Isn't that the modern hiring system that everyone hates on? Do leetcode -> get prestigious job -> quit after 18 months -> do more leetcode -> make more money.
That's such a weird way to represent the +, wouldn't it be better to say 'One or more of' or 'At least one of' instead of 'One of' with the loop? I don't see the value of the loops in that expression.
I believe he made the edit that he did because it is easier to do a knockdown than a functional edit, and he wanted to minimize the risk of anything going wrong.
I live in a 3k sqft house in Salt Lake City with a wife (who doesn't work) and a kid. I commute about 25 minutes to work, but my house is a 0.7 mile walk down a nice, sidewalked suburban street from a software engineering company with about 100 employees, good salaries, and a good reputation.
In SLC it's easy for a software engineer to make 100K and support a family in a large home on a single income. We moved out here from California for this very reason.
Maybe you don't consider SLC to be a 'major city', but you will probably find similar lifestyles for engineers outside of California, Boston, and New York.
It's like the rest of the country doesn't really exist to certain people.
There are SO many cities with environments that this is possible, you just have to do a little cursory research. Businesses in these cities are hiring all the time because no one thinks about them. They don't have enough Starbucks or bike lanes. So we get articles talking about "can't" when it's really "won't."
Austin, Dallas, Kansas City, Des Moines, Detroit, Tampa, Miami...
The list goes on and on of medium sized cities starving for dev talent without enough coworking spaces or incubators.
My goal is to tear down the premise of the title, not to compete with a bunch of commenters moving the goalpoasts farther and farther.
The real issue here is that quality urban environments in America are becoming increasingly expensive to live in. If you can't afford it, but refuse to try and work to turn a medium-sized city into the city you desire, maybe you should tone down your "why our families can't afford X" rhetoric, because it's disingenuous.
> If you can't afford it, but refuse to try and work to turn a medium-sized city into the city you desire, maybe you should tone down your "why our families can't afford X" rhetoric, because it's disingenuous.
If a software developer likes Berlin and wants to live in a city that provides a similar lifestyle then how do you propose that they turn Des Moines into something that provides a similar lifestyle to Berlin?
If there is any disingenuity in this discussion it's in equating Berlin to Austin or Dallas or Kansas City or Des Moines or Detroit or Tampa or Miami.
Those are perfectly reasonable places to live, but they are not substitutes for Berlin if you want to live in that kind of place.
If those cities are perfectly reasonable places to live, but Berlin is where you want to live, then you should write an article with a premise that reflects how you feel that American cities cannot compete with Berlin.
I'm going to repeat myself one more time because you seem to be missing my point: I am saying the premise is flawed. I am not comparing Miami to Berlin, I am saying that the author is insisting on certain prerequisites and then saying that his family can't afford to live in AMERICA at all.
If you can't agree that this is disingenuous then we are going to have to agree to disagree.
Why would I move to any of those places when everyone that already lives there is getting exactly what they wanted when they chose not to build a dense, livable city? The residents of those cities chose to build a place that I don't find desirable. It's pretty unreasonable of you to expect me to move to one of those places and immediately start campaigning to change how those people want to live to suit my lifestyle.
In contrast, the place that I actually want to live, Seattle, has everything that I need in a layout I like except that I can only afford to live on the outskirts in a crappy neighborhood. If they would let people build 6-story buildings in better neighborhoods then it would be perfect.
You are being downvoted because Amazon is a bad example. They are intentionally not profitable so that they can lower prices to drive others out of the market and reinvest all revenue into R&D and horizontal expansion. They could net way more than $3B if they wanted to.
I could not care less about downvotes, but I enjoy discussion. And I certainly think people would like to disagree with me, but it seems none are really able or willing to form coherent counter points - which I think puts a very sad frame on the disagreement. So I thank you for changing that, though I think there's something you may not have considered in your logic.
At the most basic level we can view a company's profitability as a price vs demand curve. If your price is too low then you're leaving money on the table. If it's too high then you're also losing money since you could earn more by charging less to more people. And I'm sure you'd agree that all companies are really trying to maximize that curve.
But the thing here is that competition is not some tertiary element not considered in our basic price vs demand curve. It's in most cases the single biggest driving factor of the demand function. When there's no real competition, you can increase your prices quite recklessly - see Time Warner or Comcast. But the amount that Amazon can increase their prices is strictly limited due to competition. If you're going to buy an electronic component do you buy it at e.g. New Egg or Amazon? It doesn't really matter if its the same thing - you're just going to go with wherever is cheaper in net (e.g. factoring in rewards/shipping/etc), even if that price difference is really quite small. The point here is that while you may think that Amazon could raise their prices let's say 5% and see a 1-2% growth in profit, but this is a question that they are undoubtedly constantly researching - and they disagree.
----
And in any case this is literally the case for most all small margin businesses. For instance WalMart has 2.3 million employees and $13.6 billion net. Our $1k/year raise costs them $2.3 billion, or 1/6th of their entire available income. The only companies that are truly lush with money are companies that sell their product at extremely high markups, or companies whose product enables the minimize labor, such as software. For instance Apple, as an example of the former, nets $48.4 billion with 123,000 employees. A $1000/year raise there would work out to 1/400th of their available revenue. Google/Alphabet, as an example of the latter, had a bad year last year, but generally net around $20 billion on 72,000 employees. Their $1k raise works out to about 1/278th of their available revenue. It creates an ironic result that few people would complain about the wages Google or Apple offer, yet they actually offer their employees a far less 'fair' share of revenues than do the companies that people consider greedy.
