Good at self-promotion == just good in most cases for most practical purposes whether it's factual or not, arguably. His books seem substantial though, I don't know many people who've read or written 800 pages on system performance
> Good at self-promotion == just good in most cases for most practical purposes whether it's factual or not, arguably.
This does not seem true to me. Most popular programming YouTubers are demonstrably great at self-promotion but tend to be mediocre or bad programmers who know very little, even about the topics they talk about.
If anything we have plenty of examples of where being good at self-promotion correlates inversely with actual skill and knowledge.
With that said, I wouldn't classify Brendan Gregg as being good at self-promotion.
In terms of their compensation though, it functionally doesn't really matter, and that's somewhat true for being a professional as well, it's usually only important how many people think you're good enough. A job is often as or more political as it is technical
Keeping track of actual value would require actually rewarding people proportionally; all jobs ever only really care about how often you're on time or your meeting attendance record.
Rewarding people proportionally is a macro-level unsolved problem. Kropotkin wrote it about it and his solution was to throw his hands in the air and say fuck it, labor value is impossible to accurately evaluate, and thus he invented anarchist communism.
Just look at all the weird quirks our world does to labor value: the same exact job in two different locations for a global employer (say, Google), selling to a global market, pays differently depending on "local labor market prices." In 2025 for engineering what on earth is a "local labor market?" An optimization coming from an engineer in Taiwan saves you the same money as if it comes from an engineer in SF but the SF engineer gets 8x the reward for doing the work. Luxury goods and electronics cost the same in both places. Buying property is only slightly cheaper in Taipei vs sf (yes really), vehicles cost more in Taiwan. Food and healthcare is cheaper in Taiwan, and that alone I guess means the Taiwanese engineer is worth 1/8th the SF engineer, to make sure the sf engineer can afford 16$ burritos?
Many other quirks. You point out another one: labor often isn't rewarded based on real value to a company, for many reasons but one of which is that managers often don't understand the job of the people they're managing and so apply management relevant KPIs to disciplines where those KPIs don't make any sense. Engineering, for example, doesn't correlate actual value add to the company via meetings attended or customers met, but that won't stop management from applying those KPIs and thinking it does!
I'm torn between thinking we keep things this way out of ignorance vs we keep it this way maliciously so the management class (which sets the rates) doesn't get written out of labor agreements altogether because they're often useless vs if we didn't keep up this charade, capitalism would just collapse entirely.
Agreed. There's the additional point that I think many people don't appreciate, which is that those managers and many people lower down in the org chart merely exist because somebody else needs to be responsible for a system or a liability regardless of whether they do anything measurably profitable, and aren't necessarily incentivized to do anything more productively; they're just there to take care of it or be blamed if it's not, and have a low ceiling for what that job can possibly be worth with no measurable way to argue for more, and so in the case of managers, try to invent clout-generators at any cost and with no connection to how the assignees might accomplish it.
> An optimization coming from an engineer in Taiwan saves you the same money as if it comes from an engineer in SF but the SF engineer gets 8x the reward for doing the work.
Suppose you have a thousand engineers and those thousand engineers generate ten billion dollars in annual profit. How much do they each get paid? They amount they're worth? Nope, the amount they'll accept.
If you live in the US and you have the wherewithal to be an engineer then you could also have been a doctor or a lawyer or some other high paying occupation. And many of those can't be fully remote because they have to see domestic patients or interact in person with local courts or clients. Which means that if you want someone in the US to be your engineer, you need to pay them an amount that makes them want to do that instead of choosing one of those other occupations. Whereas the one in Taiwan doesn't have the option to become a doctor in San Francisco and is therefore willing to accept less money.
So why don't companies just hire exclusively the people in Taiwan? There are all the usual reasons (time zones, language barriers, etc.), but a big one is that they need a thousand engineers. So they and their competitors hire every qualified engineer in Taiwan until Taiwanese engineers reach full employment, at which point the companies still don't have all the engineers they want. And when the average engineer is making the company ten million dollars, paying San Francisco salaries is better than not having enough talent.
So then why doesn't every smart person in Taiwan become an engineer? Because the companies hiring engineers there are only paying Taiwanese wages, and then they're not any better off to do that than to become a doctor or a lawyer in Taiwan. And if they would pay higher wages there, the local economy would have to start paying local doctors and engineers more to keep them all from becoming engineers, and then you would only get a modest increase in the number of engineers for a significant increase in compensation. Which is still what happens, but only slowly over time, until the wages in Taiwan ultimately increase enough to no longer be a competitive advantage. And companies don't want to make that happen faster because then they'd have to pay higher salaries in Taiwan.
Not everyone who can be an engineer can also become a doctor or a lawyer. Different requirements and tolls on your mind and work style that aren't interchangeable for everyone.
There are two reasons that doesn't matter. The first is that it's untrue more often than not; plenty of people could do both. And the second is that "doctors and lawyers" are just arbitrary stand ins for high paying domestic jobs. They could also become physicists, commercial airline pilots, Wall St. quants, actuaries, etc.
Because here in the real world the barrier to entry in SW engineering jobs is significantly lower than the law bar or med school. Not to mention cheaper.
And yes of course, Americans have the highest salaries in the world for white collar professions, what other new information do you have that we don't already know?
There is a significant correlation between higher scores on one and higher scores on the other.
> Because here in the real world the barrier to entry in SW engineering jobs is significantly lower than the law bar or med school. Not to mention cheaper.
The barrier to either of those professions is getting good grades and then scoring well enough on a standardized test, and the entire premise is that the professions pay well which is how people pay back the loans.
> Your high sat scores won't prevent you from puking at the sight of corpses or diseases.
Which only applies to a minority of people, and even that minority of people could still become an orthodontist. Likewise, if your SAT scores are 800 math and 450 verbal then that's quite uncommon and you probably shouldn't try to be a lawyer but you could still be a quant, and if you have certain medical conditions then you can't be a commercial airline pilot but you could still be a dermatologist.
It doesn't matter if every individual engineer has every individual option available to them when the overwhelming majority of engineers have a significant variety of alternatives.
> There's way more to performing in medicine that sat scores.
There is way more to performing in <anything> than <any individual thing>. But we use these things as proxies because they're designed and intended to be proxies and they're the thing for which data is available if data is the thing you want to inspect.
On your original post, you said they pay lower in other places because they can, which I agree with, of course companies will pay as little as they can, because margin on labor is the key profit margin that enables capitalism to function. But I disagree that this is due to efficient markets. Instead I believe it's because corporations can be sociopathic, whereas humans are humans, and come with feelings and flaws. A corporation can for example leverage the human desire for being a part of something larger, or local culture social pressure, to extract more hours of work out of someone than they're contractually obligated to give (see for example Japan or Taiwan working culture). Corporations are immune to these sorts of things so it's a one way, non-market-based street of exploitative behavior. Furthermore of course is the fact that corporations weild far more capital and thus power than individual workers, and will often collude with governments to prevent worker collective bargaining.
Furthermore, I believe your idea applies too much autonomy and collaboration between corporations. Example:
> . And if they would pay higher wages there, the local economy would have to start paying local doctors and engineers more to keep them all from becoming engineers
This seems to suggest that companies are colluding to prevent macroeconomic effects such as wage inflation. It's post ipso facto explanation, kind of like when make presumptions with evolutionary sociology: "ADHD people served an important role as guarding early human settlements. Their heightened deep focus and obsession with finding details in noise made them ideal to scan the horizon at night." Assuming evolution is an intelligent designer that made different sorts of humans for serving distinct purposes, rather than the reality that we have different sorts of humans because of entropy, and humans happen to be sentient and can leverage these sorts of diverse manifestations to their advantage sometimes - or perhaps, our society just was built in a way that reflects the reality of different sorts of people existing, either way, thus you have people misattributing purpose to chance.
I feel the same when I hear people make market-based justifications for some economic reality like geographic labor cost diversion. My confusion isn't around why it happens, it's why laborers tolerate it. The Invisible Hand of The Market isn't setting labor rates because it needs to maintain cross-role equilibrium between well defined roles, labor rates are simply, as low as a company can get away with.
Markets aren't efficient. A doctor in Taiwan must study for ten years longer than an engineer, in the USA the same is true but also the doctor must take on potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt. In medical school a student must sacrifice both their mental health and social life and dedicate themselves entirely to completing the curriculum. If they fail they're saddled with debt they have no hope of paying (in the USA, Taiwan not so much), and even still, many fail. Then there's residency. Then in the USA you get a relatively high paid job, but also depending on your role, one of the highest stress, highest legal-exposure, highest-stakes jobs on the market. In Taiwan, same, except, the pay isn't even that good! And in the USA, because of the debt and the timeline before productivity, you'd be far better off simply immediately becoming a software engineer out of college and leveraging compound interest to come out at worst at retirement the same place the doctor does. In Taiwan, in the end the engineer will always come out ahead, and have a social life to boot.
In an efficient market, nobody would ever become a doctor. It's not like people determine whether to go through the hell of medical school based on whether they'd make more as an engineer, monitoring shifting salaries year on year as they come up through highschool.
The vast majority of people aren't making their career choice based on compensation. Compensation plays a role, but the vast majority are making choices based on interest, local availability, local culture, their personal experience (people who were strongly affected by a good teacher or therapist are more likely to become a teacher or therapist), and of course their personal capabilities. This is the sort of thing that's irrelevant to a corporation, and an efficient market hypothesis can't account for.
The market is skewed to protect profits since the market, analyzed in aggregate, represents the will of corporations to extract profit against the sloppiness of humans who are motivated by things other than money, and are also sometimes stupid and irrational, and often at a severe information disadvantage. Furthermore sometimes stupid people run corporations so the corps will behave irrationally rather than sociopathically profit driven like they're supposed to.
Rates are lower in Taiwan because it was basically a third world country living under military dictatorship 40 years ago where a ruling class was an invading military force that took land by force and then stumbled upon incredible profits by turning Taiwan into the chip manufacturing hub for the world. The amount of wealth flowing into Taiwan is astonishing but it's mostly captured by a small subset of chip industry founders, mostly all older than 50, and most of whom have some familial connection to the KMT that let them get government protection as well as having the capital to set up things like foundries. The little these companies pay out to their workers is recaptured by the same class, who own something like 80% of the land in Taiwan, in the form of rent or selling property at outrageously inflated rates.
So, wealth has clumped, and so has power, and so when google sets up an office in Taipei, they find out that engineers there get paid 30k to do a job an sf engineer would do for 120k, so they pay 30k. Or maybe 35 to get the really really good ones. Hell that might be why Google showed up at all.
One final aspect: Google can take advantage of geographic arbitrage, but an individual taiwanese engineer can't, because things like borders, visas, cost of moving, mental toll of leaving behind home, and familial responsibilities don't exist for Google, but they do for the Taiwanese engineer.
> An optimization coming from an engineer in Taiwan saves you the same money as if it comes from an engineer in SF but the SF engineer gets 8x the reward for doing the work.
An underappreciated difference is that it's hard to schedule meetings between people in SF and Taiwan, because of time zones.
Lets be straight here, AI paranoia is near the top of the most propagated subjects across all media right now, probably for worse. If it's not "Will you ever have a job again!?" it's "Will your grandparents be robbed of their net worth!?" or even just "When will the bubble pop!? Should you be afraid!? YES!!!" and also in places like Canada where the economy is predictably crashing because of decades of failures, it's both the cause and answer to macro economic decline. Ironically/suspiciously it's all the same re-hashed redundant takes by everyone from Hank Green to CNBC to every podcast ever, late night shows, radio, everything.
So to me the target of one's annoyance should be the propaganda machine, not the targets of the machine. What are people supposed to feel, totally chill because they have tons of control?
I've been finding the increase in PR review volume extremely exhausting, partly because it's just way more code than typical, partly because it's just extremely mind-numbing work, but also because it's emphasizing how it wasn't necessarily the physical act of typing the (most) code that was expensive mentally, but rather that it was internalizing the parts of the system to a sufficient degree that I know why the code should have changed. With 5 different (large) PRs in 5 different subsystems, potentially each day, I'm now re-hydrating my own mental context more often, but not in a way that actually helps me become sufficiently intimately familiar with those systems, because that did come manually writing the code. My connection with the logic feels more superficial than ever, like I'm kicking more and more details out of my brain simply because of the volume of either more shallow tasks, or one-off specific tasks in an area I haven't seen that I don't end up sitting with for long enough
Same. During the week on meds I find that drinking more than half a litre just provokes unpleasant sweating and makes me feel frantic, some amount of brain fog and occasionally a mild headache, especially if I haven't been chugging water, which I guess is probably what most normal people get from coffee
It's the lowest cost time to take risks like that, and it's a hell of a lot more constructive than fighting in a world war like 17 y.o men of the past.
What kind of insane dichotomy is this? If you are 17 you can do so much with your life which isn't either grinding away making banking apps (if you want to do that, you can do that for the next 50 years of your life) or dying in a war.
Do you genuinely believe that my argument is that OP should have went into a war zone as a soldier instead? If not, why bring that up at all?
It varies, working from home can be a horrible isolating trap and simultaneously much more productive and appealing.
Especially in the winter months, if your work day is now at your home with no intrinsic reason to go anywhere else, you wake up in darkness and first leave the house in darkness, meanwhile the agency you'd otherwise have is impeded by people watching your Slack status wondering where you are, it's not exactly ideal. With no physical difference between work and home, you and up basically always being at home, which can be dreadful at times.
> Of course, that applies to everybody who achieves a stable career at all.
This stuck out to me, because even in tech, especially after being diagnosed with ADHD (out of desperately failing to adapt, despite technically being reasonably competent) my career and statistically that of many others is normally anything but stable. An overwhelming percentage of jobs and disciplines do not have any real affordances for just a little variation from the norm, and people broadly still do not believe the condition presents anything but hilarious superficial differences, but that otherwise if the person shares one skill with other employees they should be capable of being an arbitrary cog like any other.
"Other people are capable of showing up on time, why can't you!?"
"Well, I have ADHD, I have to take medication to regulate my dopamine levels and struggle with time blindless, it's a real problem that I wish I didn't have, but I do my best given regularly switching contexts and priorities"
"Ya, great, that's cute but show up on time, are we on the same page?"
"No, but I'll say yes because you can't understand, I have no choice, and I'll continue doing what I'm doing until you fire me for not meeting your expectations, even if they have nothing to do with the skill I do actually have and gravitate towards, and would like to continue applying in service of company growth or whatever"
"Great, then we're on the same page, and I'll just start checking in on you more frequently because clearly you're retarded, thanks"
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The only people who do realistically get accomodations are either in super niche fields, are absolutely exceptional in their niche field, or are just on their own or in industries that require none of the normal things associated with their discipline.
> I don't think any designer has cared about that in the last 30 years. Perhaps not ever.
Not true at all. For instance, Arial was/is typically used as the fallback font for Windows users visiting a website that relied on system sans-serif fonts, while Helvetica shipped with OSX and would be prioritized for those lucky users.
Arial would be chosen by Windows users as good enough because they were already locked in a prison of bad design and terrible typeface rendering anyway, and didn't have other sensible options installed by default.
My point is not that font substitution never happens (it quite clearly does). My point is that no print designer has ever thought "yes, I want Helvetica here, and sometimes we won't pay for Helvetica so sometimes it will look like Arial, and this is what I want". Probably back in the days of PostScript built-in fonts and font cartridges some people thought about that. But since TrueType and embedded fonts happened, I don't think a single designer has ever given a shit about these two fonts being metric-compatible instead of just, you know, picking one and designing with it.
Web design is its own beast and any web designer who wasn't designing, from day one, for different fonts possibly being used without even any regard for metric compatibility wasn't doing their job.
Sure ya, but I don't think it was implied that anyone was talking specifically about metric compatibility exclusively for print design though, just "metrics" compatibility for design in general, specifically game UI, which could be other kinds of documents transferred between people with varying fonts and OS installed
> most are priced out of the housing market right now and stuck renting apartments is a complete tragedy
It absolutely is, but as one of those myself, I just refuse to even attempt to pay their prices and will make the best of life while renting and doing other things, not having kids, not owning property unless the ratio changes dramatically. Owning at most a tiny condo for half a million where I live, or moving to the boonies to own marginally more for less is simply not appealing to me, it doesn't unlock anything but a vague sense of security and a shit ton of liability. I hope more people choose the same until the working age tranch of purchasing power isn't as available as they'd like and prices have to drop. It's a major issue, but maybe I should be thankful I never adopted the boomer/genx dreams of owning a place and having a family or whatever. It's something I'm morbidly watching from the sidelines for now (in my early-mid thirties), but there are no circumstances except a miracle side hustle that could create the circumstances for me to actually pursue a mortgage on a place in my city.
>"I hope more people choose the same until the working age tranch of purchasing power isn't as available as they'd like and prices have to drop."
You just have to remember and keep in mind that the game is rigged. Housing is far from being a completely free market in this country. The structural political forces entrenched in maintaining home prices is second to none, from the top federal level all the way down to city councils, in a completely bipartisan way. The crisis of '08 was a generational event that we're not likely to see again in our lifetimes. Flattening and dips for sure, but a crash will not be allowed to happen; they'll just print enough to fix it, and leave the burden of inflation to anyone not owning assets.
Agreed on every point, except I'm actually in Canada, so it's partly because housing didn't crash here that we're arguably even more turbofucked, afaik anyway. Although our current administration would like every working age person to believe that it's solely because of your president that we're screwed economically, the writing has been on the wall for a while; too much of our GDP is made up of residential real estate sales and the rental income generated by the scarcity of them and going into the pockets of people who borrowed endlessly against them.
Well, if we want to be technical about it, the 2008 crash did happen because some structural forces (banks) were perfectly happy to originate highly risky mortgages in exchange for higher face value rates.
Which had the side effect of allowing a lot of people who couldn't otherwise afford homes to purchase them by allowing them access to more leverage than they likely should have had.
If they print enough money your other assets will go up (maybe enough to buy a house that has stayed flat in nominal terms)
This is basically the situation with housing in Canada actually, it's been down/flat in nominal terms since 2021 but if you owned US stocks during that time while waiting to buy then Canadian real estate is now much more affordable to you.
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