killtimeatwork

5 年前議論

Let's not forget the human factor. Presumably, an operation of this scale would require hiring help - potentially lots of it. How do you make sure that one of the workers does not just leave with the hard drive? It would require security on the level employed in gemstones mines (personal search for every employee who leaves the premises etc.) Kind of hard to set up in a bulletproof way - the potential finder could just let the relevant security people in on the profits.

killtimeatwork

5 年前議論

> His answer: "don't come. It's a mess and a revolving door of people"

What isn't? I see trying to deliver value in spite of an dysfunctional organization a part of my job description.

killtimeatwork

5 年前議論

They can get a dumb phone for the child then.

killtimeatwork

5 年前議論

You don't track his Twitter closely enough then :) He was explicitly angry at people who say that it's impossible to be productive in coding for more than 30-40 hours a week. He felt that it's ingraining low expectations in young people, some of which have a potential to work really hard and do and do great things.

killtimeatwork

5 年前議論

> It is said that 27 hours a week is optimal in tech, less than that you could get more done, but more than that you add no extra value, over 40 you produce negative value/bugs.

That's probably true for typical people. There are exceptions like John Carmack and Jon Blow, who can code for 10-12 hours a day and who are running a mini-crusade on Twitter against generalizations like that. In general, I think you're right though - if you're such exception, it should be fairly obvious to you that you're exceptional in this regard and the rule does not apply to you.

killtimeatwork

5 年前議論

It's the same for most of the FAANG giants. The Amazon Prime Video app for Windows is basically unusable (frequently lags, stutters, crashes). Google Drive Windows app frequently crashes (or crashed, I think they replaced it with something else recently). Apple's iTunes was always a confusing mess. Microsoft's Windows 10 is obviously a giant failure in terms of UI if nothing else (because half of the functionality uses old Win7 UI style, the other half uses the new Win10 style - and for many features, some aspects of the feature are found in the old Win7 window, while other aspects in the new Win10 window...). Uber/UberEats - what a mess (my user experience on their website showed everything that is wrong with using "eventual consistency" approach to data).

The one tech giant that is IMO delivering a product that meets minimum quality bar is Netflix. I've never seen a bug in their service. Having said that, what they do is simple compared to what other tech giants do, but then again, even a audio/video streaming service can be completely screwed up (see Windows app for Amazon Prime Video).

In general, software development is very hard and the way these companies do it - with a team of always-new engineers (few people stay on a team for more than 2-3 years and thus few people understand what's going on on a deeper level), with apparently little testing - is not conducive to quality products. [1] Also, the recent trend of microservices means basically companies have given up on delivering a cohesive, tested product - instead every team if deploying their crap to prod and hope they don't introduce bugs that break downstream consumers - and downstream consumers protect against that with failover in circuit breakers etc. It's basically as if the companies admit that they don't know how to do cross-team coordination, quality assurance etc. and every team is fending off for themselves.

[1] IIRC someone from Microsoft openly admitted that the reason for why they decided to make Win10 a Frankenstein with two different UIs stitched together was that nobody understood the Win7 code any more (relevant people changed teams/left company), so any rewrite to use Win10 widgets was out of question.

killtimeatwork

5 年前議論

Average global temperature stops rising?

killtimeatwork

5 年前議論

I'm not sure it's conspicuous consumption. Cases of recent pure conspicuous consumption in the tech world, such as the "diamond app" (an iOS app that displays a diamond and costs couple thousand dollars) didn't really catch on that much. I think what's really driving NFTs is:

1. Speculation. People just see it as another asset class that can be blown up and sold to the greater fool.

2. Artists trying to monetize their digital work this way. Up until NFTs arrived, digital art had very little market value (due to ability to make indistinguishable copies of the original at zero cost). Some artists hope that the NFTs will be the vehicle which allows them to cash on their digital work.

3. Money laundering and similar usual suspects.

killtimeatwork

5 年前議論

In this case, it creates extra confusion and extra mental overhead, because of double meaning of "they".

killtimeatwork

5 年前議論

Like I wrote, for example Nelson Mandela lived in the same period and had much more impact.

> My bet is that he will be remembered as a capital figure for putting half of the planet on a smartphone

He may be remembered for that, but that's because people's poor ability to assess real impact. Similarly, far more people know about Elon Musk than about Norman Borlaug - with the latter being much more impactful.

killtimeatwork

5 年前議論

> He's most certainly an important historical figure of our time

I wouldn't call him that. He's in second/third leaguer at best. His impact on the world was minor. He deserves biographies for sure (people with much less accomplishments get them as well), but let's not compare him to his contemporaries who were truly important historical figures of that time, like Nelson Mandela or Lech Wałęsa - people who radically changed lives of tens of millions of people.

In general, impact made by individual businesspeople is not that great, because all they do is follow market trends, which makes them fungible -i.e. if Jobs didn't push Apple to make iPhone, some other company would come up with the smartphone later on (the next step in technical/scientific progress is a logical consequence of the previous steps and is usually spotted by multiple companies/people at the same time).

Whereas in politics, the world is not an unidirectional march towards more progress, and, depending on actual leaders, things can get much better or much worse. So, a given leader makes much more of a difference. For example, if Hitler didn't want German race to dominate the world and didn't start WWII, tens millions of people would not have died - that's a huge impact in comparison. The Nazi party and even WWII could still happen without Hitler existing (somebody else might start the party to harvest all the German resentment of that period), but perhaps he'd be less rabid than Hitler, which would result in much less death - hence the actual delta of Hitler is huge. Even deltas of vanilla American presidents are much greater than Jobs'.

killtimeatwork

5 年前議論

I get it, but I thought it's merited in cases where the gender of the person referred to cannot be determined - usually because the reference points to an abstract class of people of any gender ("a manager") and not to a particular person of known gender ("John Smith"). In OP's case, the gender of their significant other is known, so why use "they" instead of "he" or "she"?

killtimeatwork

5 年前議論

> We were already good friends, and I already had a crush on them.

them?

killtimeatwork

5 年前議論

Good list. I'd add one more:

- Hire someone above salary bands allowed by HR for full time employees (the salary bands are quite optimistic/unrealistic and are way too low for senior talent). That's probably most common cause in Europe.

killtimeatwork

5 年前議論

Do you think they imagine the end result at the beginning of the process or do they just play semi-randomly until they find something that has potential, and then refine it?

killtimeatwork

5 年前議論

Being amazing at negotiating is a salary multiplier regardless of whether the job has meaning or is part-time... For example, as an absolutely amazing negotiator, you might get yourself a $1m full-time meaningless job or $100k part-time meaningful job. $100k is not a small amount, but you're still leaving $900k on the table.

Plus, let's face it, most devs are fungible commodities and don't have much bargaining power on top of the prevailing market rate. For devs, most bargaining power comes from domain expertise, but d.e. severely limits the scope of the job search - i.e. you may be limited to only a handful of companies worldwide which would be interesting in paying extra for that expertise. Chances that any of them do "meaningful work" AND allow part-time are close to zero.

killtimeatwork

5 年前議論

It means that you'd probably have to compromise heavily on the third arm of the triangle, i.e. the salary.

killtimeatwork

5 年前議論

You want meaningful AND part time?

killtimeatwork

5 年前議論

I'm sorry, but living in a detached house with 500+ sqft per person, frequently eating out, changing cars every 5-10 years, having a closet full of clothes, eating food from all around the world etc. etc. is way above "basic survival".

Watch a documentary about rural parts of third world countries, they're much closer to "basic survival" than pampered middle-class members in the West. For reference, in China, not that long ago people were subsiding primarily on rice - that the majority they ate every day throught all of their lives. Not to mention, they went hungry quite often (but not often enough to starve to death). That's "basic survival".

Here in the West, we can cut out so much fat out of our lives without really losing out anything truly substantial. For example, check out this guy: https://earlyretirementextreme.com/. He's living in Chicago on $700 a month, around half of which goes to health insurance and real estate taxes. But, people think it's "hard" or "miserable", and they prefer to chain themselves to their full-time jobs for decades so that they can fly on vacations, get new shiny cars and go to McDonalds every other day. That's the choice I wrote in my OP.

killtimeatwork

5 年前議論

> At the end of the 19th century, anarchist thinkers predicted with modern techniques we'd be down to 10h weekly work.

Many people in the US could easily have 10h work week, if they could just reign in their creeping lifestyle inflation and live like people did at the end of 19th century.

Instead, most people opt to work more in exchange for significantly more comfort and pleasure. It's an unconscious choice for most - they can't even fathom living beyond a certain standard, so they in essence HAVE TO work fulltime. But the option to work less is there, they just don't realize it is.

コメント