Haha, I had the same thought about the program and the opposite conclusion about the font! Many characters like g and p look similar, but the lower case t has a curl on the bottom in Excalidraw, and is straight in the article's diagram.
Edit: on second look, it is the same t. I saw some images in a search for Excalidraw with a different t, but when I tried the actual site it was the same. Sorry for the noise!
I'll reply here (because I simultaneously replied to your other comment but removed it). I also thought it was funny we had come to opposite conclusions based on the same data.
Type out "Bottom-up" in excalidraw, it matches perfectly. The lower case `t` has a curl on the bottom in the diagram too.
EDIT: Re Edit:
No worries about noise. I had a good chuckle with our near simultaneous replies which was nice after the way our project has been going this year.
Grades aren’t terribly important. Some companies (including notable ones) will filter those with lower than a certain GPA, but there’s always ways around that.
If you don’t have good grades, rely on your school name. If your school isn’t notable, projects are key.
These are the same kinds of communities are just being ravaged by brain drain. Their brightest students And their college graduates are being driven out of town from lack of opportunity.
Those are the people who businesses want to hire. Instead, Youngstown’s best chances of a brighter future are moving to Columbus nearby or the coasts to places that already have plenty of advantages.
Remote work could change this. But, these types of communities really need to embrace white-collar workers and not keep praying for a blue-collar comeback.
>But, these types of communities really need to embrace white-collar workers and not keep praying for a blue-collar comeback.
Lot easier said than done. Famously, Racine Wi tried to get legions of white collar workers. The result was similar to what we see outlined in this article. Only instead of spending millions to get blue collar jobs, in Wisconsin we spent hundreds of millions to billions to get white collar jobs. End result was the same, basically, a predictable crash and burn.
Here's reality. These places are a tough sell. And until these places are willing to accept the fact that they are a tough sell they will continue to be easy pickings for slick corporate attorneys in dark suits.
FWIW Youngstown has also placed some big economic development bets on white collar industries. Last I checked, the Youngstown Business Incubator had a solid success with at least one software company: https://www.google.com/search?q=turning+technologies&rlz=1C5...
There's also been a lot of work to nurture additive manufacturing businesses (https://ysu.edu/center-for-innovation-in-additive-manufactur...). A mixture of federal grants (partly from the Appalachian Regional Commission IIRC) and support from the university going into that.
But to your point of embracing white collar workers ... does that solve the problem economic development agencies are actually trying to solve? An interesting case study a few miles down the highway is Pittsburgh. There's been a much-hyped boom in high skilled tech jobs seeded by CMU (robotics, software startups) plus a relatively strong healthcare/biotech sector there. But that doesn't do much to replace the big swath of steel and manufacturing jobs that were around a generation ago. So average wages go up and there's probably _some_ trickle down benefits, but the new tech jobs don't do much for the median Pittsburgher whose parents/grandparents would have worked in the mills.
Plus nobody cares about credentialing at all. What they do care about is solving problems, and it seems reasonable that 96% of problems become solvable with the course material provided before reaching the very end of a course. Once the problem is solved, there is little reason to continue.
You are generalizing. I am doing a MicroMaster in data science from MITx and they grant the equivalent credits of the first semester. It's worth something if I ever apply to a similar master program.
It's really cool to see a unicorn come out of Detroit. The area isn't known for tech, despite having the largest concentration of engineers in the country. Hopefully, more startups like StockX and Duo Security will shine light on the area as a tech hub.
That seems very unusual for a low CoL city. It seems like there's an unbelievably large gulf between high + low CoL cities (far more than CoL would account for)
That has gradually changed a lot in the last ten years.
A decent house is $150,000 to $200,000 where I'm at. That's 2,000-2,500 sq feet, 0.75 to 2 acres of land. The murder rate here is almost zero, violent crime is very low, and I have access to high speed Internet and normal shopping / consumer goods. I can day trip to multiple major metros. Public housing here is actually nice, safe, clean. The homeless rate is nearly zero. And I spend zero time in traffic.
Put your $50,000 down on the home. Your mortgage payment is now $725 to $750 or so.
Make $6k, $8k, $10k, whatever per month doing Go, Python, JavaScript, etc. remote contracting. Or just take a decent remote job.
Your take home is ~$54k on $85k income contracting, before any deductions. Your bills are $2,500 per month. You can easily pay your house off in seven or eight years.
And that's not a crazy scenario or a high-end outcome in terms of contract work. That's doable for anyone in the top 50% skill wise.
You can pull off that scenario all over the US.
Or make $150,000 in Seattle, and that same house costs $1.2 to $1.5 million. Somehow figure out how to come up with your $325,000 down payment. Now your mortgage is $5,000 per month. Your property tax is over $10,000. Your take home pay is $9k to $9,500 per month. Your house, for just the mortgage and taxes, is going to cost you around ~66% of your take home pay, versus ~16% in my scenario. That house is going to cost $2 million total - minimum - over 30 years of mortgage payments, plus another $300,000+ in tax payments.
I feel pretty bad for engineers making ~$150,000 or less in Seattle or San Francisco. Telecommuting will set you free.
And housing is even more expensive in San Francisco than in Seattle, general cost of living is a bit higher, and CA has income taxes, adjust the figures accordingly.
The $1.3m house in Seattle will cost you $2m in SF.
Now you need $500,000 for a down payment. Your mortgage + taxes will cost you $110,000 per year, out of your $158,000 take home on a $250,000 income. You'll burn $3.8 million over 30 years on the equivalent of a typical middle-class house, before accounting for any repairs/improvements or tax increases.
You have $4,000 per month left to cover basics like: car, utilities, homeowners ins, food, home repairs, savings, life.
That's all assuming a $250,000 salary, which few people make in SF. The average is a lot closer to $200,000 total compensation, the median is even lower.
$250,000 salary is a helluva line to have to perpetually stay above for 30 years just to barely afford a modest middle-class house, while saving almost nothing besides that.
That's not how the math works at all. 25-30 yr olds making 250k don't live in 2m homes. They usually share an apartment in SF and pay ~$2000-2500 on rent. Then when it is time to get married or move in with a gf, you get a starter home for 500-600K, putting 10% down. Now in a couple of years, your starter home has gained $200k in value. Sell that and use the proceeds for a larger single family home around 1-1.5mn. Meanwhile, since your partner is in the Bay Area, your household income is between 400-500K. Now you are 35 and you get a couple of promotions and are either a senior Engg manager or an architect/tech lead at L6 or L7. You then start pulling 200K just in RSUs. Meanwhile your house also appreciates in value. At this point, said engineer has 300-400k in liquid savings and another 300-400k in home equity. There is a reason why people move to Seattle and SF as the math largely works out
That path is as rarified among software engineers at bigco as software engineering at bigco is among software engineering at large as that is to the general population.
No, they move there because they hope that math works out that way, and they think they will be the one guy out of 10? 20? 100? where it actually does work out.
I don’t understand what is the unlikely thing to happen in the scenario described. If you’re talking about striking millions in startup exit/IPO money, I def agree with you it’s unlikely.
Plenty of engineers hit their cap at L5 or thereabouts (I'm sure if you look at the distribution of levels at your local bigco you'll see there's a sharp decline in numbers at some point), and not everyone is going to be part of a DINK engineering power couple.
That is a fair point. Liquid salary doesn't usually go much beyond 200k; all of the additional comp is in RSU's. If there is a huge downturn, a lot of engineers will lose a great chunk of their assets.
My current "quarter life crisis" is around this number, it appears to getting from $150-200k in liquid salary is MUCH more difficult than $100-150. So if liquid income is your "north star metric" job wise, what do you do?
Correct. And a lot of folks deal with this volatility by immediately liquidating a certain fraction of their stocks and investing in e.g. Mutual Funds and the like.
The problem is, telecommuting is still not common. Hell, the running joke is that Slack, a company who's entire purpose is improving communication among teams to enable more remote work, does not allow remote work themselves.
