Changing job is always a gamble. Your next place could be better, it could be worse. By the time you know if you got lucky or not, its too late.

Never leave a job you're happy with unless you have a HELL of a good reason. Money rarely is a good reason unless its an absurd amount.

All companies have slightly different promotion processes, but its a small world, and everyone ends up working everywhere, knowing each other, and trading notes. Google's promotion process is nothing uncommon. You just didn't happen to work somewhere that had a similar one, thats all. I only worked for 3~ Big Bank (tm), 2 of which had a very very similar process, the other did not. Maybe my sample just isn't representative. There are thousands of companies out there after all :) About about a 1/4th of other companies where Ive been had a very similar process. Thats just what I'm basing myself on. Your millage may vary.

Once you're talking 130-180k/year, no one moves jobs for the pay. The difference between making 140k or making 180k isn't going to change your quality of life enough to leave a job that wouldn't be as good. Thats why you'll never see someone switch away from Google for money.

For the rest, it depends what you compare to. If you're comparing to other companies that are similar, of course the pay will be similar. I live a block away from the Google office in Cambridge, so 75% of people I know work there or have worked there, half of which have moved between the Silicon Valley office and here. Quite a few are downright geniuses that could move anywhere and ask for a fortune, yet they're T4-T6, often making a lot less money than me, even though I couldn't dream of doing their job.

Adobe Reflow was what I was thinking of*

A lot of AAA videogames have been done single threaded. Web apps can be done the same way.

Have the action change the state, and use requestAnimationFrame to update the UI nicely, v synced. 60 frames per second is enough to feel snappy. Of course, all I/O is already happening asynchronously, and for the very few cases that are left, you can use workers.

Atom editor isn't as good as more mature equivalents, but its close.

Adobe has a tool to create responsive website mockups thats also all in javascript/html while still being a desktop app, I forget its name.

A lot of stuff is done in Node-Webkit, and in many cases you probably don't even know.

It will mainly depends where you come from... Google was unique a few years ago, but now a lot of companies are "cool", and Google has a lot more silly bullshit process than many others (ie: the promotion process, which has a lot in common with how big banks do it for engineers...and thats not a good thing).

For the pay, its because the tiers are shifted. An engineer lvl 2 (making up titles, read between the line) at Google is paid the same as a lvl 2 engineer elsewhere... but a lvl 2 at Google could be a lvl 3 or more elsewhere, and thus be paid a heck of a lot more. That made sense and was fine when Google was unique, but I guess they did a bit too good of a job at spreading their culture.

Its no longer "THE" place to work, for sure, but they do have all the nice perks and benefits and all the on-site stuff, interesting problems, and interesting culture. You also don't have to worry TOO much about them hiring a few retards that never get fired (at least not on the engineering side).

There's a lot of companies that provide the above, but not that many are well established with as many benefits (usually they'll be "profitable startups"). So while its not the "OMG OMG OMG OMG I NEED TO WORK AT GOOGLE" scenario anymore, its still on the list of places to consider.

Of course, then you have their "1 size fit all, basically random depending on who does the interview" interview process to go through, so it may not be worth the trouble, unless you're feeling lucky.

Just be a software engineer in one of the tech hubs. Problem -> solved.

Its still going to sting, because SOME companies have automatic policies, but I used to work with a guy who, we eventually found out (there was no BG check at that company) was a convicted felon, and if you googled his name, the FIRST thing that came up was a picture of his mug shot and a lot of details on what he did (it was pretty bad).

He eventually got fired (for completely unrelated reasons...ie: he was terrible), and got a job 2 weeks later FOR A BANK (again as a software engineer). He's still there as far as I can tell.

Companies in the booming tech areas are desperate.

Joke aside, that's basically the issue. "You're doing it wrong". Now there's various flavors of Agile, and one size doesn't fit all. But often, when people use "hybrids", instead of using the best of both worlds, they use the worse.

So we want sprints, but I can't just let my engineers work unchecked! So we'll have a full day planning meeting every 2 weeks, and a checkpoint meeting every week. The daily standups are going to last 45 minutes, and the PM will also have a 20 minute talk with each individual every day to see if anything changed during the day!

Now, I also want the full design documents and architecture up front, before the sprint start, lets have everyone sign off on it, and if anything changes, we'll just extend the sprint. /true story, happened at my last job...I quit a month and a half in.

Nothing is set in stone and each company has to figure out what will work for them...but virtually all the "hybrid methodologies" or pseudo-agile I've worked in only took the parts of Agile that suck, slapped in the worse parts of Waterfall on top, then wondered why it was a shit show.

That doesn't change my point though: that his argument would be just as strong, valid and convincing otherwise. The strength of Linus' arguments come from the details and the logic trail he puts out when he argues. My personal favorites are when he argues Git design decisions.

Without the language and offences, the amount of people he convinces wouldn't change. AT ALL.

At which point its literally just a matter of self control.

Now before you think I'm just a delicate little flower: I'm probably far worse than Linus in that regard. That doesn't change that its unnecessary. Best case scenario, it changes absolutely nothing (see above), worse case some people get defensive and miss the point completely.

Its a balance. The important part is knowing when and how to be assertive. Being an arrogant asshat is a variation of that for sure, and it will work to some extent, but the important part is that you're assertive, not that you act like a 9 years old who just learnt "bad" words.

If you know your stuff, you assert that you know your stuff, and can make coherent arguments, you'll get somewhere.

Take any of Linus' more famous mailing list arguments where he rips someone to shred, remove the "offensive" words, and the argument would still stand on its own and he would still have "won" those arguments hands down, in the vast majority of cases.

Heck, I'd dare say if you act like a little kid when arguing, you need to be 2x as good and have an even more solid argument for anyone to take you seriously.

I'd say growing a thicker skin is probably as important as having enough self control and creativity to get your point across without using extra words that don't add a whole lot to the discussion.

ie: if your neighbors above your apartment are too loud, you should get used to dealing with noise, but they ALSO shouldn't have their sound system at max.

Purely supply and demand. The amount of people who go in computer science or what have you to start making games is crazy. Stupid mini-games aside, the effort/knowledge/skill it takes to make even an average game is absurd compared to most other type of applications, yet programmers flock to that industry in droves. That lets companies be more picky.

This is in contrast to average, more business-oriented fields (law, banking, data, etc), that can be interesting if you're into that stuff, but doesn't have the same kind of appeal. Very very few people get out of school thinking "Damn, i can't wait to write the next stack to handle SWIFT messages!". Thats why developers working for big banks in NYC make a crazy amount of money.

There's no money to be made in a field a lot of people find fun/easy/exciting, because too many people are willing to do it for peanuts (there's a reason so many open source projects have terrible UI... very few people get excited about UX development). Find a niche that interests you if you want to make money.

You can't be a special snowflake if you look like every other snowflake.

They probably have pretty extensive usage statistics that made it easy to push down in priority until it totally fell off the list of things worth doing.

At that time, bad publicity wasn't part of the metric. Now it is. Thats probably all there is to it.

Hmm, there is still a point in it. When you tax consumption, you can very easily target segments. Like, if you don't tax unprocessed food and clothes (something that is already common), you help the poors a lot. If you tax the shit out of high end cellphones and luxury cars, you then specifically target rich people, without hurting those who buy a phone just to talk and cars just to get to work.

The primary issue with it obviously is that if people change their spending habits because of taxes, they then hurt businesses, who hire less people, and you go full circle.