The experience is much better as you've mentioned; the question in the article is whether a company needs to exist around making the experience better.
Now that the ideal experience is available, the question is whether people are willing to pay for it.
Right now - it's being paid for (all salaries, etc.) by shareholders as the company runs a massive operating loss.
The question these articles lay out is that - at least in theory - this can't last forever. No one's hoping Uber fails - they're just saying that a company eventually needs to make money, and they don't see a path forward for Uber to do that.
A bank wouldn't keep lending to a borrower that could never pay them back; at some point - without a fundamental change in economics - this situation will happen to Uber.
Unfortunately Sam wholly misses the point of college: it's a social club / network. The issue is "for-profit" colleges and the common misconception that college is about skills / education, when it's really (again) an expensive country club.
Sadly, the further in your career you go, the more it becomes pertinent who you know, and how many people in your network succeeded and can pull strings for you.
It's not everything, but it's these breaks that often separate the smash successes and the grinders-for-life.
Getting drunk and party and studying for 4 years is a durable way to build bonds.
Hopefully most schools begin to focus on trades, and the Harvard / Princetons of the world just openly accept they're not for learning.
The piece just seems to fully encapsulate Silicon Valley Hubris. It's amazing that he thinks he's settled a debate on 'quality' or 'taste' with a logical argument, and that people consider this an 'objective' answer to the question.
The rhetorical trick is one that many have pointed out: 'technically' superior is - in fact - easy to recognize. That doesn't mean that objective judgment of technique is synonymous with taste.
"Taste" in that sense becomes something more about having a pulse on how humans will ingest certain ideas. You can have an intuitive understanding of this in a given time and space (creatives get paid a great deal to do this). But that has nothing to do with 'taste' as an objective quality metric, it has to do with how humans will perceive or interact with an object.
2 thoughts:
* Only ~200 people out of 1000 completed the survey. Many of these people were found by the researchers, so there's likely bias (given the nature of the report)
* Basic income's benefits will eventually go away in a society with easy access to credit. Similar to comments by throwaway13337.
The original article (posted below) hits the nail on the head:
regardless of 'inflation' or 'quality increases', a single breadwinner (assumed male in this case) can't support basic parts of the 'American Dream'.
They could in 1985, with some money to spare.
That's a HUGE difference in social structure and the 'feeling' of society.
A part of the socialist mindset is the idea that people in fact should be able to live in an economic system and afford the things that everyone wants. Socialism doesn't deliver that exactly (see Spain, Greece, France, etc.) without huge amounts of natural resources, but it's similarly clear capitalism has driven out most people's abilities to do that too in the past 30 years.
Thus the impasse (political and economic) the US finds itself in right now.
Agree with @bradlys' comment:
This just suggests more highly paid people are being allowed to work remote, vs. remote jobs being paid more.
Given the expansion of high paying roles across geographies, this could be driven almost entirely by FAANG opening engineering / R&D centers in other cities like Denver / Dallas, etc.
Also 'remote' could be laxer standards for these same companies on going down to Mountain View / Menlo Park driven by commute and traffic. Many of my friends commute 2x a week, passing the 50% threshold for remote work, even though I wouldn't consider Menlo Park / Mountain View to SF 'Remote'
They totally missed the mark on this one:
"What’s meant to distinguish Infinite Jest (the book) from various artefacts that precede it is the conflation of entertainment with drug addiction, and this notion is, I think, fundamentally flawed."
It's now pretty clear entertainment can be neurologically addictive, as evidenced by the social media companies and their abilities to predict improved engagement.
On top of that, we've now got an attention + an opioid addiction.
If anything, DFW was just very early at predicting the medium term state, complete with national secession movements.
It's certainly possible. I PM at Gigster and have seen some BE Engineers switch to being PM's on the network--some successfully and some unsuccessfully.
Joining our network and seeing how it's done on a project by project basis is not a bad start :-).
My view on PM'ing is very similar to what makes a good 'salesperson' or 'consultant'. There are certainly similar traits among large swathes of successful people, but there's no 'rule'. PM'ing a software framework is very different from PM'ing a social network, which should be obvious.
From a backend dev perspective, you should have some perspectives in looking at an overall system and fully understanding what will be required. You'll have empathy for the work when requirements change. That will help.
Of course building the skills that MBA's,'brought up' PM's, and people who started in sales / marketing will take a while to brush up on. Product School can help.
However, the best advice I'd say about PM'ing is starting to build things and get feedback from users. If you don't enjoy or cant:
1) Decide a problem to solve, along with a goal
2) Figure out a path to solve that problem
and
3) Iterate and learn based on feedback
PM'ing probably will not be a fulfilling career choice.
Nicely done! $1K on revenue for that? Are you driving traffic toward that? I do photography and feel like stock images could be a nice way of getting traffic, but don't know how to optimize AdSense.