If you have a modern heat pump system, it's often more energy efficient to keep it at a steady temp. They become more efficient the less they have to work. This means if you're changing the temp while at work, there's a spike when you return where it has to work harder. The efficiency loss there is often worse than what was saved by changing the temps while you were away.
* Foreign business teams - Luxembourg (EU), occasionally elsewhere (India)
* Team members on my team - Bellevue, Seattle, Vancouver, and elsewhere
Tell me how we're going to get all of these groups together for "hallway talk". At best, you can get a team in one locality, but even that is difficult with immigration challenges.
I'm the only person from my team that works in the state of Texas. We have only one other person who works in the same timezone. We have others in Seattle and the DC area.
RTO might make sense for those in Seattle or the DC area, but not for anyone else. And we would all have to be on the same teleconference calls anyway, because we also work with a bunch of people on other teams at other places around the world.
There's no telling how this is going to work out. At least, not yet.
Wojcicki has been involved with Google practically since the beginning. The company's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, set up office in her parents' garage soon after they incorporated Google in 1998. Wojcicki became Google's first marketing manager the following year and played a role in the earliest Google Doodles. In 2006, she encouraged Google to buy YouTube, which launched a year earlier.
> My question for more financially savvy HNers, is I recently changed my investment portfolio to be more in money market and bond accounts since it seems cash will be safer as stocks would expect to go down, with the thought that once it bottoms out I can move back to stocks when they are low. Am I wrong on this reasoning or is the underlying logic sound?
You are trying to time the market. That is notoriously difficult. You are almost for sure going to miss the ideal timing. That's why there's the saying, "time in the market beats timing the market". There's many write-ups on this topic, but https://www.schwab.com/learn/story/does-market-timing-work shows a decent breakdown of different strategies and how they would have worked out.
> You start missing house payments, soon homes start getting foreclosed on, the boom we've built in construction starts to burst, and we have 2008 all over again
I'm generally not sophisticated enough to time the market, but it seems like the largest player in the market is trying to crush it in order to save the dollar. Is it timing the market to recognize this fact and adjust one's portfolio accordingly?
In other words, I don't know what the stock market will do later today, next week, or for the next month, but it seems the general direction will be down until the fed pivots. Not straight down, there will be up days, weeks, months, but overall down. Don't fight the fed.
> but it seems like the largest player in the market is trying to crush it in order to save the dollar.
The US dollar index is now stronger than it's been at any time pre-pandemic since 2002. If anything the Fed is most likely trying to do the opposite, weaken the very strong dollar, as it did in the early 2000s and 1980s.
> it seems the general direction will be down until the fed pivots.
More likely, it will be down until market participants are sufficiently convinced the Feds will pivot enough, and then it will rebound, at unknown velocity.
And, yeah, trying to strategize around that fact is trying to time the market.
First agree with timing the market. But I am a bit skeptical about your overall point. Historically this has been true, but many people think we are at an inflection point and historical trends might no longer be true. This time is different is certainly often said and rarely correct, but ... this time is different, maybe?
The US markets are the most aggressively optimized game theory engines on the face of the planet.
The biggest mistake you could ever make is thinking that the prices in the market reflect perceived value of things today. Everyone is playing in 2nd or 3rd order terms, at minimum. Anyone playing first-order is going to get steamrolled unless they have a latency advantage.
> Historically this has been true, but many people think we are at an inflection point and historical trends might no longer be true. This time is different is certainly often said and rarely correct, but ... this time is different, maybe?
During the Great Recession we were told that the time of outsized market returns were over. We should expect to no longer see 10% YoY increases and plan around a more modest 3%–4% return for the foreseeable future. Between Jan 1, 2009 and Jan 1, 2023, the market went up like 450%. Including the recent market "bloodbath", we've had a 11%+ annualized return on investment in the stock market since the GR.
The moral of the story? Stop listening to people who claim to know what the market is going to do. Even if one of them does, the odds that you'll be able to pick that specific soothsayer out of a lineup is near zero.
Right because this time we're in a much larger asset bubble than we were back then.
At this point it wouldn't surprise me if we don't go into a recession because the larger the bubble gets the more desperately we need to keep some air in it. It would not surprise me to see cheap money return only because the alternative might, at some point, be the collapse of the entire systems.
We'll keep the bubble going so as long as we can, but the longer we punt this off the more extreme the breakdown is going to be.
This time it is much worse, and for stupid reasons.
The US government funded its huge balance sheet expansion mostly by short term obligations. When rates in long term debt were at historical lows… it chose a to go in on short term instruments (because interest rates never rise!)
As that short term debt becomes due and it needs to be rolled over, it will face a much higher interest rate, severely impacting the federal budget.
The last crisis was smoothed over because the fed stood in as buyer of last resort. It’s not clear it will be able to afford to do so this time.
> not clear [the Fed] will be able to afford to do so this time
The Fed is fine. Its limits are inflation and unemployment. The latter is proving incredibly forgiving right now. A single-mandate central bank would be tempted to plunge the economy into recession right now to cure the inflation.
Maybe, but they said they're going into bonds here which seems like a pretty safe move at this point (unless you expect substantially higher interest rates from here - I think that's unlikely, more likely rates will plateau after a couple more Fed increases and stay there for a while).
I can get close to 4.8% on 26 week t-bills right now, do you think I can get that kind of return in the stock market (index funds) over the next 6 months? Maybe, but I'd rather go with the safer bet on t-bills here. (Sure, there's a non-zero possibility that the clowns in Washington will do something stupid that leads to a [likely short-term] default, but if that were to happen stocks and pretty much everything else would tank as well)
If you need the return in the next 6 months that’s not timing the market and putting it in equities would be bad even if you expected equities to out perform bonds. Having your portfolio invested in different things based on investment horizon is a normal part of portfolio design.
Timing the market is changing that distribution based on your opinion of what the markets will do.
You are looking at this differently than the parent post. You are looking at cross-industry inside Japan. Parent is talking about inside Japan vs outside Japan within the same industry/job.
If you look at public data on somewhere like levels.fyi, there's a big gap in pay even within the same company, at the same level. I'm most familiar with Seattle comp, and same tier of SDE role is a 30+% paycut from Seattle to Tokyo at FAANG companies.
I also know someone who left a FAANG company here to go work in Japan for awhile. They had to move from SDE to Data Scientist + got a senior role at the new company, and even then they struggled to get anywhere close to their previous comp.
I don't see that. I believe parent comment is also talking about "cross-industry inside Japan".
> Salaries and prestige are relatively low for *developers in Japan*, so it's relatively easy for other jobs to compete for prospective workers and *draw them away from technology*.
I agree that difficulty attracting foreign talent is a problem for the Japanese tech industry, but I don't think it's the focus of the article or the focus of the parent comment.
You have the right username to know Paris ;-) I can't remember from my own visits to Barcelona and Belgium how common it is. But photos of 1950s Paris are not evidence that it's common in other cities now.
You should be careful of the tax implications. WFH outside of the state your employment center was based in opens you to possible complications around how your employment is viewed by the IRS.
600k is too low for any home in the area that isn’t in bad shape at that size (and your example shows this). Also, that 30min can become 1h+ with traffic, with almost no public transit alternatives.
