In Cuba, the only wealthy people are government bureaucrats. As always, communism becomes dictatorship and the people suffer most. Top down control of economy doesn't work. I went to numerous tobacco plantations in Cuba and they told me the government takes 90% of their harvest and they're allowed to keep and sell 10%. I stayed with an OBGyn who gets paid $80 USD/month. He built his house out of cinderblocks. That's how you get rewarded for your 'free' education. Anyone glorifying communism is a fucking idiot with no life experience.
That share of income from wages started its downward trajectory in 1971, when the US removed the gold standard and money-printing replaced hard money. The result was a man-manipulated interest rate fueled economy. Low interest rates benefit existing asset holders the most since they most definitively increase asset prices. Think about the simplest discounted cashflow, a perpetuity. When you change the discount rate r from 4% to 1%, the perpetuity value increases by 4x.
I've heard the gold theory a lot, but my current best theory is it wasn't until credit cards became ubiquitous that wages stagnated and the debt treadmill began. There was also a significant population increase in the latter half of the century, there - but forget looking at milk prices or gasoline prices - look at a ford mustang, or a motorhome - or even housing.
Once a certain segment of the population realized that real estate was "undervalued" relative to the potential for collecting rent on the undervalued property - yeah. rent goes up, wages don't at the same rate, more credit card debt. High debt means you're paying nearly all interest, so that ain't going down.
Oh and does anyone actually remember earning a decent amount of interest at a bank? man, those were the days. 12 month 7% CDs, lol.
I've been working on a tool that also filters out the cruft comments from reddit / ugc searches. We just came out with a chrome extension as well. Would love your feedback on it: www.thegigabrain.com
I've been working on www.thegigabrain.com to address this problem. Filtering out the noise from reddit and other UGC sources to get the most useful answers
The amount of people on HN nowadays that are okay with getting nothing useful done is striking. Startup guy, you don't have to accept being part of a bloated hierarchy that rewards politics more than good decision-making. You could check out at the corpo job and start prototyping your own startup ideas. Or join another early stage startup where your performance matters. I'll be starting one soon - let's keep in touch.
> The amount of people on HN nowadays that are okay with getting nothing useful done is striking.
You're mistaking the role of a mature company. Unlike a startup, in a mature company there are a ton of customers relying on your product and making sure you don't f*k up their business with a mistake or careless change is much more important than building cool new stuff quickly. You don't want your bank "moving fast and breaking things". There are a whole lot of industries where stability and consistency are an order of magnitude more important than fast innovation. This may not be as sexy or fun as rapidly prototyping some MVP, but it's how a lot of important stuff that runs the world works. To this end, a large org may not be everyone's cup of tea.
Yes, there will be some waste and bureaucracy at any large org, but that's not the same as a place full of people "that are okay getting nothing useful done". If anything, it's the established boring companies that are doing something useful (even if that something is not sexy or exciting), while a lot of startups are just burning through someone else's money designing things that no one really wants or needs.
Exactly. When you're a $1T+ company, nothing "just takes two weeks" to implement. What if your tiny change has an unforeseen side effect that takes down a critical auth system resulting in a revenue loss of $10M/minute. Are you going to take responsibility? What are you going to write in that postmortem? What if your change infringes on someone's patent or causes some other regulatory compliance related issue and the company gets sued? Your $BIG_COMPANY is not putting this change request through ultra-scrutiny just to frustrate you.
First, the team needing to do the work has about 10X as much work waiting in their queue than they can possibly do given their staffing. So your request either has to be more important than the existing work, you need to get a VP to expedite it, or you need to wait. It's not like there's an engineer just sitting there picking his nose browsing Facebook waiting for work. And even if you just yeet them a patch, they will need to set aside engineering time to review that patch, so back of the queue it goes, too.
Second, that work needs to go through (sometimes multiple) code reviews, have unit and integration tests written, and be able to show those test passing more than once, it needs to get reviewed by legal so it doesn't expose us to legal liability, it needs to get reviewed by security so my 9 year old can't use it to get a root shell, it needs to get reviewed by privacy/data protection so we know it's not leaking some user's personal information, it needs to get a systems review so we know it won't disrupt other critical revenue-generating services. I mean, what are you expecting, just type the code in, run a few tests, any yolo it into production?? No way.
Let's also not forget the value of having a person sitting there doing just the bare minimum needed to have some familiarity with where things are and what does what... so if something does blow up (and it will), (s)he can instantly step in and take emergency measures to restore service.
It's called 'reserve capacity', and some people think it is helpful
There is no code review by legal. There is a talk, usually multiple talks, between legal representatives and the engineers + manager delivering something. It's the engineers and manager job to explain what the piece of work will do and help legal understand its implications so they can gather knowledge and come up with their assessment given their skills in Law.
I think you read it too literally, legal will review what is the impact of some changes in compliance and so on but you, as an engineer, is responsible to translate what the code/feature/system is doing to something that legal can understand and reason about, it's part of your job if you are anywhere senior+ level.
I had to interact quite a lot with legal in my past couple of jobs, it wasn't ever an issue because the legal department seemed to be staffed with smart people that would understand what I was telling them, or would ask relevant questions to clarify their understanding, it's a two-way street, not a button to push on the PR to "ask for legal review".
Our legal team has to review parts of our application to ensure we were in compliance with certain government programs such as ITAR and EAR. They don't do code level review but they do review business processes, UI's and messaging to make sure we're in compliance.
Usually it is more like "legal needs to be notified anytime third party dependencies are updated with a list of the licenses to make sure we aren't accidentally using GPL or proprietary code".
Other times legal gets involved earlier at the planning stages in case a feature or product falls under HIPAA or similar regulatory framework.
Actual code itself doesn't cross legal's desk anywhere that I know of.
The setup I saw is: there is an IP plan that documents whatever 3rd part IP you are using in your product (open-source or not). Someone has to sign-off on that plan, and sometimes developers do self-attestation that they have not deviated from it. Additionally, the binaries are scanned for certain things to avoid escapes of pre-release information, etc.
> If anything, it's the established boring companies that are doing something useful (even if that something is not sexy or exciting), while a lot of startups are just burning through someone else's money designing things that no one really wants or needs.
To be honest, SME remain the economic backbone of most modern countries and the size of SME still allow them to operate somewhat effectively. Most large companies are either slowly drifting to irrelevance, surviving on a steady diet of acquisitions from teams who could previously achieve things or milking a business line they established when they were smaller and somewhat nibble. Large companies successfully growing by building what you call important stuff without acquiring are the exception.
Working backwards from your label, what signs leading up to Facebook's recent outages could we have used to evaluate them as being or not being a "mature company"?
I think, perhaps, that being siloed, bureaucratic, large, profitable, and management heavy are not the best or only qualifiers of "maturity".
> Established businesses are trying to keep employees from knocking over that functional house of cards.
And usually also spend the next 10 years cleaning up the total mess of a house of cards from the startup phase into a more manageable and stable house of cards.
Yeah, I'm at a startup that's rapidly growing, and is adding more process. I don't feel like it's overmanaged, I don't generally need to pull in my manager or skip. But I can imagine giving a similar response, the major difference is that the team I'm on doesn't really have official processes set up.
The main problem is that the team has a lot of work to do. So simple tasks might take awhile if they aren't high priority. If I got significant push back, I'd talk to my manager or skip. Because doing it sooner would mean pushing back other high priority requests.
And when it reaches that stage, the OP can nope out to another up and coming startup. There's no reason someone needs to stay at a company through its whole lifecycle.
do you work there? would be interesting to hear how you believe it's different and why. if not, then I think "just fine" is probably conjecture, and I'd imagine they have the same problems as everyone else at scale.
SpaceX clearly has no problems innovating and moving forward fast. Something you don’t see in more bureaucratic organisations. I saw an interview with astronauts who has worked for both NASA and SpaceX and they said that the big difference was that what would take a year for NASA took a day for SpaceX.
Sorry to say, but there are plenty of companies with absolutely atrocious internal cultures that still manage to innovate and move forward fast, I've had the misfortune of working for a few LOL
I can believe that. What does that have to do with working for a bureaucratic organisation? NASA innovates. It just takes forever compared with non-bureaucratic organisations.
Yeah. All the explanations are a waste of words if OP isn't happy with the process. The process isn't going to improve. If it's not to your taste, bail as soon as your deal is complete (might be already).
Personally, I think we all win if the people who want to move fast are in situations where they can move fast.
As much as this sentiment feels natural for an engineer there are a few things to keep in mind:
* you get exposed to a wider range of technology at a startup and can work on different things; that's more fun for you personally especially when you're under 30 yo and still learning the ropes; political indoctrination is mostly non-existent
* many startups at best get acquired; so all your "useful" efforts could end up in /dev/null or be completely replaced after the next VC round
* a minority of startups are doing real tech that's worth tolerating small company inconveniences; for every Imply/Rockset/Starburst there are many more companies building another web app, likely using inferior programming languages
* Big Co compensation and benefits are unbelievable for people coming from startups. Work/life balance cannot be compared too. Unlimited PTO could actually be European-style 4 weeks. I believe there were not so many posh places to work at ten years ago and so it was less realistic to join one.
* there's no question that startups and large corporations require dramatically different mindsets/habits. But you really get paid a lot to tolerate that smaller-than-a-tiny-cog feeling.
As someone who just transitioned from a small startup to a much larger organization I feel the pain of the OP, and I hate it, but I get the feeling that this is typical and maybe unavoidable as organizations scale. Is that not your experience? Seems like you either have scale or efficiency.
Given that the entire tech industry is built on making money with tools and services that are not useful to the society, it's only fair their employees take the mantra and apply it to their professional sphere of influence.
dont need all this complexity to prevent airborne illness from going exponential, just masks + contact tracing. the results have spoken for themselves in asia
There's a lot to be desired in schools (In the US at least and I assume Canada) but one thing schools do do is bring people from many different backgrounds together for long periods of time.
That in and of itself is educational for the world students will eventually enter. It creates some level of shared experience and social cohesion and underlying social reality. It's not done very well admittedly with a lot of time wasting and poor education and lowest denominator and propaganda flavor of the decade, but the principal still applies.
The thing I'm afraid of with parent and neighbors doing the socializing exclusively is reality bubbles and a fracturing of shared culture.
Reality bubbles are very much here already. For example, there was a fun study showing that Ivy League students who graduated from a public high school had markedly lower opinions of the ability of an average person than did Ivy League students who graduated from a private high school.
> one thing schools do do is bring people from many different backgrounds together for long periods of time.
As our communities become less diverse, our schools follow. At least in Canada from my experience having lived all over the place. For example, a White suburb leads to white schools, and the house value of the suburb is always roughly the same so the socioeconomic status of the students is pretty close. There’s no bussing kids from different areas around to achieve diversity targets.
One teacher broadcasting to thousands does scale. The best course material being taught to all does scale. Teachers assistants working with small 5-6 person groups scales better than 1 to 30.
My teachers stood up and explained a topic. We read further, did homework and were marked on tests and projects. There may be a period after the lecture where we could try to get help. Perhaps going after class might get you extra help but most teachers seemed to be involved in coaching after class.
Where does teaching come in? The lecture or the help after?
A teacher with a small number of students can interact with all students. A teacher with a large number of students cannot. Is teacher/student interaction valuable? I’d say yes. Student to student interaction is also valuable.
We had much more back and forth, discussion and such. And teacher would know you personally somewhat and would communicate with you personally when ypi had trouble.
The class was giving feedback to teachers, verbal and non verbal.
The verbal feedback needed because teachers had to wing it like a standup comedian wouldn't be necessary because each lesson would have been vetted and choosen as the best material.
Having to slowdown the entire class because you need help helps you but not a percentage of the class. Going quicker for you hurts a different segment.
MIT OCW is the worst example of scaling great teaching. Just filming a teacher at the front of a classroom with poor audio and video and no interaction, no community, no feedback.
better to consider something like Coursera (live teachers, material access is not an issue as everything is delivered in the course) or Khan Academy / Duolingo where there is no teacher but interactive learning modules and immediate quizzing/feedback. Even Masterclass, which at least features engaging performances by the celebrity teacher.
MIT OCW videos are 100x more well made where the professors explain complex topics in a simple way and is pretty enjoyable to follow through.
Coursera on the other hand has courses which are almost always quite poor and basic in quality and mostly tailored to make students “feel” like they learnt something (when mostly they just learnt the basics in a random way) so that they don’t apply for a refund.
MIT doesn’t have any of that
And is pretty enjoyable to go through ,
Maybe the difference is because of the high quality experiences of their professors
But I’d take MIT OCW over Coursera any day.
I think Edx might be a better comparison , they tend to have better quality content than coursera.
