If my company announces WFH for the rest of the year, I'll be moving out of San Francisco in a heart beat. The office has been the only thing keeping me here for a long time now.
I imagine SF natives might say, "Good riddance, don't let the door hit you on the way out," and I completely agree. I don't have issues with the city itself, but the value you get for your money here is completely abysmal if you're a renter or potential home buyer.
Or, don’t get lured in by a company offering you huge compensation that you can’t actually touch (without realizing it’s a gamble).
To be fair, even the cash compensation at Airbnb was supposedly pretty high. But I’m not sure whether that’s much consolation now, after they’ve been dangling a golden carrot in front of employees for years.
IMO, this is a matter of public health and should be treated as such (as much as some politicians want to cast this as a partisan issue for political gain).
So your accusation is that Epstein blackmailed Seth Lloyd or converted him into an Israeli spy/consultant on quantum computing?
Many engineering professors consult with private companies for a fee. So it seems odd that a country would need to take a roundabout and scandalous approach like this to pick a professor's brain, when they could just work though a legitimate-seeming company as an intermediary.
If Epstein was in fact blackmailing the rich and famous, or running a sex trafficking operation for profit, how does he benefit from supplying donations (and whatever else he allegedly supplied) to a quantum computing professor?
This brought back memories of doing data entry for an insurance company as a teenager. I spent eight hours a day transcribing people's names, addresses, SSNs, and medical ailments, including all sorts of sexually transmitted diseases.
It's weird, now that I think about it. I was just some kid they hired as a temp. We've never really known who's looking at our private data.
Yes, labor market competition is the primary factor. But is there a place in Australia where engineers can work for higher salaries and the same or a lower cost of living?
In the US, the discrepancy between Bay Area and non-Bay Area salaries is not as great as they seem at first glance, once the real cost of living is factored in.
> House prices are a function of wages (or, more accurately, have a floor set by wages if land is constrained) not the other way around.
I guess if you state it as a fact, that makes it true?
But if that’s the case, why would the company pay an engineer more when she moves from the Austin office to the NYC office? She has become more valuable to the company overnight? And the most valuable engineers just happen to live in the most expensive cities?
Sorry, but salaries are impacted by cost of living. Because if they’re paying top talent too low relative to cost of living, those engineers will just move elsewhere, as you suggest.
Yes, this puts a tremendous amount of pressure on the housing market, affecting everyone in the Bay Area. I’m not claiming this is good.
Vancouver is a different situation entirely.
> Why do you think you're entitled to a $1.5m house at all let alone 3 years out of college?
This is not at all what I said. And most people I know here cannot afford a house 10+ years out of college, unless they’ve worked at a top-paying company all those years.
Who is claiming they’re entitled to it? I’m saying companies are offering it to retain employees, because it’s in the companies’ best interest.
> it completely ignores people with real problems, like, oh I don't know, the people who drive the shiny white buses who need to live 2+ hours away.
And there are plenty of people less fortunate than the bus drivers. By your logic, if they don’t like it, they can just move somewhere cheaper. Maybe it’s just too late in the evening, but I’m not really seeing your point here.
There was a peak in the mid-80s, and another around 2005.
CS enrollments reached a max around 2000, at the height of the dot-com bubble. But when the bubble burst in 2000-2001, enrollments plummeted in 2002, 2003 and 2004, leading to the local minimum in graduates in 2009.
Telecommunications engineers produce the worst naming schemes and acronyms of anyone, anywhere.
Any cellular document is a mishmash of alphabet soup: UTRAN, UMTS, PS-CN, SGSN, RNC, RNS, eNodeB, EPC, MME, S-GW, X2-AP, S1, GTP-U, HSDPA, HSUPA, RRC, PDCP, RLC, OFDM, MU-MIMO, and on and on ad infinitum.
You'd think the marketing people would at least get the public-facing stuff right, but they've likely been tainted by association with the engineers.
> this whole article can be summed up as "providing a better experience for customers can increase sales"
That, plus "be part of a community you can rely on for capital and labor." Despite the many struggles that immigrants face, they do seem to often benefit from being part of a close-knit community.
As an ordinary, middle-class, non-religious white American from a small family, I'm not sure where I'd turn to find such a network. Open to suggestions, though!
> The top firms have gotten themselves into an insane bidding war.
That may be true, but there's more to it than that. The first wave of successful IPOs (Facebook, Amazon, Google, Twitter, etc.) caused a spike in housing prices as employees purchased houses. On top of that, companies have added tens of thousands of new jobs, without proportional growth in the housing supply. So housing prices are now absurd, and these companies need to pay more so their employees can buy smallish houses on the peninsula at $1.5-$2.5M a piece and have a middle-class quality of life.
I imagine SF natives might say, "Good riddance, don't let the door hit you on the way out," and I completely agree. I don't have issues with the city itself, but the value you get for your money here is completely abysmal if you're a renter or potential home buyer.