I sincerely hope not. Employee stack ranking just hurts a company but, if that mentality is applied to a country, then we're looking at a nightmare of historical proportions. Can you imagine what it would do to this country if 5% of people in a society had to be sent to camps?
The tech oligarchs would be the worst leaders the Western World has seen for decades, if not centuries.
I wonder what he has on his investors to be allowed to do this two-top-job thing. There has to be something big.
It's shocking that this would be allowed otherwise, not because it can't be done, but because it draws attention to how little these tech-celebrity CEOs actually do, and because it'd be pretty much impossible for the proles to pull off this diversification without getting axed. My last company fired people for freelancing and called it "for performance". And yet Jack Dorsey gets to play CEO in two companies.
I like Haskell but I see no future in terms of widespread adoption for it.
The aim isn't necessarily widespread adoption, so much as the ability for people who know it to use professionally. It's way past merely "production ready", but reputation is a lagging indicator and so most programmers are stuck doing Java...
Since the goal is to avoid {success at all costs}, getting 25% market share is probably not possible. 1 percent would be a start.
The problem, economically speaking, is that Haskell and Clojure engineers are massively underpaid, when you consider that an average Haskeller would be Principal+ at any Java shop. That's because the Java and C++ people can create bidding wars every year and spike their salaries, whereas using a better but more niche language makes that career strategy untenable.
Haskell's laziness isn't as much of an issue as people make it out to be. You can have strictness any time you need it, so it's more akin to an opt-out model than laziness being forced upon the programmer. It is correct to observe that high-performance applications frequently have a lot of strictness annotations, and the argument can be made that high-performance Haskell (while it can be close to C in performance) isn't "idiomatic"... although that claim is true of all high-level languages (even Java). High-performance Clojure ends up being full of '^' characters for type annotations, and high-performance Haskell ends up being full of '!' characters for strictness.
This is a really poor analysis. Making $250k after five years at a large company is not the norm, except possibly in finance. The Googles of the world are littered with people who didn't make Senior after 5 years or who got taken into "The Perf Room" and made quiet, shameful exits.
Startup jobs are massively overrated right now, and most startup offers are terrible because there are so many unqualified people willing to work for next to nothing, but this guy is overrating big-company jobs. The truth is that, in both cases, most options are rotten and most people get a bad deal. It's important to recognize this, in order to fix it.
Technology itself isn't especially sexist. It's the swarm of VC-backed startups in Silicon Valley that has the sexism problem. The rest of the industry is much less sexist, far less ageist, and less brash in general.
The technology world is much bigger than the toxic unicorns that generate these sexual harassment cultures that make all of us look bad.
From the outside, Python 3 seems like a much better language. I don't have strong views of its object system (I avoid OOP as much as I can) but it seems like the string/bytes handling is much better, and I'm also a fan of map and filter returning generators rather than being hard-coded to a list implementation (stream fusion is a good thing). Also, I fail to see any value in print being a special keyword instead of a regular function (as in 3).
What I don't get is: why has Python 3 adoption been so slow? Is it just backward compatibility, or are there deeper problems with it that I'm not aware of?
The society where "elders" were regarded as wells of wisdom probably never existed.
Not true. Traditional Asian societies take the other extreme and venerate age (probably more than they should, but that's another topic). Hence, you have 90-year-old patriarchs calling shots in family businesses, and middle-aged men whose parents were still alive were traditionally considered still adolescent. Also, not taking care of your parents is a jailable crime in China.
In every society but our own, women after 40 were considered very old.
I'm a man under 40, so this may not be my fight, but... Fuck. That. Shit. While it is true that middle-aged, unmarried women were once considered undesirable and suspect, that was in societies in which urinating at the dinner table was socially acceptable, childbirth meant a 1-in-25 chance of dying, indoor plumbing didn't exist, and tuberculosis was a death sentence.
She should be happy to be alive instead of complaining about young people being young.
She's not complaining about young people being young. She's complaining about people (often with no reference to their age) being stupid. Not all young people are stupid.
Age is a weird prejudice because it depends so much on environment. In most companies, you're viewed negatively before age 30: you're expected to work the worst hours because the assumption is that you have nothing "better" to do and would just be out drinking. In Silicon Valley, you're viewed negatively after 30. Some doors close and others open.
I do find, strangely, that I'm way more attractive to women now that I'm older, even though my looks have (objectively) declined. Adolescent men are unwanted, invisible, and generally disliked by society unless they're in the top 5% for social skills; things get better at 25 and a lot better after 30... although I'm still glad that I married young because I'd imagine that the dating pool shrinks considerably.
People overestimate the mental decline that comes with age dramatically. It's more sporadic: most people decline very little, while a few people (i.e. those with dementia) get hit very hard. Unfortunately, much of society forms its model of "old people" based on the "hit very hard" category, and not people like Jacques Barzun, who did his best work in his 80s and 90s.
There's something you observe with biological mental illness which is that it's more stigmatized than it deserves because people encounter the "raving, crazy" people with it (the worst-off 2%) and not the other 98% for whom depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, et al, are more accurately modeled as boring and often manageable health problems than as residence in an alternative universe. I think that the cognitive negatives of aging (typically mild to nonexistent, except in senescent brain diseases like Alzheimer's) get the same smear.
In fact, various studies have put the intellectual peak age (in healthy people) anywhere from 17 to 65 (except for in language acquisition, at which we peak in childhood). That's largely because the curve is so flat and individualized (e.g. some people peak early, some late) that it's impossible to tell.
Yep. There's a reason why people in technology complain about the "Damaso Effect". Even though those Harvard MBAs get mocked by "real programmers", they get the last laugh because they decide what most of those programmers work on.
All of that said, the networking opportunities drop off rapidly, even from Harvard to Stanford or Stanford to Wharton, much less out of the top 5. The education is the same, and the academic quality of the students is probably better at non-top schools, but you're not meeting people who are so loaded and connected that they'll hand out sinecures and venture funding (which are two forms of the same thing, but that's another discussion) to their drinking buddies.
I have to disagree with this claim. Leverage matters immensely. The truth about "merit" is that no one knows how to assess it, so people judge based on external leverage and status, and having an MBA from a top-5 school gives a person a huge advantage.
If you're a walk-on for a $250,000-per-year sinecure, then they're going to give you a real tech job, and not some lowly code-the-stories position.
To me it seems Ms Garner is ok with growing old and more fragile, but does not accept being viewed as inferior or respect-unworthy. Good for her!
Amen. Not that I would want to live at the other extreme (such as in some Asian societies where age is venerated without qualification) but I think that our society's view of age is seriously broken.
Ugh. Google's idea of "normal performance management" is what the civilized world calls "fascistic". It's pretty disgusting that, in the 21st century, execs are OK with a performance review system in which rape slang (threats like "take you into the Perf room" and people with sub 3.0 scores being called "pillow biters") is the norm.
The tech oligarchs would be the worst leaders the Western World has seen for decades, if not centuries.