robatsu

Is anyone surprised that the 25 year war on corporate paternalism and 2 way loyalty in favor of a quite openly stated reductionist policy of "extract maximum value from employees for the bare minimum that they will accept" has left a lot of unhappy workers?

There is a little bit of misunderstanding sometimes when people discuss "inflation". To some, if not most people, inflation means increasing prices. To others, it means increase in the money supply, which eventually may cause rising prices after some latency, especially if the growth rate of the economy doesn't keep up with the increase in money supply.

I have no idea whether "rising price inflation" has been underreported, especially by design, by the government. I would concede that there are political and bottom line reasons (e.g, minimize increases in salaries/benefits tied to COLA), but again, if this is happening, IMO it is probably more just institutional slouch than a top-secret directive from the Federal Reserve bunker.

Overall, I don't have an informed opinion what the facts of the matter are wrt to underreported inflation - I only have anecdotal evidence.

OTOH, it is pretty clear that "money supply inflation" has increased dramatically in the past few years due to the various policies associated with the bailout.

Whether this will cause "rising price inflation" remains to be seen - there is always latency between money supply increase and rising prices. In the bailout policies case, the latency is pretty large, as the bulk of the money went to securing "toxic" assets and so forth rather than directly into the consumer economy.

The overhang of this increase in money supply/government debt naturally constitutes rising price pressure, but again, how much is anyone's guess, as there are deflationary pressures as well (falling asset prices, and such).

I agree with the SCOTUS sentiment, but in other related areas, strict adherence to the law with the underlying intent to remain legal but avoid the spirit of the law has been cracked down upon.

In the case of cash transactions, with the 10k reporting limits, people are now routinely prosecuted for "structuring" their >10k transactions into a series of <10k transactions, even when it is clearly demonstrated that there is no underlying criminal activity. There have been cases where it is just cantankerous believers in privacy being prosecuted.

For my part, I'm on the side of the tax avoiders & believers in privacy, but it wouldn't surprise me to see the government's views/regulations on tax avoidance come around to their current policies on currency controls.

I was a submarine officer back during the end of the Cold War, doing special operations and what not.

Now that was a super stressful job & the hours were lots longer, major sleep deprivation.

Our therapy was debauched shore time in various Pacific ports, seemed to get the job done. But I suppose Google HR department wouldn't go for that.

I think the early, mid 90's were a lot more interesting time to be a programmer than now, just before the Internet explosion. Back then, a bigger percentage of the focus was on using computers to do something, solve a problem directly (as opposed to implicitly) and the computers were actually getting powerful enough to do things on a cheap basis.

People's cat pictures were a vanishingly small portion of the landscape.

As an example, cheap computing power is one of the reasons that while at the beginning of the 90's, nuclear power was considered a money losing proposition by electric utilities and everyone was trying to get out from under them but by the end of the decade, all the utilities were hanging on to their nukes for dear life and trying to figure out how to extend their licenses/service life.

Now, a much bigger percentage of the focus is simply getting information out of one spot, tranporting it to another, dolling it up w/some marketing glitz.

That's not to say that the cool stuff isn't still going on, but that it is a smaller percentage and the profession has been dumbed down significantly (hence brogrammers and all).

The thing that I dislike the most about the technology business is people who want to use developers as crash test dummies for their random ideas and think that "good ideas" are the topmost measure of goodness and once having a good idea, all the rest will naturally unfold.

Pivots are good and oftentimes necessary, but I learned years ago that good ideas are a dime a dozen. The ability of an organization to competently execute on a (seemingly) good idea is the much rarer skill, 1% inspiration/99% perspiration and all that.

The OP seems to think this is something that can be managed. I do believe that, but I'm not sure it is something that can be as easily quantified & then learned as a generic management skill as the OP seems to imply.

I spend 1/2 time in Japan because my wife is Japanese. Our 8 year old is bilingual, my wife is fluent in english but learned as an adult, and my japanese is rudimentary.

Some of the comments disagreeing with the research, I can sympathize with from my perspective in Japan - certainly I feel at a disadvantage due to my language limitations.

However, I think the presumption in the research is that the subjects understand the language, that this disadvantage is removed. The thesis is that if one is fluent in a second language (or not disadvantaged by non-understanding of linguistic constructs), one is freed of cultural constraints that attend to native speakers of the language.

Going from personal experience observing my wife debate in english, and again, she is fluent, the language is much more of a coldly analytic tool for her - the words all have their nominal meaning. However, over the years, as she has grown more culturally fluent, I've observed this effect declining.

Just anecdotal observations.

The optimistic viewpoint going into the unknown, i.e, the confidence that the answer is out there somewhere and you will find it, is one of the, if not the, most important success factors in any sort of greenfield venture.

I'm an older guy and even years ago when looking back, things that I just assumed would work out, even though an objective observer would perhaps disagree, always seemed to have more or less unfolded according to plan. It is almost as if life is much like some evil jungle vine that wraps and immobilizes one the more you struggle against it.

Here is one personal example - I was born into a family that valued education, it was always assumed that the kids were going to college - this was a little before the now current assumption that everyone goes to college.

Well, I hated school from junior high onward with an abiding passion and finally quit at the first available opportunity at the beginning of 10th grade. But it never occurred to me that I wouldn't go to college and I did, pretty much on schedule w/my peers (and I paid for it..) getting a BS in physics, MS in Computational Fluids/Mech Engrg.

Again, it just never really occurred to me that I wouldn't go to college as I was bailing from high school, kind of weird in retrospect. But I never even slightly doubted the outcomes - not in a defiant way, either, just a low key assumption.

And again, looking back, I can find many other examples my life or other peoples lives that follow this pattern.

I don't know if there is a term for this mindset, but I see allusions to it both in the OP and in many of the other comments here.

Sorry, I think I poorly worded my comment. The point I was trying to make was that (imo) the better devs have an extremely deterministic viewpoint towards their code and are always paying attention to all the contextual layers in which they are coding and how their code may affect that context.

The example of compilers/languages sort of follows from this, as this (constant) awareness leads to pattern recognition which then leads to surmising about leveraging languages, code generation, etc, to take advantage of these patterns & reduce effort/errors.

There are other examples, just that I picked this one.

Top 10% - gets the coding job done, timely, high quality code. Knows his craft well, but is still essentially a craftsman.

Top 1% - Designs systems that will get the job done for the business/larger org goals, or even designing systems that generate business props. Also, the systems designed are capable of being implemented/maintained by lesser skilled developers. Of course, knows his craft, but is something of the artist, can see the Buddha in the gearbox.

The 1% guy should easily, as in no conceptual difficulties, be able to write a compiler/interpreter, that clearly demonstrates whether one is simpatico with the machine, capable of thinking like one. Actually should love doing this sort of thing, probably, and might have to resist the the tendency to incorporate custom command processing components/metadata/languages in every project.

My grandfather always used to tell me, "You can be rich in two ways - the amount of your possessions or the fewness of your wants".

This article alludes to that point at the end.

In the U.S., this legal electric company monopolies were more or less granted w/the proviso of providing universal access, sort of the same goal.

The past 20 years, the electric companies are trying to wiggling out from under this, turns out they really don't want to sell electricity to residential users, in a lot of cases their big customers are subsidizing residential users. That is why, despite the hype to the contrary, residential electric rates usually go up under deregulation.

The typical electric company strategy the past 20 years is to try "surrender" their monopoly in unprofitable areas w/a lot of happy talk about competition/choice/consumer benefits and attempt to keep their monopoly in the profitable areas (wholesale transmission, generation/cogeneration for large consumers).

I've worked at places that "only hired the best" and such. I think this kind of mantra coming from employers is as much self promotion as it is a statement of policy.

As in, our stuff must be wonderful, we only hire the best.

But really, having a plan that requires that everyone be an Einstein is somewhat limited - a more robust organization is one that can accommodate & make maximum use of what skills an individual has. Obviously this has its limits, but making a condition of success that everyone has to be a potential Nobel Prize winning renaissance man is a bit limiting as well.

One alternative to this is the strategy explained by Lieutenant Keefer in the "The Caine Mutiny": "The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots"

If you can set something like that up, you are golden, the supply of idiots being much more plentiful and cheap than geniuses.

I live in Japan 1/2 time. Apparently, when a driver here hits a pedestrian or cyclist, he's got a lot of explaining to do.

As a result, the drivers are so attentive that it is not at all unusual on reasonably busy secondary routes to see a mother pedaling her bicycle with an infant in the basket and another small child following behind on a kids bike.

And like most parents, we let our son walk to school by himself from about 2d grade along a route where he had to cross some fairly major 4 lane streets.

Years ago, I worked briefly for The Southern Company, which is the largest publicly held electric utility in the U.S (Georgia Power, Alabama Power, and a bunch of other ones).

While there was certainly a lot of expertise in electric generation and transmission there, it rapidly became apparent to me that their true core competency was maintaining and exploiting their legal monopoly.

It wasn't a pretty sight.

Identity verification and such are only part of the problem. Even if it is a bona fide person writing the review (and ignoring the problems w/Yelp filtering practices), a truly valid review only comes from one who the readers can be assured really was a customer of Royal Movers in addition to some of the other, lower identity bars.

So how could that work?

There are at least two startup opportunities for something like this. One is the creation of the credential/verified identity certification and the second is the transmission/exchange of the credential. These are two very disparate set of competencies.

Several years ago, I was working with Honesty Online, doing exactly this identity verification startup prop and where it became very evident that this is really two businesses. Now we, in another startup, sigkat.com, are very early stage in the second business - creation/exchange/transmission of any sort of credentials so that vertical apps like identity verification can focus on their domain.