do that much programming for fun and a lot of the crap I have to do for work I would never do for my own projects. It reads as though they are aware that they can get away with paying engineers less because they like to create valuable things just because. So it's easier to trick them into giving up the valuable things they create for cheaper.

Who cares why someone creates something? No businessman is entitled to someone else's creation because it was created for fun.

I mean, if all these VCs and founders are sooooo passionate about their work, they should't need equity or much of salary, right? It's the same line of thinking, but of course it doesn't apply in those situations for...reasons.

tiggybear | 8 years ago | on: How to have technical and coding interviews over Skype

Had a final interview over Skype once (they were supposed to fly me out - but I guess decided to be cheap at the last minute) and then they he me to do white board coding exercises in a google doc. It was a really sucky way to do an interview.

Was so disappointing because I was really excited about the company until they made me do that.

tiggybear | 8 years ago | on: Women Entrepreneurs Created a Fake Male Cofounder to Dodge Startup Sexism

Im hesitant to even type this, but I've had similar thoughts.

If a lot of gender is just a construct and our gender roles are rooted in a time when women were taught to be subservient to men, then it's highly possible that a lot of traits that are deemed "feminine" are just traits that were taught to women to make them subservient/less competitive/etc.

So maybe being timid, shy, soft-spoken, and like traits should not be considered "feminine" in a biological sense. They should be considered traits that make you less likely to get what you want and much more likely to be taken advantage of. And those traits were included in the feminine construct of yesterday to make women easier to control.

So maybe it's ok to discriminate against some of those traits when hiring because you aren't discriminating against biological traits but rather learned traits that may or may not make you more productive in certain environments.

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