I lost about 95 lbs (in 4 months)

That's not remotely healthy and barely even possible. To lose 95 pounds of fat in 120 days, you would need to generate a daily caloric deficit of over 2700 calories, which is beyond a starvation diet. If your RMR was 2000 calories per day, you ran 5 miles per day and you ate a holodomor diet, for four months, you could maybe approach that assuming your organs didn't shut down in the meantime, but you would be shedding as much (or more) muscle as fat in that case, which is hardly ideal.

"no, it does not mean coding (which is what she ended up doing herself in many cases)"

Tell me you're exaggerating... if that's true, wow, she should have been fired on the spot by the board of directors. The CEO of a multi billion dollar company has lots of responsibilities, writing production code is NOT one of them. If she can't trust the engineering teams to do that, she should hire new engineers, not write the code herself.

GDP = Consumption + Governmentspending + eXport - iMport

Exports and imports can both be many multiples of your GDP as long as they cancel themselves out. This is very common in small, open economies that are heavily reliant on trade.

Ditto.

In 15 years as a SW dev at 5 different semiconductor companies (small, medium and ginormous), I've rarely worked more than 35 hours per week and have found that most people who do put in a ton of hours are either (1) serial underperformers who are just trying to keep up with their workload or (2) crazy genius types who are somewhere on the autism spectrum and don't really have lives outside of their work.

Amusingly, in contrast to most of the posts here, my hours have been way shorter and way more flexible working for silicon valley firms than anywhere else. In particular, my brief stint at a German company was where there was the most pressure to put in a ton of hours, even if it meant doing nothing more than sitting in my cube and being present (that place was a nightmare, completely soured me on working for European companies)

Of course, they actually mean, "we can't get any cheap American workers anymore... OMG our profit margins!"

Where exactly does this idea come from? Facebook is renowned for paying their devs extraordinarily well (like $200K+excellent equity package). If they were looking to save money, they could just drop to the 70th percentile and probably still do ok on the hiring side.

Working as a FTE of Megacorp and making 140k+? Zero to few

????

At most tier 1 companies in Silicon Valley (Apple/Google/Facebook/Intel/etc.), pretty much every dev with more than 5 years experience will be making over 140K in salary + bonus + equity (likely far more, actually).

The cart doesn't push the horse - the reason housing prices are so high in SF and SV is because tech workers earn exceptionally high salaries compared to virtually every other industry. Only medicine, finance and law pay better but law (and to a lesser degree finance) is a total crapshoot with a lot of lawyers earning almost nothing from their JD.

$150K + equity is pretty standard for a moderately experienced developer living anywhere between San Francisco and San Jose and you can live pretty damn well on that, even in the bay area.

People in this career path are generally treated poorly and don't make that much money compared to career paths with similar educational requirements and difficulty, and the prestige is pathetic.

I don't think that's even remotely true. In San Francisco, people are freaking out because the techies are making (what many consider) too much money and all sorts of financial types are abandoning Wall St. for Silicon Valley because tech is considered way cooler than finance.

Shadow stats, in their 1980-based data set, claims that inflation has been at least 6% every year since 2000, which would imply a minimum price factor of 2.26. In other words, someone earning $60K in 2000 would need to earn $135K (at least!) in 2014 to maintain the same lifestyle.

If that doesn't strike you as utter crankery, you just can't be helped.

Yup, defense is where it is at. The SF Giants won two WS in 3 years by (accidentally, I think) putting together a team that was focused on pitching and defense while everyone else was focused on offense.

While offense is WAY more important, it is too well understood now to gain any advantage over other teams. In 2002, Billy Beane could flip a guy with a great swing or subjectively good defense for someone with better OPS+ and generate wins because everyone else valued the scout's opinions and not the numbers. In 2014, everyone values OPS+/PECOTA/Cairo over subjective opinion so the market has become almost completely efficient in that regard.

The 2010 and 2012 SF Giants had above average (but not spectacular, particularly in 2012) pitching and absolutely awful hitting but managed to win 2 championships when the current state of research says that they shouldn't. One, you could explain it away as a fluke. Two? Maybe there's something there and defense would seem to be where the current blindspot is and if someone can get ahead of the crowd in understanding it, they can get ahead of the crowd and intentionally put together a championship team in that way.

Well, except if you RTFA, it appears to have applied to executives and sales staff, not engineers. From the google document:

"3. Additionally, there are no restrictions at any level for engineering candidates."

From TFA:

"“For each of these ‘Restricted Hiring’ companies, Google has agreed to the following protocol.

1. Not to pursue manager level and above candidates for Product, Sales, or G&A roles — even if they have applied to Google;

2. However, there are no restrictions to our recruiting from these companies at individual contributor levels for PSG

3. Additionally, there are no restrictions at any level for engineering candidates."

Point 1 will probably get them in trouble, but point 3 makes it pretty clear that this did not apply to engineers.

Yup, same here (well, not Apple but a different company that was mentioned and have totally gotten cold-called by Google). Based on the documents in TFA, it appears that the agreements were mostly about cold-calling and didn't apply to engineering staff. This seems mostly to be about executive staff and salesforce.

Now, excuse me while I play the world's tiniest violin for those executives at major tech companies that had their salaries suppressed.

Yikes! No!

Well, ok, that may fly in other places, I guess, but in Silicon Valley anything fancier than business casual is not going to work in your favor during an interview. Hell, when you interview at Apple they explicitly tell you not to wear a suit.

Look nice and all, but dress appropriately for where you are interviewing. Maybe "dress like the company's CEO" is better advice, so put that hoodie on when you interview at Facebook.