coffeemug

A values approach to this problem would be promoting people with good taste, and then building a culture of acquiescing when they decide to step in. If someone doesn't like that, fuck 'em. Yeah it might hurt in the short term, but every time you let people with bad taste stall the show you erode your culture a little, until one day you come to work and realize that nobody can decide anything anymore.

An equilibrium approach is to say "well, a consultant will cost $3M/year, and potentially pissing off Alice and Bob and Carol and maybe Dan is painful and it's difficult to calculate how much that will cost, and $3M < UNDEFINED == TRUE so let's hire McKinsey".

I have a huge soft spot for economics, but the thing about equilibria like this is that they never account for externalities and long term costs, and $3M < UNDEFINED is just bad logic to use, and also it's spineless and cowardly and people should know better.

But they are going to coding bootcamps.

Few people would be in favor of taking away alcohol breathalyzers from law enforcement, and rightly so. Giving the police access to cannabis breathalyzers is no different. Once they are in every police car in the world, few people would want to take those away too. This world can't come soon enough, IMO.

To any young engineers who may be reading this, this is social fiction. If someone can fire you but you can't fire them, you better believe you're not on parallel tracks.

EDIT: it's not just firing. Managers know your compensation, but you don't know theirs. They'll all work to split their team into multiple teams so they can say they ran a group; the good ones will soon become managers of managers, and then managers of managers of managers. They'll sit in on senior meetings, work on strategic decisions, and you'll watch them rise further and futher in the company hierarchy while you're enjoying your "parallel track".

It would be really interesting to compare salary/profit ratio of the tech industry to recognized labor shortages in other industries.

What would have to be true for you to agree that there is a shortage of software developers? Big tech cos have total comp of ~$600k/engineer. Would you think there is a shortage if they had to pay $6m/engineer? $60m? How do you define "shortage"?

Tax refunds is money I'm definitely going to get back in a bounded (and reasonably short) amount of time. If I pay $40k for a car and get $7k back in the same year, it seems reasonable to advertise the cost as $33k (assuming it's clear that $7k of that is a tax refund).

But gas savings feels like bullshit -- it's money I may or may not get back (depending on my habits), the time horizon is unbounded, and even if it were bounded, it's long (an order of multiple years). That feels deceptive to me, and it's surprising they got away with it until now.

There are enormous problems for humanity to solve, but that has always been the case. From plagues and famines, to world wars, to now climate change, AI risk, and maybe technology centralization. We've solved massive problems before at unbelievable odds, and I want to think we'll do it again. And if not, what of it? What else is there to do but work tirelessly at attempting to solve them?

I hope you feel better, and find help if you need it -- don't mean to presume too much. My e-mail is in my profile if you (or anyone else) needs someone to talk to.

I think being "mastercard middleman" is disingenuous. Firstly, because doing that well breaks down into getting good at many domains (software, finance, management, regulatory, sales, recruiting, fundraising, etc. etc. etc.), and secondly because Stripe is far more than that.

At the very least, his intuition on these issues is very likely to be much, much better than random chance.

Pure electric cars have only been widely available for a few years, so there isn't a lot of infrastructure yet. The market cap prices in risk-adjusted growth, so you have to consider what the world will look like 10-20 years from now. Do you think it'll still be the case that electric cars won't travel to most areas of the globe without severe inconvenience?

> Build some nuclear power plants! Go to Mars!

Firstly, we can do both. There is enormous amount of capital in the world, and not enough actionable good ideas. Secondly, dictating capital allocation top down is tyrannical. Thirdly and most importantly, there have been human societies that have tried to avoid various will-o'-the-wisp projects and allocate capital only to smart undertakings. Historically, they haven't fared very well.

> The difference is that the internet has discontinuously more scalable network effects, so technology companies often find themselves in a winner-takes-all dynamic. If some publisher, newspaper, or literary magazine refused to publish Walt Whitman, he could always try and find another publisher. But if Twitter bans Titania McGrath, there is no other Twitter for her to join because the next best alternative has 1/10000th the number of users.

> This effect is new. These platforms are private entities, but effectively they operate as public commons. So culturally we must treat them similar to public commons where it isn't acceptable to kick out quirky characters because some of us don't like what they have to say.

> The difference is that the internet has discontinuously more scalable network effects, so technology companies often find themselves in a winner-takes-all dynamic. If some publisher, newspaper, or literary magazine refused to publish Walt Whitman, he could always try and find another publisher. But if Twitter bans Titania McGrath, there is no other Twitter for her to join because the next best alternative has 1/10000th the number of users.

> This effect is new. These platforms are private entities, but effectively they operate as public commons. So culturally we must treat them similar to public commons where it isn't acceptable to kick out quirky characters because some of us don't like what they have to say.

This effect is new. These platforms are private entities, but effectively they operate as public commons. So culturally we must treat them similar to public commons where it isn't acceptable to kick out quirky characters because some of us don't like what they have to say.

People keep saying this and repeating it, but as far as I can tell this meme is destructive and wrong. Freedom of speech isn't just a legal assurance that congress shall make no law abridging it. It is also a set of cultural norms rooted deeply in a long lineage of hard won ideas. It is Evelyn Hall's principle "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". It is Friedrich Nietzsche's dictum that only insecure societies are threatened by quirky characters with weird ideas. It is our own Daniel Gackle's observation that tolerance is the experience of suffering through unpleasant ideas. We endure that suffering because the world is dramatically better on balance when we do.

Popper and the paradox of tolerance have nothing to do with it because we aren't talking about fascists angling to march on Washington DC to burn down the Library of Congress. We're talking about people who may have made a careless remark, or have quirky ideas, or disagree with the overall bent of the arc of history.

By banning these people platforms like Twitter and Patreon are eroding free speech not in the legal sense, but in the cultural norms sense. If these norms continue getting eroded, god help us all -- it may set humanity and the western civilization back by hundreds of years.

This line of reasoning never made sense to me. Free speech is both a legal and a cultural issue. A modern society cannot credibly claim to be free on legal grounds alone. Yeah, the government won't put me in prison or fine me, but if I get fired for being a staunch liberal (or conservative) then I'm not really free, am I? This doesn't just apply to rich athletes -- in most organizations in SF I would not feel particularly safe expressing what seem to me fairly moderate views.

Depriving people of their livelihood for expressing political views is absolutely a free speech issue. Perhaps not in a legal/constitutional sense, but a cultural sense for sure. There were plenty of stretches in the Soviet Union where they wouldn't imprison you, but would fire you for a poorly timed political joke. Starting down that cultural slope is a really bad idea.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Art-Strategy-Theorists-Success-Busine...

A few questions:

  1. Why is this the goal?
  2. Why does it depend on the company?
  3. How could you categorize development as capex? Isn't it obviously opex?
  4. Why do they need JIRA for that? Why not GitHub issues?
  5. Who's "management"? Engineering management? Executives? Someone else?

VCs constantly talk about supporting entrepreneurs through tough times, enabling creativity, building amazing companies, etc. They're not lying -- they really believe it, and it's an important thing for them to believe.

But while they say all this stuff, they're also human. And humans follow their incentives. They do that before they do anything else. So your job is to make it easy for them to act ethically.

That means talk the talk -- you want to build a great product, scale it to an amazing company, hire a great team, etc. That's the only thing you care about. Building a great company that builds amazing products and makes everyone lots of money. But act game theory. Have lots of great alternatives to negotiated agreements with any given VC. Put yourself in a powerful position where you can get favorable terms. Don't give up power/equity on the assumption that "it doesn't matter", or that they'll act magnanimously, or anything like that.

It's way, way easier to have a lovely relationship with people when you're in a position of power. Put yourself into that position.

(There are some investors you can unequivocally trust to act their talk -- notably YC, winfunding, and a few others, but don't rely on that as a general rule)

Work at big companies is kind of like that. Once a company gets big enough, any given person doesn't really know anything. Seemingly no one is doing anything productive -- it's meetings all the way down. But the software still gets shipped. It doesn't happen the same way it happens at a startup where someone sits down and codes a feature. It happens in a totally different way, where one hundred engineers go to meetings all day and talk to QA and analytics and bizdev, and maybe commit one line of broken code a week. It takes way more people, and the production process is totally different, and it takes way longer, but stuff still happens (often quite successfully).

[1] https://what-if.xkcd.com/46/