Former Floridian who've lived all over the country and couldn't agree with you more. It's not just it's in the South. Texans are far better and nicer than the average Floridian. There's something very, very wrong with that state. People there are so cynical and always assume the worst about everything. More often than not though, they are right.
You also have to account for both cultures placing a very strong emphasis on education. Judaism is defined by the Torah and Rabbis are scholars. Chinese and other East Asians are strongly influenced by Confucianism which places scholars at the top.
Also Indian Americans are well represented in hard core undergraduate courses too. Not sure which direction Indian is read from. If it's the same as Hebrew and Chinese then I might have to concede :-)
I would be careful with "even in China there is now an elite that dresses in suits and engages in trade unencumbered by rules and regulations that protect the millions that are pressed into working in their factories under appalling conditions".
The adoption of suits is just a fashion thing. China hasn't really developed its own sense of fashion coming out of the Mao era. It's not a sign of wholesale embrace of Western culture and ideals. On the contrary most Chinese are quite proud of their history and culture. What China has embraced since Deng Xiaoping was the pragmatic parts of Western society, i.e. methods of doing business, trade, and manufacturing.
China never really had a system of laws and regulations to protect its workers because it was never in a situation until now where it had millions working in dangerous industrial situations. Until recent decades, China was still largely agrarian.
In short, China didn't cast off its old ways and embraced Angloculture as much as it borrow bits and pieces it found useful. It remains to be seem if it can borrow pieces without taking everything and still have it work.
China is a dangerous counter to the narrative of the superiority of Western or Anglo ideals. If China is indeed successful in the long term with its mix of traditional Chinese authoritarianism and Western style capitalism, then other people and countries would see essays like this one as nonsense.
This might shock the HN community but from my years of mentoring poor performing and under privileged high school students in the Bay Area (i.e. mostly from East Palo Alto), education is not valued by all cultures. I was shocked when I saw this. It was always so obvious to me. That said, it's only a shock because I was raised in a culture (Chinese) that had always valued education. If you never had the security of being sure of your future for more than a few months at a time, education might not seem the best choice. Education is an investment and one that only pays off if you are secure enough in your welfare to reap the benefits. Even for some middle class families, it is becoming a less obvious investment since the price of education has shot up while employment is harder to find.
If the idea of education is not universally valued, is it so hard to believe that groups that do will do better in fields that require years of study?
I read a while back an article on Slate or the Atlantic that sort of explores this very issue. The hypothesis was that Judaism was at one point defined by literacy. Basically, at some point, to be a Jew required you to be read and understand the Torah. It was enormously expensive and over time those who couldn't afford stopped being considered Jews and those who were left were the ones who could afford an education. Thus the culture became one that was placed a strong emphasis on education. Someone who've read the article or know history of the Jews better can correct me on this.
"Martin Luther King didn't live in a world where we imprison innocent men in legal limbo without trial or habeas corpus, or where we officially sanctioned torture and the oubliette. He could trust that he would be vindicated by the justice system."
You're kidding me right?!? You honestly think the era he lived in was fair and just to people like him? Do you know how many lynchings there were in Florida alone? Does the name Emmett Till ring a bell? What did you think MLK fought for?
Can people stop taking one data point and using that to extrapolate to a large group? This is pretty bad journalism. Sure, OK story telling but it's not exactly the truth.
Yale CS alum here (DC 04). Yale unfortunately tends to be on the extreme side of theories and fundamentals. Having some more practical experience helps those theories and fundamentals sink in. For example, I didn't appreciate closures until I started programming professionally. It was a curiosity before that. The professors there sort of expect you to get that sort of experience on your own, which some students do get but it's really uneven.
That would be his point if he said "Ivy Leagues don't matter". But if we agree that someone from Waterloo stands out then credentials do matter. If I was looking for candidates, I would search first for "Waterloo" or other schools with programs like them.
It might not be prestigious to some people but where I work Waterloo carries a lot of weight. We also love Brown.
"Yale teaches computer science quite well (I'm a graduate!)"
Same here (DC' 04) but from my experience places like Waterloo produce graduates that are phenomenal compared to Yale. They leave Waterloo with such a wealth of actual working experience. Even when I was at Yale recruiters from Microsoft would complain to my professor that Yale graduates were lacking in actual experience. Don't discount the value of experience in learning theory because a great deal of CS is driven by real problems encountered. It's harder for the theoretical stuff to sink in without understanding the problem they can be applied to. I don't think I am alone in this regard.
In any case, dollar for dollar, if you're going to hire new college grads your money will go farther on graduates from schools that have a strong internship program. So in a sense, school does matter.
Maybe what is more true is the label "Ivy League" doesn't matter, not in CS anyways.
"Big companies don't try to copy unsuccessful ideas, it never happens."
Have you ever worked at a big company? Big companies are so dysfunctional. It's not that the individuals are stupid but the broken dynamics of people working together can generate some pretty dumb decisions.
Big companies copy bad ideas all the time. This is one reason why startups can disrupt them.
"worst case scenario they'll try to buy you in order to copy you. Next worst they'll try to copy you once you're already becoming successful. Neither of those are bad scenarios."
This makes no sense. If they buy you, that's NOT the worst case scenario. The founders walk away wealthier. If they try to copy and succeed, the founders walk away with nothing. That is worse than them trying to buy the company.
I don't understand why "Neither of those are bad scenarios." The first one is possibly good, depending on what they're offering for the company.
The post is narrowly focused. Unless the author plans to make no friends with anyone at a place where most people spend more than half of his awake hours, his plan is insufficient to make it easier to leave a job. At this point, I would say letting down my peers and friends at work is a strong motivation for me. Perhaps in the eyes of some people, perhaps the author, caring about what others think of me makes me somehow weaker or less "rational". As a matter of preference, I would rather trade off some independence for the benefits of friendship and camaraderie.
Furthermore, his argument is unrealistic. Most of us don't compare one job with no benefits vs. another with benefits. The situation in the Bay Area at least means that we are often comparing jobs with very similar benefits. Thus, the benefits offered by my current employer is nullified by the equally good benefits of the competing offer, just as companies offering the benefits hope they would do. In the end, most jobs in the Bay Area are fairly comparable in terms of benefits and pay. What matters are the less tangible things: culture, opportunity, challenge, etc. The biggest factor that's keeping me at my company right now are the friends I've made there over the years and I have no regrets about having tied myself down with friendship.
You know what the irony of the situation is? Cabbies have argued against companies like Uber and advocated the more regulated method of doing business because they say that cabs can be ordered into service in times of emergency. Not sure if NYC has that power or not.
Cabbies can also get paid more if Uber takes a smaller cut for the time being. That would have been a good PR move too.
This is a bit of a wasted opportunity to get good PR.
The thing is that had he actually did that, I would have a more positive view of working for FB. I would be impressed by the caliber of people who work there -- people who're capable of parsing out the nuances of a given situation and take a holistic view of the situation. Those people are the type who can work through difficult situations and salvage a bad one. Instead, I walk away with the impression that FB is full of immature toolbags.