Sure, but a credentialed person is more likely to be familiar with other research in the area and have expertise with state of the art techniques in the field.
So an uninformed reader (with less background than either to critically evaluate the work) should, all else equal, prefer the analysis of an expert. That's not to say the expert cannot be wrong, but a non-expert has a greater need to establish the credibility of their argument.
Sadly, the question is "are they part of my tribe or not?"
I see it over and over again in my city in coastal California. Car dealership, gas stations? A-OK, they help me out. Instead let's go do a climate protest of a bank, an Amazon office, and a software as a service company, since they have Big Oil as clients. And let's conveniently forget the massive oil and car infrastructure from our city design, which creates huge amounts of demand for emissions. As long as the enemy is one- or two-degrees away in terms of connection, it's a target to be attacked.
Is the claim that PZ is some sort of PR attack on other companies?
Because as someone who is highly skeptical of Google's motives a lot of the time, that just seems like a batty take for anyone who is familiar with their work.
That’s been the claim for as long as they existed, and one that Microsoft employees like to respond with in the media (and behind closed doors). It’s not true though. I have talked to some of the early PZ folks and they are unwavering in their devotion to sincerely held beliefs that they are making the internet safer. They feel strongly that their hard disclosure deadline is a critical component of this and they stick to those principles, even when it is unfavorable to Google.
The only reason that deadline exists is because many vendors have had a long history of taking advantage of researchers who agree to embargo details of their work while the vendors work on a fix. Bugs were going unfixed for years.
It has been my observation that this strategy only partially worked. The main thing that happened is that vendors now won’t sit on Google reported vulns, because they know Google are not bluffing, but they’re still generally happy to take their sweet time if the report comes from someone else. I know of some companies who put PZ bugs in a special queue to fast track them.
I think it has done a little bit in terms of setting norms for shorter disclosure timelines though.
I suspect from the Chrome security team's perspective there is very little difference, which is why they take significant measures to reduce the Windows kernel attack surface.
Proven that you are worth that salary in a given city. As tech companies realize they are no longer tied to SV they will also no longer have to pay the same high salaries to attract the large but overall still limited talent pool in this geographic area.
For every SF developer there is probably a just as good developer in Boise or Belarus willing to do the job for much less. Why should a SF developer who moves there make more?
People are worth a lot, but they become worth less monetarily as the talent pool grows in size.
Because by doing this you have misrepresented the truth in order to extract more money from your employer than you agreed (presumably, in your employment contract).
(As I commented elsewhere, whether you think paying by local cost of living is the right policy is valid to debate but isn't the point here.)
Did you prove you’re worth the salary or do they just have massively inflated salaries for everyone in a certain west coast US city because A bunch of huge technology companies failed to realise computers and the internet exist outside of said city and remote working is a very workable thing.
I’m not saying they should drop your salary if you move, but I also don’t think a lot of people hired at typical SV rates are actually worth that much, so much as they can’t afford to live there if paid less.
What I'm interested in is that it's quite difficult today to find out how much you would be paid when you relocate. You need to jump through a lot of hoops to get the move approved in principle before you find out your new compensation. With this new system it should theoretically be fine to relocate anywhere, so if it is then you'd want to find out how much each area pays before you decide to move. Which means suddenly you know that guy who chose to go live in downtown SF is getting paid 1.4x more than you for the same job. The same is true today obviously, most big offices are in different areas and have different pay scales, but it's generally not as well known by the employees what those scales are.
This sort of scaling is simply a (rather flimsy) cover for the natural consequences of moving to remote work. If employees in the large metros have to start competing with workers from everywhere else, the salaries are going to start falling. A worker in rural Mississippi is going to expect a much lower salary than an equivalently skilled worker in Palo Alto, and a worker in Manila would expect even less again. Remote work puts significant downward pressure on salaries. This is simply an attempt to offset that. But if you think a hiring manager faced with having to choose between hiring somebody on a big metro salary vs a small rural one is going to be completely uninfluenced, then I’ve got news for you...
honestly as a front end dev, I don’t think what I do is that difficult and I’m overpaid. I feel a little nervous that with remote work I won’t be overpaid in the future
Jobs aren’t paid according to how difficult they are, they’re paid by supply and demand. Employers want to pay as little as possible, but they have to compete with other companies to hire staff from the finite labor pool. Employees want to be paid as much as possible, but have to compete with each other for the finite number of positions available with employers. Remote work simply means that for any remote position, employees will have more candidates to compete with, which will drive the cost of labor (salaries) down, especially if they’re competing with candidates willing to take a much lower salary due to living in a much cheaper place.
> Remote work simply means that for any remote position, employees will have more candidates to compete with, which will drive the cost of labor (salaries) down,
Remote works also means that for every desirable candidate, employers will have more competing employers to compete with, which will drive prices up.
What it really means is that both sides of the market will be larger and less segmented, meaning (1) there will be less opportunity for localized shortages and surpluses driving radically high or depressed salaries, and (2) the law of one price will be more relevant to labor prices for the jobs where remote work is normalized.
But you would expect the new one price to favor low cost of living candidates over high cost of living candidates. Especially where candidates in developed countries end up competing with candidates in developing countries. It’s unlikely that a dev shop in Bengaluru is going to start offering remote salaries that would be enticing for a US-based engineer, but the reverse would be completely expected.
> But you would expect the new one price to favor low cost of living candidates over high cost of living candidates.
I'd expect it to provide a greater surplus to lower-expenses candidates, as any common price does. That's not really favoring lower CoL.
> It’s unlikely that a dev shop in Bengaluru is going to start offering remote salaries that would be enticing for a US-based engineer, but the reverse would be completely expected.
Yes, for work that the skills required can easily be sourced anywhere, remote work is going to lead to natural price level much lower than the prices in the highest price segment of geographical segregate markets.
OTOH, where skills demanded are rare and not widely available, normalization of remote work just means its easier for more employers to join the bidding on that restricted set of employees with low transaction costs. So, for commodity labor it drives wages down to the lowest common denominator; for the most elite labor it drives wages up.
Like neoliberals free trade itself, it exacerbates inequalities.
