465 karma · joined July 15, 2017
If you don't have this mindset, a PhD will make you very angry, and you'll feel like you've wasted several years of your life.
You read "NYTimes" on the front-page, decided that you were gonna hate this article, and then found something that did it for you. Congratulations. You are justified in your hatred of "biased reporting".
I honestly don't see how something so insignificant can be considered biased. You are being ludicrous. Law and banking are excellent examples because they are the fields that most Americans associate with brutal work hours. Law and banking also are skilled positions that require (at least) an undegraduate education.
But ok - I can't convince you because the article is biased. Biased to what? Biased in favor of the right of game developers to get a fair wage? Biased towards allowing them a 40 hour work week? Oh no, what a shame that would be! Bias cannot be inherently bad because bias is inherent to any writing or any argument. If you're going to claim that Mr. Schreier is biased towards the perspective of game developers, explain why that could possibly be a bad thing in this scenario.
> That's clearly the best source for reliable developer-related information right?
Yes, actually. They broke several major stories this year that depended on internal leaks at various companies. This article (also by Jason Schreier) is a good example.
https://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-t...
For those who may be unaware, Kotaku is hated by a certain subset of the alt-right. It appears that's why all the cockroaches have come out of the woodwork for this story. Do people really not see what's going on here? There's a large segment of people who will convince themselves of anything in order to "prove" that this article is "biased".
I would argue that you're pointing that finger in the severe wrong direction. The young generation of young males who buy video games do not visit the web pages of the enthusiast game press (IGN, Gamespot, Kotaku). Instead, they consume all of their game "reviews" and "criticism" via YouTube - figures like PewDiePie, TotalBiscuit, etc (not exactly a great crowd).
The gaming press is actually having a really fascinating resurgence IMO. Websites like GiantBomb and Vice's Waypoint have both found success through cultivating personalities with distinct critical viewpoints. Recently, games criticism has developed into something very unique and enjoyable if you're passionate enough to go looking for it.
In this way I disagree with your final point. Games are still immensely valued by [old / women / minority / enthusiast] gamers, but the majority of the market (especially the big $$$ from micro-transations) is thanks to the demographic you describe and (IMO) the media they consume. As a result, large block-buster games will increasingly market themselves to this incredibly lucrative (but not always large) segment of the market and you'll continually see behavior like in the OP as companies like EA try to cut costs and maximize their revenues.
"Their income pales in comparison to what’s offered in other fields with reputations for brutal hours, like banking and law. The average American game developer earned $83,060 in 2013, according to a Gamasutra survey, or less than half the pay of a first-year associate at a New York law firm."
Your answer is right there for goodness sake! The author compares game developers to a first-year associate because both are "fields with reputations for brutal hours."
The author is also Jason Schreier, an editor at Kotaku which has frequently covered these topics. I would argue he's quite aware of the issues developers face, many journalists are close friends with developers in the industry.
To echo your demeaning tone: did you do any research at all?
Faculty members are not in control of their own situation. I'm sorry to sound a bit rude here, but you're being a bit oblivious. Faculty are under the rule of law of the administration. That is who their boss is and that is whose rules they follow. They don't get to choose the class hierarchy and power dynamics of their job same as you or I. If it were that easy to disrupt a power imbalance, then Marxism would be a lot more than just a theoretical framework. More importantly, academics are the very definition of the type of people who "get their head stuck in the clouds". They care about their work at the expense of every other aspect of their lives, expecting them to apply the same critical lens to their lives (which they are likely somewhat comfortable in) is very naive. Even Marx goes out of his way to emphasize that the means of production must be "seized" - there has to be great motivation to change the power dynamic. For professors, it can be hard to get them to care about anything that doesn't directly affect their research.
> When I was in school, talking about my student loan problems was looked down on as 'showing my class.'
The faculty have no control over your student loans. They are not the ones who charge you. And in my own experience, my professors were very enthusiastic about me talking about my issues with student loan debt. Are you sure it wasn't just in the wrong class / awkward timing? I brought this stuff up in a course on class dynamics and got plenty of positive feedback - where you say something is just as important as what you say after all.
You should redirect some of your frustration at the University's administration. Professors and faculty are getting screwed in a lot of the same ways as you, so why do you choose to get upset at them and their talk about "Marxism". They're academics whose heads are up in the clouds, what do you expect?
Good point and apologies for the slight. I suppose a better way of putting it is that faculty are often ignorant of their students' issues / difficulties due to their busy schedules.
??? Academically they're interesting questions to ask? Have you ever taken a class on Marxist critical theory or Marxist feminism or ...
A "marxist" is someone who uses Marx's method of analyzing class and capitalism to talk about whatever they want. One specific example is a Marxist critical theorist I know who likes to discuss the way class and capitalism as Marx discussed them arise in philosophical interpretations of modern literature.
Marxism is a political philosophy - one that has a lot of negative connotation in the United States due to its ties to communism, but Marxism is just philosophy so of course we'd want a space where academics can talk philosophy.
See this comment for a better explanation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15512846
1.) Overwork their students, stretch them thin doing everything.
2.) Have more graduate students.
They would always pick #2. Professors are notoriously short-handed. They are typically not the ones who are outright abusing the power. It's usually the administration tying the professor's hands in these matters.
As a graduate student, your boss is usually the administration more than the professor - especially w.r.t. things a union would care about (workplace safety, wages, benefits, overwork...). Professors do not like to overwork their students - it's just they don't care if you are overworked.
Just assuming that the university (out of its goodwill?) will do any of those things is kind of ludicrous. At my university, we had to fight tooth and nail (we had a union) to get the university to improve our health insurance and full waive our tuition (They did a tricky thing where they would waive all people with 50% TA-ships, and then they gave everyone a 49% one. Universities are not noble, altruistic actors. Far far from it)
I would just tack on, "then leverage global markets to get those margins as wide as possible". Apple really loves their huge margins. Their design work plays into this by creating a brand and lifestyle for their products, increasing the price. I feel that many of Apple's business decisions come down to either ensuring margins stay high or opting for materials, parts, and designs that increase them.
How is it indisputable? Please don't forget your citations.
Thanks!
I mean, there's verifiable evidence Russia tried to influence our election. That's pretty new for a lot of Americans. I imagine that's why the government and the media are running wild with it. Mueller is still investigating. I would say to wait till that report comes out before jumping to conclusions. I personally don't think the media and government are gearing up for some Russia conflict. This is just the first time Russia has been so involved in our politics since the Cold War, and the media is rightly running with that idea. Is it that unbelievable for some people that Russia was involved in trying to influence our election? I can't tell if you're rightly scared of the media or just can't believe Russia would do something bad.
With respect to the quality of work at the NSA?
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
And finally with respect to all the leaking... I think it's pretty clear that's just the NSA's lack of confidence in its leader.
I agree, but I think his tone is the more important thing to discuss here. Everyone is agreement that the "just go to college" idea is long dead (even though I'm sure this thread is gonna rehash it just for the kicks), but this attitude of feeling all morally superior to people who made well-intentioned shitty decisions? It's annoying as hell, and completely unnecessary. It does nothing but make all the programmers in a room feel all warm and giddy for their "wise, career decision" (aka lucky guess that aligned with my skills and interests at 17).
It's just so lame, unproductive, and plain mean. What's the point?
It's not a narrative. It's just common human decency. WHY THE MALICE? They made a bad decision - great: you get to feel superior.
... Are you done yet? Cause that person didn't just disappear after you got done feeling all high and mighty. As someone who has know quite a few theatre, dance and other such "dumb majors". I actually know quite a few who've become very successful working in their field. They may not be actresses or professional dancers, but they work close enough to the field that they feel their degree is useful. Many also chose to work outside that field in other decently paying jobs (technical writers, editors, etc).
Why do you feel the need to just act as if it's hopeless and throw these students out? Is your need to feel superior that significant?
WHO IS THAT SMART? WHO IS THAT AWARE? I just got lucky cause I liked computers, was nerdy, and did decently on exams. I assume most other programmers are the same. I didn't know anything about SV (grew up in rural Kentucky) - I didn't know what the industry was like. I just believed Google when it said I would get a job. Don't act like we all thought very hard and carefully, meticulously planned out whether the thing we enjoyed would be profitable. Most people were 17.
If you were 17 or 18 when you decided to go to college, it probably wasn't a very well-thought out decision. The fact that you look at such students with such ire and derision for wanting a better life and working for that is so heartbreaking and pathetic. There are much more productive places to direct your malice than the students themselves.
You don't have to feel bad for people who made worse decisions than you. Congratulations, people make bad decisions. It's more productive to ask ourselves, "Why?" and "How can we prevent this" and "What can these people do now" rather than just getting all "old man yells at cloud" about "suburban-liberals". Lemme tell you real quick. I know people from every end of the damn political spectrum in this situation, so whatever political image you're projecting onto these students is just nonsense. It isn't a "liberal snowflake" or "feminist" problem or whatever else whacked out narrative you have in your head. The only conclusion you've come to is that teenagers are make bad decisions.
A lot of students of this generation felt that their only way to success was through college. It isn't because they're dumb. It isn't because they're "lazy". It's because they made the wrong decision. Let's all try and be a little more productive and ask "Now what?".
Intel: Huh? Developers? But they don't buy servers full of chips. Why do I have to sell to developers?
Nice catch. And yeah, I just wanted to try and make things clear - no intention to be sassy.
Just wanna say that I completely agree, but also wanted to tack on their non-existent representation in Congress.
If the poster was instead trying to use this bad connotation to assist the argument that Puerto Rico probably shouldn't be a territory (which I now assume after looking at your comment), then that argument was lost in what was written. The writing is unclear in its intent, and that is likely why some folks misunderstood it. It kinda assumes you get lucky and interpret what he's saying the right way.
I don't think it's that odd. It might seem that way though if you're only thinking in terms of numbers. As a rough estimate, we can use the fact that "95% of customers remain without power" and "45% have access to drinking water" [1].
In other words, the numbers say the storm has likely affected all of Puerto Rico, that is about 3 million people.
[1] https://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/1330501/dod-acc...
> The Houston metro has twice the population of Puerto Rico.
Surprisingly correct (the Greater Houston area has a TON of people), but I personally think you're missing an important component of the argument you're making. I don't think it's just simply "More people in Houston -> More media".
I think a more accurate way to phrase it would be:
"More people in Houston the media thinks more people would care about and watch TV for -> more media"
In other words, I think this article is more useful to highlight why media does or does not find a certain topic worth covering. A greater population of people affected doesn't really match up with that argument. Extraordinarily few people are affected by terrorism, yet it's the bread of butter of hot news. Since the number people affected by a disaster doesn't seem to correlate with how the news covers it, I think it's wise to ask, "Why does the news think of Puerto Rico differently than the United States?", rather than assuming population is that reason because it's the simplest thing.
I think it has a lot more to do with the fact that most Americans find it a lot easier to empathize with Bob and Joanne in Houston rather than Jose in Puerto Rico. Take of that what you will. I believe this is what the article was trying to get at. Why does the media think it's easier to empathize with Houston? What makes Puerto Rico different? Does this speak to greater societal issues in the United States and the way its media looks at itself?
You're definitely taking the wrong impression from my post then. Do you code in C / C++?
If you've never had an issue compiling a large codebase as a new developer then I should either bow before your greatness or mock you for your inexperience because in large, complicated projects with 1000-line makefiles included from various sources, on a platform with various skews, flags and options, even the most talented developer can have issues with compilation - especially in most corporate scenarios where the exact command line you need for the internal build tool Steve wrote in 1996 is passed down through email and IM logs. OH and don't forget that some of the objects we link with are actually dummy files to be filled in by a shared library on the target that's been precompiled... OH and some of our functions are actually programmatically generated by a Perl script that runs as part of the build script. These are just some of the things I was exposed to as a junior at various companies.
Building gets messy, quick. Should it be? Probably not. Is it? Hell yes. Download boost or blender or something and try and compile for a non-standard or multiple platforms. My sibling even gives a specific open-source example (although open-source projects are typically MUCH better about getting building to be simple)
More importantly, my point is not that the junior doesn't know how to compile. Compilation is just a place where things get very messy very quickly, and a precise explanation of what was done needs to be given so that the senior can guide the junior along a proper debugging path. Your attitude is precisely the thing I'm recommending against.
> a file.
Whoever needs to only compile one file? That's not the hard part :)
Good point, I was simply saying that in my experience it's the people with "senior" in their job title who do this most often.
> many people come into an organization questioning why or how things are done.
I think Chesterton's fence is a very important concept for new engineers to learn. But sometimes it's still valuable to understand for yourself why that fence is there in the first place rather than just take someone's word for it. The best scenario is an opportunity for a senior to guide a junior in the exact why.
Sadly this is far from my experience as well. It's likely a few toxic work environments.
Not to hijack your comment but I would like to offer a specific example I've seen of toxic behavior from senior developers. Many don't actually read the questions you ask of them or trust your knowledge. It's very similar to attitudes I see on Reddit, HackerNews, or StackOverflow:
"Hey I'm having a bit of trouble getting this to compile / run / there's this weird error I'm encountering. I read the documentation and based on that tried X, Y, and Z, but none of those solved my problem / my problem appears somewhat different." (Where each of X, Y, and Z are somewhat long explanations of what was tried).
"Did you try X?"
"Uh yes I did" (then to be polite I repeat my explanation of doing X)
"What about Y?"
You see what I mean. Especially in text, I find that some senior developers can't be bothered to actually read what someone else said. So if you're worried that you're a poor senior developer, I recommend you actually try and read what your younger colleagues say and ask of you. And especially trust that they are being honest with you. Don't assume that someone is lying or that they're wrong on the first pass - it's condescending, frustrating, and usually a waste of time. If you hired someone in the first place, you should be allowed to assume a bare minimum of competency and if for some reason that fails, you can always question them after the fact. I think it's a result of our engineering mindset to assume absolute idiocy in every case and then work our way up, but I think it's more productive (and especially better leadership) to assume that your subordinates know what they are doing.
In the context of an online forum like this, I think it's best to do the opposite: assume idiocy and work your way to competency - simply because we are all anonymous and don't know each other. The actual workplace should be treated differently though. People always perform better when you put your trust in them.