Indeed. The cheapness comes from inexperience, though. These fresh graduates have also not learned the dangers of overworking themselves (both to themselves and their employers), so everyone is very willing to continue this grand delusion.
As someone who developed a mild anxiety disorder after ~6-8 months of starting work as a SWE, this hits home pretty hard. Luckily I've been able to overcome with help from my family, friends, and coworkers, but whenever I try to warn others I fear I come off only as a doomsayer and immediately bounce off the "That won't happen to me" shield.
Seriously. If you bet on one company with a dozen kids writing in whatever framework has the most blog posts this week, vs three seasoned lispers, I'm betting on the lispers every time.
With experience, you also learn better ways to express your intent in the languages and frameworks you know well. Inexperienced, high energy devs will just be fast at writing boilerplate.
With experience, you learn how to be able to spot the latest fads that will likely be waning or gone in a few years once they're no longer shiny things. This can make you very unpopular with those people who take it for granted that shiny things and new things are almost certainly better than non-shiny, non-new things.
Remember when MongoDB, for example, was widely assumed (by the inexperienced, mostly) to be the obvious data storage tech for building virtually any web-facing application? Now, after wide experience with formerly-shiny Mongo, it's viewed as just one among many alternatives for reaching "web scale".
Exactly! Or even people who just haven't learned a whole lot in terms of engineering practices. This seems to be especially true in Ruby, where "it works" is good enough to go out into production.
There is no programming, reliability, stability, or scale. Most greener engineers program mostly for the sunny day scenario, which is the crux of the problem.
They can't see race conditions and timing problems like someone how have spent years doing that. I see other people's code and quickly understand that they're doing really cost prohibitive queries while others who are green will never notice it.
For some definition of cheap. If you look at $/hour, no question they are cheaper. If you look at $/amount of value created (which is far harder to capture, but worth it), I don't think it is a slam dunk.
The difficulty is the financiers; they want visual bang for their buck, and they want to be told "yes, I'll make it happen" even if the person talking doesn't yet know how. If that means a bunch of young people looking busy and working themselves into the ground, versus a small team of professionals that will calmly and realistically tell the financiers what can't be done in a given time frame and budget... Realistic with older professional is boring; fantasy with young people is exciting! Guess what happens every time?
People expect immediate gratification. They pay for it and expect it two days later. We become upset because it falls out of the patterns we have adapted to.
At the same time we have to remember these apps exist for a reason.. to make a small group of people money. In the quest to accomplish this goal marketing, combined with PR, government relations, and legal, attempt to manipulate society in such a way that society will conform to the goals of the business. If we forget this, either intentionally or due to ignorance, we become much more susceptible to manipulation which may or may not be detrimental to us.
I disagree with the premise that these apps exist to make a small group of people money...
1) Nobody's working on this kind of stuff just for the money, and if they are then they've lied to a lot of people and are fucking up. If you're a strong engineer with good quantitative skills, the expected value of working on wall street, working at googazonsoft, or even becoming a realtor in the bay (if you have the soft skills) is much higher than striking out on your own to create something new. A technical founder I met from one of these companies could have easily done one of these other things but felt really passionate about improving our relationship to food. I really doubt there's a money grubbing evil genius working on food sharing apps in order to amass great wealth and power.
2) You can't really manipulate society with $50M of facebook ads and no product (and I think that's more than any of these companies have raised). If you're making a consumer app and it's not something people want, there's no "marketing, combined with PR, government relations, and legal" that's going to get them to use it and "conform to the goals of the business".
IDK, maybe I'm just a dumb optimist but I'm excited about what the future holds for this stuff.
> If you're a strong engineer with good quantitative skills, the expected value of working on wall street, working at googazonsoft, or even becoming a realtor in the bay (if you have the soft skills) is much higher than striking out on your own to create something new.
With an essentially zero chance of becoming a billionaire.
If you're driven by the desire to become a billionaire, startups it is.
He is also a US Senator's son and took advantage of his family's many connections to get his startup capital. He was also born at the right time to take advantage of postwar prosperity.
Without those advantages, it's almost laughable to replicate that career path
Also wasn't this a law firm whose data was leaked? A lot of that information is probably financial and personal records which would be massively irresponsible, not to mention highly illegal, to release in a dump.
With over 200000 shell companies created, you can be pretty sure not every shell company is involved in illegal activity. In fact, it's perfectly legal to create them, though the majority of their use cases is illegal. That still doesn't mean you can just dump private information like that on the internet
Apparently there are no American politicians or businessmen listed. And no coverage on NYTimes, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, CNN, USAtoday, LA Times, etc. That seems strange to me.
US I can kind of understand since offshore banks often refuse to deal with US persons for fear of running afoul of burdensome IRS reporting requirements. The lack of Canadians in the list is surprising, though.
It is completely possible that the schemes provided in Panama wouldn't work very well for US citizens, and also the close relationship between the USA and Panama might make US citizens looking for such schemes look elsewhere.
As for the fall out not being reported in US news, it is Sunday night, and if they weren't involved, then they wouldn't have a leg up on this. Wait until Monday to pass judgement.
Coverage will come, the leaks started later in the day in the US.
As for no American politicians or businessmen, it can be explained by sample size:
The USA might have their own internal money dirty money path. Or maybe the tax haven of choice is another country for the US. Maybe the IRS has specific rules for Panama?
That this one company has skew/bias in the origin of its clients does not surprise me at all.
If we had variety of leaks from different money fixers from different countries; say from the Bahamas, Cayman Islands, Guernsey, Singapore, UAE, Monaco, Lebanon, Puerto Rico, Belize; and no US scandal, I would be very surprised.
Though an app showing a randomized arrow veers closely into, well, not Hello World, but an intro example for developing a mobile app. There's not going to be a lot of code to spaghetti-ize.
But we look up to assholes don't we? Steve Jobs. Michael Jordan. The Wolf of Wall Street. There's something to be said by that. If only "different people are motivated by different things".
There's nothing in The Wolf of Wall Street to look up to. It's a story of pointless people greedily shitting all over everybody because they've got nothing better to live for.
The opposite side of idealism is cynicism. Further more if there's one thing humanity has proven itself bad at, it's the ability to make economic predictions.
I'm not saying your comment isn't a valuable counter-weight, just that we have a ways to go in this discussion still.
When we fully understand the psychological effects of advertisements on the brain like we do the physical effects of cigarettes on the lungs. IMO a pretty long time.
