At least for all the surveillance the Chinese do - the standard of life is improving overall. We don't even get that shit here in the US. Our life just gets worse by practically every measure as the years go on and we're taken advantage of on top of it.
There’s probably not one single benchmark (and I won’t say that all of them are negative in the US) but we can just think generally about the things we’d like in a good life:
Life expectancy. Chronic disease rates. Suicide rates. Depression rates. Violent crime rates. Marriage rates. Home ownership rates. Education rates. Debt rates. Labor participation rates. Wealth inequity.
No one metric is a complete picture but together they tell a story. If America was a product and the above was on a dashboard, you would fire the CEO.
70% of these metrics are solved in China (or most places in Asia) through methods that most people in this thread would be vehemently against. You can put the mentally-ill back into sanatoriums, enforce quick and draconian response to petty crime, and pay an economic underclass a pittance to clean your streets if you wish.
Unfortunately for Americans, it's not the CEO at fault here actually, it's the middle class and left-leaning/progressive that are directly responsible for many of the problems here. The funny thing is that Republican Party being in complete power with Trump would be more similar to the CCP than the Democrats or Progressives. Suppressing dissenting voices like Pro-Palestine in order to force national homogenity is a big part of that.
And I say this as someone who supported Biden and Kamala, but these left-wingers or libertarians who are so vehemtly opposed to the US Gov but then simp for China are just being childishly incoherent.
Does authoritarianism and over policing cause their QoL to rise while ours is debatable? Their middle class is rising, ours is nearly dead. Their years of salary to purchase a home is decreasing, ours is almost a full lifetime. We have more people per capita in prison than they do. We have rising obesity rates. Rising chronic illness rates. We are now surveiling our own populations social media to find reasons to kick them out just like they do.
So please let me know how locking up more people and paying an economic underclass to clean our streets will help us achieve all those goals? Crime, I get it, but how is what you claimed going to solve our health and financial issues?
> enforce quick and draconian response to petty crime
In the Bay Area the median response to petty crime is zero consequences for the criminal. This is because in practice criminals are not caught or punished.
If the cost of having laws enforced is that we need better surveillance (read: more security cameras) then guess what? We are already heavily surveilled.
At the very least, wages for the average citizen. It’s not perfect but at least there’s movement towards building something. What is the US building towards? Enriching billionaires?
It being only 100 seems kinda low for the size of Meta and how many Israelis live in the Bay Area. There is a very large contingent that lives in Palo Alto and Sunnyvale.
They’re nowhere near as large as the Chinese and Indian population but probably close to third place for largest foreign born tech worker populace in SV.
Then it’s doubly critical. A tiny country having citizens in top positions in critical media companies suppressing any criticism of their governments conduct sounds like accusations we make against NK or Russia.
You might think: Well, what does that effect the world if a tiny country flattens an even tinier other region. Then have a look at how Netanyahu for decades pushed for US wars in the ME and is now pushing for the US starting a war against Iran.
You could say the same about all the Chinese and Indian people who are massively over-represented in these companies. Go into the FB Ads org and try to find a single all American team, lol. You'll have a hard time even finding one American to begin with.
Being full stack used to be more exciting to me but with the front end still changing after what felt like we had reached some stability, I have decided I can’t do it anymore. It really caters to a particular type of early startup engineer who is constantly doing greenfield and creating new repos. The issue there is that means you’re constantly poor because you’re always at early stages of funding - and in this market and the market for the next few years… good luck seeing any of those options become liquid.
It’s just not a sustainable path for someone who has to pay a $3m mortgage in Silicon Valley. It’s for the already rich to tinker and the young who can live in a room in a 6bd house.
My career is entirely built around full stack and it’s no shock that I’m back to being penniless. Worked so hard for nothing. Specialize and join big tech. These early stage startups suck and aren’t worth it.
I have my own property because I don't want to share it with someone else. If I wanted to share, I'd rent a room or get a townhouse or some other form of housing where sharing space is common.
Fourth:
Building an ADU is actually very expensive and the payback time is quite long. You have to dig for sewage and water, pour a foundation, and so forth. If doing it at a high level, it's going to be as intensive as building a house... It's just smaller. Most people are not handy at all and therefore will need to hire out every bit of it... Which is very expensive.
> I like writing code and figuring stuff out, that's why I chose a career in software development in the first place.
That's not why I got into software development. I got into it to make money. I think most people in Silicon Valley these days are the same mentality. How else could you tolerate the level of abuse you experience in the workplace and how little time you get to really dig on that particular aspect of the job?
This is a website that is catered to YC/Silicon Valley. My perspective is going to be common here.
I guess there were always two kinds, Bill Gates doesn't strike me as a person who loves technology. Compared to, say Dennis Ritchie or Wozniak.
I'm firmly in the problem solver/hacker/artist camp.
Which I guess is why we're more concerned about the current direction. Because we value those aspects more than anything; consider them essential to creating great software/technology, to staying human; and that's exactly what GenAI takes away.
I see how not giving a crap about anything but money means you don't see many problems with GenAI.
This is exactly how Silicon Valley works because this is how investors work. Investors aren’t really looking for true innovation - they’re looking for an idea that will let the next sucker take the hit. When one company is doing very well, clearly there’s some suckers out there buying the stock. Therefore, if we have a stock that is similar then maybe we can also get suckers to buy the stock.
That’s all it is. That’s part of why Silicon Valley is so clout chasing and cargo culty. It’s entirely due to investor pressure to get immediate returns. Immediate returns mean you have to follow whatever the current hype is.
Is it IoT, crypto, nft, Uber for X, self driving, etc. etc.? That’s what you do. You follow whatever the hype is and bail after you get your desired return.
There’s no desire for a sustainable business. There’s a desire for other investors to be a sucker that holds the bag at the end.
> You follow whatever the hype is and bail after you get your desired return.
> There’s a desire for other investors to be a sucker that holds the bag at the end.
I agree with everything you said except for these two sentences. If you take VC funding to build a sustainable business frankly you’re doomed from the get go. That’s not what a VC wants and it won’t get you funded. There are other routes to that.
What VCs want is if 99 of those startups fail, to be holding the Airbnb, uber, Anthropic at the end. Because holding that from the beginning will make you more money than any other option.
The stock market is mostly based on the greater fool theory. You can’t really escape that.
Most VCs doing 99 investments for the 1 big are akin to YC. They’re not doing series C for $100m and expecting 99 of those to fail. They’re expecting to get a return somewhat shortly back.
Holding the stock isn’t helpful for a VC unless they’re going to be using some financial mechanism for leverage - which means they’ve given it up for the other institution who now essentially owns it. A lot of these stocks aren’t giving you meaningful dividends. You have to sell or give up some form of control on them to be a successful VC. How else would you continue to invest?
I’ve taken three years off. I’ve spent the majority of my time trying to improve my health and looks while living in a new city. All in the pursuit of finding a partner.
It has not been successful but a lot of people say that I need to do a few more surgeries and bulking and cutting cycles. Is what it is - dating is extremely superficial and only gets more so as time goes on.
Isn’t the most effective way to find out what you’ll be doing is by measuring how many people are going to be under you overall?
A “vp” at a startup with 20 people under them will likely have very different responsibilities than a faang director with 200.
I believe this is why you get asked how many people are under you when interviewing at these roles. The titles - as far as I’ve seen - are mostly meaningless. It’s about the scale of your decisions. I know the article talks about the type of influence/decisions you’ll be making. (Executing others decisions vs making the decisions) But I find it’s rare for these bigger companies to really give a shit about that. They care more about how many people you’ve had under you. It’s rare to see someone be VP at startups with a few people (and that’s their only experience) and then be VP at faang in their next role.
The "number of people you've had under you" does provides insight into what a role entails, but there's still a lot of variance. What does seem to be uniform is that the "number of people you've had under you" determines whether a hiring company will think you’re qualified for a job. Companies simply aren't likely to take a "risk" hiring an outsider that hasn't been in a role with a similar perceived scope of responsibility. And since actual here's-what-you're-doing-day-to-day responsibility can vary so much, the "number of people you've had under you" becomes a proxy for that.
I understand the reasoning for why they put so much weight on the number of reports you’ve been previously responsible for, but it also explains why big companies stagnate. The people change but the thinking and strategy doesn’t.
Tech is a big industry. It employs millions in the US. I’ve met people who only work 20-25 hours/week while pulling down $500k/yr+ at a known company that has a very toxic work culture. I’ve met people making under $150k who are working 60-70hr/week regularly at a supposed easy company. All within Silicon Valley.
The reality is that experiences vary widely in the industry even within each company - sometimes even within a team.
You get paid X. You deliver Y value. The proportion is X / Y. Sometimes that proportion is very high, sometimes it is very low. Sometimes it is negative. Sometimes you get a divide by zero error.
And again, the questions.
What specific proportion do you think is fair? And how do you calculate the value you provide?
Capitalism is explicitly not about that. Holy shit this is insane that you think that’s how capitalism works on a website that’s literally about venture capital. What the fuck.
I dunno, he's asking a really basic question that should be trivial to answer. When I see a basic, level-setting question like this go unanswered, it starts to seem like the side refusing to answer is the one acting in bad faith, not the side asking the question
The answer is 100%. This brings us to the start point of the real conversation this person is trying to have, which likely centers on the nature of employment, the importance of Job Creators, and/or the infallibility of markets.
But that's not a valid answer? It seems like you're sidestepping the question by moving the goalposts and redefining terms.
The reality is that there will always be a gap between "what a company is willing to pay you for your work" and "what your contribution to the whole earns the company", and that's... fine? The whole is often greater than the parts, and this difference contributes to that gap. The gap also needs to provide for the commons of the company: workspaces, licenses, equipment, interest/loan repayments, etc.
This mostly just a fleshing out of the `X` and `Y` quantities mentioned by the ancestor. If you don't think the whole is worth that much more than the parts, then presumably you should seek employment at a company that offers you a larger absolute `X`, a larger relative `X / Y`, or (ideally) both. If no such company exists, you could attempt to start one of your own? That would be the ultimate vote of confidence that such a thing is even possible, right?
I suspect the reason why such companies do not exist is because that's actually much harder to accomplish than you're making it out to be.
100% seems delusional to me because you're saying that the company deserves no profit for doing the work of providing you customers to provide value for?
It also seems to ignore the fact that some of the value you're creating is used to pay for the work that enables your value creation. Think about payroll processing, benefits administration, hiring, etc. etc. Those roles provide value as well but don't directly bring in money.
Isn't that part of the tradeoff of working for a company that they take a "fee" for giving you dependable work? You can approach 100% value-capture by working for yourself but there are downsides there as well.
I assumed that each of these entities would also earn 100% of their contribution to the value created. How you split up the credit is a difficult problem. (As many developers will note, there is no such thing as a 'cost center'; all labor contributes to the outcome.)
However, a bigger problem in the current state is the existence of parties whose only real role is funding, but who receive an outsized portion of the reward.
You’ve just found a roundabout way to repeat the idea that you don’t like that someone else is getting what you believe to be an unfairly large piece of the pie.
Because currently in the world today, the owner of the business is earning 100% of the value they provide as is the developer as is the bookkeeper.
You just don’t agree with each person’s view of the value they create and don’t have a way to determine the actual value they create.
So we’re back where we started.
> However, a bigger problem in the current state is the existence of parties whose only real role is funding, but who receive an outsized portion of the reward.
Isn’t the funder getting earning 100% of the value they create (just like you want them to) by providing capital? If not, how do you prove otherwise?
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