taway_1212

Tried installing Linux on MBP last month. Ran away screaming after 30+ hours of dealing with drivers issues. I do this every couple of years, hoping that finally THIS time I can get off Windows. Next attempt will be circa about 2021 probably.

Can you give examples of friends losing “everything” when following their dreams? What happened?

Excellent comment BTW.

It’s also possible that you’re more tired and sick because of the workload’s burden on the body.

Anybody else except the owner?

There’s a huge difference between actually killing someome like the Soviets did (by a bullet to the head or by enslaving and working someone to death) and “killing” (like you call it) by not sharing resources (health care) with someone. The latter is actually at worst a lack of compassion, not murder.

At least in the gamedev area, there's infinite number of games to build (the same way there's infinite amount of novels to write and songs to compose).

Am I not mistaken that in the US it's already common to get paid for blood donations? (Here, in Poland, you only got a couple bars of chocolate for it). So, people in the US are already ok with selling their flesh (at least the part that does it for money, and not to help others).

My policy - you can do whatever you want, incl. working 30 minutes per day, as long as your boss is happy with your performance. If at any time the boss points out that you're not as efficient as he'd like, you can choose to either work harder or find another job.

This approach makes the job contract fair - the boss pays you the minimum amount (or close to it) that you find acceptable, and in exchange you work the minimum amount (or close to it) that he considers acceptable. No reasonable businessman expects you to be killing yourself while working for him - they certainly can _hope_ that you will, but they know that it requires a sucker.

> Portability is nice but the reality is that almost no one uses it.

On the contrary - for example, lots of people develop on MacOS and deploy to Linux.

Find better people? I know it's easier said than done.

Fair enough. If I ever get a laptop with USB-C, I think I'd replace at least my monitors and keyboard mouse to USB-C devices, so that I can get the "docking station" effect. Sucks if you don't want to do that (ex. because you've just recently bought them) though.

What's wrong with USB-C? Sounds like a cool idea in theory - you essentially don't need a docking station.

Dunno about US, but in Europe all banks are like that. They know the work is frustrating and boring (they almost never want to rebuild stuff from scratch, so you end up building on decades-old layers of undocumented crap - COBOL etc.) , so they compensate with good pay and low expectations.

> The thing I find really hard to understand from a business perspective is that bullshit jobs are the low hanging fruit from a cost saving perspective. Why do they persist? What drives managers, teams, companies and cultures to accept bullshit in their environment.

Typically, at least in large organizations, the manager is interested in increasing, not decreasing, his budget. Since everything that happens in modern companies is very opaque (i.e. how much actual value is created is not clear for people outside a given business unit), the budget size/headcount is often used as a proxy for value. So, according to this logic, the bigger the headcount, the more important for the company the manager must be, so he can then negotiate a raise, bonus, or a promotion for himself. I agree with Michael O. Church here - managers in tech are mostly one-man PR firms (managing their own reputation). That sucks, but that's the result of our current workplaces in tech getting so complex that judging actual merit is close to impossible.

I was like that in my twenties in well, now it's no longer an issue. I dunno if it's because I got my life in order (much more excercise now) or if it has just changed with age.

> In social science research there is often a tradeoff between measurement quality and sampling quality. Do you want to measure your variables really well in a small sample, or measure them crudely in a large sample.

Wouldn't it be honest to just accept the fact that both methods don't provide data that's relevant and trustworthy enough for the research at hand? It sound irresponsible to draw conclusions (that will be picked up by newspapers and eventually policy makers) based on data that does not merit them, only because no beter data is available.

In Poland it's similar. However, in UK, Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Finland (just examples of countries where I or my colleagues have contracted in the past) companies are open to paying 100k-200k EUR directly to the contractor, provided he has the skills they're after.

That's true for large companies like Accenture, but there's plenty of setups where the consulting company is essentially doing nothing (only providing a legal intermediary between the consultant and the client) and its cut is below 20%. The net effect is that the consultant is making a multiple of his team mates salaries.

I think this is a deliberate play on the company's part, as it's a way to compartmentalize candidates according to their negotiation skills. Full time jobs are essentially for people who are poor at negotiation and at figuring out what options are available, and the company gets to have them at the fraction of their value. For smarter people, the company bites the bullet and takes them in as consultants, with much higher pay. This way, the official wages for full-time employees get to stay low and you can always say to a gullible candidate that the maximum salary for the position is so and so.

This is all about Western Europe and about huge, bureucratic and successful corporations that have more money that sense (banks etc.). I don't think it applies to smaller companies which are not swimming in money.

Maybe tech writer (author of documentation, tech blog posts on company website etc.)?

> No, prosperity is "financial success" and that's related to the people around you and to some basic standard

If that's the case, then prosperity is purely relative term (as I suspect the "basic standard" will be redefined every decade or so) and hence can never improve. To me, what you're describing sounds more like inequality than prosperity.

C/C++ are basically languages used only for technical products, while Java/web is used internally by pretty much every large company on Earth. This puts immense pressure on salaries.

> Poor people eat worse food; don't get as much exercise; and smoke more

How is choosing to smoke more an inequality?

To be fair, posting on HN under a nickname is closer to writing an anonymous rant on say a toilet wall. I wouldn’t say he’s doing it “publicly”.

To be fair, I don’t think anyone working in CPUs ever claimed that branch prediction is AI.

Don't quit my (shitty) job, and bank the (awesome) money.

Even if you do your best, you won't know if it's enough until you actually try. That's why, from a practical standpoint, it's indistinguishable from a gamble.

If he fixes it, the prices will rise, making Amazon less wonderful.

I am guessing people were off-put by a combination of grandiose goals (can sound crackpot-y to some people) and advertising.

This. If only 10% people had such goal (and did half-decent job at it), maybe it would spread like a virus and transform humanity for the better?

Consumerism requires very high prioritisation of one’s career (as otherwise you won’t be able to afford all the nice stuff), which means working very hard, moving around the country/world for better jobs etc. This must come at the cost of friendships and family bonds.