Excellent article; I thought the section copy-pasted below to be a rather non-trivial, unintuitive, and meaningful lesson:
> Craig : How was it to ride that wave, especially when the bottom fell out in 2000?
> Tim : When things are going well and you’re in a growth industry, you don’t have to deal with many difficult issues. It’s the old cliche, winning solves everything.
> Craig : For sure.
> Tim : It’s really true. It solves everything… or maybe better said, it masks all your mistakes. A lot of the mistakes you make get masked because you receive almost no negative feedback.
> But then the bottom fell out and the board let Tim Koogle go. The upper ranks of management emptied out pretty quick, except for me and the CTO who stuck around. We got a new CEO and set of peers in upper management. Let me just say, I learned a whole lot more about business on the way down than I did on the way up.
I don't know if it's apropos to talk sports, but in a very real way this is what happened to the Warriors. They had an historic, record-breaking season that allowed them all sorts of bad habits. In the Finals when they are on the verge of reaching their goal, those bad habits showed and contributed to their falling short. Coach Steve Kerr talked about recognizing those mistakes during the season but it is hard to correct those things when you are winning. Perhaps a good lesson.
The glow of outward success may very well be a lagging indicator of eventual failure, if not the cause. Companies, nation states of years past can also follow this rough pattern.
> This phenomenon brings to mind a comparison used by Thomas Mann in his great novel Buddenbrooks. Observing that human institutions often show the greatest outward brilliance at a moment when inner decay is in reality farthest advanced, he compared one of those stars whose light shines most brightly on this world when in reality it has long since ceased to exist.
The England rugby team do a lot of work with the military and other organisations to look at how to develop leadership. After a win they spend a long time analysing how they played and what they, individually and collectively, could have done better. After a loss they have a much shorter washup. It might sound counter-intuitive but it is much easier to get people to say "if I had done this we could have scored even more points" after a win than admitting that they could have won except for something they did wrong.
The relevant bit was: during the season coach Kerr recognized faults that he found difficult to correct. Not in hindsight. The discussion is about what happens when you are winning. No one is making excuses for losing.
Success hides failure...every company does some things right and some things wrong, but when things are going well it can be very hard to get anyone to acknowledge the wrong things. People can always point to the profits and use that as evidence for staying the course, even on internal issues that don't directly relate to P&L.
IMO this is what ultimately kills successful companies- once they've conquered their market (whatever they see their market as being), it's all too easy to take success for granted and get too focused on internal politics. The absence of fierce external competition is the ultimate test of a company's internal culture.
Interestingly, this problem of decadence and decay scales to countries, royal dynasties, empires, etc. We don't yet have any companies so large that their period of decline has been able to last for centuries, but it's theoretically possible.
I don't think Oracle and IBM will be around in 2050, but I wouldn't have thought they'd be around now in 2005, so my perception is probably off.
Hard to say if there are companies whose decline lasted over a century, but there are definitely some who are close. Consider the East India Company which was established in 1600 and lasted until the late 1800s. In my native Canada, the Hudson's Bay Company was granted a charter in 1670 and at one point owned half the country. It has been struggling for very nearly 100 years and I think you could say that it has been on a downturn for at least 150 years.
I don't believe the proper narrative about how the decline of the Roman empire was due to decadence. I believe it was a victim of its own success. Roman ideas, organization, and commerce spread out to the surrounding kingdoms, eventually each region developed a polity progressively capable of challenging Rome. It didn't happen all at once, and if you look at it in the micro, it does look like a decline, but in the macro, the so-called decline of the Roman empire was a story of progress.
You can generalize this. Isolate the idea that the organization was built on, then see what happened to it. Usually, you'll see that the 'killer app' that gave them the ability to rise to the top created a new world in which everyone has that ability to exercise it. If you don't come up with a new one, you'll eventually lose your privileged position.
There's nothing wrong with this at all. We just are wired to want success so we go looking for personal failures rather than thinking bigger.
Except you don't see this in the Roman Empire. If anything, the economic sophistication of their european opponents steadily declined, making war a more appealing option than trade for them.
And in warfare itself, with the exception of the Sassanids and the civil wars, the Romans did not face armies that had adapted their tactics. Rather, the longstanding issue of inferior roman cavalry in both quantitative and qualitative terms and the decline in quality of their infantry legions/ reliance on auxiliaries made them far more vulnerable to concentrations of heavy cavalry, horse archers, and non-pitched battles. For a variety of factors the averagesquality of western Roman armament and training consistently declined from about 200 AD on, which is the opposite of what you're saying.
Decadence is a politically loaded and over-determined word and there are myriad factors contributing to the fall of the Roman empire in the west, but the thesis that the germanic, central asian and gaulic tribes had successfully adopted Roman administrative and logistical forms has no historical basis. I get that it's supposed to be a cute metaphor for tech companies and market-wide adoption of an innovation, but if a metaphor is advancing a novel thesis that's empirically false, it's not a good metaphor.
I've seen this happen in a couple of industries and have joined two companies at the start of the reorg/turnaround. There is a lot to do as until the pressure is on a lot gets ignored and runs inefficiently.
It's a different kind of challenge but just as fun.
"I went there with a positive attitude. The work was interesting. It was rewarding and intellectually challenging. But after a few months, I remember looking at my boss and my boss’ boss, and my boss’ boss’ boss, and saying to myself, “You know what? I don’t want any of their jobs.” I saw how they spent their time and didn’t find it interesting or very rewarding. They spent their time managing meetings and office politics."
I think it's fine to decide you don't want their jobs, but it's a mistake to frame it as "bullshit" which he does after the section you quote. Human nature isn't bullshit, and any endeavor which requires a large number of people to accomplish requires the management of human nature.
No, sitting in meetings all day, essentially accomplishing nothing really is bullshit. Granted, there are some super productive management teams out there, but the majority of time is spent dealing with nonsense politics, and having meetings to schedule meetings. Stereotypes have basis in reality.
Having held a few of those jobs, I understand the sentiment, but that doesn't mean those positions are unnecessary, especially as organizations get beyond a certain size. I understood his take on it to be that it just wasn't for him since he likes to be able to see something he has built in a fairly short timeframe, and at a place like Motorola in the '90s, middle management and probably many of the executives wouldn't get that kind of feedback.
From my experience managing managers in big corporations, a lot of the bullshit is created by people who want their own way after a decision has been made. They tend to be the reason meetings are called in the first place, since someone has to make the effort to get everyone moving in the same direction. They are also the most likely to walk around calling bullshit on everything that's happening in the place.
There's no need to denigrate the work of the people who spend more of their time than they'd like in meetings trying to get a big company of individuals to cooperate on goals that are set by executives.
As an aside, there are people who enjoy the kind of work that doesn't necessarily provide instant feedback. Teachers come to mind. Sure, there are little victories and defeats every day, but at the end of the year, there are times when they sigh and wonder what good it did. Try going to a good teacher's retirement party or funeral sometime and mingle with those who come to pay their respects. You'll often hear things like, "He changed my life" or "I'd probably be in prison now if she hadn't been so patient with me." Similarly, the people who make big organizations actually work have an impact on many lives and on the direction of companies, the effects of which are not always visible for years or decades.
I'd like to commend you on a well-balanced reply. The following line really struck me, "..., a lot of the bullshit is created by people who want their own way after a decision has been made." That plays out daily in my organization.
I've come to appreciate how little I know about management over the past few years. I stayed friends with an IT Director who led my department around 1996. He used to say, "If you want to be successful as a manager, you have to remember that your main job is managing personalities everything else falls in place if you do that right." Having run a very small organization for the past couple of years, his message was on target.
My experience with teachers is that the really good ones tend to know. Students come back to say so if a teacher really helped them. My daughter's teacher has former students coming back all the time. My father's former students came back to say thanks. My brother-in-law's students come back. So, it's not quite the tragic, post-mortem recognition that Van Gogh received.
I think the point was that he was emphasizing the bosses bosses bosses boss. Many levels of nonsense, leading to politics. Managers do need to exist, and I agree they have a purpose, but often times, even in the company I work for currently. There is more management than there is workers.
The whole flat org with minimal managers "ideal" has been tried lots of places and always failed. I think even Google tried it at some point. Let me tell you a few things that happen when your org gets flatter:
1. Decisions get bottlenecked
Typically, the "flat org" thing gets tried without empowering the rank-and-file to make big decisions. So decisions that would normally get resolved one or two levels up the chain all get bottlenecked at the GM or CEO, who (now having 100 reports) does not have the knowledge or context to always make the right call.
2. Extreme micromanagement
A counter to #1 is if those decisions actually DON'T get bottlenecked: If you think it sucks to have your manager nit-picking over every little engineering decision you make, imagine how bad it is having the CEO do it, and feel he has to because he has no other managers to make those decisions. Let me tell you from experience: It sucks.
3. You get less time with your boss
When your boss has 4-5 direct reports, they can spend time with you weekly to chat about current challenges, help you with career development, give you pointers on things, etc. When he/she has 20-30 directs, good luck getting any airtime at all.
4. Shit rains down on you
A great manager shields his reports from 95% of the shit that gets rained down on him by the higher-ups. Uninformed complaints, decision churn and flip-flopping, "strategic enterprise synergy workshops", requests for perpetual motion machines and features that defy mathematics: If your boss is good, he doesn't let any of this crap get down to you. Without management, you as 3rd engineer from the left on WhatsitApp Project, get a firehouse of this in your face every day.
5. No career advancement
Granted, this is not important to everyone, but if your boss is the CEO or if his/her boss is the CEO, you're unlikely to get promoted at all during your tenure at that company, or you're going to have to wait for one of them to quit. Whereas if you're manager #6 down, there will be plenty of opportunities to find a #5 level manager position to move up to at some point.
I have been thinking about how to solve this problem and have been wondering what AI can do to help. There must be a way of using AI to help empower workers to act in a co-ordinated way to run the business effectively.
Most of the "sharing" or "on-demand" economy is based on this value proposition. Replace a manager's job with software and suddenly your taxi drivers, hotel workers, cooks, delivery drivers, administrative assistants, artists, visual designers, computer programmers, etc. can report to software instead of a person.
You could argue that the reason Uber etc. have found success recruiting workers for pretty shitty wages is because people are willing to give up that much money to not have to deal with a boss.
This trend also has a long way to go: for one, wearables will open up electronic coordination to people whose jobs normally require having their hands full, and two, improved AI will allow the automation of increasingly complex managerial tasks.
There's a balance to how flat an org can be. One can still have a 100,000 person organization that is only 7-8 levels deep. e.g. Starbucks has ~120k US employees and is about 8 levels from a barista to CEO. My organization is about 3k people and is about ~5 levels to the CEO.
I really really hate having weekly meetings with my manager (or any other manager that I had) I don't see a point, it is stressful and takes me away from my job.
More over I don't know any other developer that likes those 1 on 1 meetings with their manager.
I would love a manager that doesn't have time for them, if I would want something from him I would go to his desk and say to him, why meet?
And don't get me even started on the career development, the biggest bull*t is the whole carreer development process and how I have to write what I will do this year, what I did etc.
Are you by any chance a manager, because you sound like one :)
I had a coworker that used to say that when you have more managers than toilets, something's wrong.. To be honest the company we were working on has now laid off more than half the team!
OK, so imagine that middle-manager person stopped dealing with nonsense politics and took on a role in eng or sales or whatever. Would the nonsense politics disappear?
I honestly think it would decrease. There are more managers than management work so they start creating their own work. That applies to all roles when there are too many people. Designers will redesign constantly when they have nothing else to do, programmers will refactor evertyhing, bureaucrats will create rules.
As a way for people to feel like they understand something that they really don't. The human mind will make all kinds of contraptions (religion etc.) as an attempt to rationalize and understand the unknown. I think stereotypes serve the same purpose.
If that's your example, well then my counter is that Apple is arguably in the least innovative, most boring slump of their existence. Nothing but incremental nonsense hardware wise, a desktop OS going no where, and a mobile interface that has largely remained unchanged since 2006.
Well, the author talked about meetings after meetings, slow progress and a huge hierarchy of bosses, and you assumed they are wrong to call it bullshit because "Human nature isn't bullshit, and any endeavor which requires a large number of people to accomplish requires the management of human nature."
As if its inevitable that the "management of human nature" should necessarily take the form the author argued against.
A hierarchy of bosses is not the same thing as Dilbertesque management culture. An organization above a certain size requires managers of managers and meetings. There certainly are bad managers and bad meetings, but it is bad logic to jump from that to a dismissal of management and meetings in general.
Hmmm....That's basically where I am now. I look at what my superiors are doing and it's just constant meetings with the occasional writing up tasks and doing code reviews, pretty much nothing else. I'm not sure I want to get promoted into that role.
I've had project management roles before, but the meetings were minimal and I still got to code at least 40% of the time.
I am going through that right now. For a long time I was working more on infrastructure in the background where we just had to make things working for other engineers without execs paying much attention. Now I am working on a product and the whole process is a nightmare.
- Long meetings with directors and project managers who never read any previous reports so you spend hours explaining the same thing again and again.
- Demanding precise estimates while requirements are nebulous
- There is always one more manager who pops up from nowhere who derails a finally reached agreement with bringing up another nonsense issue
- There are plenty of managers who come into a meeting who monopolize the first half hour asking questions that have been asked and answered a long time ago. Then they monopolize the second half explaining the stuff they learned in the first half with an authoritative voice. They forget everything soon and three weeks later it's the same.
- Creating more teams to make "quick decisions" consisting of insiders who spend weeks deciding how often and when they should meet.
- Some VP inserts another angle into the project that gets refuted several times but somehow keeps coming back.
It's insane. The only explanation I have is that some people are just social and political animals that enjoy talking for hours and getting nothing done. They view work's purpose as having meetings, talking about things and looking good in front of their own manager.
Once you're in middle management, it's all about putting on a show like you're contributing in order advance & not get laid off. Honestly, I think it's a survival tactic.
"I saw how they spent their time and didn’t find it interesting or very rewarding."
it may not be interesting but I'm sure it's quite rewarding (as in money/wealth)
In my thirties now, after spending my twenties in pursuit of wealth. I can tell you unequivocally, as cliche as it is, accumulating money/wealth is not rewarding. Of course one needs a certain amount to be comfortable, but obtaining more has absolutely not made me a happier person.
Relationships, interesting purposeful work, and travel has been what I have found to be the most rewarding. Basically experiences over things.
> In my thirties now, after spending my twenties in pursuit of wealth. I can tell you unequivocally, as cliche as it is, accumulating money/wealth is not rewarding.
As someone a hair's breath away from 40 I can tell you it is if you don't have it. I see my body starting to creak and groan, witness Silicon Valley's blatant ageism, take an honest look at my ability to continue to earn into my 60s, take a frightened peek at my wholly inadequate retirement account, and find myself wishing I did more of that "pursuit of wealth" and less "travel and purpose" earlier on in my life.
I'll be happy to do "enlightenment and purpose" when I'm confident that I won't have to choose between dog food and back medicine when I inevitably get old.
The tech world doesn't revolve around Silicon Valley, as much as they'd like you to believe. There is TONS of opportunities in this world. Start your own company if you aren't happy with any of them. Thirty-nine is not the end of the road.
Agreed, and the reason I am sitting here in Upstate New York, making way more(cost of living) adjusted than I would there. Though it can be argued you're paying the experience tax working for big names there. But it doesn't interest me.
I've worked both in and out of Silicon Valley and you can't beat SV in terms of "opportunity risk". Most places outside of the area are one-horse towns when it comes to tech: If you lose your job there's nothing else there, you're picking up your family and moving to another city at least, maybe another state.
I lived on the east coast for years, and I'd happily move back in a heartbeat, but I'd be a nervous wreck every time it looked like another downturn was coming and I might have to scramble to find another job.
That's just crazy talk, there are PLENTY of companies to work for. If you're talking about big tech companies sure, but for every big tech company, there are zillions of other companies that require big tech people. I work for a company that is complete unrelated to my field. I get paid well, I travel the world to their ninety offices, and my house is only a five minute commute.
The northeast, NY/NJ/PA/DE/DC/MD area has a vibrant economy aplenty. Within a 3 hour radius, there's virtually an unlimited amount of jobs across a ton of industries.
The places that scare me are places like Chicago & Atlanta. Outside of Chicago, there's virtually nothing. Outside of Atlanta, it's the same, which usually means moving across the country for something.
This is a ridiculous trope which keeps getting trotted out.
You can easily live in SV for under $100k/year. You can earn >$200k as an engineer in SV (and in few other places). SV is almost certainly going to leave you with more money in your pocket than working at the average tech job.
The ">$200K/yr engineer" is also a ridiculous trope. I'm sure there are a handful of outlier engineers at top companies making that, but the median base Software Engineer salary in the Bay Area is anywhere from $100k to $105k depending on your source (+ maybe a few K in equity depending on the company).
If as a mid career engineer you can only make 105k in SV, then leave the valley and go to the Midwest. Random senior engineers make more than that in KC, with cheap cost of living. Top senior engineers make a lot more.
I don't agree with this. People making good money would be most often the ones to boast about it. You sound like my hiring manager regarding total compensation. Base salary is everything, and I can prove this when I lost 20% of my "total compensation" in no bonus this year for the first time ever.
You can downplay your expertise, but from reading the About of morgante.net you have plenty of accolades, programming contributions, winning the 2013 ArabNet developer tournament and receiving awards from MIT, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania, starting various companies, and even an investment fund. You are very much in a top minority percentage making $200,000 a year with under ten years experience.
$110k is an opening offer to a new grad these days. A few years in, you'd be at least $140-$150k. These are not outlier rockstars; they are standard pay bands at big tech companies. (And to be clear I'm talking salary, stock would be a few tens of thousands on top of that).
I'm not sure how attainable $200k is, but $105k for a mid-career adult is quite low. Perhaps that is the case at actual startups, definitely not the big ones or unicorns.
Unfortunately the publicly-available reports that exist on Bay Area Software Engineer salaries disagree with you. I don't claim to be an expert on this--just someone who can search Google.
$111,885 average [1]
$110,554 average [2]
$103,000 average [3]
I know this is HN, where everyone makes $150K and has $1M in savings and a supermodel girlfriend, but in the real world I think things are a little different.
The big tech companies are VERY standardized in their compensation for new grads. I guarantee you that at the one I know in the most detail, the base salary for a new grad is a bit over $100k. Add bonus and stock, and it's pretty easy to get to around 150k within a year or two. Not base, but total cash compensation. This is certainly not AVERAGE, but those companies hire thousands of engineers, so it's not exactly "unicorn" status either. This is not an estimate, or extrapolated from a couple of data points - this is actual knowledge of the compensation structure I'm speaking from.
> Relationships, interesting purposeful work, and travel has been what I have found to be the most rewarding. Basically experiences over things.
And how big does your fuck you fund and/or financial stability in general have to be to be able to say No to uninteresting unpurposeful work?
And how much do you need to both pay for travel and to be able to afford the time to travel?
Wealth accumulation is freedom accumulation. You need the freedom to lead a purposeful rewarding life. You can't do that, if your days are consumed by struggling to make ends meet.
A lot of modern inspiremotivationstuff neglects that part.
Would your thirties be as fulfilling as they are if you hadn't spent your twenties in pursuit of wealth? I'd guess not.
Paycheck to Paycheck - getting fired mean, being unable to pay for housing & food.
3 months savings - bills can be paid at once, a lay off puts pressure on one to really jump on the job search.
1 years savings - termination doesn't scare one, but thinking about taking a 1 year sabbatical, while nice, also means that torwards the end of the sabbatical, one must hope /plan apply for jobs after some period of 6-11 months or so. Strict budgeting is paramount.
5 years savings - termination and paying bills has no day-to-day thoughts. One can ponder of maybe dumping that savings into a startup, but if the startup doesn't pan out, one may be in one of the aforementioned states.
10 years savings - one can consider never working again if they reduce their draw down rate to last indefinitely.
20+ years savings - One could try a startup, lose 10 years of savings, and really not worry about anything.
I think people wouldn't necessarily have a problem working indefinitely, if they could participate in a lifestyle business where hours are flexible, workdays are shorter, weekends are longer, commutes are minimized or optional, vacations are plentiful and the pay is above average. For a lot of programmers at large institutions, this is pretty possible if one can find the right boss and company with policies that allow for this. how long these kinds of cushy positions will last is the question.
I think that depends on your definition of FYM. For me it's $1.3MM. For others it might be $5MM or $750k.
I make a good living for my area but have nowhere near $1.3MM liquid or even my entire net worth. Getting and extra $500k would not give me any peace of mind or security that I don't already have.
Getting an extra $500k would put you ~38% closer to your goal of $1.3M. So to say it wouldn't give you any peace of mind or security that you don't already have seems odd as it would put you SIGNIFICANTLY closer to your goal of FYM, which presumably would bring you peace of mind and security that you don't have now, and reduce the risk you would not eventually get there.
That's all relative. For me, I could go home and retire off of 500K, just drawing off the dividends, but I'm from an area that is exceptionally cheap in the US.
I can't speak for the parent, but that's about my target too. $1.3M / 300 (safe draw-down rate) = $4333/mo. Our family spends $4500 / mo in Salt Lake City to live comfortably. That doesn't include travel or expensive toys, but it would be enough to make it much easier for me to go off income for long periods to take bigger risks.
I started out from a very young age focused mostly on finding sources of interesting/purposeful work that provide enough wage to afford a comfortable life, but not luxury.
I have not been able to find meaningful/purposeful work in any organization. The life lessons I've learned can basically be summarized as: there is no such thing as purposeful work for which you are paid a wage, and businesses rarely extract meaningful labor out of you. Businesses are rarely punished for being unproductive, and most effort within any organization is spent intensely focused on politics, both internal and external, to ensure the business can create Dutch books and survive any possible outcome without needing to actually be productive.
The closer you get to pure knowledge work, the worse all of these effects become. In my field, machine learning and statistics, it is about as bad as it can possibly be. Because policy is ostensibly supposed to be based on evidence and sound, statistical reasoning, and it's very fashionable right now to try to characterize all aspects of business planning as if they are "data driven", all that it means is that the corporate politicians now hawkishly focus on statistics/machine learning and "science" as the means by which they control politics.
It unequivocally does not mean that businesses are actually shifting to truly be more scientific in their decision making, nor are they less wasteful, less driven by prestige or politics, less hyper-focused on short-term thinking, etc. If anything, firms are worse on all of these dimensions, and waste vast sums of money setting up big data infrastructure than truly does nothing but give glossy data visualization facades that decisions are somehow being made based on hard data.
What it has taught me is somewhat of the inverse of what you say.
I agree that pursuit of material wealth and power is uninteresting and highly unfulfilling. The problem is that pursuit of meaningful work turns out to be even more uninteresting and even more unfulfilling and you simply end up poorer and sounding like a burnt out crank.
You are probably better off (if you can; I unfortunately cannot) sublimating away any desire for creative, autonomous, meaningful, purposeful, or interesting work -- simply delete that from your genome with hardcore unhealthy repression. Then try to amass enough wealth doing horrible, horrible politics as you can to retire early, start your own small business, or something else where you are personally in charge of what you do and where you don't have a need for anyone else to pay you for your labor output.
The one part I will agree with you on is to definitely value relationships. Whether you are burning yourself out chasing the carrot of so-called meaningful work, or you are killing yourself slowly playing political games to get promotions and money, do not allow either toxin to infiltrate your personal life, and really try to slow your brain down and savor the moments you have with family, friends, and loved ones.
I don't want to be wasting my youth burning myself out in the pursuit. Do things while you have the energy to now. You could be dead tomorrow walking across the street.
If all the other companies and people couldn't figure out how to be companies that aren't brainfucked by politics, I think it would be considerable hubris for me to believe that I somehow know better and somehow can get into business without becoming brainfucked by politics.
I think business == brainfucked by politics. That is literally what you are compensated for. For some, it's a trade-off they are happy to make, and can be very lucrative. But you can't kid yourself that there is any possible way to pursue success in the business world, whether on your own by starting a company or by working up the ranks elsewhere, that does not ultimately bottom out at being paid solely for your ability to endure being brainfucked by politics.
This oft-quoted piece of advice is starting to sound like "have you found Jesus yet?" to my ears. Yes, yes – we know, we know that's an option worth considering (if feasible).
I do always love the underdog stories, but then you get to "I had to explain to my parents, who were paying my way through [Harvard] Business School". I realize a lot of people here had their educations paid for or at least got some hereditary assistance. Not sour grapes here - I'm happy with where I am from what I've had. I do hope people see how many more options become open to people though with parental support.
I like how he closes. That there are important roles for non-founders who jump in after seeing that an idea is a good thing.
On one hand, I guess it could be seen as a lack of confidence to not do your own thing. But on the other hand, it could be seen as not letting your ego get in the way of recognizing a good idea. I can see both sides and honestly, I don’t know where the truth lies.
For me, my sweet spot is when I can say, “That’s a great idea. It’s just getting started. Count me in.”
>> Come out to Silicon Valley and get a regular 9 to 5 at a place like at SGI [Silicon Graphics], and then you can moonlight with us. And we’ll see where it goes.
That sounds so absurd. Today that would be like, "hey come out here and get a job at Instagram, and them after-hours we'll work on our own thing"
I'm familiar with what a C64 is, but I have never seen one in my life. The majority of my fellow undergrad students know next to nothing about the history of computing. But in reality, that's just fine. If our goals are to become functioning software engineers, all that really matters is what's in use now. Provided, a little historical context can help us make some better decisions, but you don't see people coding in ed just so they appreciate their IDE.
> But in reality, that's just fine. If our goals are to become functioning software engineers, all that really matters is what's in use now.
I used to agree with you, but I've come a full 180 on this. I now believe that 'functioning software engineers' need a thorough understanding of what has already been done in the past to avoid endless re-invention of that past (but usually worse). The amount of resources that is squandered because present day engineers have no idea of how we got where we are today easily weighs up against the extra cost of requiring a class in computer history prior to becoming a functioning engineer.
If we don't do that we'll be stuck forever at the present 'local maximum', which is essentially mostly a rehash of old ideas but with some eye candy thrown in and usually more latency and waste. I suspect that we can do a lot better with our current hardware than we are really doing.
Java 5: 2004. Java 6: 2006. Acquisition: 2009-2010. Java 7: 2011. Yu're kind of right, but I had always interpreted that the acquisition had delayed every decision-making and effectively halted any release of Java, until they got the approval of the acquirer about the contents and scope of the release.
I don't find that to be true at any place worth working at (and I've worked at Google, Microsoft, and Twitter among other places). All had fairly reasonable work/life balance, though I imagine it depends greatly on your team and tolerance for bullshit.
Of course, if you get a job at any of the big names, they'll make you sign papers saying they own everything you invent that's related to anything they do (which is just about everything in tech for the top companies). I don't know how enforceable that is, but it does have a bit of a chilling effect.
I expect most employers in the anglosaxon legal system have those terms in all employment contracts - as it goes back to the Master and Servant Acts (as amended)
"On one hand, I guess it could be seen as a lack of confidence to not do your own thing. But on the other hand, it could be seen as not letting your ego get in the way of recognizing a good idea. I can see both sides and honestly, I don’t know where the truth lies."
Thats an interesting distinction he makes between the type of person it takes to be an early employee vs a founder. Both take on huge risks but as described here its a very different profile.
Step 2: Have parents to pay for that school, that you quit a large company to go to. Granted, he got into stanford fine. He went to high school in one of the most affluent neighborhoods in Michigan. Easy to take risks if you already have little to worry about.
> I remember looking at my boss and my boss’ boss, and my boss’ boss’ boss, and saying to myself, “You know what? I don’t want any of their jobs.” I saw how they spent their time and didn’t find it interesting or very rewarding. They spent their time managing meetings and office politics.
> This wasn’t my vision of what work was. To me, work was doing and making things and being able to see the fruits of that labor. At the end of the day or at least after a short period of time, I need to point to something and say to myself ‘that’s what I’ve been building.’
> [...] the internet was used exclusively for the
> non-commercial sharing of information at the time. The idea
> of commercializing the internet wasn’t accepted by the very
> people using the internet. Of course, the number of people
> and the demographics of those people were rapidly changing.
--Tim Brady, about the creation of the first f*^#&*! banner ad
I personally liked its addition. If you read it again, the "Hahaha." adds an extra pause that makes the ridiculousness of waiting for the ticker to come on screen sink in. The same way someone telling that story in person would pause. It makes it feel more like a real conversation. Without it the reader would have moved on to the next paragraph too quickly.
> Craig : How was it to ride that wave, especially when the bottom fell out in 2000?
> Tim : When things are going well and you’re in a growth industry, you don’t have to deal with many difficult issues. It’s the old cliche, winning solves everything.
> Craig : For sure.
> Tim : It’s really true. It solves everything… or maybe better said, it masks all your mistakes. A lot of the mistakes you make get masked because you receive almost no negative feedback.
> But then the bottom fell out and the board let Tim Koogle go. The upper ranks of management emptied out pretty quick, except for me and the CTO who stuck around. We got a new CEO and set of peers in upper management. Let me just say, I learned a whole lot more about business on the way down than I did on the way up.