trowawee

I'm a little frustrated at the tossed-off reference to Plato and Aristotle at the beginning - "The good life may have sufficed for Plato and Aristotle, but it is no longer enough." - because I feel like that ignores the fact that both Plato and Aristotle, along with a lot of philosophers, actually had a lot to say about physical fitness. Plato was a champion wrestler, and both he and Aristotle viewed physical education as a fundamental component to living the good life. Xenophon quotes Socrates saying this:

"For in everything that men do the body is useful; and in all uses of the body it is of great importance to be in as high a state of physical efficiency as possible. Why, even in the process of thinking, in which the use of the body seems to be reduced to a minimum, it is matter of common knowledge that grave mistakes may often be traced to bad health."

The whole article feels a little too mired in presentism, and ignorant of the history of self-improvement ideas.

I think he was deluded about being the Son of God, but that doesn't mean we should throw out the ethical precepts he advocated. A life lived by the major tenets espoused by Jesus in the Bible - treat other people the way you would want to be treated, be compassionate to people who screw up, take care of people who are less fortunate than yourself - would be a good life. Not surprisingly, those are tenets that are common to most ethical systems, whether they are religious or philosophical.

It's definitely broken. It doesn't help that a lot of the cost of hiring is born in externalities - it's difficult to measure the cost of the time spent screening and interviewing and thinking about prospects, or the cost of the extra 15 or 30 or 60 minutes of Googling/reading the codebase/chasing bad ideas that the rest of the team has to do to replace having that knowledge sitting next to them in the form of a person, or the technical debt accrued when the next thing you build is implemented in a slightly worse form than it could be.

Basecamp appears to be successfully managing this. If you look at their "About Us"[1] page, you see a lot of people who've been there for quite a while. Their solution appears to be:

1. Pay a lot of money: "Our target is to pay everyone at the company in the 95th percentile, or top 5%, of the market, regardless of their role."[2] Previously that was benchmarked to Chicago prices; as of late 2017, that's benchmarked to San Francisco prices.[3]

2. Offer an excellent benefits package that actually benefits people (i.e. isn't just an unused ping-pong table/game console and the promise of "great culture!").[4] Something specifically noticeable is that they offer the kind of benefits that maybe aren't big selling points when you're younger, but that become increasingly enticing as you get older, and especially if you have kids - a fantastic parental leave policy, good retirement policy, short summer weeks.

3. Respect your employees and treat them like adults. Harder to quantify, but if you click around their handbook[5], you see a lot of things that boil down to "We trust you to do the right thing, even in a very independent setting. We won't be looking over your shoulder constantly." I think that's a really scary idea for some people, and a really attractive proposition for others. If you find people who are in that latter group in your hiring process, I suspect it makes it easier to keep them around when most other jobs are not going to involve that level of trust.

The idea of "interesting work keeps good people" - I dunno about that. It's hard to say what's interesting work. It's easy to say "adding new endpoints to a CRUD app" is not interesting, but for some people it might be, or at least it might be "sufficiently interesting" to make a career of it. I have friends in FinTech for whom tracking the market actually brings them joy, and I'm happy for them, but when I try to watch their screen while they tell me about what they're doing, my eyes start to glaze over. I don't know if what Basecamp does counts as "interesting work" for most people, but it seems like it's interesting enough, and the other parts of the company are good enough, for a lot of people to want to stay there for quite some time.

[1]: https://basecamp.com/about/team

[2]: https://m.signalvnoise.com/how-we-pay-people-at-basecamp-f1d...

[3]: https://m.signalvnoise.com/basecamp-doesnt-employ-anyone-in-...

[4]: https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/blob/master/benefits-an...

[5]: https://github.com/basecamp/handbook

You still haven't actually laid out a metric showing that Medicare is inefficient; you just keep asserting it is not efficient in the face of evidence that single-payer systems are in fact pretty efficient. To add more evidence to the "you are incorrect and single-payer systems are in fact pretty efficient" pile, here's another potential efficiency metric we could compare: Medicare spends significantly less (approximate 1.4%) on overhead costs, compared to private insurers that average around 12.4%.[1]

So, again: the US as a whole, using a primarily market-based healthcare system, spends more money per capita for worse results than most other developed nations, most of which are using single-payer systems. Within the American healthcare system, there is a limited single-payer system that only covers a particularly high-risk patient population, and yet despite that patient population, runs more efficiently as an organization than the market alternatives. What evidence are you offering to make the argument that that limited single-payer system is actually more inefficient than the private alternatives?

[1]: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/sep/...

Personally, from my observations as a software engineer married to a doctor and friendly with lots of doctors, and as an occasional participant in the American healthcare system, the general inadequacy of electronic medical systems is one of the most maddening aspects of our system. Epic is a monstrosity and none of the other systems are much better. The tech is outdated, the interfaces are awful, they're incredibly difficult to get to communicate with each other, and it sometimes feels like every single provider is using a different system that won't integrate with any of the other systems. It makes me angry as person whose doctors are using those systems (and it kinda scares me), and it makes me angry as a professional, because whoever the members of our profession are who are building those systems are doing a crap job.

I'm not sure where you live and you're not providing any links or statistics to back this claim up, so it's difficult for me to respond to what you're trying to claim here. If you read the link I provided, you would see that they use cancer, heart disease, and diabetes mortality as a shorthand for patient outcomes in significant health events, and that while the US healthcare system ranks reasonably well in cancer treatment, it is significantly behind other developed nations in treating heart disease and diabetes. They also provide statistics regarding mortality rates in various populations, and the US lags other developed nations in basically all of those populations.

Your point about dentistry is interesting, although also mostly unsupported, and I'm having a difficult time finding good statistics about dental care, spending, and outcomes. Anecdotally, dental care in the United States is sharply linked to money; people with money have good/great teeth and excellent dental care, people without it frequently have major issues with their teeth. I don't know how that compares to other countries.

The link I posted does suggest that economies of scale do, in fact, work for other governments, and that despite covering 100% of their population, they see significantly better efficiencies than our system does. If you're going to claim that economies of scale don't apply here, you're going to have to provide some evidence that contradicts the lower per capita spending/better outcomes we see in other systems.

Actually, the first world nations that have socialized healthcare systems experience better outcomes than the United States with less per capita spending.[1] Medicare as it is currently formulated is specifically targeted towards at-risk populations that have higher incidences of medical usage than the general population; you can't just apply the exact same per capita spending across the American population. 80 year-olds use more health care than 25 year-olds.

[1]: http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/20...

I don't think that's a particularly controversial view. Your last few sentences touch more on the issue - when you're faced with losing someone, it's very easy to say "Pull out all the stops, having [ mom | dad | grandma | grandpa ] here for one more year is worth it." Honestly, the only group of people I've ever been around who have less trouble with that mindset are medical professionals. Most doctors, especially if they're 65+, are DNR/DNI because they've seen what spending significant time in the healthcare system is really like. But I've seen some of those same people fall into the trap of demanding care for their aging parents that they've explicitly rejected for themselves.

Well, I can’t shoot people to death and potentially get away with it at my job. If I was interviewing for a job where I literally held the power of life or death for other people, then yeah, I would probably expect some pretty strict controls on that power.

I would love to see more Bold Disrupting Entrepreneurs trying to disrupt the way that San Francisco treats poor and homeless people.

Also a bit of a misanthrope, but I'd totally second this. I moved to Chicago from another Midwestern city that had no public transit a few years back, and I seriously sing the praises of the CTA to everyone. I have my share of gripes about city life, but on the whole, I love Chicago and I love public transit. I went from spending half an hour every morning and half an hour every evening in the boring-but-also-dangerous hell that is a car commute to spending that same time on a train. I usually listen to music in the morning and read in the evenings, and I've listened to more new albums and read more new books in the last few years than I have in any comparable period since college.

Sure, that's what I was trying to convey in the paragraph after D. That said, I think that even for a company Google's size, having those different skill sets will be useful as your business ages. Google will probably always need a number of people that have memorized every data structure known to humanity, but they would probably be better set up to avoid stagnation and continue in a position of market dominance into the future if they also have a set of people who can come up with new things and implement them.

But also maybe it's better that those people don't end up at Google et al. and that these gigantic companies stagnate and eventually die because their corporate bureaucracy/scar tissue prevents them from hiring the people who can prevent them from stagnating and dying? I dunno, haven't really fleshed this idea out too much.

I get that the response to this will be "they make $INFINITY as-is", but yes, I'd be willing to argue that they should reverse that. My basic argument would look something like:

A) Writing algos on a whiteboard is not the be-all end-all of actual programming

B) The skill set of "can identify things that people want and need and actually implement them" is a useful one that the person who created one of the most widely used pieces of OSS out there has demonstrated they have.

C) There's no evidence that I know of that indicates that whiteboard algo writing correlates with the skill set identified in B, and a fair amount of anecdotal evidence that suggests they aren't correlated. (And there are a range of other skills that are useful for an engineer or someone leading teams of engineers that are similarly not correlated with whiteboard algo writing.)

D) Firms benefit from diversity. Gender-diverse and ethnically-diverse companies are more likely to out-perform less diverse companies.[1] I don't have specific evidence for it, but I suspect that a firm that has a hiring process that brings in people with multiple diverse skill sets will eventually perform better than a firm that only brings in employees with tightly focused, highly similar skill sets.

And to respond to the "well, FB/Amazon/Google make $INFINITY as-is, so nyah-nyah", I would say that those companies are in market-dominant positions now that may make their math on hiring a diverse array of skill sets different from a theoretical firm, but I also suspect that maintaining those dominant positions will be more difficult with an engineering corps that is solely selected on a narrow band of proficiencies.

So, I'm not necessarily saying that Google should change their policy (although I do feel comfortable saying that any company that isn't in that rarified air that decides to copy that policy is making a serious mistake), but I think there's a pretty solid case for why they should at least acknowledge that there are people for whom they should make exceptions and possibly completely reverse that policy and overhaul their hiring process to achieve a broader range of skills among their engineers.

[1]: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our...

No no no, you just don't understand! Solving the issue of "how do we handle mid-month sign-ups for a service that bills monthly" is a nigh impossible problem that requires at least 40 to 50 Stanford- or MIT-trained engineers.

With the fee change, if you have a budget of, say, $15 to spend on creators on Patreon, it makes sense to split that into as few pledges as possible to minimize the number of times you pay the fees.

Can't be a Real Silicon Valley Start-Up™ if you aren't wildly over-capitalized and constantly adding unnecessary headcount.

Because it lets them extract a lot more cash from their users under the cover of processing fees.

Sorry, I should have worded that more precisely. I was basing it on this: https://twitter.com/wombatoverlord/status/938849760198447104 and various pieces I've read by creators. It looks like creators were averaging around 89% in net fees previously, where they will now be averaging 95%. So, ~$0.05 more on a $1 pledge.

Well, the analyses that I'm seeing suggest they'll see about $0.05 more per pledge. So, not "no gain", but very little gain, and almost certainly some cost as patrons leave the service over the price increase.

> If someone wants to fund a creator, they will, and the extra couple of bucks isn't going to discourage that.

I'm explicitly hearing the opposite from creators on Twitter. People are already seeing patrons defecting from projects over this.

I mean, why wouldn't they say that in the messages they've distributed to creators and patrons, then? If that's the case, they have needlessly caused themselves a tremendous amount of public headache by being disingenuous about the reason behind the change.

I believe that Patreon's claim is that the bulk of that money is going to the payment processor, although that argument falls apart if they are batching your payments (which is what they currently do).

I mean, if we can't extract money from people who are richer than God via taxation, I guess I support extracting it via their idiotic investments.

Nope, that's a pretty dead accurate description.

It's the only thing that makes reading stuff about us snake people bearable. And based on another thread here, I see they've already put something in that changes Generation Zed/Z into "Zolom's Children", which is also excellent.

Seconding this. Channels was actually shockingly easy to implement, maintain, and expand, even at a small startup with a fairly small and relatively inexperienced team.

Huh. At my last job, we went from 1.7 to 1.11 and while it wasn't seamless, I suspect we spent about that much actual work time making upgrade-related changes/fixes (120ish person-hours) for all of those upgrades combined. We hadn't jumped to Python 3/Django 2 before I left, but we were starting to plan for it. I knew it was going to be painful, but that's part of the cost of holding out for so long, isn't it?

Welp. Someone has committed perjury today. https://twitter.com/kateconger/status/935584091990138881

"Russo is on the stand now. He says that Jacobs' statement about recruiting inside sources at competitors is false."