I know that the motivation behind the question is outside of the blog post, but I'm really curious, and would love to ask folks here, what is so exciting about living on a farm? Is it about independence? Or radical self reliance?
As a person who lived my whole life in cities, I have a very hard time to find an appeal in a lifestyle like the one described in an article.Can someone share what they like / appreciate about the life on a farm?
My anecdotal experience (and I'm not remotely close to Marc Andreessen in wealth and power) is that there is a lot of benefits in structure and schedule.
Knowing how big part of your day will play out is a very powerful thing. It removes so much stress and uncertainty.
In the end of the day it's a question of balance. It's probably unhealthy to plan every single hour of your life in advance (which Marc does not do), and the same goes with allowing too much spontaneity.
ha, interesting. I was personally impressed (and inspired!) how much of a free unscheduled time Marc maintains.
I disagree that his life is boring. He is influencing directly and non-directly the decisions that shape the future of humanity. What is boring about that?
I "discovered" this blog a couple of month ago, and I absolutely love it. The recent posts about agriculture in pre-modern times[0] are particularly insightful and I enjoyed so much to read.
I would like to add to this that it's definitely not unique to the US. Growing up in Eastern Europe the attitudes of young people around me were very similar - you want to get out of the house ASAP. The age threshold would be somewhat higher (maybe mid-20s instead of 18), but overall trying to become independent and self-reliant was considered a virtue.
I'm wondering how much of it is a form of filtering based on a social bias. There are a lot of hobbies in the world (that the author would potentially enjoy), but the ones that first come to mind are ones that have an examples nearby (e.g. my teammate Dan mentioned he went rock climbing on Sunday)
In my experience - heavily relying on relationships built before is how a lot of things are actually get done. While my company closed its offices in March - I see people getting `socially distanced` coffee with their co-workers more and more.
I think there are tasks / kind of work, that requires minimal communication or relationship building, and it's possible to optimize WFH setup to be very productive at it (way more productive than in the office). A lot of comments on HN are alluding to that some people figured that out and are good at it.
There are also tasks that are hard or borderline impossible to do remote. Relationships are harder. Negotiations are harder. Random lunch conversations don't happen anymore, the serendipity of new learnings is lost.
I have to agree that this advice is awful too, unfortunately.
As an engineer for an early-stage startup you daily work and value add - shipping things and invest into deep engineering work, would not be very well aligned with networking and relationship building that would be beneficial to start on your own.
Another interesting idea to consider - as a FAANG engineer you would be able to angel invest already (or fairly soon). That would be a productive (quite expensive though) way to meet more people interested in the same things as you do.
Well, that's a useful reminder that work by itself does not have an intrinsic value. What matters is an outcome or a perception of it. Sacrificing your lifespan is generally not something that is valued in a corporate life at all, outside of the face value of being visible.
In my experience companies who try to not pay based on location tend to underpay in general (Gitlab would be a prime example).
Sure, and it's a good point that I think companies should consider instead of downright rejecting this option.
There are implications though:
- What about equity grants? A lot of comp in SV based companies is based on equity (both liquid/illiquid). If you are hiring someone on a pure cash basis vs other people who are not - what kind of dynamic / incentives that will create?
I'm very curios about hearing your experiences working in freelance capacity for a US based company though, it sounds like something I would like to do at some point (as of hiring someone), and would really appreciate the ideas
- the compensation strategy seems in line with what other companies were doing. Compensation adjustments based on local markets are fairly standard for the large tech companies. They seem to be fairly limited though (< 20% of TC) inside the US
- Lots of tech companies allow their employees to work remotely until the end of 2021 keeping their current comp. I'm not surprised to see that changing and VMWare may be the first canary (or I'm just not aware about other companies already doing that)
There is a lot of complexity for a US-based company around hiring people internationally:
1. Security. How would you prevent your monorepo being copied out to competitive companies in a foreign region or get snooped by some local government officials?
2. HR/Payroll. If you want to be compliant with local laws you will need to create local business entity. Would that make sense to do if you only have one employee in the country? How expensive that setup is going to be?
3. Somewhat obvious cultural/language/timezone difference.
There were a lot of conversations about moving jobs to India in early 2000. It didn't happen - I think primarily for reasons that I just outlined.
I don't see what's different this time.
This article is incredibly well written and rings true to me and my experience being in a similar role / working with people in such roles.
I like the notion of articulating a career path in tech as of:
1) Learning the ropes
2) Being a producer / writing code / driving design decisions
3) Being a multiplier - working across different teams to unblock / amplify other peoples work
3) is pretty much communication centric, while 2) is deep knowledge of tech involved
There is a lot of nuance to that of course (which I think this article captures well within specific organization). I'm curious if this is something any one else has the same experience with
I've been to Helsinki, it's a lovely place, but calling it a big city is misleading at best.