Orchard | Software & Infra Engineers, all levels | NYC, Austin, DC, Atlanta, Remote | Full-Time

At Orchard we're building software for life's biggest financial decision: buying and selling a home. Our products solve problems along the entire lifecycle of the home-buying transaction: from finding your perfect home to coordinating with multiple parties along the way so that the entire experience is seamless.

We're looking for software engineers at all levels and especially Senior and Staff engineers to work on scaling our consumer-facing web services, developer tooling & workflows for scaling business ops. We work with Python 3, TypeScript & Angular, Docker deployed on AWS.

Details: https://orchard.com/careers/engineering

Agree.

Further corollary: more workers will be concentrated around 2nd-tier hubs where their wages will be lower than 1st-tier, but higher that median wages. 2nd-tier median wages will then drive up housing prices which will rinse & repeat COL increase trends seen in the Bay Area.

Hopefully these other hubs will have better development zoning & housing policies than San Francisco / Bay Area.

But new hubs could emerge, though.

Super helpful - thank you! IIS / containerized .NET apps that may be optimized in Azure is compelling.

Exciting is also a confusing property for me.

AWS has offered a superset of services beyond what I or colleagues have ever been able to apply.

I agree. There's lots of interesting services or functionality in AWS. I find that my company limits what we use, either based on money or lack of forward thinking. Plus, most of the problems we solve are trivial. There's so much I'll never get a chance to use.

By exciting, I mean pushing out research and open source, which eventually makes it into products. I have yet to see anything serious or popular comes out of Amazon. Compare this to Google and Microsoft and you can see a clear difference

> serious or popular

I'm still a little confused. What's not serious or popular coming out of Amazon? What's the different in Microsoft and GCP?

Kubernetes, Golang, Cuelang, Tensorflow ML research in particular for Google

Visual Studio Code, WSL, .Net on Linux, Hololens 2, MRTK, a number of interesting ML tools and research.

Amazon... do you know of any examples?

Largely GOOG and MSFT are giving back through research and open source while AMZN is rarely seen doing this and with little fanfare

Makes sense that business incentives inform decision making, but how do you explain the difference in Twitter's content policy? They also, presumably, measure their business via MAU & DAU.

Sometimes I think its as simple as humans making decisions. And Zuckerberg is making a spineless decision (by way of inertia).

That my friend is exactly is the difference made by who is leads the company. This is exactly why what kind of a person a leader is so important. Be it for a company or a nation.

We get what we tolerate.

Initially I thought of those numbers (36m in the US) as totally unrealistic. But then comparing to seasonal influenza case counts, they seem to be within that order of magnitude (39m-56m cases): https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...

would that be implausible? am I misunderstanding or comparing the wrong metrics?

I'm actually curious to see the time interval of when the first true COVID-19 case appeared plotted over first true 2019-2020 influenza cases. If along the same timeline, you'd figure that social distancing would have affected the R0 of both.

Assuming that SARS-CoV-2 is truly more (or comparably) contagious, 36M could be plausible.

To be clear: I am not equivalating COVID-19 fatality rate w/ the flu, or suggesting it is "innocuous" as the flu is.

But these numbers cannot be compared as a lockdown is in effect..

Re. Money in a bank account not contributing to scarcity: I think that logic checks out when you observe money as a resource in isolation.

If you think of Money as a proxy for "captured value," then one way to look at it is how much "captured value" is "captured opportunity for wealth creation," which has a certain distribution % chance across the entire population.

In that sense, total aggregate money at any point in time can be viewed as zero-sum.

Suppose the government prints a hundred trillion dollars, buries it in the ground for 50 years and then digs it up and burns it in a furnace.

Notice how printing a hundred trillion dollars would normally be expected to cause a lot of inflation, but doing the above doesn't do that. It wouldn't have been any different if they had printed monopoly money instead of real money, because it doesn't get spent.

The opportunity for wealth creation is in raw materials and labor force. We measure those things in dollars because dollars are fungible and we want to be able to compare them to each other but the green paper isn't the prize, it's only a token that represents the prize. If some of the money is removed from circulation then the rest of it is worth more. It costs fewer dollars to buy an hour of labor, but there are still the same number of hours of labor available to buy. This is deflation, which is bad for various reasons, but deflation can be countered by printing money.

Not buying stuff with your money doesn't destroy the stuff, it only causes somebody other than you to have the stuff. This is only worse if what you'd have done with it is better than what they do with it.

This was such an excellent way of illustrating your point. Thank you for sharing

Interesting to present it as a binary tradeoff.

I want to win, but I want to make sure that the thesis has some modeling diligence =)

Strongly agree with this. Dates serve a critical goalpost in technical planning, yet they should be viewed as flexible (having a reasonable margin of error) and informed by tight & trust-driven feedback loops. I subscribe to Gantt charts as a planning tool, not a bible. Use it to empower development teams to plan and track execution, but don't use it for 0-margin accounting.

One anti-pattern in engineering management is shielding engineers entirely from timeline estimates. A CEO with limited runway, reporting to the Board, doesn't have such a luxury of infinitely elastic time.

Edit:

Note: dates should never be prioritized over value. If you're hitting dates and not delivering value then it won't do good for anyone. Product value should always be the function to optimize for, but rarely is it entirely independent of time.