I prefer to be paid based on how valuable my work is to the employer, not the cost of living wherever I happen to be or even my personal financial needs.
ssh -Y came late. For a long time as I recall you just let your X windows server listen on the network and any other machine could just send it windows to draw. You could just manually set the environment variable on the remote machine. That was still how stuff worked at some banks in 2004, because they were slow to adopt ssh. Wide open connections to X servers enabled both impressive hacks and impressive trolling.
This post would have benefited from a longer title. As it was I was disappointed to not see a picture of a horse with a gun coming out of its forehead.
The pro move, at least with a similar law in Massachusetts, is for the developer to threaten a ridiculous skyscraper with 20% low income housing, and then negotiate with the town to instead, out of the grace of their heart, build a more reasonable all market rate building.
There are a lot of companies that don’t adjust salaries when engineers go remote, but they also only let engineers they are committed to keeping go remote in the first place.
Depends when in your career, and what the company is doing. I went from my first starting salary of $72k at age 23 (in 2003) as engineer #2 to $150k as chief architect about 5 years later. After another 5 years we sold the company, and I was making better than $300k salary plus bonus in 2013. So that’s two doublings in 10 years. But it’s also probably the exception that proves the rule.
I haven’t done the research, but Facebook is generally exceptional. I would expect that on average shareholders of companies that drop on IPO would be better off selling at the open and diversifying than holding for any period of time. I’m even more confident this is true of SPACs.
Utopia of Rules - our culture thinks that if we just had the right set of rules and everyone fallowed them then everything would work well. This is a flawed belief, like other utopias.
Because there is a natural monopoly in being a trusted provider of legal transaction services. Both for integrations and for the fact that no one wants to risk their job saving a few dollars on digital signatures. And no one wants to explain to a future acquirer / legal inquiry / judge / whatever that they are using some weird alternative. “We process the contracts with Docusign” is a safe thing to say. If that wasn’t good enough, a whole lot of other people would also be in trouble, so the collective hallucination that is our legal system will support it.
I don’t see a lot of disruption heading in the direction of local high skilled technicians doing sophisticated component level repair. If anything I see the exact opposite. Unless we have some regulation forcing companies to account for cost of disposing of devices, they are going to keep making devices more disposable.
Maintaining inventory makes “cost” a weird concept. And I can’t think of any regulation requiring anyone to provide something at “cost” that works well.
Goals masquerading as strategy is an incredibly common problem. Good Strategy Bad Strategy is my favorite treatment of the problem. Unfortunately a lot of executives don’t like to be told they are suppose to take responsibility for strategy. Here is an article length version from the author: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-cor...
The real change was Intel shifting from manufacturing commodity RAM to creating microprocessors. The 4004 was a major factor. But it was the corporate strategy change, leading to 8008, 8088, etc which really drove the success of Intel and the microcomputer.
Anybody asking me for money to cure Alzheimer’s I just at this point assume is Theranos 2.0. There are plenty of well informed life sciences investors with very deep pockets.
People were incredibly gullible in the 19th century, so I’m not sure your premise is true. I think 99% of people are equally gullible and 1% of people are notably less gullible and so there is a small improvement between the 19th century and today.
Depends on the scale of the outcome and whether you are growing in responsibility/impact as the business grows. If you want to make $1+M on a $50M outcome you better be early and hope management doesn’t raise too much money. If you want to make $1+M on a $5B outcome, you want to be a top 200 employee, which is certainly easier if you are early, but is possible if you come later and make a big contribution.
The idea that the only, or even primary, incentive to do stuff is money is an invention of 20th century economics. It was then tragically taught to most educated people, especially business leaders. That made it a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, along with the shareholder value myth (the idea that companies should be (may even be required to be) entirely short term profit motivated out of a duty to shareholders. These are among the most harmful ideas from the 20th century. To answer your original question, no money is not the only incentive to do stuff. But in Econ 101 that assumption is made to make the math easy.
My old Brother printer has an installation utility for OSX that doesn’t run under modern Java for a trivial reason. I recompiled it and swapped in a library to make it work. The only point of the tool is to configure the printer (over USB) to talk to the right wifi.
Breaks down instantly when you try to define which activities count as businesses, or try to define why individuals are offering goods and services to one another.