Regardless, US culture says that this sort of thing gives the employer far too much power over the employee, and that there are plenty of unscrupulous employers who use that leverage against the employees to make them do what they want, far beyond what the US considers appropriate.
EEU culture typically says the world is far worse without these books and that there couldn't possibly be any downsides that outweigh the costs, or that there are bandaids which could theoretically fix any problems with it.
Neither side will likely ever convince the other side on this topic, so no point in arguing about it :)
But go talk to some people who've only ever experienced these types of business cultures, and they'll start listing for you a ton of reasons why it would be IMPOSSIBLE for the business world to operate as well or better, if it were any other way.
These slavery books are still pretty common in parts of Europe too.
It's a region-level culture I'm talking about. In this case, I was thinking of Eastern Europe culture.
You're in for a MASSIVE culture shock, if you ever get employed there. For this, and many other reasons. The cultural expectations in business are often the far opposite of that of the US.
Don't forget that individuals and group culture are two distinct things, but both are very real things. Let's be clear about which one of those we're talking about.
Worst is the whole country's cultures who really believe that each person can only be great at one single thing. Being great at multiple things? Impossible, right?
Is there a document that lists out Redis best practices like "Redis is very fast as long as you use O(1) and O(log_N) commands"?
Sure it's probably all obvious things, but it would be nice to have a checklist to skim over, to be sure I haven't forgotten any major consideration when designing a new system.
The top chart looks correctly formed, but you may be right about the bottom chart on that page: "Probabilities For Years Left to Live".
If I'm reading correctly, it seems they tried to deduce the bottom chart from the top chart, which is not appropriate for the reason you wrote.
The top chart only considers ONE year into the future from TODAY, based on someone's age TODAY. More specifically -- It's a chart for survival analysis (predict rate of failure, based on a certain fixed time period and a certain starting date) not life expectancy (predict the time period over which a certain fixed rate of failure occurs, based on any future date.)
The bottom chart though, should be far more influenced by the predicted increase in life expectancy -- since it would have to account for decades of predicted average life expectancy improvement, instead of just increase in average predicted life expectancy over one year, which probably has a negligible effect on the top chart.
You have to realize that it's not about what's going on in your mind. The receiver can't possibly read your mind to know your intentions behind the words. But they will likely know that people who typically use these techniques are easy to see through.
> Second, after our consultation and looking over the specifics of your situation with my team
Sounds like you're calling out the specifics of his project as being problematic. This vague yet specific line is going to attract questions and / or arguments.
> it looks like we're probably not a good fit for your project."
= The "it's not you, it's me" method. A very obvious and overused way of saying that you don't like something, but you'll pretend that there's something wrong with you. Even young children can see through this attempt at controlling emotions.
Regarding the length, it's extremely common for people to interpret long excuses for avoiding something as deceitful, even if that's not truly the case. It's a well known phenomenon. "Signs of Lying: Offering multiple excuses for a situation, instead of just one". One of many sources: https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?Con...
> All that said, don't hesitate to keep in touch. Your project has a lot of merit, and sounds like it will be real winner with the right team behind it. I'm looking to hearing about your eventual launch!
Anyone who's frequently dealt with proposals and rejections knows that this is a meaningless gesture. E.g. lesser VCs use this "keep in touch" line all the time. After hearing the 10th person say it, who you know couldn't care less about your project, it starts to feel extremely fake.
> Instead, I recommend you talk to one of these local firms:
This part is a nice gesture though. The only part that I'd use from the template.
> I know it's hard to know who to turn to with such an important project, and I appreciate your show of trust.
Perhaps the client had no hesitation at all in sharing his plans with freelancers. Now suddenly you're telling him that he should be concerned and that freelancers as a class are untrustworthy? Even if true, maybe not a good thing to be pointing out to the client.
The template sounds very passive-aggressive, and the excessive length of the template makes the receiver feel like the freelancer has something to hide.
What's missing from this argument is that opportunities to make ongoing profit without considerable ongoing investments tend to be VERY short lived in the tech field. Assuming that steady revenue will last, will lead you to ending up crashing as hard as Atari.
You grew a steady, low-stress $1MM/year lifestyle business? Great. Now thousands of people are going to see what you're doing, and dozens are going to try to clone you, many of them far better connected than you are. Software is rarely like the e.g. restaurant business, where you can own a scarce piece of property in a good location and don't have to compete with the whole world, or other defendable advantages. Tech startups tend to have far fewer defendable advantages.
Once you realize this, it becomes obvious that "grow or die" is the nature of the business. Not some silly scheme that only exists due to VCs forcing it upon entrepreneurs.
Long-term opportunities that are easily defendable with minimal effort are extremely rare in the tech startups field.
On top of that, guess which type of businesses are, by far, the most attractive to cloners and other competition? - those "ideal" lifestyle businesses that make profits from early on and require minimal upfront investment.
Edit: Or instead of Atari, insert here all the other profitable businesses that you've never heard of, who got crushed after a couple years because they slowed their investments into innovating, assuming that their very steady profits would continue instead of dropping off a cliff. Happened to me twice.
Is lower goals really more founder-friendly? I'm not so sure.
A bit perplexing, but in my experience, VCs who aim lower will often put far more stress and pressure on founders to meet short-term milestones and ramp up revenues immediately. Since the distant billion dollar goal is gone, it becomes all about the short-term.
Aiming for a billion is a great filter too. At the early stages, you desperately need to be associated at least a few investors / founders / employees who absolutely believe you're on the path to something huge. Low goals allows more people to get involved who have extremely misaligned interests, who are often looking for something medium sized to milk, instead of something huge to help grow.
I'd just note -- both total-profit and profit-per-employee are REALLY terrible ways to predict employee happiness. Just look at some of those rankings. They're a really mixed bag of both exploitive and great employers. I mention this because I always hear inexperienced people from small towns using those metrics, in isolation, to rank their employer choices. It's such a bad approach.
I'd even argue that highly-negative profit, pre-profitability employers can be far better for tech employees.
- High profit = the company's major problems are already figured out, they already have a money-making machine, they don't desperately need you and in fact you may be a liability who could break their already profitable machine. They could fire nearly everyone and possibly continue making bags of cash for a very long time.
- Highly negative in profit = they desperately need someone to solve their problems fast, which in tech product companies is often by making some new tech. Without you, they're nearly guaranteed to end up very screwed.
> Second, they tell every applicant that openly discussing the interview process (esp blogging about it) will get you disqualified/blacklisted from any future positions at google.
Wow, it's like they're fully aware of how poor many of their interviewing procedures have been over the years, and instead of making them more employee-friendly to compete with the rest of the industry, they'd rather just punish the employees instead.
So punctuation is a type of musical notation for high-level meter and pitch, while the words are like the lower-level rhythm. Pitch and meter fluctuations, over the ranges of phrases and sentences, are what many spoken languages use to chunk sentences and phrases, which helps listeners disambiguate the connective structure of the words.
Quite interesting that punctuation co-evolved with musical notations. I had thought that punctuation existed prior to musical notation.
Side note: although American English speakers employ quite diverse pitch and meter patterns, e.g. more homogenous populations, as in many European countries, have extremely consistent spoken pitch and meter usage patterns over phrases and sentences.
Also worth pointing out that in languages which do divide the words, they often divide the words too much, such that the individual words have little to no relation to the meaning of the longer phrase. E.g. new york, arm and a leg, kick the bucket.
This, over-dividing problem, along with the under-dividing problem you mentioned, are both huge hurdles for machine textual understanding and machine translation systems.
On the information-extraction system I'm working on now, roughly 80% of the entities we're trying to extract are multi-word expressions. Very difficult.
Regardless, US culture says that this sort of thing gives the employer far too much power over the employee, and that there are plenty of unscrupulous employers who use that leverage against the employees to make them do what they want, far beyond what the US considers appropriate.
EEU culture typically says the world is far worse without these books and that there couldn't possibly be any downsides that outweigh the costs, or that there are bandaids which could theoretically fix any problems with it.
Neither side will likely ever convince the other side on this topic, so no point in arguing about it :)