braza

> finish converting all of the Amazon into a giant pasture for beef.

I do not believe that it's going to be so simple like that, since the government has social and environment pressures as well. And being completely pragmatic, the issue with the pastures is more structural due to the Military Regime from 70s [1] in a failed strategy than to some availability of land to do it [2].

[1] - https://g1.globo.com/economia/agronegocios/noticia/2020/10/2...

[2] - https://mamiraua.org.br/noticias/gado-amazonia-criacao-pecua...

The main issue in the article is that the author assumes that those factors "drag" EU startups, but as others pointed out, there are fundamental differences in values, cultures, and principles between those places.

> - If you’ve worked in tech in the EU, can you share examples of this affecting you?

As I have worked in both ecosystems, some things that I have on top of my mind are:

1) The taxation on unrealized stock options: For me, it's the worst. Roughly speaking, if you have stock options, you have to pay for the appreciation of that stock, even if it is an illiquid asset. And since in Europe we do not have some clear equivalent of 409A, it's a no-go to pay for something that has no intrinsic value.

2) Salaries: Since companies cannot pay with SO, some of them use some synthetic mechanisms like phantom stocks or virtual stock options, but all of them have a small issue: The returns are not so great, maybe 1.05x-1.10x. It's better to be in a big company with a great upfront salary than to run for something that will not provide even a 20% downpayment on a house.

3) Low payment with no learning: People underestimate this aspect, but for me, startups are an environment to deliver and learn at the same time with some cap on the salary. In the US, this is not something controversial, but here in Europe, I know startups where the average developer cannot even choose to work on a Linux workstation and most of the founders have little knowledge of how

4) Talent density: The tech diversity in talent is great here, and it's awesome to work in a multicultural environment, but the problem is that, at least in some places in central Europe, the talent density is not as great as some places in the USA, especially in cultures where the least denominator reigns in terms of accelerating and fostering talents. It's more or less the Procustes bed: if you're short, they will stretch you out; if you're big, they will cut your legs.

5) Talent culture: This is a big difference that I see in comparison with the US. Most of the founders in US see developers as expensive talent but they fundamentally understand that without

6) Low probability of exit; more likely to go and be acquired: Self-explanatory: no one will run to build something that will end up acquired by some other tech company in central/western Europe or have a very low probability of exit. I saw cases where a scaleup was just afloat and meanwhile, the founder and the executive team were enjoying the nice things in Europe while underpaying people with illiquid, non-valuable stock

7) A secondary market is non-existent; most of the contracts do not have the right of first refusal. Once you have this illiquid asset/liability in your hands, it's almost impossible to get rid of it. Due to the cap-table structure here in Europe, there is no culture of selling shares outside.

I really miss some empirical economics and management research during that 4-day workweek debate. Most of the debates come from parties with a vested interest in them. What makes me more curious is: what is going to be the minimum or maximum performance time offset in terms of competitiveness that the companies will need to overcome to adopt or not?

> You know very well that coders are among the most reserved people on earth, why punish them for their government rules?

I'm more or less on the same camp, but I am not African I come from another similar challenging demographic for the mainstream axis of tech (USA and Europe) and I'm reflecting a lot about it and I think we're going back to the "equal but separate" world in tech.

One thing that you should keep in mind is that a lot of folks within PSF have some pressures regarding optics and at the end of the day they are on the hook in their local conferences, companies, and local meetups, even if they personally do not believe in those restrictions.

At the time that I had the same issues at some local/national conference for other "X software foundation" the concrete action that we took was to de-risk and get local companies on board, individuals, and move forward.

I do not want to sound cynical, but I think those folks should get rid of PSF baggage and its "control by money", high horse cultural posturing, the politics and start small without all this.

> But when they hit a roadblock or need to adapt an algorithm many engineers will stumble.

My experience is the other way around.

People underestimate how powerful building systems is and how most of the problems worth solving are boring and require out-of-the-box techniques.

During the last decade, I was in some teams and I noticed the same pattern: The company has some extra budget and "believes" that their problem is exceptional.

Then goes and hires some PhDs Data scientists with some publications but only know R and are fresh from some Python bootcamps.

After 3 months, or this new team no much was done, tons of Jupyter notebooks around but no code in production, and some of them did not even have an environment to do experimentation.

The business problem is still not solved. The company realizes that having a lot of Data Scientists not not so many Data/ML Enginers means that they are (a) blocked to do pushing something to production or (b) are creating a death star of data pipelines + algorithms + infra (spending 70% more of resources due to lack of knowledge on Python).

The project gets delayed. Some people become impatient.

Now you have a solid USD 2.5 million/year team that is not capable of delivering a proof of concept due to the fact that people cannot do the serving via Batch or via REST API.

The company lost momentum, competitors moved fast. They released an imperfect solution, but a solution ahead, and they have users on it and they are enhancing.

Frustration kicks in, and PMs and Eng Managers fight about accountability. VP of Product and Engineering wants heads in a silver plate.

Some PhDs get fired and go to be teachers in some local university.

Fin.

> If someone doesn’t listen to major artists then revenue from them shouldn’t go to said creators.

Well I do not have the numbers here, but I would argue that this is definitely not the case in reality.

> Spotify however wants to maximize its cut and so has incentives to shift money from less popular artists if it can entice major labels to its platform

It’s the other way around, because the platform has competing interests: Spotify wants to have the labels to sell an “optionality” to the users (I.e. get the money from subs) but in terms of reproduction/execution Spotify wants to reproduce the maximum of podcasts and/or long tail artists because in those 2 cases Spotify does not spend a single penny.

The labels has a very high bargaining power over Spotify due to its catalog, so as expected this is the biggest expenditure.

That’s one of the reasons why Spotify is desperately pushing podcasts like crazy.

Articulating a bit more in depth: Spotify it’s a multi sided marketplace where on the artist side will have a very big power law where the big labels (that has a catalog power) brings most of the users.

What sustain the economics on the Spotify is its catalog that is a composition of the labels catalog + long tail artists and their podcasts also.

When users goes to the Spotify, they are paying not to support their favourite artist but to be able to access the platform, that occasionally will have their long tail artists.

> The whole point of spotify is ALL music, so ALL music is important, surely?

Not necessarily. Catalog + Network effects + Marketplace is important.

What you’re describing in your argument is that “since you’re in the platform due to the artist, it’s fair that this artist receives the 70% of your money”. The flaw here is that this artist is benefiting of a marketplace and all its infrastructure and distribution without paying and the whole point of the platform is to give access to its catalog.

Think on the Spotify price as some kind of “optionality fee”.

But in terms of unit economics, the bigger artists/labels (or the artists that bring more users) are responsible for funding the entire platform, no?

In other words: A small artist can _bring_ users to the platform, fair enough, but the platform that gives access to other artists and enables that needs to take the bigger share.

> You will rarely get greenfield projects

If only I had known that one earlier. I was fortunate enough to work only on greenfield projects for my first fifteen years as a software engineer. However, at some point, I was brought into a brownfield project [1] for maintenance, support, and bug fixes.

The difficult part was not related to things like clean code, architecture, and so on, but to the lack of consistent thought processes around the choices made, as well as the fact that there is a lot of tacit knowledge in people's heads that aren't documented, and how arbitrary convoluted things can be, especially if foliks wants to ensure their own employability through manufactured complexity.

It took me at least three years to realize that new technology is the exception rather than the rule.

[1] - Brownfield project it's something that has something green still but starts to be muddy and swampy.

Whenever I read an article that praises a software engineer as "great," I always wonder what that actually means.

Is it the ability to solve problems using code? Is it performing maintenance? Is it the capability to navigate a socio-technological environment to build something? Or is it a mastery of technical fundamentals?

In most other professions, "greatness" is often tied to the actual outcome of their work. A salesperson can say, "I sold XYZ units this month," a plumber can say, "I fixed XYZ bathrooms this month," and a soccer player can say, "I made XYZ goals or defended XYZ balls against the goal." However, when it comes to software, some people forget the importance of outcomes, or worse, claim some exceptionalism in this field.

I'm not trying to be cynical here, but for me, it's quite challenging to establish if someone is great or not if we detach outcomes from the evaluation, regardless of the concept of "greatness" in this piece.

At least for me, greatness has a large share of context, opportunity and concrete outcomes.

> I cannot count the number of times I had various age-related crises. I’m in my 40s now and I’m starting to be a bit better about it.

How much of it do you think that is related to your environment and socioeconomic condition?

I ask that because I'm more or less of your generation and I know exactly what I want and I am disciplined/motivated around that, but due to my demographics/socioeconomic condition, the only crisis that I have is that I do not have the right passport/continent and/or financial resources to pursuit it.

> which creates a sense that the old timers are just dogmatic ideologues who don't have good reasons for asking for certain changes. I realized this when I once had a manager point out to me that I was coming across as some type of esoteric "purist" when I spoke of "clean code.

This is something that I struggle with a lot with the mainstream engineering literature currently available that has a lot of empiricism packaged with opinions, especially folks who worked only in some specific setups in terms of demographics (e.g. SF and USA generally) and resources (e.g. FAANG companies, Mid-Caps, companies with infinite amount of money pre-2021).

Where do you folks get scientific or empirically reliable information about practices and methods in Tech Engineering?

> Big organizations tend to grow in weird ways, opaque to the folks on the ground. They sometimes make big mistakes and spend money where they shouldn’t.

The article is good and at the end of the day, it's a... rant.

The core issue that substance the main point of the author is that we do not have a scientific and empirically validated method for management in technology (IT). This is expected since tech is a quite new industry that surged after the late 90's.

On top of it, we do not have established literature related to the economics of IT to calculate the opportunity costs, average acceptable waste, association between cloud costs x productivity and delivery value, and so on.

Most leaders and managers are using methods that can or cannot work, but it's a discovery phase now in how to establish a management method that covers inefficiencies, opportunity costs, and value.

Would be great to have OTel bundled in a single package. Thanks for sharing.

In the last decade in all companies that I've worked the biggest issue by far in all of them were vendor lock-in and how the teams coped around tools that did not evolved with their problems along the time and the switch cost was high.

I know that Open Telemetry has it's own issues, but between low ergonomics and amenities and a lock-in; nowadays I will choose the first.

One forgotten aspect of this PE taking over established businesses is that are the employees.

I saw some cases where the company gave stock options for employees and kept everyone hanging due to a promise of an IPO and when the whole thing scrubs, the founders sells to the PE and the first measure is to expire all the options from the employee pool [1].

Honestly I think the whole thing about options with the rise of PE and this brutal aspect to get best financial resources is over for any person joining wanting to have a more outsized exit.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28561054

Same experience, but I have one hypothesis: in B2C the “client” after some point become some abstract entity where people ship code/product to. A great PM can talk with those masses and extract exactly what needs to be done. This is a very hard skill.

In B2C the customer is way clearer and the relationship is everything and it’s quite hard a bad professional hide for long.

> These PMs you hire have no vision, charisma, expertise, strong beliefs, or technical skills. So what do they do when you give them that kind of power? They play it safe, and they play politics.

I can relate with that.

I was working on an operation that has the incredible track record: 74% of reliability (in a daily batch), 2 Engineers to serve 12 Analysts, stack running an old version of Haddop and Spark (2 majors down at least) and the company hired a technical PM.

The first measure of this PM? Setup meetings with consulting behind our backs, plus tons of politics with upper management, and the cherry on the top was he thought that was a good idea to move the Data Engineering team to a Front End team since “it’s more or less the same and a developer is developer everywhere”.

Final result: everyone quited and he eventually was fired with 1 year of delay.

> is SRE a byproduct of a bubble economy of easy money?

I think it’s definitely one of the aspects.

Talking with some SRE friends the point that they think part of their role is important are the multitude of moving parts in the current development environment (partially related with the easy money for resume driven development and a lot of tech stack side quests) and how the bar had lowered to hire folks (for this one with hiring managers with almost infinite budget e a lot of questionable product initiatives).

Yes due to the fact that one of the partners of the PE company that acquired us mentioned that the developers used to spent some time getting coffee all day long.

> save money

> take care of old relatives

If I had the opportunity I would go for that in a blink of an eye.

I know that for some folks being close to relatives can be a problem, but in my case my family was a great resource for all the good and bad times.

Nearly 2 decades systematically paying 23-30% of my income for rent sometimes living in the same city as my family.

For the second point a lot of folks underestimate how hard it is to see a relative dying slowly after 70 y/o.

I lost someone close and the last ~6 years we spent a lot of money for someone to take care of this family member and at the end of the day was just a matter of being together (ex: put the kids to play with, go fishing, eat something simple and enjoy the moment).

During the final years I started to be way more closer and I prepared everything for the after death, specially paper work like testament, fix legal issues around real state, etc and it saved me a lot of time and I did avoid a huge amount of stress.

One thing is a relative passing away with the family around, and have all logistics more or less simple to coordinate; another is having this same relative dying in the other side of ocean, with no resources, no close family, and a lot of vultures trying to get some advantage.

> They must be prepared for a culture that vigorously prioritizes profitability and performance metrics, often with a sharpened short-to-mid-term focus due to the typical PE investment

Folks that comes from VC-Backed/Big Tech universe gets sometimes a shocking surprise when comes to PE held company.

Once in a previous employer (PE acquired company) our manager hired a person from FAANG and after 3 weeks the person told that he would like to know the company perks; and the lady of HR (that was the Office Manager also) told:

- Smoking area cubicle on the terrace

- 30 minutes a day of smoke break

- 5 daily capsules of coffee (some cheap version of nespresso)

- wet wipe and listerine on the masculine bathroom

- training for the fire brigade

After a week we never saw the guy again.

Honest question: What do you mean by that?

Considering the last 220 years and all the evolution that we had in medicine, global trade, and socio-economics (to name a few), on average, it's better to be born in South America today than to be a European king or queen 150 years ago.

The whole point of my argument is that everyone can have a chance in the world.

[1] - https://vizzlo.com/gallery/time-series-graph/example/global-...

Agree mostly with that, but the issue is that in certain occupations where you have a high transitivity of professionals, monopoly of work, high income, and some sort of power law in terms of outcomes, and asymmetric info that can be on the weak side of the negotiation that can generate high payouts an union does not help so much.

For instance, blue-collar professions do not have much of these, so being out of any agreement would be a huge disadvantage for the worker; for technology in general (talking here about software engineers specifically, I do not know other workers in tech) an union would be beneficial but not critical since this professional has some of the attributes described above.

> Then why do we need this kind of company?

I come from a place that has in the last 13 years more than 500K people died, in almost 28% of the cases it happened roads/highways due to illegal overtaking and over-speeding.

I would like to have in my lifetime a car that had some sort of technology that could prevent some of those accidents, and autonomous cars could help on it.

I am a happy user of Evernote for 8 years and after 1 year using Obsidian this was the first time that I consider migrate.

Having the capability to have all notes in Markdown, sync via Git and clips makes everything way interesting.

Huge props for the Nixtla team for the tool.

A personal note here is that they could done a better job on the tokens because the announcement was so grandiose and maybe they underestimated people with legit interest.

I’m using all libs from Nixtla with active advocation and I did not have a token; meanwhile lots of guys posting their usages on Twitter.

Non related question: there are some examples of good public APIs docs? I would like to develop a product that serves an API but it’s very hard to get a great API as template.

> Those who already agree with the indie hacker/no-VC style approach and Daniel's writing appeals to their confirmation bias

Indeed.

Maybe old founders of YC can chime in but I do not think that someone that has that entrepreneurial spirit to have a start-up would gave up to a small-bet approach.

If we count all skills/perks/network of being in a YC program (seeing from the outside) it's a very hard sell to this folks.

There are several folks that at the same time could not take the BigCo. 9-5 could not take the solopreneurship/bootstrap as well.

Personally the idea of small-bets would not work for me due to the nature of my job (low-stress environment, high pay, a job that fits in my lifestyle and transitivity around countries with my set of skills) but I see the point on the approach.