Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?

I do note that you say "mostly" - but I've seen truly epic spreadsheets (including one that my employer at the time spent almost £1 million on) and I'd rather reverse engineer an application with source code rather than a complex spreadsheet (even though the feature in Excel to show dependencies visually is rather cool).

Same thing with reliability. So many of these IT supported applications that are supposed to survive a nuclear strike are down a day a week, while the basic access database pretty much hasn't seen a downtime during business hours since inception.

Once I was contacted by a friend who works on the QA department of a factory (belonging to a multinational company) to implement a system to keep track of the building process (what was soldered, who did it, what tolerances it must have, things like that). The factory's process was entirely modeled in Excel spreadsheets, with the caveat that they took almost 6 months to gather and deliver the data to the client after installing the product on the client site.

As it was a freelancing job, I gave them a very high hourly rate, such that it they could forget about it, as it was too much work for one person alone. But in hindsight, I also refused because most certainly it would imply that a lot of the workers in that departament would be made redundant (there were 30 workers there, I would say that at least half would be unnecessary after the system was up and running). If only management understood the huge savings that would be possible.. But in this case, I'm glad they don't!

I blame the "MBAs can do anything" philosophy, but it's probably also a consequence of worker mobility.

To state it most simply: if your management (at any level) cannot call bullshit on the data their direct reports provide them (whatever level of abstraction that is), then your business is at existential risk.

This is pretty common practice, in Australia at least.

There's this dilemma that the people buying the software and mandating its use aren't the ones who end up having to use it. So, often ridiculously complex workarounds happen in order to comply with company policy yet still be able to get any work done at all.

This quite likely is one of the largest productivity sinks in industrialised societies.

There are ways to amend these issues but they require a change both in company policies and in thinking: Allow departments and teams to choose their tools. Have a repository of internally developed tools (Excel spreadsheets, bespoke CRUD applications, shell scripts etc.) for others to share and build upon. Put an emphasis on software quality and user experience.

If they insist on tech in SV or nothing, its like people who fail the culture fit criteria because they're a woman or minority. Uber and sales and non-tech employers, unlike tech, won't discriminate as much against women or people of color. If a white male can't get a job because of a different issue like skill vs pay, he can Uber and sales and non-tech employers just as well as a black or woman already has to do.

I'd like to see salaries raised if only for the "a rising tide raises all boats".

Some are still in tech, at places that pay them, places that you may not know or have never heard of.

Little experiment: Add 50% to your top compensation, then you may soon start interviewing people who earn around that number and sometimes another 50% on bonus/stock (that your company doesn't have).

They are here and they are the people you wanted, they're not difficult to get, you just didn't know about them.

Now that you found out, you'll continue to ignore them and keep looking for a unicorn at half the price :D

My anecdotal case : I currently work for a very well known French startup. I am paid a bit under 50k€/y (and no equity).

The company really struggle to attract skilled engineers and to be honest there are not that many skilled engineers in a given field in the country.

I could get 70-80k€/y in some other less known French startups that do their best to attract top talent.

I got an offer for an US based startup a little bit under 200k$/y with some advantages and a good amount of equity.

If I can get an US work visa, I am going to take that offer, otherwise I will follow other opportunities but I am not staying with that first company in the long run.

I don't really want to get started about those slow laptops (that have “Pro” labels on them). I don't know about you but for me their performance is disappointing. (By the way, I use a 2010 Macbook Air as my home machine so no need to call me “picky”). Yet those “Pro” machines seem to be “default” ones in so many organizations I know. They are a good trade-off indeed between looks, portability, versatility and price. But they are nowhere near “pay whatever it takes to scrape every last drop of performance and reliability from your tools” approach that to me seems to designate the choice of tools by professionals.

About software. There's the brilliant, inspirational and slightly sad article: https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff . Where, I remember, was a comment with a person asking, “do you want to pay hundreds of dollars for a text processor written with the level of quality described?” And my reaction was, “Hell, yes! If it's a professional tool and I earn tens of thousands using it, I should be able to pay accordingly for my main equipment”. In web development industry there's an apparent trend now to switch to “hipster” (I mostly like things hipster) text editors. Won't specify the names here but they are usually written in Javascript and HTML and are “highly customizable” but I rarely see them made to perform functions my IDE does out of the box. In the meantime, IDEs for web development are a few (are there any besides the Prague-made ones?) and are not very customizable by my needs (compared even to aforementioned lightweight editors).

Anyway, thank you for your answer and I am glad, that you do focus on the positive side of things!

Another problem is that there are two categories of success: you find a simple way to make amazing batteries, or you find a massively complicated way. If you find a simple way, that's great, but it can be copied by anyone who wants money, and you'll end up like the Hoverboard - a very successful _idea_ but the company only captured a fraction of the market. If you find a complex way, it's very likely to require an expensive material or process. For example, say you need a rare metal or something that's not currently produced in large quantities. The capital you'd need to raise in order to extract or create this material could be absolutely massive. For example, let's say you got a 10,000 Wh/kg battery but it needed a substantial quantity of rhenium. Well, worldwide production of rhenium is about 40 tons/year. You'd have create a worldwide industry for extracting rhenium, perhaps rivaling the oil industry in size. Imagine that conversation with VCs. "You want to raise $1.5 trillion? With a T?" "Yep, and we want to do it to create a battery that could either enable our world to look like Star Trek. Oh yeah, and it might become obsolete in months if someone has a better idea."

Another thing is that there's not much to "disrupt". If someone gave me $XXX million for a battery startup, it'd basically be set up in a very similar way to the research arm of Panasonic or Samsung SDI. If some genius comes up with a way to improve the efficiency of the core research - sure, that's obviously worth funding. But the problem is that everybody is trying to get to the breakthrough directly, not invent tools to get to the breakthrough faster.

Imagine if you were in a room with 1000 people, and an authoritative source announced that there's a pot of gold buried in the hill behind the room, and it'll probably be found in a few hours. Do you spend two hours driving home, getting your shovel, and driving back? Or do you run out there and rabidly start digging? Sure, you might answer "get a shovel" now, but in the real world 999 of those 1000 people will be digging with their hands.

The last problem is that the risk, and the return, is absolutely ridiculous. With startups, say 1 in 1000 makes you a billion dollars, 600 return your money and 399 go bankrupt. Great, that's acceptable. Even worst-case scenario, you take a big loss but you don't lose _everything_.

With moonshot battery research startups, every single one will lose all your money except for one - and that one will make you fabulously wealthy beyond your wildest dreams. If the breakthrough is big enough, it would revolutionize literally every field from space exploration to aerospace to power generation to electronics to vehicles. There are so many variables you can't even start to calculate the odds.

I've also grown up in a region where education was overlooked, and living with complete fucking morons is not fun. Especially when these morons themselves think that education is worthless, which is a snowball effect meaning many of their children will be stupid, as well.

On the other hand, it's easier to control them if you want to. Like they did in Medieval ages and earlier. Yeah, let's go back to that.

The ROI is as indirect and long term as it gets, but it's real and it's massive.

Speaking of illiteracy, there's an urban legend (not sure if true, anyone with access to data please check it) that literacy rate has actually dropped in the US throughout the 20th century, coinciding with increase of education "supply".

With that measured success, we got the idea that once you were a functioning member of society, you could become a functioning member of the workforce simply by continuing in even more years of schooling. But it's not clear if it has really worked out. In 1970, approximately 10% of the US population had a bachelors degree or higher. In 2017, that number is closer to 30%, yet incomes have remained stagnant throughout that entire period and job quality has declined. Not what you'd expect from the promised higher incomes and better jobs that people were willing to spend large amounts of money for.

For one, if the labor market in a particular specialty becomes oversaturated, does that mean existing grads need to spend years retraining?

High school is and will always be needed. Also, for some careers university education is obviously necessary. Just not always.

However, this probably only applies to the USA, or other places (South America as well) where students get into high debt to get degrees.

While I agree that you can get pretty far with self-study on small projects, the most important parts of software engineering revolve around communication, especially with other developers and with expert tools. It's hard to get better at communication without, well, communicating.

Of course, one can get a lot of experience by contributing to open source projects or finding other ways to work on group projects.

They also learn to read, write and count. It's a rather useful skillset to have :D

The challenge the real world presents is that the resources needed to reach that level, such as access to specialized equipment, is not in reach of the average person. It's not like a software development career where a widely available personal computer that can be purchased for hundreds – even tens – of dollars pretty much sums up everything you need to become among the best in the world.

What the schools have been able to provide is a place where people can pool their resources to gain shared access to infrastructure. Education comes as a natural consequence of effectively utilizing that infrastructure, of course.

Not to say theoretical education worth naught, I say there is a cursor that is way tilted in favour of theory that costs less and make universities earn more.

Let's call it a corporatism behaviour.

You don't want a surgeon that was good at school, you want a surgeon that when his hospital is poor will use his earning to buy medical reviews to stay up to date, say fuck to the hospital and take unpaid vacations to go in conferences to stay up to date.

You want a surgeon that don't care about his diploma, or the titles but stay focused on his craft and will go on learning without caring for what society legally requires him to do in order to practice.