3grdlurker

So a fast programmer is necessarily better than one who takes a little more time but pushes out stabler code?

So you’re gonna go around the office to point fingers and tell on people that they’re not 10xers, and then call them too sensitive if they react? You’re talking in abstracts but if you put what you said in context (ie this discussion) it doesn’t make sense.

I mean, if all you’re saying is that “better programmers deserve better pay”, then you’re not exactly saying anything groundbreaking and the concept of “10xer” is not going to be necessary to make that point. It should also be noted that the salary that you get isn’t just a product of your talent but also of how well you sell yourself. Amongst many other factors, of course.

Of course it is subjective. This is literally what you said:

> That is my definition.

You obviously care about optimizing for salary expenses. Most companies have room to hire more people who can do a few things well, so their definition of 10x would be different because they’ll have different expectations of their employees.

And really, if your definition of a 10xer is some poor fool who’s willing to take the job of 10 people for a single person’s salary, good luck finding someone who wants to spend their lives living that way.

But then you have to ask what metrics are being used to define a 10x engineer. You’ll see that everyone has a different version of that and therefore whether a 10x engineer exists solely depends on the ontological argument for a 10x engineer. By the end of the day 10x is subjective because teams have different needs.

I mean, I get your point about the government but now you’re just complaining about how being insensitive to other people has the consequence of them fighting back.

It’s incredibly reductionist to think that productivity is inherent to an individual when the world is never that simple and there are always a lot of factors involved in any outcome. Even the people that you think are “10xers” will stumble under the right circumstances, and the converse is also true about the people you think are incompetent.

It’s not so much that we built a culture that disallows these things to be said—I’m sure you have the freedom to say that to people if you’re prepared for the consequences. It’s just that it’s such a hasty, unnuanced thing to say, and business decisions should not be made on the basis of rash remarks that aren’t very well thought-out.

Yeah so the problem with that response is that you can say the exact same thing about Facebook, so it now doesn’t make sense that that’s being made as a point in favor of Google.

Have you actually weighed the value that you're getting out of Google services versus the privacy that you (and people) are trading off? Because I feel that people are blindly saying that and are overestimating the value. Let's see:

* Google Maps - great navigation and place accuracy, in exchange for your real-time geolocation and social media posts tagging places

* YouTube - free video hosting in exchange for your data being fed to ML algorithms, which make them billions; also now a great source of disinformation

* Google Photos - free image hosting also in exchange of your enabling of their billion-dollar ML-based businesses

I think I'm making the point in the above examples that they're making more money than what we're turning over, but please feel free to tell me--what other great value do we derive from Google products do we derive from our data?

Not a US citizen, but what’s noticeably lacking in discussions about surveillance (such as this one) is faulting the very government that’s pressuring companies to comply with state surveillance programs. Doesn’t matter how big you are or how much you’re worth—if your interests do not align with the state you’re not above its power.

I find thought pieces like these frustrating since it always devolves into a debate of definitions. For example, isn’t a passionate person curious?

Keeping up with the competition, if you’re talking about quality of product/service, isn’t the same thing as growing yearly revenues, which usually entails scaling up operations and product lines to more places and more customers, which no business has to do just for the sake of survival. See for example long-surviving small- to medium-scale family businesses. There doesn’t seem to be another motivation for chasing YoY revenue growth other than greed.

But in an economies of scale line of argumentation, shouldn’t the cost of building/selling houses for single people go down precisely because plenty enough people (and plenty more are projected to) live alone? It does seem that culture lag is to blame.

I don’t think the author intended to talk about men as a class and all the politics that comes with it, and as a man I would hate for discussions about my gender’s politics to be based specifically on sexual transactions. I mean, she had to talk a lot about her own safety and boundaries here. Not a very good sign for me.

The problem with that is when you sign a work contract with your employer, there's typically a clause there that also says something along the lines of, "whatever uses you may have of company resources becomes the property of the company".

So clearly, there can be a delineation of personal vs. corporate entities there if I don't elect, for example, to use my personal Github account versus my work Github accout, which I signed up for using my company email address. If under that scenario, the company cannot claim ownership over my personal email account, then clearly my person is not the same legal entity as my employer and I can keep both free accounts without violating Github's T&C, isn't that correct?

What do you mean by they don’t provide separate Apple accounts? You sign up for an Apple ID, you don’t wait for it to be provided to you. For example my employer doesn’t provide a work Github account… but while I have the option to use my personal one, I can also sign up for a separate one.

Or do you mean to say that they can detect when an employee tries to sign up for a second account under the same personal info, and so then the sign up fails? If it is this, couldn’t they just obscure their personal info and use a second credit card in the second account? Not a US citizen but it seems unbelievable that Apple could legally compel its employees to use their personal accounts at work.

Promotes isn’t requires , though. I’ve read that before as well, but the language around it has always suggested that employees can get away with having a second phone.

It’s still just an airing of disagreement by the end of the day. The people who lash out on Twitter don’t have the direct agency to fire or deplatform the object of disagreement. It’s still the platform or the university that decides that, and those entities are not necessarily doing so for the same reasons as the crowd that’s disagreeing.

It’s not even as if the people who “cancel” strangers for deliberately making bigoted and hateful remarks or committing workplace sexual harassment are the same people who “cancel” professors from speaking about a difficult topic in the academia. You can call it a culture, but it’s not the same people with the same ideals. Plenty of those who are vocal against bigotry would agree that professors who research on difficult topics must be allowed to talk in universities, as long as the content of their talks are actually academic/scientific, and not just outright bigoted.

I don’t think that there’s enough information in the article to take the side of Western academia or of the professor in question. The word used was “harassment”, so I’m not sure that that’s still the same as what people refer to as “cancel culture” which is really just disagreement, which people are free to do.

Developer here. I can confirm that it’s harder and more time/effort-expensive to build a UI framework or design system or custom component than using existing ones. I absolutely abhor working with designers who think that software design is about the freedom of expression of their personal creativities and tastes instead of the pragmatic, simple execution of fulfilling a business need both for the business and the customers.

Design systems should not exist in a silo. Design systems should be consistent across a platform, so if you want to practice your freedom of expression, make your own platform. Or, design a website, where there are hardly any constraints.

Why are there people who expect that HN comments are by themselves supposed to fix the world

I’m not sure if you described 10x people or one-track minds.

I love programming, I’m good at it, but what I do with my free time isn’t necessarily related to programming but is still definitely productive. I read up on economics, politics, maybe write a few essays or short stories, work out, pick up a new skill or something. Somehow being a holistic person is now considered mediocre?

The video left me with a feeling of reverent astonishment about how beautiful our planet really is. Such a shame that we’re destroying it.

> one person can have hundreds of thousands and even millions of followers that basically encourages flamewars, short inflammatory comments

Honestly you just described reddit, too, except of course for the follower count—but the point is that reddit doesn’t have to have that many participants in a discussion thread for it to reach a level of toxicity same as Twitter.

Sure, social media did make information more accessible, but the vision of the internet before Web 2.0 was that it’ll democratize information without the trade off that comes with social media today—because that trade off is exactly what we hated then about the status quo.

I was replying to your question about ever seeing the phrase in a positive light.

No, but that would be because racism or inequality is impossible to see in a positive light unless you actually like it. I still don’t see why seeing racism/i equality as bad is inherently racist in itself.

> more often that not when people say “white tech dude” they mean it in a negative way, implying that all white guys in tech are the same and bad

This is why we’re talking about the specific tweet in the article and not other uses of “white tech bro” that we cannot account for. Context matters. The usage of “white tech bro” here was referring to the archetype of straight white American male in a position of power, which actually comprises majority of people in power in America, which is a long shot from “all white guys in tech are the same and bad”. It’s really just pointing to the privilege and you’re infusing a far-fetched racist connotation to it.

Implying that his success is about his race is not exactly a racist sentiment though. In order for it to be racist it needs to be discriminatory (heck, by your own definition of racism, success is not a “negative” stereotype). Such an implication points out to the fact that society gives an unfair advantage to some people just because of their race.

I don’t see how it doesn’t add much—the tweet pointed out his race to point out his privilege. Can you explain where the veiled racism is in that? Because I’d hate to think that we’re actually making the CEO the victim here.

More people have been gaining awareness about the lines along which inequality occurs, and race is one of them, so that must be why you’re seeing the phrase more often lately.

As for the employee who was asking for a safe space to gather with other employees who are being fired on such short notice and without severance, that’s a reasonable request.

You can’t have lack of opportunity, poverty, diseases, broken homes, war, and domestic abuse in a city? I don’t get your point and the blind defensiveness.

If I’m not being a hypocrite I certainly moved to the city for the comforts of the modern world, but I’ve learned a lot since to learn that consumerism is wrong and there’s much that needs to be changed about capitalism.