Amazing! How did it compare with what you had been flying until then? Did you fly any other jets since?
2,479 karma · joined April 24, 2014
> The TSR-2 project was considered to be a Conservative 'prestige project' by the Labour Party, one of the major causes of the UK's economic difficulties. This was unfair as the project had only cost some £125 million up until cancellation, and had in fact, quite a slow rate of spend for a major weapon system of this type.
As for the rest, history is complex and high dimensional and there is rarely just one reason or easy explanation (for example, above link argues for a Labour vs Conservative political fight, rather than international relations and economic warfare motivations). You read a lot of sources (and I doubt the government-controlled BBC would ever criticize past government decisions or admit to US influence) and try and criss-cross a most likely opinion, and mine is that it was a political shot.
As with the Valkyrie, the roles of both nuclear delivery aircraft and the interceptors that would catch them were rapidly being retired by ICBMs, and of course Britain's military might was less and less justified to the taxpayer as decolonisation and economic stagnation progressed, but there was still no justification for setting back the British R&D community by so much (by destroying all the TSR-2 related work, and burning the airframes). That work was relatively cutting edge ([1] claims it set the British back 8 years) and could have been used in a myriad of other projects, thus having relatively high value, even without the option to sell TSR-2s as a ROI.
To me, there is therefore the motive for economic warfare from the American side, especially considering the later purchase of F-111s by Australia when they had expressed their interest in the TSR-2 bringing back the short term international economic interest into the picture. The companies involved were clearly capable of doing this kind of thing - see General Dynamics' continuous fight against Admiral Rickover [2].
> in 1963, the RAAF chose to buy the F-111 instead, having been offered a better price and delivery schedule by the American manufacturer.[84][85] Nonetheless, the RAAF had to wait 10 years before the F-111 was ready to enter service, by which time the anticipated programme cost had tripled.
I am sure this particular tactic is familiar to many in the IT industry...
Why would they do it?
> Among the topics of discussion were the future of the TSR-2, Britain’s purchase of F-111s, and U.S. support for a desperately needed $8.4 billion loan to Britain from the International Monetary Fund.
> Although it has never been proved, some believe the TSR-2’s fate was sealed on that trip by an unofficial deal between Healey and U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara: Britain would cancel the TSR-2 and buy the F-111, McNamara’s pet fighter-for-all-reasons, in exchange for U.S. backing of the IMF loan. [3]
[1] http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/weapons_tsr2long.html#t...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Forced_retir...
[3] http://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/cancelled-brita...
Anecdotal evidence: my "college" or middle school equivalent (which I won't name and shame) in Grenoble had a much less interesting canteen. For example, the fries (served with every meal) were undercooked, sometimes still frozen inside, and we occasionally found worms. The queue for food could be as long as 45 minutes, forcing everybody to gulp down their food as fast as they could so as not to be late to the next class. The food was always deep fried meat or equivalents. A decent part of the student population was quite fat, although not to US or UK levels of obesity.
France is like the US. You have areas like Manhattan or Santa Monica, and you have areas like North Virginia or Ohio, all with their own history, local funding, civil servants providing wildly differing levels of service. Paris is almost another country (and its residents definitely see "provinciaux" as foreigners), maybe even more so than with London and the UK.
For a deep dive down the other end, I recommend the movie "Journee de la Jupe" which gives you a taste of the ZEP schools (arguably the worst in France), it's a bit more realistic than "Banlieue 13".
First, Rocket managers come and go all the time. In my first two years at one of the Asian Rocket companies (I own no Rocket stock today and am not affiliated with anything Rocket anymore), I think I counted 4-5 CEOs. Since I left, it's been the same CEO, though. The key thing is that the Samwer brothers have designed their companies to be resilient to any departures; "people should be replaceable" which sucks a bit when you are "people" but is good corporate governance when you are a publicly traded company trusted with billions of dollars. I'm pretty sure from what I saw that this also applied to Berlin; and since we're shortly after the IPO (and maybe the start of the period where executives are allowed to liquidate their equity?) it might be that those who culturally were more comfortable in a privately owned conglomerate are not enjoying the public version. It's also common for senior executives to be poached for more money by smaller Rockets, CMOs are in particularly high demand and managing directors find it relatively easier to raise funding and start their own thing (e.g. Shopback in Singapore).
Second, there are a LOT of Rocket companies. Some are very successful, others are case studies in problems. Just look at the map: https://www.rocket-internet.com/companies and imagine that each of these countries will have at least three companies (one fashion retailer, one Amazon clone, and one of several of the smaller concepts like Birchbox or FoodPanda). There are hundreds of companies operating in vastly different countries, legal systems, business models. I'd be wary of extrapolating too much from one or two examples - it's like picking a few YC failures (and I am sure there are spectacular ones, just from the sheer number of companies funded - HomeJoy is the most prominent in my head right now) and saying YC as a whole has failed as an incubator.
Third, Rocket is relatively operationally decentralised. Yes, the Samwers visit often, but companies are ultimately left alone to figure things out, even if insights are occasionally emailed around, and even if Berlin has some R&D and obviously runs the financial and legal aspect. I would doubt that Berlin departures would significantly impact the operations of non-Berlin-based companies (which is to say most of them).
> The stock was down another 0.2 percent on Tuesday, to 23.33 euros at 1330 GMT, valuing the company at about 3.9 billion euros ($4.2 billion).
I've always found these short term stock price tidbits fairly useless. What is more interesting is the long term trend (from a peak of 57 EUR down to 19 EUR) [1] which is strangely not mentioned in the article. Nevertheless, I used to be fairly critical of how the Samwers were running their conglomerate, but thinking back about it, I'm not sure I would do much better. How would you go about starting 200 companies in parallel in 40 countries? I do not know any other examples of even remotely successful attempts...
[1] http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=RKET.F+Interactive#{"rang...
No mention of airworthy Cold War jets is complete without Thunder City [1] which until a crash in 2009 flew the last English Electric Lightnings [2] in the world.
The Lightning is a fascinating aircraft for two reasons: first, its design, optimised for intercepting Soviet bombers, was highly original and efficient at the job, beating many records, and it remains the only production fighter with vertically stacked jet engines; second, it was the very peak of British military aerospace engineering, the last time British engineers could say they were ahead or at least on par with what came out of America, and its success caused the Americans to put pressure on the British government to cancel the very promising TSR-2 [3] program, destroy the production equipment, the plans and most of the airframes, in order to favour the export market for the F-111 (which the British didn’t even end up buying) and in the longer term to effectively destroy their main competition.
To give you an idea of the importance of the Lightning in the British aerospace community, I spent some time at Rolls-Royce in Derby back in the late 2000s, and the production manager managed to mention the Lightning and the techniques they derived from building the Avon engines that powered it in our first meeting, a half century later! Even Jeremy Clarkson has one in his garden [4]. The Lightning intercepted U-2s, flew as high as 88,000ft (27,000m), and in a NATO exercise in intercepting Concorde, was the only fighter to do so leaving F-15s, F-16s, F-14s, Mirages and F-104s behind.
A fun anecdote involves airframe XM135 (which is still preserved at Duxford if you are in the area, as well as an incomplete TSR-2) [5] [6]. A persistent electrical fault that appeared only when accelerating meant that the people working on the jet had to accelerate it. Whilst taxiing, with the ejector seat on safe, no canopy, and wearing only noise guards (so no radio), Wing Commander “Taffy” Holden accidentally went airborne. He had a few hours in a Tiger Moth but nothing comparable to the Lightning (“I had never flown a jet aircraft, no”), so he had to figure out how to fly it, and since he couldn’t eject, how to land it, which he did eventually after three attempts, contacting Air Traffic Control via hand signals.
On another note, the most performant Cold War aircrafts flying in the US today are probably the two FAA-approved brand new SU-37s from Pride Aircraft [7] which were sold by the Ukrainian Air Force with zero hours on either the engines or the airframes and completely Westernised with English language controls and modern electronics.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunder_City
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Electric_Lightning
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_TSR-2
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnGXerN0tlo (Jeremy's jet fighter garden feature - Speed - BBC) “Do you stock Lightning jet fighters? Oh you do! Could you please leave one aside for me?”
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfeN3FoZYj0 (Wing Commander "Taffy" Holden ENGLISH ELECTRIC LIGHTNING Inadvertent Take Off Incident)
[6] http://forum.keypublishing.com/showthread.php?20807-Lightnin... ("The flight in Taffy's own words")
Limits are subtly different from circuit breakers in that trading can continue... within the limits.
[1] http://www.cftc.gov/industryoversight/marketsurveillance/spe...
It's a massive step up from what was available with taxis before. I remember when I worked in Mumbai, getting ripped off systematically until my co-workers helped me find "Meru Cool Cabs" which were always on time, professional and charging my non-Hindi speaking, non-Indian looking self by the meter. That, and trying to haggle on a fare with autorickshaws (resulting in 1 in 20 agreeing - the rest wanted 10x) to go home from the Big Bazaar in Vikhroli, and wondering if the shortest path REALLY has to go through that slum. Wish there had been Uber back then.
In the hypothetical case where I'd be running a company like that, I'd want a small team of people who are both technically and operationally extremely able, and personally likeable and politically capable; preferably people who have proven themselves and have credit internally (or such achievements as to reach the same reputation even as an external hire).
I'd task them to overview everything that is happening globally, coordinate trials and experiments so that several hundred could run at the same time globally, and share back information and results across the world. They'd be in effect the repository of knowledge of the company, the institutional memory (so much wheel gets reinvented!) and they most crucially wouldn't be based in HQ in the Bay Area, but a distributed global team constantly roaming and meeting all the local teams. They wouldn't have or need authority to "get things done" by steamrolling over the local office (as the IBM Black Team did [1]), instead convincing them that it's a good idea to try.
They would include specialists in every discipline that is important to the company from finance to statistics, to make sure that there is always at least one team member that can be on the same level as a local specialist (both to avoid taking stupid decisions, and to be credible in conversations).
They were quite open with feedback which is another reason I have good feelings towards the company. The whole process was very quick - responses in days. Compared to what my friends tell me about Google's sometimes multi-year process, it's a dream.
I don't know how much I can say about their internal structure but what I found very cool (especially as a former Rocket Internet employee) was their focus on and methods for detecting and spreading knowledge across the entire organisation, which is sort of decentralised even if many important decisions are made in California.
This is something we never got right at Rocket, where companies and regions are much more independent and have wildly differing methods and standards. It was very rare for things to cross over beyond the "startup code" (the PHP e-commerce codebase that is sent over to be deployed when a venture is opened) and some marketing methodology. The other large companies I've been familiar with are better at sharing information, but tend to have a global hub where most of the thinking is done anyway (i.e. knowledge tends to radiate outwards).
I recently interviewed with Uber in Asia, spoke to a half dozen people there right up to the head of the region and many Americans who have been with the company for years, and I did not get the job (so, clearly not biased towards the company).
Here's my one data point: they were all really nice, professional, competent people I'd actually want to work with. When I say nice, I don't mean polite, but trustworthy and well intentioned.
They are working very hard to cope with the massive growth of their app, trying to figure out how to manage 200 offices in parallel with tiny teams whilst keeping the same quality standards and avoiding unsavoury incidents that come when you hire a large number of people in many locations (imagine what would happen if there was a rape or robbery attempt by an Uber driver). They are under extreme press scrutiny and large amounts of negative PR globally, because they are hitting some of the best organised, most entrenched oligopolies.
Psychologically, it felt like there was a strong sense of family and purpose, that I haven't really seen since I left commodities trading (whose companies are family owned businesses where long careers are common). They were proud of what they were building, genuinely appreciating the value added to the community by their work. The place also felt meritocratic, with people getting expanded responsibility rapidly after proving themselves (based on the career path of the long timers I talked to - could be survivorship bias).
Naturally, I poked a bit towards the "unethical" side of things, suggesting a couple of things as feelers for how they would react. The reaction was overwhelmingly negative - it seems that "dirty tricks" are not looked well in Uber in 2015 at least, fair competition is the name of the game.
So, they impressed me enough as people (after impressing me as a service) that here I am putting up a positive word on HN. I suspect much of the negative press is "black" PR from competitors and threatened interest groups.
This is true of most countries, differing only by degree. A state has two choices for internal security: a small professional force that reacts quickly to flagged problems or a full scale surveillance state (as the Russians had in Moscow, where it was extremely hard for agents to operate due to the sheer number of KGB staff). The latter solution is usually not applied, or applied only partially, due to being prohibitively expensive even in a modern state.
For example, the FBI only has 35,000 employees. Even if each was dedicated to surveillance, that would be one employee per 9,000 American residents. Instead, they rely on the population approaching existing civil services (police departments, fire brigades, city halls) with suspicious activity; those that look genuine are further investigated and acted on.
The French government has recently published posters and a website [1] encouraging members of the Muslim community to highlight any recent radicalisation candidates. This obviously follows recent events but might also be linked to the systematic defunding and shifting around of internal security organisations (RG, DST, DGSI...) in the last decade or two resulting in the loss of the HUMINT network within the population. That FBI ratio, calculated for the DGSI? 1 employee for 20,000 residents.
[1] http://static1.stop-djihadisme.gouv.fr/var/stop/storage/imag...
For example, as recently as about 5 years ago (when I left), freight prices were sent by brokers on Yahoo Chat to a fresh grad who could then rapidly quote prices when traders needed it.
There's a bunch of things associated with a trade that need to get done - the futures position (it might be worth structuring something interesting, instead of just going for vanilla - the market makers in that space are WAY behind equities/fixed income/currencies), the FX hedging, compliance, etc. Market risk is another are just filled with opportunities - the key is to focus on UX, or they'll stick with Excel.
These processes are not, or badly, automated because the IT departments are large, political animals and the traders (who run the companies and are the major shareholders) are the type of people happy to deep dive into a war zone and have kalashnikovs pointed at their belly in the hope of a 20-30% discount, or who can trek 10 hours in the jungle to meet and charm the extended family of the man responsible for a country's grain exports, thus impressing him and securing a monopoly for life.
Still, since the work is by its very nature extremely human intensive, saving any time from the trader point of view, even for work that is traditionally passed down to the new guys, is very valuable, and the companies make enough money not to need to worry about the size of the bill, if the product is of a good enough quality. Adding reliability is another great angle. Catching a mistake on the FX hedging (traditionally one of the biggest sources of mistakes amongst the less technically inclined) as it happens, rather a few months later when the trade is unwound, might mean a few years' salary saved.
Of course, that would require gaining the trust of the traders. Good luck with that. Half a decade working closely with them should do it... and then you're up against the CTO defending his domain. Trust is way more valued than skill, although both are important.
Great industry though. Meritocratic, fast paced, high stakes, really interesting people. I miss it often.
"We do what it takes to get a billion people to first world middle class standard of living. Yes, there's a bit of collateral damage but you guys' industrial revolution was not all roses, read some Dickens. We can have the luxury of rights when we're there. You're telling me to eat cake since we ran out of bread."
In other words the majority of Chinese citizen (that I know - YMMV, selection bias, etc.) think that the government is doing an alright job considering its constraints, and don't feel particularly oppressed - the authoritarianism is population-sanctioned. Just like the new French anti-terrorism measures.
Funnily enough, having worked for a while on projects in rural Maharashtra, the children are the path to information for those villages - they're the ones who can read and write and know the prices and share information upwards to the adults.
(the conclusion being, back then, that one should market to children...)
For an example that will be close to the HN readership, to a freshly graduated Harvard MBA and former McKinsey consultant with a BA in Economics, a self-taught full stack web developer with a couple years experience is for all intents and purposes the same in skills as an MIT post-doc in computer science with a few papers published (I've also met some "business" folks who think the web dev is "superior" because he "gets things done" and his output is "prettier").
I personally think that one should achieve depth in at least one field to appreciate just how hard it is to get to the top of it. As a former classical musician, I can absolutely tell the difference between a good pianist such as you might find playing on a typical night at the Lincoln Centre in New York, and a "once in a generation" pianist such as Richter; this came at the cost of perhaps 2 decades of purposeful study and practicing the art. But my friends with little experience of classical music do not get quite as excited about Richter.
The Japanese are also unique due to the history of their country shaping their philosophy of art (which I will try to summarize based on my very limited understanding - I'd love to be corrected by more knowledgeable readers).
The Heian-period aristocrats, who looked up to the mainland Chinese civilisation, became so decadent and self-focused in their seeking of ever increasing sophistication that they completely lost interest in the running of their own country and the resulting chaos led to the rise of warlords (Daimyo) and a ruling military elite structure based in many parts on fighting ability (this is not unique to Japan: "may they eat cake!").
The Heian period marked spirits (exiling someone from court for having composed a distasteful poem or wearing a slightly mismatched ensemble being, generally, not a good governance principle). So when the Daimyo stopped fighting each other, united under the Tokugawa shogunate, thus having more time to do things other than get good at fighting [1], they sought to display status in other less flashy ways (this did happen later - cf the Rinpa school of painting), a form of counter-signalling based on taste rather than wealth, such as the very materially simple tea ceremony and teahouse. In other words, it's not about the tea, but about the way it is served and the contextual notes. This was helped by the idea that Spartans make better warriors than hedonists.
On top of this and perhaps linked ("dying a good warrior death young, is more honorable and valuable than dying old in your bed having not fought"), the philosophy of art tends towards valuing things like the "ephemeral nature of life" and making very subtle statements related to it. For example, there is a phenomenon in Japan of "the first tuna catch of the year" which is a very expensive and prized fish, almost a celebration. But for you, that's just a slice of tuna, and chemically, it might just be the very same composition as much of the tuna on offer the rest of the year. It would be missing the point - it is the act of catching the first tuna of the year (or it might be the first tuna caught after they come back from a migration where they get fat or something - it's seasonal, I can't remember the details), and the eating of that tuna at that particular time, that is valued by the consumer. Similarly, the rice is designed to be served at a specific temperature, and to "just" hold together at that temperature and with that mix and at that amount of time after being hand shaped for you, and an experienced consumer will appreciate the texture and cooking level of the rice and be satisfied to have had the experience of that precise moment in time and the ephemeral nature of it, much more than by any feeling of satiety.
Now personally I am happy eating the sushi at the standing sushi stand at Tokyo Station in B1 of the Yaesu exit (Uogashi?). That's as good as I can tell the difference and the cheapest I know (around $10-20 a go). So, I'll probably never fork out $400 for Jiro, because I know that's where my limit lies and I couldn't appreciate the conversation anyway (which is a great part of the experience, and why Jiro proper doesn't allow non-Japanese speakers to book). But that's also because I do not wish to invest time and effort into getting to a knowledge level where I could truly appreciate Jiro. I'm also avoiding attending any No theatre performances because, again, have no desire to spend years studying the art.
In other words, it's good to decide whether or not you want to gain depth in a field; if so, time to put in serious effort and do much reading; if not, one should (in my opinion) be aware of one's limits and unknown unknowns and not worry too much about not appreciating said field. But there is absolutely an objective level of difference between the top performers and the middling ones in all fields, even if outsiders cannot perceive it instinctively.
[1] As an example of the discussions of the transition period: 47 of a few hundred samurai that saw their master being betrayed and killed plotted revenge for two years, then executed it (google "47 Ronin", if you didn't see the Keanu movie). In the Hagakure, Tsunetomo criticizes the 47 Ronin for not having immediately committed seppuku, which even if not achieving revenge, would have been the honorable thing to do, instead of deciding to live. Tsunetomo was in turn criticized as being too much of a typical peacetime warrior, choosing honour and appearances over winning, in contrast to a Miyamoto Musashi whose methods were not always clean (such as arriving late to his duels to put the adversary off balance) allowing him a legendary record of victories. Or indeed Ieyasu Tokugawa himself.
> Ayn Rand's key point: "man does not live in a lifeboat -- in a world in which he must kill innocent men to survive."
> She also observes: "Under a dictatorship -- under force -- there is no such thing as morality. Morality ends where a gun begins.... Moral rules cannot be prescribed for these situations [lifeboats or dictatorships], because only life is the basis on which to establish a moral code."
http://objectivistanswers.com/questions/1892/what-is-the-obj...
"... they offered to set up a payment plan to reimburse the money he had spent on the restaurant."
Which goes to show - it's a bad idea to do anything before terms have been put down on paper! It is quite amazing when you first start doing business by yourself (as a contractor, entrepreneur, or even chef it seems) how often people "go back on their word".
What happens is that both sides have a different idea of the deal, probably picking on whatever hints were in the conversation to interpret them in the most favorable light possible; and in some cases, it's just a case of one side last-minute-changing the deal because they feel the situation has progressed to give them more leverage.
In this case, the disagreement could easily have been avoided if they had typed up a term sheet and preferably some kind of legally enforceable shareholder's agreement BEFORE the payments were made.
Now begins the PR battle as both sides will try and influence public opinion to protect their reputation.
The Fountainhead's strength is the promotion of professional ("artistic") integrity and a warning about the lack of long term happiness one might find in "selling out" for short term advantages (such as social status) versus building long-lasting work. It's also one of the few works to make the case for very strong IP rights. Despite Ayn Rand's association with the modern right wing globally, I know many left-leaning professional artists who loved the work, it is less political than philosophical.
Atlas Shrugged is about individual rights, and should be read from the point of view of the time it was written, when millions of Soviets were stuck behind the Iron Curtain and told what to do with their lives. Ayn Rand herself left the Soviet Union and much of her output ("Anthem" is the most obvious) is coloured by the stark contrast between the misery of living there versus the prosperity of her new home - less so the physical aspects, more so the psychological.
The key idea of the work - the one that somehow, is rarely talked about - is the idea that the individual is more important than the state in which they are a citizen, that "raison d'Etat", the sacrifice of a few innocents for the "many", is not morally valid philosophically and ends in disaster for the "many" in practice. And it is a shame the work is so shunned in today's American political discussions (beyond being used by a few Tea Party politicians to promote small government) as it is very much relevant to many modern discussions such as, for example, the NSA scandals, drone use or the existence of the Guantanamo prison.
Regarding the title itself and a popular criticism of the work, there are many countries today where it is still the case that people with potential are unable to make any progress and should absolutely emigrate (e.g. [1]). I recommend following Atlas Shrugged by Vito Tanzi's excellent chronicle of the collapse of Argentina since the Peronists [2], it's short and an almost direct real world parallel.
Something I always wondered about is why Atlas Shrugged was only very recently translated into French. I read another book [3] by an anonymous but clearly French intelligence services officer who claims it was done deliberately as the work (much like Frederick the Great's Political Testament) is considered politically destabilising by the French authorities, who put pressure on editors accordingly. I suspect a more realistic explanation might be that the political environment in France is such that there would be little demand for the work, which would be derided as "typically American" even by the "liberals"; this makes me a little sad.
Ayn Rand's output has a subset of "interesting" fans, as with many other famous works (I'm sure someone, somewhere has made a wooden wand with a horsehair in it and shouts "Accio!" at their kettle or something). No work is perfect but there is much to be learnt from books that became famous and influential. For better or worse, Ayn Rand is the modern, famous writer who most extensively wrote about "extreme" individual rights enforced by the state, as well as advocating well for passion in one's work and pride in one's competence, and as such is worth reading.
[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/humans-new-yorks-scienti...
[2] http://www.amazon.ca/Argentina-Economic-Chronicle-Richest-Co...
[3] http://www.amazon.fr/Missions-methodes-techniques-speciales-...
June 2015: "If you add another $18,000 a month in legal fees ... we just can't absorb it on our own."
October 2015: "We're still working with the other party to wrap up the lawsuit. But to maintain the restaurant at this point it would just continue to put us in a substantial amount of debt. [...] as small business owners, we won't be able to afford a trial, and we really can’t even afford to go through the proceedings leading up to a trail. The realization was that the only way to bring this all to a close is to dissolve the business and move on"
http://www.grubstreet.com/2015/10/alma-closing-interview.htm..., http://www.grubstreet.com/2015/06/alma-crowd-funding.html
It is however relatively unique to Haskell and similar languages whose paradigm is very different to what most of the market is used to.
Everything is an optimization over a number of variables.
The upside of Haskell is that (if you make an effort) you get very good people and they don't cost as much because there is comparatively less demand for the language, so even on a greenfield project it makes sense to give it a shot. This is aside from numerous language-specific benefits which have been discussed to death in the never ending language wars.
The downside is that only a portion of the self-defined Haskell community can truly be more productive in Haskell than say, Python; and these people have many options and are themselves making trade-offs and optimizing across a variety of variables when picking a job (e.g. interesting machine learning work in Python vs boring CRUD work in Haskell, given the same salary, might rank about the same). If you find these people, if they want to work for you, you get good results. But you're bidding against Google and hedge funds, so you need to find an edge that they cannot take advantage of. For example, I saw almost no CVs with prestigious universities on them, because that's a common filter in prestigious organisations, who tend to miss out on the self-taught talent and the less well ranked alumni; those with "prestigious" CVs wait for organisations to get in touch rather than having to sell themselves. So it's probably a good idea to avoid using university as a filter.
One reason there are many Haskell job openings in comparably fragile settings (low budget, bad politics, low stakes etc.) is because in cases where resources are ample (thus allowing for time for senior people to learn a new language or junior people to learn professional software development skills), the risk-taking appetite is less and managers will hedge by going for the popular instead of taking a "Python paradox"/blub bet. A cynical reason for this might also be that you do not want to be dependent on a small number of talented people - having a large team of replaceable junior talent hedges against the developers acquiring strong negotiating power by virtue of adding too much value, or even just the risk that a car crash wipes out half your codebase.
In some ways the survivability of the organisation in the low-resource setting is then dependent on the Haskeller - if you help your employer increase its conversion rate or customer lifetime value 10-fold, or reduce dev ops and infrastucture cost by a factor of 10, you might well change the very dynamics of the business and justify your team and salary; so it might make sense to take a less attractive posting if you know this is a possibility. At the same time, there are numerous companies arguing this to try and get you to accept a pay cut.
The CEO of the business will basically hear two messages:
1. "Look at how well my tech organisation is doing, we solved 150 tickets this week, a 40% increase over the last 3 months! And yet our headcount only increased 10%."
2. what your comment said.
It's down to him to act accordingly. I've seen many trust 1, he's "data-driven".
There's variations of the JIRA ticket inflation, such as requesting regular update meetings and the tech organisation adapting by finding days-long tasks and pushing off the hard weeks-long ones (since they do not result in neat weekly progress updates).
"I've listened to all the excellent argument for doing nothing, and reaped the consequent frightful harvest. I've watched people hop up and down and call it progress." - George Smiley (in Smiley's People) making the point that this is not a new problem.
I also would expect employers to get wary, but they are so desperate he always has multiple standing offers waiting. Amazing what you can do when you have a great Kaggle ranking...
From my relatively limited experience in the space: most companies have trouble actually doing anything with their data beyond slicing it a couple of ways [0] and making bad graphs with it; these same companies also have a lot of trouble hiring and retaining [1] people capable of doing it (I know because they end up my clients).
Palantir will offer large amounts of money (despite accusations of below market pay; although a good portion is in equity) and a half-decent lifestyle-wise, not too corporate environment to young smart engineers to go and help them outsource that function for the kind of companies that do not care about paying large fees to "get the best", and for whom the consultant status helps cut through the red tape.
The "products" are, from my limited understanding, more like a loose collection of accumulated knowledge from clients which can help future deployments not reinvent the wheel (particularly since so many of the engineers are young and inexperienced). This is also a selling point. "We get it right because we did it before with all these prestigious clients".
Each client has its own infrastructure and schema, and so most data related projects are naturally oriented towards a lot of manual effort - talking to technical staff, reading through code, understanding the data customers and feedback loops... and whilst many companies in the space pretend to offer "plug and play" BI (or data science, or whatever) in practice without a strong data team behind it, these end up failing pretty badly. So I see Palantir's competitive edge as its staff, not its products, and I don't think much (as a data professional) of pure product data companies.
In many ways, Palantir is what McKinsey was half a century ago: it offers job variety and a pick of the best clients to the "top ranked" fresh grads and early professionals; it offers these "guaranteed fresh" minds to clients who have trouble attracting them in-house to solve difficult problems that can't in theory be solved by the internal talent pool; it brands itself as the "top" company globally doing this. If it is successful, it will just keep growing its competitive advantage ("you don't get fired for hiring IBM"). And I think their focus on people instead of software is a great idea in an age of exceptional open source products and ever cheaper hardware.
Where might its cash flow come from? I see two sources:
a. as you get further into a data project, you've built the infrastructure and it is comparatively easy to provide answers. For example, once I'm done with a data warehouse, I can produce a complex report or query answering just about any question management can throw at me in 10 minutes to 2 hours; this will take them two weeks to use. So the time actually spent working, vs the monthly retainer, just keeps going down with time (and of course experience - if you wrote the query for another client you can just change the variable names and output).
b. the value add from getting the data right is extremely high. Cf [0] below. For many modern companies it can be the difference between a 50% increase in profits and not being a going concern the following year. As CEOs realize this, and realize that no, you don't get "80% of the quality for 20% of the price" by going for the lowest bidders, prices track up and stay there.
[0] Most classically trained managers that I've met are unable to cope with more than 2 variables at the same time. A graph is basically a 1D or 2D model with your brain and past experience being the curve fitting. This becomes an issue if the business model fits 20 or 100 dimensions better (e.g. many trading strategies and even market making) and most of your competitors are very comfortable with it.
As an example, I've witnessed two e-commerce companies in the same country with a 10x difference in conversion rate; one had statisticians to manage its marketing spend, the other preferred going by the traditional way of "if its conversion rate is high I'm going to add more budget".
[1] I know an exceptional data scientist who changed jobs 4 times in the last year... each workplace bidding him up!
The "public" is not the people at rallies, not even what people in the street and cafes are saying, but the tally of the vote at the next election, and politicians act accordingly.
As you can see from the first round of the regional elections, the French "public" overwhelmingly voted for more.
The latter was driven by a strong belief in many Bay Area startups and companies that remote work doesn't work well, and that you get more output per head and more productivity if you sit next to your developers. That's what the premium is for in that case, usually with a tech stack that is relatively easy to find people for (e.g. RoR, PHP, Python).
The former was driven by rare knowledge with few customers, all of whom have good reasons to be relatively price insensitive to get the job done.
Pick your strategy accordingly...
I am running a small consulting operation with clients in Australia and South East Asia.
Right now, I am signing up new data consulting clients (including a big one in February 2016) and need some help. This involves running AWS instances, figuring out APIs, building a PostgreSQL data warehouse, and finally building various machine learning products from recommendation engines to using multivariate statistics to improve their understanding of their business. The latter part is the fun one but anybody who has done this will know 90% of the work is in the data warehouse.
I write some of the code but I mostly spend my time dealing with the clients and writing the functional specs for you.
You should be familiar with relational algebra and relational databases. I recommend having a good knowledge of the topics covered in "An Introduction to Statistical Learning" (http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/). Most of our recent projects have been done with Haskell, Postgres and some bash.
You can usually name your price (per week), worst case the client will say no. Clients are all OK with never meeting you in person (in fact, my first client still hasn’t met me).
If interested, please get in touch - email is in my profile. You can expect some technical discussion and potentially a little programming test. If you can, please point to some public code you've written.
- $1 IT contracts get in the way of crony overcharging, said cronies then provide campaign financing to the right people (never forget Accuweather paying Rick Santorum $50,000 to lobby to stop making National Weather Service data public);
- overcharging is how some intelligence services finance black ops (the modern Air America might be a press or marketing company) as France is alleged to be doing already (e.g. [1] for the full description)
In both cases, there would be powerful incentives to shut down "more efficient government IT" projects.
[1] http://www.amazon.fr/Missions-methodes-techniques-speciales-...