While currently it’s open season on the golden goose in America, the golden goose has been under attack for decades. Academia has a strong publish-or-perish culture that I believe is stifling, and industry has become increasingly short-term driven.
Ironically, one of the frustrations I’ve had with the research funding situation long before DOGE’s disruptions is the demands from funders, particularly in the business world, for golden eggs from researchers without any regard of how the research process works.
A relevant quote from Alan Kay:
“I once gave a talk to Disney executives about "new ways to kill the geese that lay the golden eggs". For example, set up deadlines and quotas for the eggs. Make the geese into managers. Make the geese go to meetings to justify their diet and day to day processes. Demand golden coins from the geese rather than eggs. Demand platinum rather than gold. Require that the geese make plans and explain just how they will make the eggs that will be laid. Etc.” (from https://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/)
I dream of a day where we see more places like the old Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, and where universities strongly value freedom of inquiry with fewer publication and fund-raising pressures. However, given the reality that there are many more prospective researchers than there are research positions that potential funders are willing to support, it’s natural that there is some mechanism used to determine which researchers get access to jobs and funding.
>> Prior to WWII the U.S was a distant second in science and engineering. By the time the war was over, U.S. science and engineering had blown past the British, and led the world for 85 years.
Citation needed.
The United States has been a scientific powerhouse for most of its history. On the eve of WWII the United States was the largest producer of automobiles, airplanes and railway trains on earth. It had largest telegraph system, the largest phone system, the most Radio/TV/Movie production & distribution or any country. It had the highest electricity generation. The largest petroleum production/refining capacity. The list goes on.
This lead in production was driven by local innovations. Petroleum, electricity, telephones, automobiles and airplanes were all first pioneered in the United States during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
We can debate the causes of this but saying that the United States was a 2nd tier power behind the British or the Germans is demonstrably false.
This is the first thing that struck me. Dangerous to weave narratives where large scale phenomena are elegantly explained by a single cause. It's always a confluence of multiple factors: influx of Nazi scientists, the policy mentioned in the article, the fact that Europe was recovering from a war, and perhaps others we're failing to notice.
A favorite example of mine is the idea that World War 1 would not have happened if only Duke Ferdinand's driver had been told of the route change during the Sarajevo visit.
Too generic terms become an issue at some point. "Government" and "market" are not one thing that you can easily measure to "big" or "small" or "good" or "bad".
To make a technical parallel can we really say "C is good, Java is bad"?
I think focus should be much more on discussing actual policies and their impact - which can become quite complex - rather than stamp everything with "more/less government/market" and then use the predefined belief that one or the other is good. I personally favor various policies, and I can't put all of them at the same time in a box with a label of "more government" or "less government".
> Just with a bunch of extra features hastily grafted and grown organically, but never dealing with the insane amount of technical debt.
This describes probably 95%+ of the entire software world, from enterprise, to SaaS to IoT to mobile to desktop to embedded... Everything seems to be hastily thrown together features that barely work and piles of debt that will never get fixed. It's a wonder anything actually even works. If cars (the non-software parts) were made like this, there would be millions of them breaking down by the side of the road daily.
This jives with my general reaction to the post, which was that the added complexity and difficulty of reasoning about the ranges actually made me feel less confident in the result of their example calculation. I liked the $50 result, you can tack on a plus or minus range but generally feel like you're about breakeven. On the other hand, "95% sure the real balance will fall into the -$60 to +$220 range" feels like it's creating a false sense of having more concrete information when you've really just added compounding uncertainties at every step (if we don't know that each one is definitely 95%, or the true min/max, we're just adding more guesses to be potentially wrong about). That's why I don't like the Drake equation, every step is just compounding wild-ass guesses, is it really producing a useful number?
In the grand HN tradition of being triggered by a word in the post and going off on a not-quite-but-basically-totally-tangential rant:
There’s (at least) three areas here that are footguns with these kinds of calculations:
1) 95% is usually a lot wider than people think - people take 95% as “I’m pretty sure it’s this,” whereas it’s really closer to “it’d be really surprising if it were not this” - by and large people keep their mental error bars too close.
2) probability is rarely truly uncorrelated - call this the “Mortgage Derivatives” maxim. In the family example, rent is very likely to be correlated with food costs - so, if rent is high, food costs are also likely to be high. This skews the distribution - modeling with an unweighted uniform distribution will lead to you being surprised at how improbable the actual outcome was.
3) In general normal distributions are rarer than people think - they tend to require some kind of constraining factor on the values to enforce. We see them a bunch in nature because there tends to be negative feedback loops all over the place, but once you leave the relatively tidy garden of Mother Nature for the chaos of human affairs, normal distributions get pretty abnormal.
I like this as a tool, and I like the implementation, I’ve just seen a lot of people pick up statistics for the first time and lose a finger.
Unfortunately as a nation our culture appears to have shifted away from taking personal responsibility for anything. It's always someone else's fault now. Some else's responsibility. Someone else's job.
I have seen many comments that this has become worse since the isolation period caused by COVID. I tend to agree but I also think it goes deeper than that. We have some problems in our society that have been festering for much longer and have root causes like inequality, lack of opportunity, and a lack of constructive facilities and positive role models.
I hear a lot from friends who work in education about children coming to school with profoundly disturbing attitudes and other children who have experienced nasty forms of abuse. And yes - absolutely the schools and the government should push back against problems like bullying and misogyny and racism where they can.
But maybe the answer here isn't just trying to lock up this week's negative social media influencer or introduce unusual and potentially dangerous concepts like regulating online content that is "harmful" yet not illegal or expecting governments to spy on us all and interfere in our lives more often. Maybe we should first be asking why so many kids think they have nothing better to do than spend all day watching that nasty online content in the first place. Maybe we should be asking why so many kids are given unsupervised and unregulated access to ideas they aren't ready to deal with yet.
That's about education and children but you can pick almost any hot button topic and find similar examples. Try immigration or people who live entirely off state benefits. You can find plenty of examples where people advocate for papering over social problems but there's a sad lack of discussion about properly fixing the cracks underneath. Those are the real social harms we should be trying to reduce. Unfortunately their perpetrators are often among the first to assume it must be someone else's problem.
My first job out of school was in defense operations research. Not at RAND, so maybe of limited relevance. But I found it less like modern data science and more like GOFAI. The work was mostly coming up with hand engineered models of military operations and then guesstimating the crucial variables since they were impossible to actually measure. I also observed that the analysis was rarely independent so it could inform policy in an unbiased way but instead was shaped to support particular policy choices.
The real skill is storytelling. Or, frame setting if you want. It absolutely can lead to safety and empowerment, but it’s an incredibly difficult set of skills for most people to learn. Essentially, instead of expressing content into a conversation, you express context. Instead of “stop spending so much of our money”, you say “You know, I keep thinking about what it’ll be like for us together when we retire. I have this nightmare where we’re poor…”. Or, someone says “You’re just not listening!” And you respond with “Oh, if youre not feeling listened to, let me try to express back to you what I’m hearing you say. And after you feel heard, then I’ll respond.”
Frame setting is a tool of power. It’s probably the single greatest tool that exists for manipulating people. (Well, aside from offering people giant sums of money). It’s the tool of good therapists and psychopaths the world over. And I think the only way to build resilience against it is to learn the skill yourself.
(It also comes with a paired skill - which is to become consciously aware of the frame someone is speaking from, and being able to name and debate the frame itself.)
Robert Kegan has a developmental model that bunches people into one of 5 progressive stages of cognitive development. The 5th stage is (very loosely) characterised by this sort of thinking. They did a broad assessment of the population and found only about 5% of people assessed are in this stage.
The sad truth is that most people spend their whole lives subject to the frames that other people set for them. Speech from outside the frames you know is usually incomprehensible.
This is an interesting article if you read it like a howto for constructing a neural network for performing a practical task. But if you take it at face-value, and follow a similar method the next time you need to parse some input, then, well, I don't know what to say really.
The author takes a hard problem (parsing arbitrary input for loosely-defined patterns), and correctly argues that this is likely to produce hard-to-read 'spaghetti' code.
They then suggest replacing that with code that is so hard to read that there is still active research into how it works, (i.e a neural net).
Don't over-index something that's inscrutable versus something that you can understand but is 'ugly'. Sometimes, _maybe_, a ML model is what you want for a task. But a lot of the time, something that you can read and see why it's doing what it's doing, even if that takes some effort, is better than something that's impossible.
Unlikely, but… Small arms enthusiasts are often not great with hearing protection. As hearing declines, men especially tend to be less proactive in seeking care, mostly hearing aids.
Why does this matter? Hearing loss is often a causative factor with depression, social isolation, anxiety and early onset dementia.
Fear and anxiety drive a lot of the behavior that gun merchants leverage to sell guns. It’s a vicious cycle.
Could also be the difference between having a plan with long term goals that leads you to a new city vs not knowing what to do next and defaulting to just going back home. Maybe it's not that home is bad, but the fact you ended up there.
This makes a lot of sense. People are fundamentally changed by their experiences in combat zones. I'd imagine that going somewhere new afterwards allows you to be whoever you now are on your own terms, whereas going home means continually experiencing the pain of no longer fitting in to the life and loving relationship that you'd had before, with no relief in sight.
Cicero talks about how you can get comfortable with the fact that you eventually won’t be around in his On Old Age... he says the key is making a positive, meaningful impact. If you do that, then even if you die, your positive influence lives beyond your own years.
“The actor, for instance, to please his audience need not appear in every act to the very end; it is enough if he is approved in the parts in which he plays; and so it is not necessary for the wise man to stay on this mortal stage to the last fall of the curtain. For even if the allotted space of life be short, it is long enough in which to live honorably and well...
But somehow, my soul was ever on the alert, looking forward to posterity, as if it realized that when it had departed from this life, then at last would it be alive.”
There just are some people who don't care about career and money. They need money to pay their checks but they don't spend a second thinking about it any other moment. Some people are even more weird and hate specializing and planning, they just do whatever comes into their hand. CSS this, Verilog that, organize a team, interview some candidates, train some sales, build an office network (cabling + rack + AD etc), do some email tech support, proofread some contracts, design some boxes, walk a boss' dog, whatever, don't care, here and now, on and on, year by year, from the day they're in a high school to the day they look like Dumbledore. This is a legitimate way of life for those who are fortunate enough to be uninterested in alcohol.
Money- and status- hungry people don't understand this mindset. They are here to sacrifice their young years doing whatever it takes specifically to grow rich step by step and nothing else, then gtfo. But some people just live, have simple fun and feel no urge to change anything. Someone would say this is out of accord with the American spirit but in fact it's just another kind of it, like that H. D. Thoreau wrote about.
Legal and ethical obligations aside (it is illegal in most places, and unethical everywhere [1]) there are (mostly bad) reasons for discriminating based on age in some places.
First though it's worth pointing out that the industry as a whole is young. When i started in the 90s everyone was young. Most businesses didn't have a computer at all. A generation of 90's kids went round writing software, selling computers, building networks and so on. There were -very- few old, experienced folk from the mainframe era floating around.
Today we're in our 50s, so at least we exist, but we're still swamped by folks who started this millennium.
So first problem is that most startups (founded by youngsters) probably encounter a lot more youngers than olders. Since the goal is to get-rich-quick, it seems counterintuitive to hire others who haven't done that.
Secondly, as people develop their careers they slowly stop job-hopping. Most folk in their 50s have found their home. Especially if they're good. So (consulting aside) startup jobs are not that attractive. Cheap pay, long hours, opionated (inexperienced) founders, isn't overly attractive to me.
All of this plays into the idea that "its a young person's game". Which of course is nonsense. We stood on the shoulders of those who went before, and the systems of today stand on ours. The folks who built Unix and Cisco, HP, and so on were all previous generation. Today the people who built the internet are over 50.
The valley may like to discard the old, because they remind us that the VC model mostly spits out failure. But outside that bubble companies mostly value stable, experienced, quality "old folk" who want to provide real value, not scratch lottery tickets.
[1] Ethics are subjective, but we're all getting older, so you might want to sow good karma while you're young.
For all you founders and YC aspirants who build companies to get rich as quickly as possible: think of what this man achieved and the lives that have been changed by creating something built to last. By not extracting maximum labor from employees and maximum cash for yourselves but by recognizing you matter less than you think to your company's success and your employees matter more. I buy Bob's Red Mills flour a few times a year and probably will for the rest of my life. TextPayMe, Loopt, Infogami, Memamp, Simmery- do we even remember what those first YC companies tried to do? Think about making things people will remember in a decade, or even 4.
This is good and realistic advice. Companies exist to make profit and returns for their investors/shareholders and ultimately they will do what this necessary to make that happen. Layoffs are just another (unfortunate) business transaction.
I was once in a meeting with an SVP who was going over what he was going to say in an upcoming all-hands meeting. He kept referring to employees as “resources” and I told him he should call them people or team members as resources was dehumanizing and made it sound like we’re just line items on a spreadsheet and pawns on a chessboard. He looked at me and said you’re right - that is how they look at things, but thanked me for reminding me of his audience. He was candid with me only because I was also high up in the org.
Companies are not your friend. The people above you in the org are not your friend. You are not special or different or immune or safe. Ultimately, you do have to look out for yourself. If a company is able and willing to terminate your job for financial reasons, you need to be willing and able to terminate your job for financial reasons too - on your own terms and with a better higher paying job lined up. It’s just another business transaction. Loyalty is dead. Act accordingly.
>"Your job is not safe" does not mean you should do everything possible to keep your job -- allowing yourself to be unfairly exploited and abused.
In my opinion it should mean that you not only consider the relationship transactional, you consider yourself as an independent business operating within a business transaction, an LLC or sole proprietorship if you will. Remove yourself from emotional attachment this way.
This line of thought leads people to naturally adopt the exact same sort optimization (exploitation) strategies businesses (your employer) does with the same justifications they use. As such you should focus on diversifying your employment or making sure you’re diversely employable should you need new revenue streams, have savings and cash reserves for economic downturns, and focus on your profit margins (time invested vs paid) and so on and optimize around these sort of criteria.
Obviously if you have a good transactional relationship and are to some degree dependent on that relationship you don’t do everything possible to undermine it (just as employers have limits they’ll stop at before employees start to flee) but never consider it at any sort of emotional or attached level, it’s merely a strategic relationship and be ready to optimize wherever you can for your LLC depending on its goals (i.e. your goals).
I see what you are saying. I am an engineer-turned-EM and you don't know me, so please take everything I say with a grain of salt:
> Your job is NOT safe.
Nothing will make execs happier than having this line of thought popularized amongst engineers. It will allow them to hire cheaper, and exploit existing engineers more.
I think a better way to put it is:
"A job is not your family, and a job is not your identity. You must rely on yourself"
This line of thinking still means diversifying your options, building an emergency fund, have a fulfilling life outside work, keep doing interviews from time to time, spend some cycles thinking about "what would I do if I where to build my own startup", etc. But it will not put you in the "oh my I need to accept whatever they offer me right now" path.
Especially on FAANG companies, it very easy to "get lost in the technical work" and to "offshore your life's direction to the company", so to speak. If you think this might be happening to you, I recommend involving someone else - a coach, a therapist, a friend, a brother or a priest. Whatever works for you. Someone from outside the company. It might be scary and uncomfortable at first, but taking the driver's seat of your life is worth it.
My firm made billions last year too and just laid off hundreds of engineers (a decent %)
Some of the best engineers, those that I respected the most, went. People who make no sense.
After last year's layoffs they told us they were "done" and it was "all behind us". Last year then turned out to a better year financially than 2022 (we have access to the top line numbers)
You can't trust anything anyone above you in the management chain tells you. Not one thing. Not ever. Even if they're being truthful they were probably lied to themselves or told a half truth.
Never get invested emotionally. SWEs in particularly no longer live in a world where you can expect to have a rewarding career working for >=5 years at any given firm. Take their fucking money, build a big emergency fund, save, invest, and focus on the rest of your life outside of work.
You can be somewhere for 10 years. have glowing performance reviews, feel like you're making a difference, think it'll never happen to you, not even be aware the company is in shit, and then... tomorrow you're gone.
I guess so, but that’s also how it’s always been. Not everyone was a hippie. Not everyone was a yuppie. Not everyone was grunge. Not everyone was Johnny Football.
The prevailing zeitgeist narrative about any given era is all at once revisionist, simplistic, and projected onto it after the fact.
One could assign some characteristic to the preset era like the dominance of influencers and gurus or something of that sort. It will be easy 15 years from now to look back at how everything from makeup to IT infrastructure culture became hitched to “influencers”.
Maybe that's a good thing? I remember a few years ago when journalists were outsourcing their reporting to Twitter and we had headlines like "The Internet is Freaking Out About X" when it was really a dozen nobodies on Twitter. The death of Twitter and the re-fragmentation of the internet sounds like a breath of fresh air compared to the purple haze of the last decade's centralized web.
Feels like a move in the right direction. For a long while now, subcultures a
have been getting publicized and subsequently commercialized so quickly that the subcultures die before they mature. Maybe something interesting will come out of this, who knows.
If my friends hadn’t had such vividly bad experiences with the compiler class, I might not have taken the distributed computing class that was one of the other options to fulfill that category.
It’s not the most defining class of my undergrad years, but it was pretty damned close.
The fact that most people designing systems don’t know this material inspires a mix of anger and existential dread.
Reminds me of ZX81's BASIC: you didn't type keywords. There was a key for each one on the specialized keyboard. The editor was context-sensitive - in other words, a parser-driven lexical analyzer was you. At the time, it seemed a little magical to me that it knew whether you wanted to type a word/number versus a keyword, and what kind of keyword (but really, the pedagogically relevant aspect was that I knew).
BTW Significant to the ZX81 was the memory saved by storing tokens instead of their text representation. Yes. It had 1k RAM kids - including display memory (no separate GPU). This parsing when entered would also make runtime faster.
Ironically, one of the frustrations I’ve had with the research funding situation long before DOGE’s disruptions is the demands from funders, particularly in the business world, for golden eggs from researchers without any regard of how the research process works.
A relevant quote from Alan Kay: “I once gave a talk to Disney executives about "new ways to kill the geese that lay the golden eggs". For example, set up deadlines and quotas for the eggs. Make the geese into managers. Make the geese go to meetings to justify their diet and day to day processes. Demand golden coins from the geese rather than eggs. Demand platinum rather than gold. Require that the geese make plans and explain just how they will make the eggs that will be laid. Etc.” (from https://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/)
I dream of a day where we see more places like the old Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, and where universities strongly value freedom of inquiry with fewer publication and fund-raising pressures. However, given the reality that there are many more prospective researchers than there are research positions that potential funders are willing to support, it’s natural that there is some mechanism used to determine which researchers get access to jobs and funding.