California Is in Big Trouble Again, After Averting a Collapse in the 2000s - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-17/california-is-back-on-the-brink-of-being-a-failed-state <comment><USER3> I believe the fundamental problem of CA is Prop-13 which has a substantial impact of its revenue as lots of very high value properties pay a substantially low property tax.

On top of that, in many cases, as the property tax is so low, people who otherwise would not be able to afford such high value properties continue to hold them, leading to an artificial increase in the overall property values.

If Prop-13 is abolished, a lot of properties will enter the market, and overall revenue would increase resolving many of CA's and local government's woes, including that of the public education system.

OTOH, I know that abolishing Prop-13 is an impossibility. Our best hope is that the split tax roll is successful that that would require at least the commercial and industrial property to be regularly reassessed and taxed at their full value.

<comment><USER4> I hear this repeated a lot, and I'm not so sure I buy it. Yes, Prop 13 limits how much taxes can go up, but if that's the case, then why wouldn't you try to build more to capture more tax? I'm willing to bet that easing zoning restrictions would help with revenue generation.

<comment><USER5> In addition to what buerkle said, build more... what? The amount of property is fixed and already owned. The state isn't somehow making more land in places people want to live, so there's no real opportunity for the state to get more tax dollars that way.

Additionally, Prop 13 is kind of a disincentive to build higher-density buildings because if you tear down a building and build a new one, your tax base will go up to match the newly assessed property value rather than remain at the artificially low level it was at before.

<comment><USER6> But that building will be locked into current rates for a long time. So property taxes might hike from $500/yr to $50,000/yr, each rising by 3% pa, but revenues could spike from $40,000/yr to $400,000/yr rising at like 8-12% a year. In 30 years, a $100k/yr property tax bill will be peanuts compared to the $7,000,000 in rent revenues they'll be earning.

Developers understand this, they want to build, but they are having trouble getting the permits to replace low density SFH with medium- to high-density housing.

<comment><USER5> I agree, but at the same time there are also _a lot_ of SFH owners who literally could not afford the property tax bill if they even significantly improved their homes, so you get ridiculous situations like entire neighborhoods in LA that are basically ghettos despite the tiny lots being worth close to half a mil each.

Any real solution needs to be a combination of changing zoning/permitting _and_ fixing Prop 13.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _" Thanks in large part to spiraling urban rents, the homeless population increased by 5.3% from 2010 to 2018, in a state that already has almost half of the nation's homeless. In Los Angeles and San Francisco, the crisis is especially acute, with destitute people and pitiful tent encampments crowding the sidewalks."_

This is ridiculous. California is filled with homeless people because:

1) there's a nationwide opioid crisis

2) if you're going to be homeless, might as well move to where the weather is nice

In a recent survey in Los Angeles, somewhere around 90% of the homeless reported a substance abuse problem.

This is impacting Seattle and Portland too; it's a lot easier to be homeless in Portland than Phoenix.

<comment><USER8> > This is ridiculous.

Perhaps, but why let a perfectly useful argument for cheaper housing go to waste, just because it's nonsense?

<comment><USER9> I doubt opioids are 90% of the problem. Every day I read about a senior citizen who is living in their car, has some retirement money, and usually not a drug problem but they lost their housing because it's too expensive.

This is the situation in Seattle. There are tons of people with drug addictions, but there are also clearly lots of people economically pushed onto the street.

So we still need more cheaper housing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article is full of excuses to argue California has simply experienced lots of _bad luck_ , burying the lede. Really, its just that California's spending has been and continues to be unsustainable and it's primary efforts to raise revenue - raising taxes - has the side effect of encouraging those with mobility (citizens and businesses) to relocate elsewhere.

<comment><USER11> For states, California is actually middle of the pack when it comes to per capita budget. Given that, you're going to have a difficult time convincing me there's a spending problem.

<comment> at-fates-hands It's not necessarily the spending that is a problem. Its the fact California relies on a very small percentage of high earners to carry the majority of the tax burden.

At some point people will decide its too much as the state continues to increase taxes to pay for its overzealous spending and leave, creating an even bigger problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Pretty disingenuous to not mention the rainy day and surplus funds: [https://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2018/dec/18...](https://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2018/dec/18/jerry- brown/does-california-have-budget-surplus-nearly-30-bill/)

Include all facts if you are trying to make a point.

Yes we have issues when it comes to poverty and housing but we are not doomed.

</comment><comment><USER13> > The state legislature needs to pass bills to allow greater housing density > and more construction throughout the state.

The Legislature did just that with the ADU bills that effectively abolish single-family zoning throughout the state. Additionally, SB 330 (the Housing Crisis Act) puts a stop to some of the more egregious forms of NIMBYism. Citizens can sue cities that refuse to follow the law under the Housing Accountability Act, which was recently strengthened; no such recourse is available to residents of most other states.

More must be done, but California is now leading the way in cracking down on NIMBYism. I predict that states like Texas are going to see the NIMBY pattern play out in time (if they aren't already—look at Austin), leading to skyrocketing housing costs. They will have to do the same thing in time. California is just ahead of the curve.

<comment><USER14> At the same time, they passed rent control, and the jurisdictions that have the worst housing crises have the strongest rent control.

Once a few people rent out their ADUs and then find that they can't evict their tenants as their needs change, very few people are going to be willing to invest the several hundred thousand necessary to permit and build one.

<comment><USER13> The statewide rent cap is significantly above the amount rents have been rising on their own. It also expires after 10 years.

And the cities with the strongest rent control--San Francisco and Los Angeles --are also the cities that have been seeing a boom in ADU construction, even though the dysfunctional rent control policies of those cities apply to a lot of those ADUs. The statewide rent cap isn't likely to be a meaningful impediment to ADU construction. Much more problematic is the cost of constructing the ADU in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> To add to the parade of horrible, California also has the highest poverty rate in the country once you account for cost of living: [https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/the- conversatio...](https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/the- conversation/sd-california-poverty-rate-20180913-htmlstory.html). It's also one of the poorest states overall—the median Californian has less purchasing power than the median Mississippian: [https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2018/11/1...](https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2018/11/15/median- household-purchasing-power-for-the-50-states-and-dc).

<comment><USER13> I have trouble seeing how the fifth largest economy by GDP in the world (11th per capita) can be fairly described as "poor". If that's "poor", then the word "poor" doesn't mean anything.

Edit: I'm not saying that the state doesn't have high inequality. It does, as does the US in general. I'm saying it's not _poor_. California is rich, but does not distribute that wealth equitably.

<comment><USER16> Averages in this case are meaningless. The distribution matters more than the average.

Never cross a river that is "on average 4 feet deep".

<comment><USER13> Both matter. California has a high Gini coefficient (as does the US in general). That's a problem, and one we need to fix. But it's counterbalanced to an extent by high GDP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Note: this is an opinion piece, not a news piece.

I never feel like I can trust pessimistic opinion pieces on California's economy. Many pundits want California to fail for various reasons, and trying to dredge useful information out of them is difficult.

<comment><USER18> Reading the comments on this piece makes it pretty clear who the target market for op-eds like this is. Someone suggests that living in California is like living in Venezuela.

<comment><USER11> I've had certain family members say they always thought California would return to Mexico. I managed to calmly explained why no president would EVER let that happen.

<comment><USER19> California returning to Mexico seems fairly unlikely to me as well (it brings in a lot federal income tax, for one thing), but I'm sort of curious what exactly you say to your family. After all, republicans might like to be rid of that electoral college base.

<comment><USER11> That California is 15% of the US GDP and it would be suicide to let that go. It has huge centers of tech, entertainment, and defense. That it could cause a cascade of other states to split. That it would take some very important ports with them. That strategically the US would never give up that much coastline. That California pays more to the fed than the fed puts into the state.

As a joke I also like to throw in that Ronald Reagan's presidential library is here. Heh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > But California's political system is making it hard to respond to these > pressures. Thanks to a 1978 ballot initiative called Proposition 13, > California cities have stringent limits on raising revenue from local > property taxes. That forces the state to provide many services, financing > them with hefty income taxes. Those are inherently more unreliable than > property taxes, since wealthy taxpayers can move away (while property can't > move), and since California's income taxes fluctuate a lot because they > depend so much on the profits residents earn on volatile stock prices.

Prop 13 is widely cited as one of California's biggest weaknesses. I suspect the state will be looking quite closely at other ways to tax property, given that property taxes are relatively easy to assess and enforce, and depending on your economic situation, have a built-in progressive quality to them.

What restrictions does the state have around imposing taxes on real estate sales?

For example, could the state impose a 1% tax on profits from the sale of a private residence under $50,000?

I know this would put the state at odds with the federal government, but could it be a way around Prop 13?

<comment><USER21> The big push now is to exempt commercial property from prop 13

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I mean we can fix it. Allow high density, tall buildings in urban centers, discourage centralized working environments and encourage satellite offices throughout the state, remove fees/expedite permit applications for new construction contingent on low/middle income rents, and get people out of fire areas.

</comment><comment><USER23> The problem is the "services" the state is providing are economically unprofitable. Proposition 13 was passed to force the state to have controlled expenditures by not allowing the majority to extort the minority by using their property as extortion through property taxes.

The causes are actually bad laws which are put into place by an increasing majority of people living in want trying to force the "State" into providing it services they cannot pay for themselves.

The "state" can't afford to pay for their services either, and the net effect is to try and coerce people into a redistribution of money from people that have money to those that don't have as much to cover these expenditures.

Because the mechanism used (income taxes) to coerce people to do this now isn't efficient enough now to meet their ever increasing demands, and the voters force the government (who created the problem) to fund these "services" without really thinking about how they will fund their expenditures - <USER2> it the governments problem to figure out - which it can't without using coercion.

This thereby allows them to continue uncontrolled expenditure in an ever increasing downward spiral to catastrophe as in effect they are spending 'other peoples money' in the hopes that "eventually these invoices will be paid" through some sort of government sponsored coercion mechanism forcing socialized redistribution by holding peoples and companies properties or income hostage or some other such method with the same result.

Its really quite simple and clever and funny that it still works.

<comment><USER24> I think you exceeded your "quota" of quotation marks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> California should abolish the income tax like WA/NV/FL and watch people move back in droves.</comment>


3,000 GitHub stars in 10 days – respect - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/square/leakcanary

<comment><USER2> Looks nice and easy to plug in, just at a quick glance I'd prefer to see some of the visualisations or output that it produces. Lot of stars for ten days on github.</comment>


Why Krugman and Stiglitz Are Wrong About Government Spending - <AUTHOR> http://www.professorhollybell.com/2012/11/04/why-krugman-and-stiglitz-are-wrong-about-government-spending/

<comment><USER2> I recommend you watch the actual talk: [http://ineteconomics.org/blog/inet/conversation-economy- stig...](http://ineteconomics.org/blog/inet/conversation-economy-stiglitz-and- krugman-financial-crisis-and-future-economics)

They don't really disagree, although it may appear so in the talk. The only major disagreement is about QE, not the size or character of fiscal stimulus.

I think you should pay attention to both Stiglitz and Krugman because they are very insightful 'hackers' in Economics in every good sense of the word.

Both are theorists, that try to explain real world phenomena with simple, often in their own words 'silly' models. Both don't shy away from math and are mindful of the empiric research being done by others, without sacrificing substance.

The results of their work are that we are able to explain very accurately anomalies in international trade and errors in traditional welfare analysis (Krugman's increasing returns models of agglomerations and Stiglitz's externalities, respectively). They should really be given Nobels at least two times - they are definitely not one-hit wonders and Krugman's work on exchange rate volatility, currency crises and liquidity traps are extremely relevant today.

Both are very outspoken in their criticism of the powerful of the day and the orthodoxies of 'think-tank economists' and thus often dismissed by them as 'leftists'.

Even if you don't agree with them you should watch their talks and columns. To see the hacker ethic in Krugman's work check out this piece: <http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/howiwork.html>

Specifically about government spending and the article:

* Stiglitz and Krugman both assert in the talk that they prefer the spending to be on infrastructure and education. So the article is being very dishonest. Even in the infamous "Space Aliens invasion" remark Krugman recommended building "things like high-speed rail"

* Actually the US has austerity in the state and municipal level, so there isn't actually "additional dollars of federal spending". Also mentioned in the talk, and many other places by these two.

* There is wide agreement about positive multipliers in the crisis since around 2011. The proposition that they may have been negative has been shot down by studies in 2010 and has very little basis in theory. Economists like Alesina who were austerity hawks before that have back-pedalled somewhat and the IMF has admitted that austerity deepens recessions.

* Krugman and the Romers have written quite a lot why this depression is very much like the one in the thirties.

<comment><USER3> Disclamer, I have not seen the talk.

> Stiglitz and Krugman both assert in the talk that they prefer the spending > to be on infrastructure and education. So the article is being very > dishonest. Even in the infamous "Space Aliens invasion" remark Krugman > recommended building "things like high-speed rail"

This does not matter. There theory clearly states that the main effect of the spending has nothing todo with what is being spend on. Sure the do not advocate spending on usless things but that does not matter. There theory is wrong and spending this money is wronge. If is your political opinion that more money should go into education or whatever, you should do it threw the proper politcal channals and not go around the normal political process with a stimuls package.

This (proper) discussion between a keynesian and a free market guy about stimulus infrastructure spending might be intressting.

[http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/09/frank_and_rober.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/09/frank_and_rober.html)

> Actually the US has austerity in the state and municipal level, so there > isn't actually "additional dollars of federal spending". Also mentioned in > the talk, and many other places by these two.

There is only very, very few presidents that ever decresed spending. If you look at the amount of GDP goverment spends, its constantly growing, with every president (I think the only expetion is Clinton).

Bush and Obama have both been record spenders, and then you have the obama stimulus. Claming the US is doing austerity is just wrong.

> * There is wide agreement about positive multipliers in the crisis since > around 2011. The proposition that they may have been negative has been shot > down by studies in 2010 and has very little basis in theory. Economists like > Alesina who were austerity hawks before that have back-pedalled somewhat and > the IMF has admitted that austerity deepens recessions.

Sorry this is just wrong. "wide agreement", really?

The only people that agree are the ones that where pro stimuls in the first place, ie. keynsians and neo-keynsians. Basiclly everybody else disagrees, including all form of montarism (classic, new, market), austrians and many others.

Can you find any economist or groupe of economist that where anti stimulus and now are pro? I have not heard of a single person that changed there mind.

Also you might want to read up on the sumner critique that has gotten a lot of attention.

Some Blogpost on it: <http://marketmonetarist.com/category/sumner-critique/>

> Krugman and the Romers have written quite a lot why this depression is very > much like the one in the thirties.

I quite agree and many economist do too but the point is that economist still do not agree on the what should have been done in 1929 (or 1933). They do not agree if the new deal helped or harmed, they do not agree if going of the gold stanard was good or bad

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The debate should be about who's most wrong.</comment>


How Our Success Is Ruining Seattle - <AUTHOR> http://jeffreifman.com/2015/07/09/how-success-is-ruining-seattle/?sdot <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this. It's also on Slashdot tonight: [http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/07/11/2255232/is- the...](http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/07/11/2255232/is-the-amazon- led-economic-boom-wrecking-seattle) and on BB yesterday by Doctorow: [http://boingboing.net/2015/07/10/how-seattles-economic- boom-...](http://boingboing.net/2015/07/10/how-seattles-economic-boom-i.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Seattle has had an anti-growth strategy going on 20 years now, and the State as well as City have been terribly mismanaged for at least that long.

Housing prices go up when you cannot build more housing units while population increases. When the state gets any money-- the dotcom boom is a perfect example- they spend like crazy, and not on things that add lasting value (transportation was a trivial part of the state's budget) ... then when the boom times end or slow down, the state has the same spending as before, without putting any reserves in. So they end up raising taxes.

It's the standard "let the roads suck so you can get people to vote for a tax increase, even though road spending is less than %1 of the budget." routine.

Seattle is geographically challenged with the sound, lake union and the mountains compressing the amount of room available... yet you can't build housing on a scale that makes it affordable?

Lets not even mention the fact that Seattle has been overrun with califronia liberals who have bought real estate and profit from the rapid increase in costs... so long as supply is way below demand their houses go up in value each year.

They pretend to be about "keeping a good community" but really they profit from their anti-growth position.

</comment><comment><USER4> So if I read the linked story correctly, the Amazon bro brigade called in the patriarchy to destroy Seattle for the real natives. They are also responsible for an increase in prostitution and associated drug crimes. Hate crimes are somehow their fault too.

It has nothing to do with progressive anti-growth policies enacted by the state and city governments. What I really love is the appeal for more progressives in government to fix the problem.

</comment><comment><USER5> No, Seattle "died" when a bunch of people moved from California and Almost Live was no longer culturally relevant. Outside people trying to recreate California with California problems. Tech lynch mobbing is lynch mobbing.</comment>


Ask HN: Where does one find true entry level development jobs? - <AUTHOR> I have several languages that I have either used infrequently in personal projects or have leared in classes over a couple of semesters. I want to find an entry level or junior level development job, but all of the ones I run across seem to want significantly more experience than I have. I am particularly interested in COBOL, but every "junior" job there wants 5+ years of experience. I am a quick learner when I get into the language on a day to day basis, but I have rarely used a single language for longer than 6 months at a time on an entry level basis.<p>Can anyone recommend any particular job boards or tips for filtering for true entry level jobs? Thanks! <comment><USER2> > every "junior" job there wants 5+ years of experience.

That sentence is the important clue you need. If you are still a junior programmer after 5+ years experience, there is probably something wrong. You should mostly ignore the job requirements in terms of the years of experience they want.

There are even plenty of inside jokes around this. Jobs asking for 10 years javascript experience a couple of years after javascript was released!

Either they are looking for a senior programmer and are hoping to pay junior programmer rates (possible) or they are just putting their list of ideal requirements (more likely).

Sometimes the requirements aren't even written by IT staff, HR writes the requirements, and HR doesn't have a clue about IT.

Unfortunately, this means that it's very difficult to filter for "true" entry level jobs.

Applying to jobs is mostly a numbers game. Unless the job makes it clear that you need to be a senior developer, or a team lead, then just apply. Before traveling to an interview, see if you can set up an initial phone interview. If the interviewer doesn't do a great job of screening you, ask questions yourself to try to understand your responsibilities better. Will you be working under a senior programmer? That's a good sign that they aren't looking for someone who can work 100% independently and that they are willing to mentor you.

<comment><USER3> I suspect they are encouraging people to lie on their applications, which gives companies a defense to any sort of fired for cause lawsuit.

<comment><USER2> Really? That sounds a little paranoid. I always just tell the truth on the interview and application. "You asked for 5+ years experience, but I only have 6 months. I'm willing to learn if you are willing to train me".

<comment><USER3> How is that paranoid? You think there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for asking for more experience with a technology than is physically possible?

<comment><USER4> "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

<comment><USER5> It's not malice, it's business and legal acumen.

<comment><USER2> If that's what the legal department recommended to me as a business owner to add in protections for being able to fire employees, I would fire the legal department.

How many applicants will be inspired to lie because of my absurd requirement on the job spec? Of those applicants, how many will I hire? Do I only hire applicants who have lied in order to be protected so I can later fire them? I wouldn't hire someone who lied on their application in the first place!

I've never had a legal department recommend something so silly as this, and I challenge you to find one that does. If you want certain protections for the company in an employment agreement, you put them in a contract.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's probably not the answer you want, but do not hesitate to apply to jobs that ask for 0-5 years of experience, it's very often a nice to have and not a requirement. Worst case scenario is, they don't contact you (which will not happen either if you don't contact them ;) )

Your choice of COBOL is both strange (it's an old language that's not used for any new stuff) and potentially playing against you. Company looking for COBOL devs are often banks or big companies having huge critical systems that they're afraid to update to a more recent language. Thus, they may be looking for someone with some experience, considering how critical those softwares are. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't apply, I may totally be wrong or you may find something anyway!

<comment><USER7> The guy probably wants those fat stacks that come with COBOL, but I agree, there are not gonna be any entry level COBOL positions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My experience is probably not typical, but I had an EE degree and more of a self taught programming background. When I graduated in 2009 the job market was pretty bad but took a job doing support for a telecom company. Within a few months I found a lot of what they were doing could be automated so I started writing scripts. Very quickly this became my full time job. I later leveraged that to get a more "normal" software dev position at another company, although sometimes I miss that job because I don't think I have ever written software since then that felt as directly impactful (saving many hours and $) lol. Also, COBOL is a very unusual language to be perusing in this day in age, but you might find something in sustaining type roles at big corps and government. I would think they would actually be quite eager to find new hires that were actually interested in maintaining old COBOL but I don't know.

</comment><comment><USER9> The public sector. I got my first dev job at the local state university. They pay less than the private sector, thus making it harder for them to find solid talent. Put in a few years, and then jump ship once you've accumulated the requisite experience to no-longer be entry-level.

<comment><USER10> Second this. Universities are a great place to find junior dev work as competition is relatively low compared with higher paying industries.

I started off at an extremely low salary in my first job at a UC and doubled my salary in two years (though I still work in higher-ed and like it).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Apply for jobs that it doesn't seem you qualify for. True entry level jobs in development know that the people that are coming straight out of school are going to require training/mentoring (hence the lower pay).

There are jobs out there that are looking for mid to senior level developers, but don't want to pay their prices, so they post entry/junior level jobs with mid/senior requirements. Screw those jobs.

Further, still, you have some jobs that are trying to do the aforementioned with the intent that no one applies, and they can use the evidence to justify an H1-B visa.

Even further, still, you have those jobs that are posted by recruiters that are at least two levels removed from any person with expertise in the field, so they don't know what the hell they're doing.

</comment><comment><USER12> Just a curiosity question: why COBOL? Since it's not mainstream anymore, this makes the process of finding a job way more complicated. As a person who has never programmed in it I'm simply curious what makes it worth all the extra trouble?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am open to any language I have a base in, but to explain my COBOL desires... I took two semesters of it in grad school. I just really enjoyed the language. It made a lot of sense to me, was straightforward in its output, and was structured in a manner that I found worked with my thought process. There are jobs in my area for COBOL, but even the entry level ones seem like they want 5 years of experience every z/OS feature.

<comment><USER13> Out of curiosity what Uni is currently teaching COBOL?

<comment><AUTHOR> RMU in Pittsburgh has a very close working relationship with IBM. They also offer z/OS and DB2 courses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> People who write job ads often times don't know much about the jobs, hence the keyword soup and outlandish timelines. You will do well to reach to hiring managers directly, making sure to explain why. I scan those emails for about 15 seconds each, most get discarded because the applicant couldn't be bothered to explain what attracted them to our company and how they are going to contribute. The latter part is most important, and can easily land you an interview.

<comment><AUTHOR> So if, for example, you were hiring for a developer in Java and I sent an email essentially saying: "I did this language in school. I haven't done much of it in my current internship, but here is one of my last projects. I liked the language due to X, Y, Z reasons and am interested in the job for ABC. I apply myself when learning, and quickly pick things up. I can put you in touch with the professor who taught me the language to confirm that."

I may have a chance at an interview even if my credentials are well/mostly short of the posted job? I interview rather well when I do get a chance. I just don't want to spend time banging my head against the wrong wall.

<comment><USER14> We don't hire for language skills, so this will do nothing to persuade me. I am a lot more interested in someone who can _own a problem_ and drive it to conclusion. Coding is part of it, obviously, but only one of many.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Most jobs will list a bunch of bullet points as requirements.

If you can check off more than half, consider yourself well qualified.

Even things like "never programmed in swift, but have read some code examples, and understands the basic principles" can be enough check off "swift programming experience", especially if you already have mobile development experience from school or personal projects.

</comment><comment><USER16> I have no formal academic credential in CS. I got my first job as a programmer off of Craigslist, and I recommend taking a look to everyone who is having trouble finding an entry level position. People/companies advertising there typically don't care too much about pedigree (this should not surprise, given the branding of Craigslist), and also usually aren't looking for rocket scientists.

I agree with the advice others have given re: years of experience: it's rarely a hard requirement.

Take a look at this list of software jobs for NYC[1]. I see three or four entry level positions just on the first page.

[1] [https://newyork.craigslist.org/search/sof](https://newyork.craigslist.org/search/sof)

<comment><USER16> I'll add one more thing. Very few of the jobs on Craigslist are "sexy." Ignore the sexy jobs. Once you get your foot in the door, your options expand enormously. The adage "no one cares about your grades after your first job" holds fairly well, especially in this industry. I got that first Craigslist job in the summer of 2013, and was only there for five months (it was a horrible, toxic work environment). I now make more than 5x what I made at that first job. Whatever first job you take doesn't have to define the rest of your career.

<comment><USER17> I second this. Get some practical experience before trying for the "sexy" job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Not sure when the next one will be, but AFS [http://www.afsvision.com/Careers/Career- Opportunities](http://www.afsvision.com/Careers/Career-Opportunities) sporadically holds a Cobol training academy, where they pay individuals to learn Cobol for a few weeks, and generally hire a majority of them.

The exton, PA location is also close to Lancaster PA, so rural living is an option. I only use webservices with that group, so our corporate recruiter would probably have a better idea of what's available.

</comment><comment><USER19> In 2008, I went to SCALE, which is a Southern Californian Linux/Open Software expo. I met someone from a large company that pays finding fees to people that bring in new talent; he was there hoping to make a couple bucks.

From that, I've got two suggestions. First, go to expos, meet-ups, etc. They sometimes have mini job fairs, or at least people that know about some open positions. Second, find someone that will advocate for you to be hired (greed and friendship are both good motives for that).

</comment><comment><USER20> I was able to patch together around 2 years of paid development experience by the time I graduated college from various internships. I think it helped a lot in getting my first "real" position. If you're still in school I strongly recommend taking this route as entry level positions themselves are pretty hard to find.

</comment><comment><USER21> In my, outside of the valley experience, getting jobs is usually about talking to someone you know who know some one who knows someone. The sites where you spam your resume unannounced into a hiring inbox are not generally a high percent choice.

Do you have any local connections? The local development shops usually know a guy who knows a guy who has a start up who is hiring a few people. Typically, if you can find your way into a few local conferences, maker spaces, or gatherings generally there are a few companies who are hiring someone.

In a university setting, you are looking for professors who have some money to throw around of a one off project or know someone else who does. Think internships here. Typically colleges have a jobs/employment office specifically designed to find you jobs/coops/internships they are an excellent resource.

</comment><comment><USER22> Universities usually have plenty of student developer jobs, if you know how / when to look.

</comment><comment><USER23> Is there a college near you? They often have career fairs where employers are looking to hire entry-level employees. It may take some digging to find these fairs, because they often aren't advertised off-campus.

</comment><comment><USER24> networking events. (meetups & hackathons)

</comment><comment><USER25> Usually around colleges and in large cities.</comment>


How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=bot;idno=5283331.0003.001;rgn=div1;view=text;cc=bot;xc=1;g=dculture;node=5283331.0003.001%3A8

<comment><USER2> Article is generally correct ... as of 2008.

Facebook changed their strategy, though, which is why it doesn't ring quite so true today.

The key issue Cory picked up on is that FB2008 had no concept of delineation of social circles -- between actual close friends, family, people who happen to know you, folks who used to be friends ages ago, "frenemies", and people you want to keep tabs on (and vice versa). Nor did it have any concept of different social roles -- e.g. Cory's teacher example. FB2012 is still pretty crap at managing all those aspects of multivalent identity, but at least they've made a few gestures in that direction.

Meanwhile, FB2009-FB2012 picked up users on a wave of network externalities; if everyone is on FB and using it for messaging, you _can't_ ignore it.

I have an FB account. I hate and loathe FB, but my publishers' marketing folks insist I have an FB account. "But I've got a blog that gets 10-15 thousand daily visitors!" I tell them. "But everyone's on facebook," they chant. So I also have an FB author page with about 2K folks following it (and less than half of them actively reading it), and it forces me to waste time maintaining it and tweaking my privacy settings every time FB create a new privacy leak. This annoys me, and I'm pretty sure it annoys Cory as well, because we both have public personas and the relationship someone with a public persona has with FB is somewhat different to that of J. Random Member of Public. Whether it's truly as bad for everyone else ... shrug.

</comment><comment><USER3> What a nice looking website. There's a bit too much random whitespace above the article, but it's all very nice and clean. The width is just right. Thoughts?

Also, 2008 should definitely be in the title.

<comment><USER4> 2008 should certainly be in the title, because this argument is woefully out of date. If it were right, Facebook would be well into a Friendster-like decline now.

But everybody has adapted. To my eye, it looks like a combination of better features on Facebook's part (hiding users, quiet unfriending, friend lists to control content distribution, auto-filtering of feeds to people it thinks you care about, etc); more skillful users; wider uptake of good social network etiquette; and people just getting used to the fact that everybody is on Facebook.

I look forward to the day that somebody will find a way to challenge Facebook, but I don't believe this is any longer a route.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Haha! It reminds me the guy that wanted to fight with me all day on school, I broke his nose out of anger on a fight, he was so stupid.

Recently I made something on Internet and got a little famous, got a little press from TV or newspapers and I received invitations from all the people I had known in my life, including my biggest enemies on school like this guy or the girl that ignored me.

Some of them send me things like "I have changed, we could become friends now". Super creepy ones I tell you.

Why can't be just ignore each other ? Now that we live hundreds of miles away.

<comment><USER6> Easy, don't accept friend requests and ignore them. If they want to stalk you, take precautions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why hasn't this happened in the four years since it was published?

<comment><USER8> Because the entire premise is wrong

> It's socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list—but > removing someone from your friends list is practically a declaration of war.

It really isn't that bad as he makes it out to be. End of discussion.

<comment><USER9> "It really isn't that bad as he makes it out to be. End of discussion."

You say that as though you'd definitively disproved the premise, instead of just saying "nuh-uh."

Citation?

<comment><USER10> In case the question was not tongue-in-cheek, what's the citation for the original premise? I have trouble imagining what would be a citation for "(dis)proving" that something is socially awkward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> kevin rose kinda repeats the same idea today <http://kevinrose.com/the- boolean-graph>

</comment><comment><USER12> >> which lags even end-of-lifed e-mail clients like

>> Eudora for composing, reading, filtering, archiving,

>> and searching.

These words hit the mark with me. I've never found a polite way to word it so I just bite my tongue and avoid being the negative nelly but whenever someone shows me some cool new tool or website, odds on bet its missing a ton of basic functionality that I already had in the boring old pre-web 2.0 version of whatever the tool is.

We're very forgiving of this in general as consumers but it does suck a fair bit.

</comment><comment><USER13> As others have pointed out, this is woefully out of date. But the core issue is that it's actually NOT hard to say no to adding someone on Facebook. Life will go on if you hurt someone's feelings (which you don't really care about as you don't really like the person anyway). JUST SAY NO to idiots you don't want to be friends with on Facebook.

For me Facebook is for old friends or solid newer friends, and family members. Work folks have the abomination that is LinkedIn to connect to me on, others can use Twitter.

Saying no is okay. Try it occasionally.

</comment><comment><USER14> The unrealistic binary friend statuses are what Friendica Red is supposed to be aimed at resolving, such that it becomes something more like a set of permissions mapped to degrees of familiarity.

<http://friendica.com/node/51>

</comment><comment><USER15> "So-and-so has sent you a message." This is actually not true at all. Facebook will email you about a new message and include the message content in that email. Not sure how old this article is (hate when people publish stuff online and don't include a proper date).

</comment><comment><USER16> Well, you must admit the average age of persons using Facebook in the span of a few years went from university age to something like mid-30's or 40's. It's just not "cool" anymore.

<comment><USER17> This is definitely part of it. As generations come of "Facebook age" are they really going to want to join the same social network as their parents?

I'm in my early 20s so I was on social networks well before those of my parent's generation. Just try dodging your parents' friend requests, that never goes well...</comment></comment>


JASON, an open source joke - <AUTHOR> http://www.ollydbg.de/Jason/index.htm

<comment><USER3> It may not be useful to everyone, but it seems like a sincere project (from skimming the website). Why is it being described as a joke?

<comment><USER4> FWIW, the first line of the linked page does read

 _Olly, the author of OllyDbg, presents his new open source joke:_

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice! It reminds me of the EDSAC simulator, which I find extremely important:

<http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~edsac/>

Why important, you say? Well, these old computers aren't around any more, and what better way to teach new computer-science wannabe's the values of 35-bit computing? ;)

Shall we play a game?

Honestly, the joke angle is lost on me - old computers don't die, their users just degrade them! A working computer, whatever the age, is still a damned fine machine to be using, User!

<comment><USER6> >Honestly, the joke angle is lost on me - old computers don't die, their users just degrade them! A working computer, whatever the age, is still a damned fine machine to be using, User!

I think that the likes of Richard Greenblat and Bill Gosper would disagree with you. Just from a description of the PDP versus the IMB mainframes it's obvious that the articles produced by DEC were superior machines.

<comment><USER5> See, thats where it all began - this malignant thought that 'old computers' are 'dead computers'. Computers don't stop being useful because of age - <USER2> stop being useful because someone makes the _decision_ not to find a use for them.

<comment><USER6> I don't see what you're getting at. Those machines were produced in the same time period. Old machines that only have KB of memory do stop being useful because of age. At this point it would be an egregious use of power to run these things to do calculations that can be done by your cellphone in milliseconds. If you want to experience ITS, run an emulator.

<comment><USER5> At one point, 64kb was useful for something. There is an infinite number of uses for 64kb. Its only the decision being made that its not useful any more that makes it so - the users change, not the computers.

I still break out my 8-bit machines now and then for some fun, localized, minimal computing. Its amazing how much you can get done in a little bit of RAM, but the 'amazing' is just the result of an arbitrary decision, nothing more.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google TV relaunches with Android Market - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2011/10/28/google-tv-relaunch/

<comment><USER2> Now things are going to get interesting. Games distributed to the Google TV via the Android Market, using an existing Android-powered smartphone or tablet as a controller. Hell, developers have already figured out ways to get the Wii remotes and other console controllers to work with Android.

If Google plays their cards right, especially with some more powerful hardware in their next iterations, they could accidentally become the next big contender in the Console Wars. If nothing else the Wii proved that the casual, indy market was a completely untapped niche that exploded overnight. The machine basically printed money for Nintendo for the past few years.

<comment><USER3> Actually, Google TV 2.0 has native support for game controllers and USB host, too. They could really push Android/Google TV into becoming a "console platform", too. They could use the same strategy they've used against the iPhone to beat Xbox, PS3 and Wii - just get everyone to make TV's and set top boxes with high-performance ARM chips.

Everything is laid out for them. They just need to act on it. So far I don't see them promoting it too hard, which is a shame, because Apple will probably hype it up hard when they launch Apple TV with iOS apps and games, and then everyone will think Google is playing catch-up again.

What's sort of ironic, is that Google "TV" might actually be a lot more successful as a console platform than a "TV" platform, meaning that there would be a lot more customers buying it for the "console" promise, than for the "improving TV experience" promise. If they were smart, they would take full advantage of that, get millions of units in people's homes, and _then_ figure out the TV part.

<comment><USER4> _They could really push Android/Google TV into becoming a "console platform", too_

This strategy can be problematic. Google and their hardware partners will have to choose if its going to compete with consoles on the high-end or with cheaper internet boxes (Boxee/Roku) on the low end. Currently its price point (when it was first launched) is the same as the Xbox and PS3 and I have no idea why you'd get a GoogleTV box instead of an Xbox. If they can get down to $200 they'd be closer to Boxee but this wouldn't be a "console gaming" machine.

Remember the Consoles (Xbox/PS3 even Wii) are all subsidized platforms and sometimes the consoles themselves are actually sold at a loss since MS/Sony/Nintendo can make up the difference with game license fees. So its not as simple as you lay out.

<comment><USER3> I don't think Google TV set top boxes should be higher than $150 anyway. They can probably make it for $100, too, and it might be possible if Apple is going to put an A5 in their Apple TV, while keeping the price.

Android already has quite a few console-like games, that to be honest would be played a lot better with a gamepad than on a touch screen. I'm sure it would open up another market at the $100-$150 price, and disrupt all the other consoles. It doesn't have to compete with them at the "high-end" on performance.

All I'm saying is that they shouldn't treat it as an afterthought, when it will still use more or less the same hardware that is going into a set-top box. They just need to show intent and support it, and get developers to modify their phone/tablet games for TV. There's a difference between letting it happen by itself, which Google tends to do in general (unfortunately), and announcing it all at launch, like Apple does, and with many partners.

<comment><USER4> Without subsidizing the price they can't sell GoogleTV boxes for $150 bucks they'd be losing money. Not with any decent sort of processing power. Remember all those Android smart phones out there are subsidized by contracts. Apple's box is subsidized by iTunes sales.

I'm telling you a lot of those console like games on Android smart phones aren't going to work on a GoogleTV with a $150 price point.

EDIT: I'm not saying the BOM on the boxes are over $150 but total costs involved (marketing/manufacturing/support) would run at a loss. Or even that Apple is selling their box at a loss but the platform is subsidized.

<comment><USER2> Really? The smartphone bill of sales comes out to about $200 per device. After you take out the battery, baseband, transceiver, GPS, gyroscope, display, and touch-screen components, that price gets slashed in half to around $100. Granted there are a lot of other costs to associate with it, such as additional output and input controllers, marketing, distribution, and profit margin. But still, it's not out of the realm of possibilities to see the new models go for $150-$200.

<comment><USER4> There's not a lot of CE manufacturers selling devices with a $100 BOM for $150-$200. Those $200 Smartphones (iPhone 4S is ~$189) retail for $600 assuming the same markup even with your number of $100 your looking at a $400 box. Boxee's box is $200 bucks and is pretty decent so you have to assume a $200 box is possible, but GoogleTV is a significant step up in performance and hardware features to Boxee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Doubling down on GoogleTV is exactly what they should be doing and I think the device has great potential with the Market.

The Aljazeera and Netflix apps are already a good way to watch stuff on Android, so I'd imagine a small collection of good quality apps will make this a very attractive platform.

<comment><USER6> I love it too. After years of harassing wife with different tv add on boxes, plain Linux, apple tv, boxee, I came home to find her just using the thig with no input from my self. She just got it. That is why Google TV is so awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like my Google TV, but there was room for massive improvement literally everywhere -- performance, UI, features. I hope they really hit on a lot of it.

</comment><comment><USER8> The best thing about GoogleTV is that it has HDMI passthrough, so for the most part you don't have to use it unless you really, really need it.

The only time we use it on our set (we have the Logitech Revue) is for Amazon VOD.

I'll upgrade to the new firmware, but....that keyboard as an HID device for a television is such a pain I can't see this ending well.

<comment><USER9> I never use the keyboard. The phone (Android/iOS) app is solid.

<comment><USER10> It's great except for 2 annoyances: (1) the d-pad just doesn't feel natural to me still, (2) the constant crashing of the app and google TV when connections don't establish correctly. That being said, I use both the iPhone and android tablet versions all the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> They really need to think about how to improve interaction with it. Virtual apps? Voice commands? Kinect-like actions? Pretty much any of those is better than a full blown keyboard for controlling it in my opinion. And why do they still have a mouse pointer in there for crying out loud??

As for the virtual apps, it might be best to use a complete interface inside the phone or tablet, rather than a simple "remote app". Stop replicating stuff from other paradigms. Just take advantage of the current paradigm you're working with.

My idea would be to show the complete Google TV interface inside an app on your Android phone, and control it from there. When you touch an element on the phone, it should on the TV. I think that would be even faster than using a "remote app", which means you still have to go from one app to another until you reach your target, rather than simply selecting it on the phone.

<comment><USER11> That's exactly what I've wanted to build. I haven't peaked inside the API enough to see if anything close is even remotely possible, but the absolute best feature of Google TV is using my phone as the remote. The current remote app sucks, and it's still so much nicer of a way to control my TV. If something can be built to have really solid integration between a phone/tablet and the TV it would really make a phenomenal experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I really like the on going developments around Google TV, Apple TV, Netflix, ... for now the world is not ready yet for such services but will be in a few years. After the mobile, the next battle will be TV.

</comment><comment><USER13> GoogleTV blog post:

[http://googletv.blogspot.com/2011/10/update-on-google- tv.htm...](http://googletv.blogspot.com/2011/10/update-on-google-tv.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> So... can Google TV finally catalog what I have on my HD and stream it to my TV?

</comment><comment><USER15> Drat. Apple could have done that first. Kudos to Google for taking that step.

<comment><USER3> They could've done it much earlier, too, if only they didn't waste all that time porting both Android and the Dalvik VM to x86. They should've used ARM from day one. Hoping there will be some Tegra 3-based set top boxes launching with Google TV 2.0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Many people think GoogleTV is pointless, because they can't imagine throwing away their current TV (or blu-ray, or DVR) to buy one.

That's not the point.

The point is that it's a good feature to have, and soon enough it will be silly for you to buy a TV that can't do those same tricks.

It's like a TV remote on old TVs. You probably wouldn't throw away your old TV just because it didn't have a remote. But when you bought your next TV for whatever reason, you probably wanted the one with the remote.

</comment><comment><USER17> From the comments, I must be the only one that thinks that adding new features to something that is already a complete mess, is just a terrible idea. Google TV is not a real consumer product. It sucks big time. I cannot even gift it to my parents because they (as well as I) dont have a cable box and most (all??) Google TVs use HDMI (reminder: my cable provider doesnt have an HDMI cable coming out of the wall).

So what am I supposed to use this junk for?

\- Browsing the web? I guess that is what my cursor and the big ass keyboard on my lap is for.

\- Netflix/Vudu whatever other streaming service? My PS3,Wii XBOX 360 do that already.

\- Games? That crap doesnt even have decent accelerated hardware support, and did I mention that I have a PS3, Wii and XBOX 360? Any of those devices (which by the way are mostly at the same price point) can do 1000 times better.

\- Apps? I like my apps in my tablet or phone. Since I usually have to read to use them and it is a horrible experience to read anything on a TV screen.

I know I am going to get downvoted like crazy, but I dont care at all about my HN score.

Face reality - Google TV is a piece of junk that does several things - and it sucks at all of them.

<comment><USER18> > I know I am going to get downvoted like crazy, but I dont care at all about > my HN score.

I downvoted you because this kind of baiting is extremely annoying and is the kind of thing I would expect from reddit but not HN. It also goes against the HN guidelines:

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

> Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it > makes boring reading.

> Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.</comment></comment>


Exposure to fake news in 2016 election overstated - <AUTHOR> https://m.phys.org/news/2020-03-exposure-fake-news-election-overstated.html <comment><USER2> Data here show how much impact exposure to "news" on social media has in terms of quality and engagement.

[https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2020/02/29/top-economists- st...](https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2020/02/29/top-economists-study-what- happens-when-you-stop-using-facebook/)</comment>


Symantec Is Now NortonLifeLock - <AUTHOR> https://investor.nortonlifelock.com/About/Investors/press-releases/press-release-details/2019/Symantec-Completes-Sale-of-Enterprise-Security-Assets-to-Broadcom/default.aspx <comment><USER2> I see lots of comments from people who don't know what "LifeLock" is. To save you the trip to Wikipedia:

"LifeLock Inc. is an American identity theft protection company based in Tempe, Arizona. LifeLock was founded by Robert Maynard Jr. and Todd Davis in 2005. LifeLock's identity theft protection system detects fraudulent applications for credit and illegal use of personal information. It also monitors the use of personal information and credit score changes. As of 9 February 2017, it is a subsidiary of Symantec."

It is mostly famous for being somewhere between being really terrible at actually protecting your identity, and being an outright scam. The "controversies" section is worth reading:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LifeLock#Controversies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LifeLock#Controversies)

<comment><USER3> Are there any credit monitoring or "identity theft prevention" services that _aren 't_ outright scams?

Most of them spend huge amounts of money on scare-tactic ads, use shady free- trial-with-automatic-billing-that's-impossible-to-cancel sign-up models, and are cagey about what exactly they're monitoring and how their flagging works.

It's too easy to run these sorts of businesses as "do absolutely nothing, collect checks every month, suffer no consequences if things go wrong because the event is rare, profit is purely a function of sales team size" operations.

Kind of like the anti-virus market, actually... I guess this is a good match!

<comment><USER4> CreditKarma is legit and free. Of course just like any other free service, you are the product. They recommend products to you based on your credit and finances. They also give you full weekly access to your Transunion and Equifax credit reports.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this just me as a non-native speaker, or does "Norton LifeLock" sound... kind of sinister? Like something out of a dystopian novel?

I'm actually not quite sure what the name is supposed to mean. Are they locking my life to protect me from evil hackers?

<comment><USER6> It sounds like they're trying to sacrifice the remaining scraps of Peter Norton's reputation in order to make a horcrux.

<comment><USER7> *The antivirus that shall not be named

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So what's the difference between 'enterprise security' and 'consumer security' products?

I work for a (partial) competitor and I can't really imagine splitting our company into consumer and enterprise versions.

Exploits are exploits, no matter if the target is a Windows XP in an AD domain, or a Windows 10 video game box in a home. A lot of threat analysis/discover infrastructures need to be duplicated, let alone the analysts and reverse engineering engineers.

<comment><USER9> Enterprise security is typically B2B with annual contracts in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars; most any company dealing with any kind of PII requires every employee workstation/laptop to have a security product installed with periodic scans, often daily, and then an audit trail a mile long.

Vs. consumer security, I am guessing, Windows has a built in virus scanner now that's pretty good, and also free; LifeLock is a sort of credit freeze/identity theft monitoring service... a product marketed directly to consumers, but also as a pack-in offering that credit card companies are starting to offer to customers for free, especially as part of settlements due to personal information breach legal settlements. Different market/scope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Norton Utilities, Norton DiskDefrag, Norton Anti-virus (earrrly versions) were all great, man I used them heavily. This news feels like more of a eulogy for what was Symantec

<comment><USER11> His books on x86 assembly helped me out a bunch too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So ignore the "life lock" stuff for a moment. Is anyone paying attention to the gobbling up of second-tier suppliers that broadcom's been steadily doing? The life lock stuff is the stuff that Broadcom for some reason found indigestible.

Go look at the history of acquisitions over the last 20 years. [1] LSI, PMC- Sierra, Avago, Infineon, Brocade, CA... It's highly likely that any electronic device has a Broadcom chip or component inside of it.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcom_Inc.#History](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcom_Inc.#History)

<comment><USER13> It's logical if you look at Qualcomm and its history of acquisitions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Same scam, new brand? Whatever happened to the Norton class of product? Those delivered good value to the user. Did what they promised, didn't spy, didn't upsell me through FUD and dark patterns.

<comment><USER6> Looking at their history[1], they got commoditized. They were first clobbered as the OS vendors started to build in utilities that were good enough for most people, and later open source software was better.

Add to that they wanted to capture a larger demographic, so they've exited the hobbyist market entirely and got into PC optimization / AV / VPN snake oil. They became the crapware you have to delete from a new Windows machine.

And now branding themselves after ID theft snake oil? If you burned $30 a month at least you'd get warm.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Utilities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Utilities)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does this feel to anyone else like Symantec has been the victim of identity theft?

</comment><comment><USER16> Norton Utilities were great! Not sure about the later products.

<comment><USER17> Norton Commander was great too and Peter Norton wrote the book on programming the IBM PC.

IIRC Norton AntiVirus was a rebranding of Symantec's antivirus software and probably the first usage of Norton's name for marketing reasons whereas NortonLifeLock is the last.

<comment><USER18> Was? It still is! Used it two weeks ago when I had to copy some files to my DOS retro machine and I could not be bothered to re-learn the xcopy syntax after all these Linux years :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why life lock? What does that mean?

<comment><USER20> I guess they're suggesting that they put a lock on your life so others can't steal it. It's a pretty tenuous metaphor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> xd</comment>


Uber lays off around 350 more across Eats, self-driving and other departments - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/14/uber-lays-off-another-350-across-eats-self-driving-and-other-departments/ <comment><USER2> This is hardly surprising at all. There used to be lots of complaints, both internally and publicly, about how bloated and ineffective Uber's engineering organization was. Many engineers were bitter about many overlapping projects in Uber. It's also funny that Uber engineers used many bogus reasons to implement NIH projects. A typical example is that Uber had a team to implement their own Bazel-like system because "Bazel (or any other tool) does not scale in Uber-scale". Same went for their own GPU database, their own SQS, their own key-value store, their own resource scheduler, their own datacenter, and their own deployment system. The end result was that almost everything sucked. Engineers suffered productivity loss for years. I kid you not that Uber's docker system didn't support persistent volume for more than three years, so anyone who wanted to build a persistent system like Elasticsearch had to jump hoops and spent weeks even just to get machines. And the sad fact is, Uber did not have a "Uber scale". The traffic and complexity it had to handle was far less than other internet companies.

I wish they didn't hire so irresponsibly back in 2015 and 2016.

<comment><USER3> I worked at Uber from 2014-2018.

Can confirm this. It was a very poorly managed org because it was extremely grassroots driven—leadership was underempowered to say no to front line teams or hold groups accountable.

The overlaps and poorly considered projects described above are not an exaggeration. Many of them were designed for building the lead engineer's open source brand, not for company needs. Half of the projects described above have since been canceled.

Google:

\- Hyperbahn

\- Cherami

\- Schemaless

\- Peloton

\- uDeploy

\- m3db

\- piper

\- XYS

Contrary to their glossy open source and tech blog presentations, these projects were highly contentious internally and widely viewed as inferior to industry counterparts. Each of these projects had 5-20 engineers working on them for over a year; many of them are being EOLed or phased out currently. And this is just the list that I can publicly talk about. This development came at extraordinary cost for the org and, in the case of the people who were laid off, cost to people's careers.

<comment><USER4> Ok, innocent question, having never worked in a giant tech company with a viable, popular product -- how do they deploy the massive amount of available engineering hours?

Do teams just work on random projects like the above while other people fix bugs? Is it like a million mini startups internally all pitching an idea to the CEO all the time?

Or do you need 90% of people focused on how to develop your product at first, then suddenly it flips and you need 90% of your engineers to balance enormous amounts of network traffic and data storage?

<comment><USER5> A guess, from other companies: a manager is given some engineers, they ask themselves "What should we create?", they come up with an idea, make up a random business justification, POC it to upper management, get approval and headcount, and spend a year or two trying to prove it was worthwhile. Best case it works and gets used by other internal teams for 2-5 years, worst case the team gets broken apart and the project abandoned. (Mind you, nobody gets laid off, they just find other reasons to keep paying people who aren't making anything of value) If you have ever heard about it publicly, it was probably someone's pet project and they wanted their ego stroked, or to "get a win" and a promotion.

Many of the projects are just a response to some other internal problem, like "the teams aren't using a shared platform", so they build a platform for the platforms. Persistent problems get ignored because nobody wants to rock the boat. The joys of working in a large corporation...

<comment><USER6> I saw this at a decades-old retail company. New CTO brought a Silicon Valley perspectives to the company which involved hiring a load specialist engineers into newly created departments without any explicit business justification. Literally said that once they were hired they'd come up with useful projects. He also wanted to start exporting our in-house software as standalone products even when we were still running transactions through a mainframe. CEO bought it all hook, line and sinker.

<comment><USER7> > Literally said that once they were hired they'd come up with useful > projects.

This is a great way to have engineers burn time on projects they think are interesting rather than projects that will actually have good ROI.

<comment><USER8> How do you balance avoiding this with wanting engineers who have ideas and agency?

<comment><USER9> Bring engineers in to solve problems you know need to get solved. As they learn the system, its debt, the business, etc., listen to their ideas. For ones that sound good, give them the resources to develop a POC. For the POCs that work, give them the resources to take it all the way.

Larger companies with substantial profits can hire engineers explicitly to come up with POCs one after another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder at what point this kind of thing is enough to tip the Bay Area tech labor market into a new equilibrium.

In the recent past there have been a lot (hundreds?) of startups and a few dozen larger players fighting to hire in an environment with virtually zero unemployment. There are thousands of empty jobs waiting to be filled. Hence if you live around here and have tech something on your resume, it's 3-5 recruiter emails a day.

Across three rounds, Uber has let go ~1000 people. I have no idea how many are in the Bay Area, but to pick a random number and say "half," that's ~500 new people in the labor market who are probably well qualified for the rest of the open jobs.

By itself that's pretty healthy, and should actually help a lot of smaller companies in particular to be able to get "butts in seats."

But with this whole thing of "the window being open," and a lot of recent IPOs, if we start seeing a lot of the other IPO companies engage in similar layoffs, it's not hard to imagine we end up with a few thousand qualified people suddenly looking for jobs.

Is there still so much demand that the market swallows that up without noticing? Is it just enough that it helps take some of the pressure off locally, that labor demand dips but remains healthy? Or is it enough that employers can start being pickier, or stingier with their offers?

I don't know, and I'm not sure how you estimate the impact of something like that, but it's an interesting question to me. Anyone with a labor economics background have an idea how many layoffs it would take to get Bay Area supply/demand in balance?

<comment><USER11> In the bay area, Non-engineers, like product managers, MBA types and data analysts, etc are having a really hard time finding work (sometimes taking 1 to 3 years to find their next job!) based on what I've seen in my circle of friends. (unless your in a specialization that's in high demand like User acquisition).

It's the senior engineers (5+ years) which have multiple emails from recruiters and are in really high demand, not so much junior engineers.

Look at the last StackOverflow dev survey: the number of devs with 0-5 years of experience is almost double the number of devs with 6-10 years. That means the number of senior engineers will be increasing very rapidly over the next 5 years. You can bet it's going to be much harder to get a job in about 5 years or so, layoff or not.

<comment><USER12> >> Look at the last StackOverflow dev survey

Just looked at it.

In 2018 there were 87,259 responses and 72,688 in 2019.

Developers with less than 5 years experience were 35% in 2018 and 13.4% in 2019.

<comment><USER11> For 2019 I see the following:

Less than 5 years 41% 5-10 years 27% 10-15 years 14%

As you can see, there has been a massive supply increase of junior engineers (probably entering the industry). And this massive increase will in a few years result in a massive increase in senior engineers. Right now being a senior engineer is still a huge advantage but that will diminish quickly over time.

<comment><USER13> Personal anecdote, at 12+ years in the industry I don't really go to StackOverflow anymore so I wouldn't have even seen the survey. The kind of questions I Google now are most often answered only in Github Issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Re: The target of UBER EATS this especially interesting news given they will likely be reporting Q3 results soon.

\- Last quarter of UBER's $1.2b operating loss almost 50% of that is from UBER eats subsidies. They paid $544m more to drivers to deliver food than they took in. Why? (a) It is their fastest growing (by %) division (2) It's arguably the most valuable battleground in logistics - developing a "last mile" delivery network at scale.

\- Their core business - ridesharing - has improved their gross margin and unit economics quarter-over-quarter to the point that operating and discounting losses here are almost non-material (less than $22m total worldwide this quarter, representing less than 1/2 a percent of total ride sharing revenue).

\- In addition another area of analyst criticism has been losses in their "other bets" which is almost certainly their freight brokering network at -$50m, and the losses appear to be diminishing.

Seems to me like these layoffs are analyst signaling that there are still inefficiencies in those departments, UBER is aware and working on in preparation for Q3 finances.

(1) [https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release- det...](https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release- details/2019/Uber-Reports-Second-Quarter-2019-Results/default.aspx)

<comment><USER8> > It's arguably the most valuable battleground in logistics - developing a > "last mile" delivery network at scale.

But it's also hard to get the prices up enough without people just getting off their lazy asses and buying food.

source: price goes up I get up off my lazy ass.

<comment><USER15> I don't think they can increase service fee much more. The endgame will be to have enough users and drivers that they don't need to increase prices and can make their share from volume, ads and deals with restaurants. Economy of scale + Winner takes all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 350 people across a 25,000 person company sounds more like performance management than layoffs, especially since they are still hiring.

I think Uber has way overhired but this doesn't seem to be the signal a lot of you all are making it to be.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think food delivery will come to be won by pseudo food trucks. Vehicles with minimal cooking capabilities, perhaps just warming, that go around delivering standard uncustomized meals.

The economics of one driver picking up one order and delivering it just don't make sense to me.

<comment><USER18> Food delivery in cities doesn't use cars, it use bicycles (increasingly of the e- variety).

<comment><USER19> Do you happen to have a source for this? Also perhaps the average full trip distance/time for a runner? I.e. from where they are when they accept the delivery, how far do they travel to the store and then to their destination?

I suspect that Uber Eats, Door Dash et al. do not want those figures published because it makes the profitability issues glaringly obvious.

<comment><USER20> In Europe I only see bicycles delivering Uber Eats and in Sweden it's even illegal to deliver with car unless you have a special permit which is expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't understand why Uber would need so many engineers, give that their business is so easily shardable, and scaling is not even a major issue. In that sense, the Whatsapp team of 50 engineers solved a tougher problem. I know, it's difficult to compare these companies, but still I'd expect the labor force to be within a factor of 10 at most.

<comment><USER22> Uber does almost 1 million rides _per hour_. About 100 million monthly active users are driven around 26 billion miles each year. Think about all these car locations, requests, passenger details, messages, prices, tips, customer support etc landing into their system every second. Think about price predictions that can be off by just few cents and could make a dent in your earnings or push customers to the competition. Add onto this reliability in at least 3 or 4 nines, latencies across the globe, security, fail-over, multi- platforms, privacy etc issues. Don't forget you need to operate in 700 cities worldwide with all kind of regulations, customizations and geographic/culture adaptation. Uber accomplishes 230,000 trips per employee and earns $500,000 per employee - which is on par with other tech companies. I think you will find that the scaling system without falling on your face every day, every hour is a pretty significant undertaking at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "" In total, the layoffs represent about 1% of the company""

That seems like a very small lay-off. From reading the article it sounds like this is full time employees, not gig workers.

<comment><USER24> 1135 employees total across three waves. They say they have approximately 19,000 actual employees. So about 6% total laid off.

<comment><USER25> IIRC it was normal for large companies (Sun, Intel, Oracle, etc) to terminate the "bottom n%" where n=5+ by some performance metric?

<comment><USER26> Sure, and most (not all) consider that a horrible practice that encourages backstabbing politics. And it's definitely bad for morale. And the people that defend the idea say it's nice to cut the flak once a year, but it's obviously better to just fire people for being bad as needed rather than create this constant annual layoff. The main reason it's done it's because it's so much easier than managing companies correctly.

<comment><USER27> It creates perverse incentives for managers to hire one sacrificial goat per year so they don't have to cut into their otherwise effective team.

A lot of this is just managers that don't want to be confrontational and firing the guy who just isn't working out but seems perfectly happy to just keep sucking at his job. These 10% haircuts give them the excuse they need to do their job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life > were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the > Deliverator's report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but > needs to work harder on his cooperation skills."

> So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved -- but no > cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, > your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take > his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job > for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never > delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.

</comment><comment><USER29> Strange that they are also ramping up hiring in other cities at the same time. Could this be because they just want to clean house and lay off high paying employees and replace them with newly hired low paying ones. Also they can force to sell the stocks and they dont have to give it to new employees.

<comment><USER11> i think it's just standard hire/lay off routine. It's not about the employees that get laid off.

The purpose of the lay offs is to keep everyone else working even harder. People will work even harder to keep their jobs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> They lost around 1185 people over the last 3 months. They claim that this is all that they will lose for a while.

1185 x $150000 average salary per employee (guessing at the numbers) yields annual savings for the company of $177.75 million. A sizable chunk, I suppose, but they lost 656 million EBITDA just _last quarter_ , or around three times that amount.

</comment><comment><USER31> The funniest piece is a16z bragging about how many startups they're now funding that are run by ex-Ubers.

Yes, let's assume people who did not work in a sane environment, who have never seen how to make a profit, yes, let's give them funding. Same BS as all the ex-Googlers who immediately ran most of their start ups into the ground (after 6-7 awesome funding rounds of course).

Let's be clear, the ex-Uber founders will make mint, given what happens in those endless funding round pyramids. But for anyone considering joining those rackets? Goooooood luck.

<comment><USER32> Can you name a couple ex-Googlers who ran their startups into the ground after 6-7 rounds of funding? Or even 2-3 rounds...

<comment><USER33> Andy Rubin comes to mind but the list is very large and full of people you never heard of. Google is not very good at teaching their employees what it takes to run a successful company, their cash cow is just too successful and most people don't realize their contribution is close to zero and most of what they do doesn't make any difference.

<comment><USER32> Wait, Andy Rubin is your only example? What company has he started and then "run into the ground"?

I'm going to call bullshit. Have many Googlers started startups that failed? Yes, but that's the default state for startups so it hardly seems notable. I doubt the failure rate for ex-Googler founders is any higher than for regular founders. In fact, I suspect it's higher, if only because they're probably more likely than the average founder to be able to raise a round, and that likely increases your success rate vs the average startup. But you're still probably going to fail.

What I take exception to is the 6-7 rounds of funding. A tiny, tiny fraction of companies raise more than 3 rounds, so the idea that there's a "very large list" of failed companies started by ex-Googlers who have raised 6-7 rounds is total hogwash. Your hand-waving "you've never heard of them" notwithstanding.

<comment><USER33> Which company has Rubin started that was not a huge commercial failure?

<comment><USER34> Android, Inc.

<comment><USER33> How was Android a commercial success?

<comment><USER35> Are you kidding me ? Mobile ad revenue for one ? This comment shows you are not acting in good faith or just plain anti Google.

<comment><USER33> This is funny. You're making the point Android is successful as a product because it provides google with "ad impressions" which is exactly my point, Google knows only how to make money one way, with ad impressions. Android the company wasn't successful commercially (no revenue from licensing, not self sustainable) and was acquired quite early when they realized it wouldn't be. Android itself is a huge money pit for Google, and it's worth it only because it creates an avenue to monetize mobile. In commercial terms that's a "loss leader", not a profitable product.

Stick to engineering, it's better.

<comment><USER35> In the same way that BMW builds "only cars" ? The Play Store gets 30% of in app purchases too. First party phones are sold at profits. The collective revenue of Google due to Android is a big net positive. Not to mention the stickiness to Google products that results too. You don't know anything about business and yet you call out "all the Googlers" who don't succeed at startups. Stick to trolling on HN and feeling good about yourself. Google and Googlers will march on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> How much money does Uber Eats make? For that matter do any of these delivery companies make money? Its pretty hard to see how. Someone has to take a hit, enter the restaurant, delivery company or the user. One cannot expect the user to fork a lot of money, and the delivery company probably wants to make money at some point, so it will mean the restaurants have to be willing to eat these costs over the longterm. Is this sustainable? I cannot imagine the delivery/routing algorithm to find optimum routes every time to merge or make the delivery efficient.

<comment><USER37> Glovo say they become profitable (in that city) six to nine months after arriving.

They seem to be run quite differently though to Uber / Deliveroo, probably because VC money doesn't or didn't flow quite as easily in Barcelona as it does in California.

They talk about how it's a matter of timing and not entering markets with two established players, but I think the key for them has been only bothering with places which have a combination of low salary expectations/requirements and high densities (southern Europe, Latin America, Africa).

I imagine that it's the driver pay in high-pay societies which blows up the economics of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> If I'm not mistaken, the lockout period expires Nov 10th.

Also give how aggressively they were hiring in the run up to IPO, a lot of people are probably nearing the 1yr cliff.

<comment><USER39>
      Nov 4th: Q3 Earnings[1]
      Nov 6th: Blackout ends 2 days after earnings
      Nov 6th: Lockup expires

...not that I'm counting or anything

[1] - [https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release- det...](https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release- details/2019/Uber-Announces-Date-of-Third-Quarter-2019-Results-Conference- Call/default.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Curious to know how many of those are iOS engineers. It could easily be dozens or even 100+ given how many Uber has in SF alone.

</comment><comment><USER41> The ultimate problem here with all these startups like this is the financial strategy.

That strategy is precisely: Get big fast. That means hire a bunch of engineers, build out an expensive infrastructure, consume a lot of office space. Sell.

Nowhere in that strategy is: Earn a lot of money. Do it cheaply.

The VC world doesn't care about earnings. They don't care about profit. The value of a business to VC only comes when it is sold to someone else. You don't need something really good to sell it to someone else. You just need someone to believe it is worth the amount of money you want to sell it for.

The problem with that strategy now is that the public is wising up to them. We ain't your fool anymore VC. Go home.

</comment><comment><USER42> I have never found Uber eats, or Grub Hub for that matter, to be particularly great services. Only twice have I ever not received my food but my god the delivery is expensive. I could either order 3 items from Taco Bell or an entire pizza plus wing and a 2L of Coke for the same amount of money. Also the local chain pizza delivery is almost always faster.

While I'm not in one of the big cities like NYC/LA/SF or in a big tech area, my state or metro area isn't tiny either. I've since stopped trying all of the tech-company food delivery services and likely won't be going back. Also, not too keen on them skimming tips.

<comment><USER34> Only Doordash and Instacart skimmed tips. Instacart reversed course on it as soon as they were called out. Doordash defended the practice for a while before paid lip service, but last I heard they were still skimming tips.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Weird. Recruiters were calling me last month for some well paid contract gigs there.

<comment><USER44> Even weirder, they are building a new HQ in Dallas and just last week, they reconfirmed and signed the contracts to build a new skyscrapper.

<comment><USER45> Was it Google that was famous in its early days for using the headquarters of other companies that went bankrupt building them as its own headquarters, rather than building one itself?

<comment><USER46> Google HQ used to be Silicon Graphics building

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> They just signed a 10-year lease on _half a million sqft_ of office space in Chicago. How's that going to go?

<comment><USER48> Gradually move their workforce there to reduce cost is what they will do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> UberEATS just shut down their entire operation in South Korea.

</comment><comment><USER50> The first wave of many waves for Uber. They are still overvalued by a factor of 4 or 5 X.

<comment><USER51> They said this is a "final wave"

<comment><USER52> Perhaps. But obviously they'd want to make this appear as the "final" wave to not overly-agitate existing employees. It'll be interesting to see how this quarter's earnings go (especially since the lockup expires in Nov). If the market reacts poorly, expect additional cost cuts.

<comment><USER53> No, that would erode trust. Saying "this is the final wave", and following that up with a fourth wave of layoffs would be even worse for employee agitation, and have a worse long-term effect. I doubt Uber management is that dumb.

<comment><USER50> So you think there will NEVER be another waves of layoffs? This is obviously a statement they needed to make in order to calm down the current employees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Uber EATS was the worst eating experience I've ever had in my life. It was super bowl a couple years back and After 2 hours this guy in a black Honda Accord rolls up and hands me a sack of wings that were disgusting and smelled like pine air freshener.

Glad that one is getting axed.

<comment><USER55> A) Uber EATS isn't getting axed, their engineering efforts are because it doesn't need more bloat since it functions efficiently enough.

B) You ordered from a restaurant that had poor service, two years ago. You should have ordered from a better restuarant, and you still can. Maybe from one you recognize and have eaten at before. That has very little to do with Uber EATS.</comment></comment>