This is great. Wish list: expand this or make separate website to track prices for Chipotle, Chick-Fil-A, In-N-Outs, McDonalds and other fast food chains.

Chipotle Tacos are much better IMO. You can get 2 Tacos for about $8-$9 on West Coast.

May be time for Unionization in Tech to stabilize things and protect tech workers? There is already unionization in some parts of Europe.

Unions only work in locations where capital is immobile and the labor to operate the capital is immobile. Tech labor is the most mobile on earth ...

I'm dumb, why do unions only work where capital/labor is immobile?

Because the capital is immobile (can't move) from the labor. When it is mobile, it moves away from the union, to a place without union.

Having been laid off myself in engineering leadership position towards end of 2022 so I can totally correlate this. I had FAANG offer but it was pulled back due to budget cuts towards end of 2022. I continued to interview. Got another offer in April 2023 but that was pulled back too because of indecision by leadership for more than a month. I then found a IC contracting role in the middle of 2023. The job market is even more tough for leadership positions. Also there are lot of people being silently laid off from smaller companies every month which doesn’t show up at trackers at layoffs.fyi.

I also had a FAANG offer just before the layoffs started. Have been applying again recently, but don't even get an interview anymore. It's probably time to stop thinking about those jobs, but unfortunately they're just about the only ones where I could get a better compensation.

Sigh, being a developer was so much better a few years back. Now it's all AI this, AI that.

The recent wave of generative AI hype has nothing to do with this hiring climate for developers.

I know, and not sure why you'd think I was implying that. What I meant was that a few years back you were hot shit just being a developer. Now days you need to have some flavour of AI going on in order to get the same treatment.

You can find the ridership numbers compared to pre-pandemic levels on BART website here, https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2023-09/202308%20MR...

I’m currently shuttling back and forth between SF and Seattle and I would like to stay in a similar pod in Seattle though. I am currently renting $1000 per month for a room in someone’s house where I hardly stay for 50% of the time.

I think one of the cause is we don’t tax the landlords higher for the investment property. That’s why lot of upper middle class and HNIs have lot of investment properties around the country. It’s so easy to buy and rent out properties without even seeing them ever. One of my friend who works at Microsoft in Seattle, owns 4 properties around US(3 in WA and 1 in TX). It was so easy to get cheap mortgages between 2017-21 if you had 100-200k lying around.

Higher or lower taxes doesn't change the market rate for a given unit. If your landlord has to pay higher or lower taxes, they still can charge what the market will bear. However, increasing the supply of rental units will lower rents or at least slow the increase.

That is one instrument to deincentivizing accumulation of more than 1 property. Increasing supply is definitely another one but as I mentioned that earlier most of those rental units get acquired by richer landlords. One can also make those investment property mortgages much higher.

What is the point of disincentivizing the accumulation of more than one property?

To allow more people to buy property and to prevent price increases due to speculation.

Fewer landlords means cheaper to buy and more expensive to rent. Helps the upper middle class at the expense of the poor.

In my town now house prices are through the roof and the rental market is completely impacted.

So cheaper to buy would be a step up.

This article doesn’t explain why running is so good for you. Running can be good and provides some benefits to your heart, lung and joint health. Good for your mind if you are doing it in moderation. My heart readings improved significantly year over year based on lab results. But if you do too much running it can affect your mental and physical health adversely too.

Physical health I get. Running is hard on the body and most of the people I know who have done it for a long time have developed some kind of chronic physical ailment.

But how does it adversely impact your mental health?

I haven’t used Angular but I have used Nest and I agree with this sentiment. Java Spring’s annotations are similar to Nest’s custom decorators.

I like Will Larson’s most of the articles but this one seems all over the place. Shouldn’t engineering strategy be defined by 1. Customer’s needs first and then 2. Internal stakeholders like developers, marketing, product, analytics etc. needs 3. Company values and principles could be the next guiding principle.

I think if you work backwards engineering strategy should become more clear. That’s the part I found strongly missing in that article.

The tail shouldn't wag the dog.

But if you don't let the tail wag the dog you'll find you have a very disaffected tail.

Turns out putting those three circles at the same table solves this.

Much easier said than done.

What you described is as close as possible to product strategy and not engineering strategy.