If we buy into the fact that we can account for "culture" onto this distribution, this article assumes that the distribution has remained the safe size and shape, and so he draws the conclusion that the long tail is declining or disappearing.
But the nature of the long tail is that it is comprised of a series of outliers. To use the author's analogy, what might be happening is that there's a distributional shift occurring at the same time the general amount of "stuff" under the curve is increasing, which gives the appearance that things have become more alike, even though what has actually happened is that the bump has just gotten bigger.
I actually live close to here, and trek out occasionally to show friends the ziggurat. There's some live excavation going on sponsored by the UN, but what's wild is that every random rock in the area that you kick over has Sumerian writing on it.
it's fine, there's hordes of youtubers roaming through. I'm a foreigner living in Karbala that's fluent in Iraqi Arabic, so I'm typically not in those circles. Visa on arrival for p9 + eu countries though.
I've been fascinated by Sumerian culture lately, it must be awesome to have such close access to Ur. It's amazing how many artifacts are still not translated and for how much such a culture was forgotten.
Can you tell a little more about those random rocks? Is nobody gathering them up and cataloguing them? Why is the UN excavating when there are artefacts lying there on the surface?
The other blog that monkin posted had a disclaimer about not working with companies from countries that have the death penalty for being gay.
So I turned that into the opposite political statement, to make a point.
interesting how different this is from the salaries at large companies on levels.fyi. annoyingly, the dice URL is broken currently, so I can't verify the underlying dataset.
yeah huge information asymmetry as people are used to looking up "salary" versus "total compensation"
these salaries are 1/3rd to 1/10th of what people actually make, and thats not a statistical outlier with the stock appreciation over the last few years
Of course, that sort of RSU appreciation can go away overnight. (To be clear, RSUs still have significant value even if they don't appreciate. But a lot of the really big $$ people have been making over the past 5 years or so are because of stock gains.)
ADDED: It's a difficult problem to solve with one number though. Base salary hasn't been very representative of total comp at the big SV tech companies over the past few years. On the other hand, there's not necessarily reason to believe that the past 5 years or so will be representative of the next 5 years--even if RSUs and bonuses are still relevant to a certain degree.
Those stock gains absolutely are negotiating leverage as much as the same person's prior or competing salaries would be, so I don't think it is productive to draw a distinction. Open to discussion.
An "L5" position is very similar to what is written on Levels.fyi and Blind, no matter what macroeconomic factors made it so across the board
Sure, absolutely relevant as a backward looking measure to offer a potential new employer a baseline--to the degree you want to share it. Certainly, when I last got a new job, I handwaved a bit around "counting bonuses etc." when giving a salary. (Was a private company so no stock.)
On the other hand, the fact that your comp could drop by $100K next year because your company's stock was flat or a bit down is probably at least somewhat relevant.
> On the other hand, the fact that your comp could drop by $100K next year because your company's stock was flat or a bit down is probably at least somewhat relevant.
Sure, but that applies to cash-comp too, for companies paying big cash bonuses instead of equity.
If the overall economic environment turns downward, your share grants if paid in equity are gonna be worth less than in the last 5 years, and if paid in cash, your cash bonuses are likely to fall off as well.
Right. I was specifically responding to the parent around stock-based comp.But, yeah, if your comp is 75% variable there's a real possibility it could be cut in half if things go south. Of course, you could also be laid off but that's a somewhat higher bar.
Man even though the third party Fever apps were mostly terrible they had such a scrappy vibe to them. Really liked Fever, back in the days when you could sell a self-hosted thing for 30 bucks.
This truly feels like https://www.aleksandra.codes/tech-content-consumer/, where every blog post rehashes the well tread territory of Hugo/Jenkins/Netlify/GH Pages or Wordpress/Blogger/Ghost/Medium/Neocities, or even the newish "minimal" ones like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23313196. You can even blog to specific audiences with the rise of "send a newsletter" SaaS things!
IMO, very few people are at a loss on "where to blog" or "how to blog", but rather actually writing. If you're a dev, you've got text files you can serve (or convert to html). If you're a non-tech person, you've got a dearth of places to blog on, with nearly a decade of tutorials about how to setup a domain and site. It feels like the demand for these "where to blog" posts are mostly to bikeshed on the tools and not actually the writing part.
