It's actually trivial to dodge US taxes. The most basic and effective way to accomplish that is to establish fiscal residency in a friendly european country. It becomes /really/ easy when you have dual citizenship.
Same applies for crypto gains, if you avoid using US based crypto-exchanges you are probably OK for the foreseeable future.
I have found that many americans overestimate the reach, competence, and sheer willpower of the IRS.
You would be surprised at what /doesn't/ happen if you stop filing taxes.
Yes, salaries in SV are high. But, you can bet your ass that that sample set is made of students who for the most part come from a handful top-notch schools.
That's my experience as well. Considered opening an office in Bangalore as I was thoroughly impressed by some candidates I had interviewed. Performance on the job was significantly different... like by several orders of magnitude.
You link a Wikipedia article about a highly contentious issue among economists and expect to be taken seriously?
It is almost universally the case that when someone says "economists think X" they actually refer to a group of academics belonging to a specific school of thought which defends that particular position. Not that scholarly consensus does not matter, just a reminder that in certain fields those questions become so highly ideological that you simply cannot treat them as a math question on which you can definitely rule one thesis or another.
Because those companies are US companies, their very existence is a byproduct of this political community's stability, of the infrastructure that was paid with taxpayer money, sometimes of the direct subsidies of the US states and their federal government and generally speaking by the direct or indirect economic activity that US citizens generates.
Simple as that. There is a social contract that exists and that holds together the civic tissue of this country. Of course, some companies are going to try cheating it. That's fine, it is the reason we also have law enforcement agencies.
In the case of UCSF, a public University that almost exclusively relies on public funding to survive. I think people have an overwhelming amount of reasons to be pissed off.
Sometimes I wonder if software engineers are half as smart as they think they are. I can't think of any precedent or similar situation: a corps of highly skilled workers pro-actively sabotaging themselves in order to share the fate of their country's dying middle class: longer hours, shrinking salaries and cut-throat competition for employment.
I am glad that I have some fuck-you money now. Because the prospects as software engineer seem, frankly, rather poor now.
The first step is to stop thinking that this industry - somehow - matters more than any other or that herein lies the future of humanity. Half of that is marketing garbage and the other results from free kool-aid parties that were held after a few of us either built successful companies or made good exit deals with bigger ones. There is an alarming amount of people who are not only drunk, but blind too.
I might be the bearer of bad news, but hear me out: this industry is just like any other. In other words, you are subject to the same dynamics that fuel workers - shareholders dualism everywhere. Basic game theory: you are going to get screwed and that's not funny.
>The success of many companies, and probably all of the unicorns, has nothing to do with technology.
Most of the unicorns are founded with engineering talent coming straight from Stanford, MIT, Harvard, UCB, Waterloo etc. you name it.
Making a company successful is as much about economics of scale than raw engineering and of course, both are closely related in this day and age. Engineering shapes what and how your products feels like in real-time (= understand very short code-to-production lifecycle).
It might not be politically correct to say but I am not here to make you feel better. Anyone who has actually been in a team at a company that has exponentially grown will tell you the same: your chances to ever survive that "first wave" of users is directly proportional to your ability to hire the best, which of course is a lot easier when they are your current or former classmates.
That's not to say there aren't companies founded by people not going to the schools mentioned above or that engineering talent is only available at these places. It is obviously not the case.
However, the density of talent at top-schools is absurdly high. And this is a game changer for most early stage companies and even more so for soon-to-be-unicorns.
Stealth startup | San Francisco, Waterloo, Hong-Kong| Full time, REMOTE, INTERNS, VISA
- Stealth startup w/ founded by two former early employees at large tech companies and and a MIT PhD; we all have success exits under our belts and we all have a strong engineering background.
- High salaries and high options: we want engineers to have a vested interest in the success of the company.
- Exciting technologies: we work with the cutting edge and toward capturing full value of our target market
- We are looking to hire the best and brightest - if you are an over-achiever in your domain (we are mostly looking for engineers) then shoot us an email.
- VC backed - we are VC backed and each found has a strong personal network of people both in Washington DC and SV.
To protect my anonymity on HN, please address your emails (resume + optional cover letter) to [email protected] - I will reply with my professional account.
Shoot us an email.
Note: I expect a high volume of application so please forgive me if your email do not get answered right away. It might take a week or two.
Except the diversity quotas, or EEOs as they call it now, almost never allow for truly norm-bending individuals to access those roles. Having a different skin colour does not make or break group thinking.
It's a mirage, at best, and a sad state of affairs for racial perception at worst. That trendy cult of diversity is only contributing to kick-start racial consciousness among white people and that fragmented society is going to blow-up in your face, down the road.
I am left speechless before this comment. I cannot believe some people here unironically believe that because they hired someone with a particular skin colour or heritage this will translate in better software for their end-users.
You do realise that worshipping diversity is symmetrically as non-sensical as starting a cult for homogeneity? Your assumption that an unlabelled individuals cannot work on a product whose target market isn't them is crazy.
>I make software for everyone, not just white males. Why? Well, consider if nothing else, that white males are not a majority of the world population! There is a lot of money being left on the table!
By your own logic you should mostly hire europeans because, well the EU is the single largest market of high purchasing power individuals. Do you see yourself saying to a capable latinx engineer: "Nope, sorry, your demographic isn't my main consumer target and everyone knows the craftsman has to be as close as possible from the consumer; Sorry, really mate".
Please remind me never to invest in anything you touch.
Those are candy-bars to make you happy, just like the EHRC is keeping the leftists in line while we slowly shift toward an ordoliberal paradigm at the european level. For countries like France, Italy and even Germany, that means social regression and harmonisation by the bottom.
>Yes, I would rather have decisions made by people in Brussels that understand what they're doing.
Yay structural unemployment in the eurozone! The folks at the commission and at the ECB sure know as hell what they are doing since the EU is a sui generis structure and the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment absolutely did not hurt western economies and destroyed the industrial tissue of those countries. I am being sarcastic.
Now, without any offense, you sound like someone who has red a wikipedia page about the European Union and who nows consider everyone having dissenting opinion to be a stinky redneck who does not deserve a voice.
Maybe that's not what you wanted to convey, in that case I apologise, but to be honest, at this point, I have met so many pseudo-smartass people who think they understand everything that I have very little hope you don't fall into that category of people. Thinking technocracy will magically solves all your problems is lazy, at best.
"Défiez-vous de ces cosmopolites qui vont chercher loin dans leurs livres des devoirs qu’ils dédaignent de remplir autour d’eux. Tel philosophe aime les Tartares, pour être dispensé d’aimer ses voisins."
"Beware of those cosmopolites who go find in their books duties that they fail to uphold around themselves. Those philosophers love the Tartares to exonerate themselves from loving their neighbors (their nation)."
Maybe you will understand why Trump has such a strong support among the classes which aren't trendy to defend and advocate for. As much as I disagree with the rhetoric, Trump has a point: a country with no borders is not a country.
I tend to ignore any comment that starts with "you misunderstand basic economics". That's not so much the arrogant tone but rather the crass dogmatism that pervade those comments.
Change the set of axioms and the initial parameters and you end-up with invalid definition and properties of market dynamics. I guess OP probably believes that markets reach equilibrium by themselves.
Most professions you are referring to are unionized and defend their interests as a group, if you wait for C-execs to increase salaries of its information workers you might wait a long... long time. They have a board of shareholders to respond to and that is just not in their interest.
I am actually quite surprised at the devotion of some people here for their masters. It does provide a beautiful illustration of La Boetie's speech on "Voluntary servitude".
I mean, c'mon, this isn't the McCarthy era anymore... people should not get thrown off because you pronounce the word unions. Ordoliberalism like applied in Germany where I worked a couple years provides a quite elegant framework to allow a local form of union so the workers' right can be defended while not impending innovation and regular market dynamics.