Garbage in, garbage out. It is not going to imagine your perfect scenario and then create it for you. I take anyone saying it is garbage with a grain of salt because it is incredibly useful for me. And others think so too, so how can your bad experience negate that. It can't. If you can craft the right prompts it can make you much more efficient. Anyone saying it is going to replace whole people en masse is just part of the hype machine. But if all it does is make every human on earth 1% more efficient then that is an obscene amount of value it is creating.
There are good doctors and bad doctors just like any other profession. I have gotten plenty of bad advice over the years from doctors. Took me 2 years of going to various doctors to figure out I was having a reaction to mold. My neurologist just had me try all these different medicines, almost all made me worse, but none of them got to the actual problem. This is VERY common. Doctors so often just treat symptoms. That said, there are idiots out there that don't listen to anything a doctor says about politically charged issues like Covid. Homeopathy is mostly nuts. But integrative medicine is also often poo-pooed, but it makes logical sense to treat the whole person, not just symptoms. But I am sure there are plenty of crackpots there too. The waters are muddy my friend, not much is clear.
Yes, i feel like the biggest problems getting real treatment are in equal parts, people not thinking of the concomitant factor/asking the right things/being afraid to tell certain things, and doctors having no where near enough time to actually listen to someone and think about their situation.
I try not to fall into the first category but I've known many people who do. Though I've had many experiences with fast talking, eyes glazed, interrupt me to push the first thing that comes to mind type doctors. Once i had to fight with guy to just get him to let me finish a sentence! He changed his mind every 5 words trying to get out of there but it'd've been faster if he just let me talk! It's infuriating, I'll never go back to a doctor like that. Seems like he didn't even wait to leave the room before i was out of his mind, possibly i never even entered it
Steve Jobs would just say "figure it out". Way less condescending because he isn't trying to offer a solution to something that is your domain of expertise, but it also says he doesn't care if you think it's not feasible right now. Think hard and find a creative way to make it feasible. This often needs to be said because people tend to jump to the conclusion that it is too hard before they take time to think about possible solutions.
Give me the budget that Steve Jobs gave to his engineers, and I'll figure it out too.
The difficulty in what my clients are asking for is often not the feasibility but rather the time, monetary, and opportunity cost for ignoring other features.
Apple didn't pay well for most of its life, until well after iPhone/iPad success
It was not like "FAANG salaries", which started around 2011, by my reckoning because Facebook didn't agree to the "Steve Jobs collusion" with Google/Intel/Pixar (ironically!)
A budget is also time, resources, and latitude. Steve Jobs’ “Figure it out” was “I’ve given you a task, now go do what’s necessary to get it done”. This is what the post you’re responding to is referencing: the client is asking for something to get done but is not providing the resources required.
As a side note, engineers tend to be bad at couching conversations in these terms - nothing is impossible*, things just cost more or less, and that’s a decision for the money people to make.
I'm not sure this makes the idea of him saying "just figure it out" any more applicable to the rest of us (which is what the parent comment was responding to). You've pointed out that he was _unsuccessful_ for a number of decades before hitting the jackpot, and I'm dubious that the only reason he was more successful than everyone else in the long run was due to the rest of the industry just not trying hard enough. That means it was some combination of his specific skills or circumstances beyond his control, and either way, it's not really super actionable advice to "just figure it out (and either be uniquely talented or extremely lucky)".
When I think of “budget” in this context, I’m thinking about what is available to the engineers in terms of tools, resources, and time.
Where I work, it doesn’t really matter what I’m paid, we don’t have a budget to go get what we need. If I think a certain tool would help get a job done faster, too bad, I have to cobble together what I can with the tools I’ve been provided. If I think something will take a year, too bad, it’s due in a month and we’ll have an hour long meeting every day to ask why it isn’t done yet.
In this context, employee pay is largely irrelevant.
I can't tell for sure if the "ironically" refers to it feeling ironic that Facebook didn't collude, or that Pixar did collude. If it's the latter, it's because Jobs was CEO and primary shareholder of Pixar and orchestrated it's purchase by Disney to get himself a seat on the Disney board. Ironically, if I'm recalling the biography correctly, Jobs made significantly more money from Pixar than he did from his first phase at Apple.
I had a coworker who wanted a BMW more than anything. Typical young Indian male aspiration of that era (everyone had a BMW as their wallpaper).
He got the money together to buy one. Or thought he did. Forgot about insurance, being a young male and little driving history. Doubled his payments.
Also he was a terrible driver. The expensive thing about BMWs is not the car it’s repairs. Which is also why the insurance is so high. He wrecked that thing three times. He probably could have gotten his family into a better house for the amount of money he burned on that car. So foolish.
Customers live out this sort of drama all the time. They need a good used car but they want something that’ll bankrupt them because they have an image in their head. Either a dream or a status symbol.
Gordon Ramsay did a whole TV series about restaurateurs with the same mental block. They want to be successful but they don’t want to pay their dues and pretend instead.
I generally find that more resources are often the easiest thing to get and rarely helpful.
Most of the time the issue is the "9 women can't have a baby in a month" problem where adding more resources is not going to make things happen faster - in fact it may slow things down.
But the business doesn't understand that software is not like construction where adding more people really will get that ditch dug faster.
At its core software is not making a thing - it's inventing a machine that makes the thing.
If you're Little Debbie and you have a machine that makes cupcakes it's hard when the business comes in and says, "now it needs to make fudge rounds." And no amount of extra people working on the problem will get that machine retooled any faster.
Oh, I wasn't meaning to suggest that all problems are solvable by throwing more resources at it, that clearly isn't the case.
But it's super common for a team to be asked to do something fundamentally outside their scope, and the asking client/boss not realizing that they are doin g it.
"Figure it out" as a useful strategy sort of assumes that both sides of the equation are clued in about this and roughly on the same page.
"I underwrote a great team, you should be able to figure this out (stop whining about it being hard)" is a fundamentally different statement than "Why can't you just do X, how hard can it be?"
It's also worth remembering that the plural of "resource" is not "team".
> But the business doesn't understand that software is not like construction where adding more people really will get that ditch dug faster.
People tend to understand that there's an upper limit to the amount of people that can be deployed to dig a ditch any faster too
They just refuse to believe that with software, sometimes that number is smaller than they think it should be simply because people aren't physically getting in each others way
"Get a spaceship to Alpha Centauri next year. Oh, and it has to have a crew of at least 20 people, who all return safely to Earth by the end of the decade." I'll leave you to think hard and find a creative way to make it feasible.
Sure, sometimes you can re-define the goal. ("We need to know more about what's in the Alpha Centauri system.") But sometimes domain expertise means telling non-experts about reality. (Pi is not 3, no matter how much someone thinks it should be.)
I had a boss who I’m now sure had aphantasia and his two best UI people would tell him something wouldn’t fit in backlog grooming, then we’d get to spend a week showing him all the different ways it doesn’t fit before he would shut the fuck up about it.
We already “figured it out” in our heads because we are equipped to do the job. We were already doing some pretty sophisticated typesetting to make more things fit on the screen than really did.
He was sure he knew where the problems were in the org and that they weren’t him.
Since they referred to talking to “clients”, I’m guessing the problem wasn’t that the task couldn’t be done but that the client didn’t want to pay more for the additional work.
I've built you a toilet with a collection bucket that smells, needs regularly scheduled emptying into the other toilet, and it overflows anyway when you throw parties.
This resonates with me. I get a lot of "But Microsoft Office 365 Cloud does…"
I tell them that Microsoft spent a quarter of a billion dollars on that item last year, and I'm perfectly happy to re-create it if they give me a quarter of a billion dollars, too.
While I agree this is an improvement, and that it respects the agency of the worker, it’s not enough. Pushing true boundaries may in rare cases be catalyzed by an inspirational leader, but that’s exceedingly rare even if survivorship bias makes us think different. On the contrary, our tech graveyards are littered with bold bets that failed because leaders deluded themselves with yes-men.
I have long wanted to build an engine that let's you book a vacation on points. You connect all the points programs you have and it shows you how to leverage them to get the best deals on flights and hotels. The trick here is that you can transfer points from credit cards to some airlines and hotels, and sometimes the points are worth more when transferred. But, integrating with all these systems is the problem, and it's a big problem. Especially since there is no way any of the players want this to happen. Maybe it could be built as a browser plugin?
There are a number of sites that do this that have been released in the last few years. https://www.pointsyeah.com is probably my favorite since their free offering is very workable.
It's even worse when using points. Amex now uses Expedia on the back end for hotel booking. I made a res for a hotel in Italy and I tried to change it. Amex says call Expedia. Expedia says call the hotel. The hotel says call Expedia. Soooo frustrating. I think Amex travel is going to poop, and that used to be their thing.
This would only make sense if it isn't actually indexing the permissions, it just checks the file at the time it finds it. That would be DUMB if they did it that way. They can index that one extra field and it would still be fast.
I heard it directly from a YC alum who said he helped me push a post to the top. But this was several years ago. I didn't mean that YC alums would be less likely to upvote that particular article, but it does make the rankings much more unpredictable.
He was founder of Meetup, acquired by WeWork for $200m in 2017, my guess is for cash. They only raised $18m so that should be a good exit for founders. I don't think he is using his LinkedIn profile to find a new job. I would expect him to use his LinkedIn as more of a bio, and include the McD's experience.
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