Bart and Caltrain stations in broad daylight have always worked well for me. Same goes for major public transit facilities in any city. Granted my transactions tend to be limited to computer hardware and automobiles.

Don't think I'd feel comfortable meeting someone at a pig fortress, just to buy/sell a laptop. Adds unnecessary risk to otherwise routine business.

FTFY

No one actually believes these numbers are an accurate representation of public opinion.... right?

Violent Purtians vs insensitive clods - loads of fun, but best watched from a considerable distance.

"Pardon me - does this train go to the airport?"

Sure, the best workers in a given profession usually earn more than the average worker. Duhhh.

More interesting, when comparing different professions, is to look at typical earnings for the average worker. In that regard software development beats the pants off food service and menial labor. But it falls far short of occupations such as finance, real estate, and some guild-restricted professions like law and medicine.

I've been freelance for a long time, so I'm no stranger to uncertainty, erratic cash flows, and the hustle to find new clients. Seems like it might be a tad nicer with bigger paydays for less laborious work.

That's a legit concern for the future. But at the present, in my particular city, there is real competition.

I took Lyft home tonight, but I would have LOVED to take the Muni instead. I'm nothing if not cheap. It's good that SF has the all-night Owl service, but to be honest it sucks balls. A 15 minute walk followed by a 30 minute wait followed by a 15 minute bus ride followed by another 15 minute walk wasn't really worth it when the Lyft ride took under 10 minutes door to door.

So you shop at almost Walm... er, wait, almost any retail shop in America.

Uber & Lyft offer basically the same service and very similar pricing. Formerly I used Uber because (at that time) I slightly preferred their Android app over Lyft's app. Now I mostly use Lyft because they seem like a subjectively "nicer" company.

When there are multiple companies offering equivalent services, it doesn't take a lot to sway people's loyalty.

Open floor plans and cubicles alike indicate that a company doesn't really value the employees who work therein. If a company truly values a worker, they put their money where their mouth is and give that worker a real office. But talk is cheap, whereas real estate is expensive.

While ago I worked for a venture-backed company. The code was an awful steaming pile of dog shit. But a few modules were much higher quality than the rest. Logical design, solid implementation, good comments, full test coverage, etc. The programmer who wrote them had only worked for the company a few months before he was canned - apparently management thought he sucked balls.

Yup. I made the mistake of getting into software development, because it a) was accessible to a liberal arts drop out and b) it seemed to pay well (for a kid just out of college in the early 2000s). Now I realize that a not-very-successful real estate agent makes double a successful programmer's salary, while doing way less miserable work. Time for career change.

I worked on a project for several years where the team was split between Boston, Sydney, and San Francisco. It actually wasn't all that hard for us to communicate and keep in sync. It probably helped that the SF and Sydney folks were on flexible schedule, while only the Boston team were cubicle slaves chained to their desks 9-6.

FWIW, scheduling wasn't really any harder with SYD included than it was for just SFO and BOS.