Well said! I did think about the programmer or programmers when this story first broke. I am not shocked that some executive would come up with the idea...but I am shocked that someone would actually code it. You have to wonder how many people knew and said nothing.
Glad to see support for Scala/Play sprinkled throughout the responses here. I love working with both. Now I'm considering taking the next step and adopting ScalaJS for some small internal apps.
Now we just need a follow-up post from someone at AngelList explaining how their "signal" algorithm strongly weights proximity to tech hub and we will come full circle.
Well you certainly have a point. I would argue that a working society is a society with purpose and is ultimately healthier than a society without jobs but adequate social welfare. But more pragmatically, I don't think a truly livable basic income program is in this country's DNA.
Ah, yes, the old "train everyone to be a doctor, lawyer, or CEO" mindset (actually, 2 of those 3 are at risk these days too!).
Here's the thing. Not everyone in this country can be a CEO. The WALL-E premise of everyone living the fat life (pun intended) while the robots do the work is not viable. The truth is that this country is made up of people with a broad spectrum of capabilities and talents. Furthermore, these people are not fungible resources that can easily relocate to whatever third world country that has now usurped their former job functions. We have already seen large parts of this country's population essentially permanently displaced with the mass outsourcing of manufacturing. These were good paying, stable blue-collar jobs that people who were not born to be CEOs could rely on, live a good life, and raise families. Now look at the former manufacturing cities. They did not all magically retrain to be knowledge workers. Instead, entire communities were laid to waste. Now extend what happened to manufacturing to skilled labor under your "every job to the cheapest bidder" philosophy. What happens? Maybe plastic crap at Toys-R-Us is 3 cents cheaper. But eventually a large enough percentage of this country is displaced to where society itself becomes unstable. When this destabilization eats away at enough of foundations of our society, even the wealthy will be affected.
Government's job is (supposed to be) to take the longview on what is good for a healthy American society, not to facilitate multi-national corporations in their quest to cut every cost they can.
Apparently this is a repost, but I for one missed it the first time around.
I'll just say I found it to be a highly entertaining and well-written account of a nightmare scenario I think many of us here can relate to: The unexpected and unexplained exploding AWS bill.
I'll just say that when it comes to algorithmic portfolio planning, I think there will continue to be downward pressure on the fees that can be charged. Basic portfolio planning and diversification services are clearly becoming commoditized. The traditional high-touch personal wealth advisor will still provide value to their clients, and both clients and advisors will ultimately benefit from the improved technology that handles the actual portfolio management chores.
As the co-founder and CTO of Investmynd, I have strong opinions on the rise of the "robos". We are building a company based on the premise that high net worth clients are not just chasing returns, but can truly benefit from the overall financial guidance that a personal wealth advisor can provide. But in order to provide value, an advisor must truly understand their client. We offer tools to capture not only the traditional profiling data an advisor needs to collect from a client (risk tolerance, cash flow needs, long-term and short-term goals, etc.) but also behavioral finance tools to help both client and advisor understand the distinct personality traits that influence every individual's investing decisions. Are you the type of client that seeks to maintain a high degree of control over your investing decisions? Do you prefer to delegate? Are you unduly optimistic? Pessimistic? Are you a collaborator? Do you prefer to work alone? All of these behavioral tendencies influence how you invest over time, both at a micro-level (individual stock picking, buy and sell decisions, etc.) and macro-level (high level decisions such as switching advisors, moving to a robo-fund, etc.). We firmly believe that advisors can add value beyond the basic asset allocation services offered by a robo-fund, as long as they have the right tools to understand how to best serve their clients.
> "I like that I don't need to render things server-side because then the server is just running a REST-ful API."
Thank you! I never understood the big push towards server-side rendering. I did server side rendering for 10+ years in JSP land. I love having a clean separation between client and server, freeing me to experiment with different languages and frameworks on the server side. Likewise, if I want to experiment with a React component consuming my REST API I can. Not to mention my AWS expenses are kept minimal as most of the processing is offloaded to the client side.
> "I like using nearly straight up HTML as my template."
Agreed again. Am I the only one who works with people who know HTML, CSS, and a little bit of Javascript who can contribute to the front end design? I feel like if I threw a "DOM in code" type of approach at them they would feel lost.
First, I believe them when they say they didn't steal anything. But second, and more importantly, I find it highly unlikely that even if they technically violated some agreement somewhere that it would play any significant role in the success or failure of Shred Video. I think it's just anti-competitive, greedy, ill-will to not allow former employees to succeed or fail based on how well they execute their new venture. It's a dangerous bullying approach that stifles innovation.
@aidenn0
> "Our marketing research shows that there is a $3B market for an app that does X" <-- likely protected.
-----
I don't see how even that would or should be protected.
"and you guys can all be friends". What world are you living in? This man is trying to destroy their livelihood. It's almost like a direct physical attack on them and their families.
It's been a while since I've seen anyone take a stand for IE6 users.
As a web application developer whose bootstrapped startup needs every user it can get, let me just say: I am perfectly willing to forgo all IE6 traffic.
Agreed. I love Flexbox too, but you can't ignore the fact that this very same flexboxin5 tutorial site is completely broken in Safari and has been for months.
How exactly were you "burned by Angular"? Many of us here are using it very successfully. And no, you don't need to "serialize your data into some kind of string format" (at least in the sense that you would never flatten JS objects into serialized strings in order to work with them). Scopes definitely take some getting used to, but they are not magical.
Agreed. Once you are fully up to speed with it (and not at one of the local optima as brilliantly shown on the famous Angular learning curve diagram), it's a pleasure to work with.
Hmm, I think it's easier than ever for the solo programmer. Production deployment is easier, research and knowledge sharing is easier, testing is easier, finding a third party library to help is easier...everything is easier. A good programmer can build a product from beginning to end very easily now.
I just really wish the Play Framework evolutions feature allowed you to give a logical name to your scripts. It would nice to be able to tell at a glance what the high level purpose of each script was.
One thing I always found interesting in these discussions is how the same people who are quick to cite The Mythical Man-Month when it comes to the futility of adding new people to a late project will also claim that working 1-3 hours on some trivial problem is "doing free work" for a company. How much value do you think your 3 hours of work with absolutely no context can possibly add to the company? A company trying to get meaningful work done by secretly farming it out to interviewees is beyond ludicrous. Interviewers are only interested in finding good hires, not in conning you into doing their homework for them.
> Huh. It seems I'm the only one here who finds value in LinkedIn.
I don't get the hate either. When it comes time for your next job search, it's incredibly valuable to have a consolidated list of everyone you've ever worked with where you can see where they work now. When I was looking for some part time work while launching my (bootstrapped) startup, I reached out to about 50 people from my LinkedIn network and it worked out great for me.
As for spam, I just filter and/or ignore it (yes, I get a ton of it, maybe 10+ recruiter emails a day).