There are taste difference, brand prestige and story differences, and scarcity. The most extreme examples of this would be in burgundy where laws from a few hundred years ago ranked the value of very small and fractured plots of land and it’s been memed into the best wine in the world so you have the prestige of this ancient law, the scarcity of these small plots built in, and a region that is good but not my favorite selling the most expensive wine in the world.
The oil production there is completely decimated. They have huge reserves but production is low and falling because the regime doesn't do any maintenance or support of anything in the oil production and supply chain. It is very much the meme of "living in the ruins of a once great society".
There is a specific group of people, matt stoller being the primary leader in the media, who are the "anti trust left". There is another specific group of people who are "abundance liberals" (dereck thompson and ezra klein being main media leaders) and there is an active competition inside the democratic/left of center politico-academic-policy-legal-media blob over prioritization of laypeoples attention and allegiance/belief which is in fact a finite resource and relatively zero sum between the two camps.
there are a ton of build code issues in the US that raise the cost of construction without substantionally improving benefits. As an example, I am in Europe right now, most apartment buildings here have single stair entry and smaller elevators, both of which are prevented by US building regs for bad reasons. Fixing these regs would expand the market for new construction at the low end (lower costs for marginal opportunities) and the high end (makes 4 unit condos feasable).
Hillsdale college is a fundamentalist Christian college. “Bible is the literal word of god” stuff. Many people there believe the world is 6000 years old and evolution didn’t happen.
most of these cars will be charging using L2 overnight charging. If you need to limit the fast charging, you can surge price it so maybe it costs $100 to charge fully instead of 25, etc. There are many possible solutions as long as they can solve for the surges as it spins up and down.
you are not describing someone who is "carrying water for the team". Someone who is carrying water for the team is, for instance, working on reliability improvements so that the errors or things requiring support occur with less frequency. Its not about being busy, its about having impact.
This might be a definitions issue, but my assertion is not that a "great engineer" is someone who can complete leetcode hards in 15 minutes for 8 hours in a row without stopping. My assertion is that about 1 in 5 people have 5-10x the business impact of the median software developer, and if you are recruiting or managing a team you should have the goal of having your team be entirely composed of these top quintile folks. The article specifically says that you should not have this goal, and I extremely strongly disagree with that assertion in the article.
The reason people aren't motivated to do boring work is because of a poor culture of ownership, it has nothing to do with skill or "10x" stuff. Having a team of only great people allows a much deeper culture of ownership and its much easier to get people to work on the boring stuff. Allstar teams absolutely work and are the best way to work.
Great teams are made of great individuals. All of the policies and trust and rituals and expectations are based on the performance of the bottom quintile of the team. If the bottom quintile of the team is still the top quintile of "engineers applicable to this problem" you will have a radically different and improved culture and performance than if the bottom quintile of the team is a median engineer, and especially a bottom quintile of "engineers applicable to solving this problem".
The skill gradient is steep. Broadly speaking a top quintile dev will have 5-10x the productivity of the median dev, but only 110-150% of their salary. A bottom quintile dev will have zero impact, negative impact, or .1x impact relative to a median. The goal is to have the top quintile for your project, whether that is product engineers working on b2b saas, or graphics devs working on improvements to game rendering.
Comforting yet false assertions. Great engineers tire of working with “normal” engineers, they want to work with others who they respect. A team of only great engineers can have a completely different culture than a team of “normal engineers”. Teams of great engineers are magnets that attract others. Building a great team weirdly does not become harder over time, as your project is derisked you get access to larger and larger pools of talent. Talent concentration pays an enormous dividend and is a worthy investment. Maybe things change when you hit like Facebook/google scale, but at that point… we’ve won anyway, wouldn’t be arguing online anymore.
No, I’m optimizing for making customers happy. I dgaf about your ability to leetcode. I strongly care about the rate and quality of the things you ship to prod. This is what a 10x engineer does 10x of.
I could not disagree more with nearly everything in this article. Individuals ship software not teams, unless you are pair programming. Nearly all complex technical projects are owned by one super smart person (Ex: linux). You don't need to have a scientific measurement of productivity to know that in your median team of 12 there really are 2 people carrying the water for everyone else. A players hire A players, B players hire C players etc. Building a team from the ground up is very much an iterative process of fighting complacency and mediocrity all day every day, and this guys pitch is just "give in, its not so bad".
Redundancy is definitely part of it, but 2 people also make things much much easier and reduce accident likelihood when unexpected things start happening and the workload increases. Lets say there is some severe mechanical issue, you want someone to run through a checklist to address the mechanical issue and fly the plane which is likely now out of autopilot, and another to find alternate places to land, etc.
Sort of. There’s like 5 conditions of automation commercial planes can be in. The automation mostly functions to make the pilots workload manageable, not to make their workload non existent. Commercial flights used to have a crew of 3, captain, first officer and flight engineer. The automation has reduced the workload to eliminate the flight engineer role and make flights operable by 2 people.
"Why don't other highly developed countries have the same issues finding employees?"
Baumol effects. Our economy is incredible, extremely high productivity along with full employment. Its why we have ordering kiosks at fast food restaurants, pay 225k for bucee's managers and 20 dollars/hour to flip burgers at fast food restaurants. ATC is a low productivity growth job, technology hasn't increased the number of planes or amount of airspace one ATC can manage. As other jobs and sectors of the economy improve in productivity, people migrate to those sectors from low productivity sectors like ATC because on average high productivity sectors can pay more. The salaries of ATCs rise because there is more competition for the limited pool so you end up paying more but getting the same or worse outcomes over time.
I think you're simplifying the frame far too much here. My wife works in medicine as an ENT surgeon. There is an ENT surgeon position open in a rural hospital outside of fresno CA that pays 1.1M dollars/year, or about 2.5-3x the salary a large hospital in a major metro would pay for the work. The position has been unfilled for 4 years. As best I can tell, the two main reasons the job goes unfilled are a combination of (1) it has a stressful call schedule and (2) its in an remote and undesirable location. ATC jobs have a wide geographic distribution. You need ATC at the commercial airports in Klamath Falls OR and Elmira NY and these are places people are generally moving away from, not moving into because they are run down and have low opportunity and general prevalence of rural poverty. Paying more money doesn't automagically fill these roles, and there is an upper limit to how much you can pay someone and have it be a net benefit.
Didi/Uber was more complicated than just data stuff.
At a high level, chinese tech culture is an insane no holds barred cage match with very little legal structure to protect IP or employees or anything and most companies who enter fail at participating in this.
Didi did a lot of corporate espionage and sabotage at uber china. They'd have "double agents" working for uber they'd pay to f stuff up. This type of thing is not practices in america because it is extremely illegal, but it was fine in China at not something that uber could do "back" to didi. There were people on the uber china fraud team paid by didi to tip off fraud networks on how to fraud. In the last year in china, they moved a ton of important work back to US offices because the china office was "compromised".
> As for who the losers are, the data is quite clear: Mostly corporate profits.
Amongst the problems I have with the policy are around reducing profits being presented as something purely beneficial or at no cost, and claiming that we have seen enough to "call it good" within 6 months of implementation. Corporate profits drive investment and investment grows the pie. You won't see these impacts over 6 months but you will see them over 1-5 years. Restaurant closures in response to these policies can take 6 months to few years because the medium/large size franchisees will run a franchise operating at 0 profit for a year or two until the franchise requires capital investment (replace the parking lot, buy a new grill etc) or their financing situation changes against them such that they can't maintain working capital. "20 dollar big mac" is and was unrealistic fanfare, the most likely scenario is languishing for a while.
"Also, what is the relationship, if any, between quantum computing and AI? Are these technologies complementary?"
AI is limited in part by the computation available at training and runtime. If your computer is 10^X times faster, then your model is also "better". Thats why we have giant warehouses full of H100 chips pulling down a few megawatts from the grid right now. Quantum computing could theoretically allow your phone to do that.
Theres a bunch of factors that will mess with your intuition here: 1) ride hail demand as significant spikes in usage during morning and evening rush hours AND it has a fairly strong seasonal trend depending on geo. 2) Insurance is also a big expense and for large operations like this is priced per mile or per operating hour, having more deadhead time means a higher loss to insurance. 3) People are very sensitive to wait times AND reliability. The desire to use the service drops a ton when wait times are greater than 10 minutes or if you're consistently not able to find a ride. Could waymo support less dense suburbs now? Maybe at certain off peak hours, but the economics and product experience are difficult.