I ignored it for years and things are still great.
Still running with simple Bootstrap themes, jQuery and mostly server side rendering and have thousands of users on my side project and lots of paying ones too.
Confident I could scale this to hundreds of thousands of users with no issue.
The article is good but it’s missing a big point that equity in startups is tied to risk taken not to contributions.
Many people, including myself, make this mistake the first round at startups. The mistake of believing if you work hard the outcome will be good. I wrote an article a little while back on how this relationship works and how it follows a logarithmic and exponential relationship, risk and equity, and how human minds are terrible at understanding those scales.
Appreciate your comment, it’s good learning for me to hear a different opinion.
I might have extrapolated the benefits of a capitalist system too far.
But the main point still stands I think, the response to the above comment and the fact that it is very much those strong incentives that drive much of the innovation in our society today. It is not someone forcing someone to do something or pure good will that lead to these results.
The companies you just mentioned all got Paid at whatever market rate they/the market set.
Just because it was the government that paid them, why isn’t that capitalism?
Socialism and Communism is when you tell people what they’ll charge for the greater good of the people. At least that’s what it is to me, someone from a former communist country.
Edit: not only did those companies get paid to invent it, but others got paid to make it, and yet others got paid to distribute it (pharmacies etc).
Capitalism for all its flaws at least taps into what motivates people to work really hard and encourages it. It mimics nature itself. Some ideas might be mundane but others can be extraordinary, it’s par for the course.
As an example, Capitalism gave us a vaccine to a novel corona-virus within a year. These companies didn’t do it out of good will, they did it because they knew they could make money. Many socialist countries are struggling because it turns out it’s hard to force people to produce innovation without the right incentive structures in place.
If you want to blame anyone blame God for making human nature this way. Capitalism is just the system that is most effective at tapping human psychology to push people to produce the best possible work.
I know a lot of people make their money on here from these companies. Heck, I interviewed at one of them twice. But my gut says these two are no longer good companies to work for. If you need the money desperately then do what you need to do, but if you can afford to take a role somewhere else you should. Anywhere else is better than these two right now.
I also recognize that they didn’t start the way they are now. Back when they started they represented the very best of our industry and they lured in young ambitious people with the promise of changing the world for the better. They did do that for a little while. The engineering capabilities were and still are world class, they are beacons our industry for that.
But unfortunately a lot has changed. They are absolutely monopolies now, everything in those slides is true. I know because I worked at a startup that relied on both of those companies for its growth. They abused us in the beginning, threatened us with bans and gave us strikes for arbitrary reasons, and then treated us like gold as we spent a lot more with them. On top of how they treat “partners” they now do far more damage to the fabric of society than they add value to it. Again, I recognize that at some point it wasn’t that way and without them tech wouldn’t be what it is now, but they are no longer that and we should all see it for what it is.
I don’t have a solution on how to fix this. I think it’s the business model that’s acidic and broken. I think only disruption can fix this but it’s unclear when and if that will come.
Nearly every system in nature has some slack baked into it.
Take the human brain, pound for pound it packs more neurons in it than any other animals brain on the planet. 20% of the glucose we burn goes to power the brain, in children it’s closer to 50-60%. Yet even though nature powers this incredibly powerful computer, 24/7, we use it’s power, maybe once in a while if we’re lucky. We can’t remember more than 6-7 things at a time, we can never fire every single part at once. You might assume this is a defect, it’s not, it’s a feature.
The brain has so much capacity, they have found people that can literally remember every single thing that happens to them their whole lives. Guess what happened to them? They had no slack for reasoning in abstraction, the things that make us human, they could detail every aspect of a story but couldn’t summarize it, and the list goes on and on. What would happen if we ran our chips at 100% capacity 24/7?
We assume we need to do more, we need more information, we need to squeeze every ounce out of our life and work but in reality this has the opposite of the intended effects.
This article is great because it puts it all into perspective. I recently wrote about the same topic but it’s not as good as this article but still if you are interested:
I have been doing a lot of writing lately, short and longer essays. I have also written on-and-off for the last ten years.
Writing well is not easy.
I used to think I wrote well until I started reading better writers. The whole idea that we will just slap together a bunch of text using some “AI” and it will resonate with people is crazy to me. As an engineer whose dabbled with some AI and ML, and has even seen what GPT3 can do, we are as far away from being able to use AI to write a best seller as we are from landing on the Sun. Not saying it will never happen just that nothing we are building right now will be able to do that.
Good writing factors in human culture, sparks emotions in people, tells stories that resonate. I will keep going to sleep at night safely assuming that no AI will out-write humans anytime soon and you should too.
I have found a lot of power in doing a retrospective on my own failures.
This post is very well written and I completely agree with the author that we should hear more about failure from others but I also think too many of us go through our day to days and rarely do a proper retro on where we failed. If only so we could get better.
This was just posted and already there are two types of comments:
1. Most devs don’t need this, it’s not so helpful to know etc.
2. These are critical numbers to know and in the very least devs should know these numbers.
This sort of disagreement is common in our industry, it’s not just this it’s also Big O, algorithms and data structures, and even OS fundamental people disagree on.
I’d love to take both groups of devs commenting and give each group a set of programming tasks to complete. Judge them based on correctness, speed of development, speed the tasks run, the quality of the code etc, etc.
I think a huge reason, I didn’t see in the article, that TikTok is able to train their ML to be far more effective than any other video platform out there has to do with the size of those clips and how easy it is to flip through them.
If we are watching 30 second clips, flipping through them quickly, that’s 2 signals a minute and 20 signals every 10 minutes (the average size of a YouTube video) and that is assuming we watched 20 videos, we might have flipped through 60 in 10 minutes.
That’s 60 signals where YouTube would’ve gotten 1 signal. Whose ML will be better trained with your preferences? Obviously TikTok, I don’t think there is anything special about their algorithms it’s just a function of their product and the type of content.
I thought about that believe me, it would keep things simple for sure.
There are a lot of features to consider these days though, such as a newsletter and building an audience, the editing process, etc.
You can basically have the power of the NY times with your publishing platform today (paywalls, payments, newsletters) for free using open source software.
As someone who currently works in healthcare tech I can tell you that taking on health records is one of the riskiest things any company could ever do. In fact we try to keep health records as isolated as technically, and humanly, possible.
For each HIPAA violation a company will be fined $10,000 dollars per customer. If ten million records on a database are part of a breach the company can be out of business.
It boggles the mind that anyone would want to take on that liability.
I disagree with this, like anything else it’s going to depend on the person. It’s really hard to generalize when it comes to people’s ambitions.
There are so many examples of serial entrepreneurs doing it over and over. Likewise of employees of startups going on to do even better in the next startup they join.
Serial entrepreneurs do get to raise more money, markets reward success, and I am with you that it’s not always deservingly. I also think many startups can and do pivot and serial founders aren’t more likely to pivot than the non serial kind.
I would bet on Justin Khan finding a way to success, much more so than not.
1) “How to win friends and influence people”
2) “Never split the difference”
The first one will teach you how to work with people. The second will teach you how to negotiate salaries, raises, and promotions among other things.
I don’t recommend many technical books because engineers can find all of that on the internet and are much more at risk of being bad at people stuff.