obstacle1

What are the strict "levels" of education? Why is obtaining a "Yale" level of education in and of itself a good thing, especially if we're not seeing society-wide positive change driven solely by individuals with that level of education?

The article's point is that historically, large-scale change is driven by groups rather than individuals. And the groups are not cabals of HYP grads, their compositions are wide and varied. So it's worth revisiting exactly what your comment assumes: that there is a strict hierarchy of individual capacity to drive change, and we need to segregate people according to said hierarchy in order to push society forward.

> Also what is wrong with giving people the choice to go to Yale?

99.999% of people don't have the choice to go to Yale. That would be true even if everyone in America were given "equal opportunity" from birth -- it's how scarcity works. The article answers this question for you in case you want to give it a second read.

> It treats streamers as kids who can't take care of themselves and don't understand the long-term impact of their lifestyle and career choice.

Interesting. I did not read it like that at all. Do you have an example quotation of what makes you think that?

The impression I got is both Tyler and Micayla are well aware of how negatively streaming affects their lives. They both explicitly said they don't want to be doing this forever and want to retire, didn't they?

>If a kid told me he wanted to be a Twitch streamer I'd say he can't be one

You'd be lying though, and your kid would probably grow up to resent it. There are ways to educate kids about the relative risks of careers in good faith.

> after the easy parts are done

"Uncreative farmers" is insulting, and this isn't? The claim that your standard megacorp legacy maintainer is altruistically keeping the world spinning seems a little self-important, too.

> made-up nonsense about churches and bars.

The first sheet music printed (15th century) was almost exclusively liturgical (i.e., religious).

Similarly, it's no accident that the first popular work of the printed word was the Gutenberg Bible.

Say during due diligence two options are uncovered: use an upstream dependency owned by another team, or use that plus a 3P vendor for redundancy. Implementing parallel systems costs 10x more than the former and takes 5x longer. You estimate a 0.01% chance of serious failure for the former, and 0.001% for the latter.

Now say you're a medium sized hyper-growth company in a competitive space. Does spending 10 times more and waiting 5 times longer for redundancy make business sense? You could argue that it'd be irresponsible to over-engineer the system in this case, since you delay getting your product out and potentially lose $ and ground to competitors.

I don't think a black and white "yes, you should be punished" view is productive here.

I would exercise a little humility and allow for the possibility that you don't understand what parent is saying, before slinging obscenities.

You are absolutely right about music being fundamental to the human experience, universally. But parent isn't denying that at all.

Parent is talking about the BUSINESS of popular music -- not music full stop. The business of popular music absolutely _has_ co-opted music itself as a means of marketing other products. That's how the money is made and it's the only reason you are aware of any popular music artists at all.

Yes people listen to popular artists because the music makes them feel certain ways. But from the business' perspective that only matters insofar as it enables the business to capture the attention of the listener, to sell things. Are you aware of how many product placements litter nearly all popular songs? Why do you think country music -- which is a massive market -- is hyper-focused on getting drunk, drinking beer all day, driving pickup trucks, etc.? Do you know how much money there is in that?

In what context would it be OK for a CEO to send ENTHUSIASTICALLY YELLING e-mails to employees telling them they are SLOW DUMB DOLPHINS and to STOP EMBARRASSING ME STOP IT STOP IT RIGHT NOW...?

Also how would our knowing more about the CEO/employee relationship here improve our perception? The most "positive" thing I can think of is, the employees are so used to it they would tell us something like "oh, that's just CEO, he communicates really passionately". That's not actually positive, though. It's Stockholm Syndrome. [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

> To me, this is not relevant. What people should be focusing on is WHY.

Totally fair that to you it is not relevant. But that doesn't imply that people should be focusing on what you think is relevant instead of what they think is relevant.

The delivery of the message is super toxic from a labor relations POV and I think a lot of people care about that, as a lot of people sell labor to employers in order to survive.

Say a couple has a good relationship. One day, Partner A has a bad day at work. A comes home and screams at Partner B: "you're dumb! you're slow! why isn't dinner ready? you're a dolphin!"

Partner A was just venting frustration after having a terrible day. Is that abuse? YES! Unequivocally, yes.

There is no excuse for insulting, yelling, or otherwise treating other human beings as lesser than. It's abuse, always, even one time. And frankly if it happens once, it's very unlikely it isn't a repeated pattern of behavior.

"You're moving slowly and dropping tasks. That is impacting the business and we are losing customers. This needs to change by next month/quarter/whatever."

vs.

"YOU ARE A DUMB DOLPHIN BLAH BLAH BLAH"

Massive difference.

The former is a warning rooted in a sincere desire to lead the org/employee towards positive change. The latter is verbal abuse that accomplishes nothing but placating the ego of the abuser.

Seems ripe for exploitation.

What's stopping the PM-but-really-Major from invoking chain of command and making overriding decisions? In an org like the military I'm not sure you could just say "please act like a PM and don't make broader decisions" to someone with seniority and expect them to not exercise their authority, unless you actually revoke their authority.

Or, what's stopping the Major from installing a friendly and symbolic tech advisor? Stranger things have happened than bureaucrats hiring and building departments designed to do nothing but legitimize and push forward their own agenda.

It's almost like that style of commercialized prose forces you to recognize it as such and reflect on how crass it really is. And then you realize that that kind of dialogue is pretty much the one you are having with yourself 24/7, involuntarily, due to how mediated our experience is by commercial interests.

Or maybe we just go back to building our adtech stuff, and the system marches on and on.

The vast majority of dev jobs don't require you to be good at CSS. Unless you're going for a front end position, which is a small minority of jobs, it's not even a factor.

> Why would they promote hard work if hard work didn't matter?

Hard work matters. But it isn't enough. Luck is needed to transform hard work into wealth. Line cooks work very hard.

Incidentally, YC's business model positions it extremely well vs. other VCs to take advantage of this calculus. Fund 1000s of startups full of maniacally hard working kids, and you can expect a few to also get lucky just by sheer volume. Whereas if you're only funding a few startups they may work equally as hard and never run into the luck required to succeed.

> You can have a family, a house be sustainable but not earning enough to be able to pay for a year off of work.

I think we have different definitions of "sustainable", then.

What you're describing sounds one step up from living paycheck to paycheck. And the fact that "most people are in that position!" doesn't make it a good position to be in, or a necessary one.

I don't see this as much different from "sure, if you don't have a million dollar mortgage and 2 car payments to cover!"

Having a family is partially a financial decision. People should make the decision with eyes wide open, having planned for it. Achieving a financial position above sustenance before having the expensive family is generally a good idea. Same as buying the house and cars.

> trust fund crowd

You're on a discussion board filled with software developers and tech employees generally. The vast majority of such workers make a lot of money. If you're working in tech and you can't bank enough to take 6m-1yr off, you're doing your finances wrong. It doesn't require a trust fund to avoid the hedonic treadmill and save up.

It doesn't seem necessary for an article about moral decision making to contain anything about utility theory.

For example, what if the author prefers a deontological framework? Then they'll write about that, and it'll be perfectly valid.

In either case, it doesn't seem necessary to mention any particular framework by name in such an article. Because it's an article on the Internet aimed at a popular audience, not an undergraduate philosophy textbook.

> a sensible risk tradeoff

Note the tradeoff doesn't make sense as soon as you're operating at a meaningful scale. A small likelihood of failure at small scale translates to "I expect a failure a million years from now", whereas at large scale it's more like "a month from now". Accepting the same percent risk of data loss in the former case might be OK, but in the latter case is irresponsible. Provided whatever you're storing is not transient data.

Maybe the problem is you're hiring CS/engineering students to "show KPIs" or "set up mixpanel" or "not program"? I can't imagine any competent student from those disciplines, never mind a student from a top tier school, being happy at any kind of job like that. Especially if they were sold a job that would use their full abilities. Sounds like a recipe for otherwise talented people half-assing your job while looking for a new one, resulting in you thinking they suck rather than just don't care about doing trivial stuff.

If you're frequently being paged for stuff you literally can't fix, then the process/monitoring/alerting has broken down somewhere and needs to be fixed. If it can't/won't be fixed, then the company needs to hire ops people whose specific job is to react to and triage system failures -- devs should not be treated as escalation machines. If the process can't be fixed and the company won't hire people to handle the process, then you quit.

> God forbid anyone be multifaceted.

It's fine (and necessary) for everyone to be multifaceted. But it's not wrong to not care about some facets of a person you follow, in the context of social media.

Even two different people following the same person would care about different facets of that person, and not care about others.

The point is it's easier to manage the stream of information available to you if you can filter signal from noise in a way that you want.

Does that create a filter bubble? Maybe. Would it be better for everyone to read everything from everyone to get a broader perspective? Maybe. Or, maybe that would be worse, since there would be so much noise to sift through that the signal would be impossible to find.

> already have some kind of desktop computing arrangement at home

Sure, but it's your personal desktop computing arrangement -- not the company's.

With WFH, the company is effectively renting that space from you so you can work in it, but you're charging them $0.

That's because CRUD people can do work that is far more leveraged than a hardware engineer, from the business' perspective. So the CRUD people produce more economic value.

One dev can spend 2 weeks automating some process or building a prototype web app that goes on to generate tens of millions for the company with no overhead.

Your hypothetical EE can spend 2 years designing a chip. The chip will then require 100s of millions of dollars to be spent on testing, manufacturing, and sales in order to be economically useful to the company (note that none of those functions involve the EE who designed the chip).

Sad? I dunno, maybe. True, yep. Nonsensical? Definitely not, there's clear logic to why certain kinds of work pay what they do.

The point is they might be the first ones to voluntarily leave.

The problem is when they grow into the lead role, you need to pay them like leads. Otherwise if they are really that smart, they will realize they are being exploited and jump ship.

> Marketing is still a factor but matters a lot less (many artists even wear masks/helmets).

Marketing doesn't matter any less now than it did back in the day; it's just something the artist is expected to do themselves, rather than something to outsource to a label.

The helmet/mask thing _is_ marketing. It's a gimmick and is half of what built the original hype for guys like deadmau5 and marshmello. It was really novel to see a guy spinning records in a mouse costume, at one point, and that was the reason _masses_ of people discovered, rather than just a few.

Martin Garrix had to find, reach out to, and collaborate with hundreds of unknown artists before he built his network big enough such that Tiesto 'discovering' him was a possibility.

There are hundreds of thousands of people producing EDM and releasing it on Soundcloud/Beatport/etc. A tiny fraction of those people will ever get more than 10 listeners. The ones who do get listeners will hustle like hell to build up their network and broadcast their channels -- i.e. market themselves. Marketing is still the only way to get people listening to your stuff, quality tunes alone won't get you there.

> Don't focus on semantics

Semantics is the meaning of what you say. It isn't some subordinate type of communication; it is fundamental to communication. If we don't focus on semantics, we don't focus on the meaning of what you said, and we aren't able to judge whether or not what you've said is true.

You used a word, presumably to make a factual statement about a thing. We need to know why you think the word applies given the context in order to know what you're trying to communicate.

If you don't want to communicate with people, you're free not to. But you did try to communicate with people, so don't be surprised when they ask you to clarify what you said.

I think you're conflating contrarian thinking with critical thinking. Believing in conspiracy theories does not imply a well-reasoned path to belief. Critical thought requires not only analyzing a position from contrary points of view, but also judging the objective likelihood of each point of view being true, and then picking the view that is most likely to be true. Stopping at picking a contrary point of view is more like subscribing to a religion than performing critical thought.