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12 Apr, 4 tweets, 1 min read
PSA: If you’re an engineer and have not done the job search thing in a few years it may be time to ask Mr. Market what prevailing wages are, because the answer may surprise you.
That has been good advice over much of the last 15 years but, according to a number of conversations I have had recently, is particularly good advice at the moment.
The roaring bull market for equities and vast pools of capital coming into tech (at every level) have mechanically pushed up some parts of compensation, companies have adjusted, etc etc.

It’s very much a jobseeker’s market at the moment.
(It did not occur to me that this was ambiguous: wages have increased, a lot.)

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More from @patio11

Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
11 Apr
It's Day 87 of VaccinateCA.com and I've got the update baton.

In addition to making hundreds of calls to pharmacies/etc across California to ask about vaccine availability, here's what we're working on:
We launched localization of our site into Farsi ( vaccinateca.com/fa/ ) bringing our total number of languages supported to 7.

We're continuing to work to expand access to vaccination information for communities which are underserved.
We've redone our caller-visible UI, allowing us to more easily iterate on scripts, questions asked, data structuring, and call targeting.

This has allowed us to do mini-sprints, as we have capacity, on call lists / scripts which are outside of the core daily mission.
Read 7 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
1 Apr
General availability for the vaccine, and believed-to-be-sufficient supply (e.g. "doses for every person in X"), is not the endpoint for either the vaccination campaign or the pandemic, and is much farther from the endpoint of both than it is broadly believed to be.
Supply is hyperlocal and often non-fungible. From the perspective of many people who we need to vaccinate, much vaccine which we believe to be available and routable is as effective as vaccine stored on the surface of the moon.
We have some limited (and intentionally underexploited) ability to move demand around systemically but have functionally no ability to move around shipped supply and extremely limited (and intentionally underexploited) ability to retask future supply.
Read 6 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
1 Apr
Insurance underwriter: I mean check the tables; senior systems engineers are great risks. Negligible all cause mortality, inclusive of automotive accidents.
Company: What about competing job offers?
Insurance underwriter: Oh eff everything about that; you're on your own.
*sigh* While that makes a good joke, "key man" insurance policies are a real thing, but they're largely not used for line employees, even very critical line employees.

"Would that cover case of employee leaving of their own volition?"

If you're willing to pay for it, maybe.
A "key man" insurance policy is taken out by a business (as the beneficiary) against always the life and sometimes the health and availability of a person indispensable to the enterprise, to transfer a difficult-to-otherwise-control high-hazard low-probability risk to an insurer.
Read 7 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
31 Mar
I've been asked recently "What's the importance of the effort if supply problems are improving?" and one of my answers is that it is not a given that supply continues to improve.

The probability space we're preparing for should include a lot of weight for future problems.
For example: nytimes.com/2021/03/31/wor…
I feel like a lot of the discourse around that issue will excoriate low-level technicians and/or the manufacturer for "ruining our perfect plan."

I have had the honor of working in the orbit of a company which has a complex supply chain. Expecting perfection is not a good plan.
Read 5 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
31 Mar
I’m really, really confused by “You thought we wouldn’t lie to you, BUT WE DID, hah, you should now forget about that lying thing” strategy.
“Is he subtweeting Volkswagen or the pandemic response?” *cough* Not sure.
(There’s honestly part of me which worries about describing government officials as having made bald-faced lies during the pandemic response, because that could potentially burn political capital, but as God is my witness I don’t think I will ever be able to forget that.)
Read 5 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
29 Mar
“You’re as secure as the least secure laptop which can push code at any of your dependencies” not broadly adjusted to in tech yet.
And this doesn’t even require malfeasance on behalf of the OSS contributor.

A great deal of the effort to secure my laptop is because of what the laptop could do in someone else’s hands; the world has many laptops and few people paid to secure them constantly.
“What’s the drill if an engineer’s laptop is in a car which is broken into?”
“They won’t be able to log in, because we force a password prompt. But even if they could, would have to elevate privileges to push code. And we’d nuke box / roll chefs when they reported it gone.”
Read 4 tweets

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