BrandonM

I’m not making any particular argument here, just adding color to your fair points. My dad worked labor his whole working life until it broke his body at about 50 (now on disability). Now I’m working in part to send him money every month, but also building toward my own early semi-retirement. I’m happy I got into programming, but I’ll be happier to have my thoughts back.

I just looked, and room+board at OSU costs $13,352 per year (http://undergrad.osu.edu/cost-and-aid/basic-costs). Adjusted for inflation, that’s cheaper than it cost 20 years ago. Of course, unsubsidized private or out-of-state schools will cost far more. Many fewer people went to college 40 years ago, too.

The health insurance premiums are higher now, but the coverage is far better. Everyone can have guaranteed health coverage via ACA, subsidized in cases of financial hardship.

Free childcare is still available for many of those who live close to family. Maternity and parental leave and FMLA laws have only improved. Free public schooling generally starts earlier. More wfh jobs are available today than ever before.

My point in all of this, of course, is that I suspect a lot of these differences boil down to optionality and different decision making. I don’t think it’s reasonable for our generation to pursue a more exciting, leisurely, and expensive lifestyle than our parents had (prestigious school, expensive city, travel, white collar job, moving away from a childhood home, delayed commitment), then resent that generation’s boat and lake house.

Can you have it all today? For most, the answer is still no, just like it always was. I suspect that more people than ever before can get pretty close, though, leaving those who can’t even more resentful about it than in the past.

BTW, with one month of SF rent, you can buy yourself a nice used boat. A couple years of that rent will buy you a simple lake house.

25 years ago, the median car and house didn't have (central) A/C. Cell phones and the Internet were expensive and not widely available. Truly portable laptops, usable tablets, and smartphones didn’t exist. Health food options were limited. The world was not mapped for all to access at street level. Translation was far more difficult. Information was less accessible—Wikipedia and Google didn’t exist. Free public preschool (4K) was uncommon. The death rates and crime rates were higher, life expectancy lower. Cash and checks were the primary payment methods. The list goes on and on.

Does wealth here refer to an individual’s relative share of contemporaneous wealth? Should the generation that built all of the great technology and systems of the past 25 years not reap the benefits of their work?

I’m in my 30s, btw, in case I come across as defensive in this comment. It sounds like my parents’ generation did a better job of building lasting wealth than their parents did (though not my parents lol). Should we find fault in that?

There might be other factors. Maybe people leave CA with more belongings than they arrive with. Maybe new CA jobs pay for relocation, then people eventually do a self-serve move out of CA.

Still, I found it to be an interesting data point. The UHaul outflow date starting in 2016 corresponds to the SALT deduction reforms and the worsening annual fire conditions. Both seem like plausible “tipping point” factors to kick off an exodus, among other commonly cited issues.

> 2020 Migration Trends: U-Haul Ranks 50 States by Migration Growth

...

Growth states are calculated by the net gain of one-way U-Haul trucks entering a state versus leaving that state in a calendar year. Migration trends data is compiled from more than 2 million one-way U-Haul truck customer transactions that occur annually.

...

California ranks last by a wide margin, supplanting Illinois as the state with the greatest net loss of U-Haul trucks. California has ranked 48th or lower since 2016...

    git blame WS_COMMIT^ -- FILE

Few seem to consider that contextual difference. Poor word choice aside for a moment, "quite trivially" meant something very different in 2007 than it has come to mean today.

I appreciate your theorizing on its staying power. It’s interesting to think about why a particular phrase sticks with people.

[1] http://shebang.mintern.net/tips-for-remote-unix-work-ssh-scr...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3364025

As much as I appreciate your thoughtfulness, I really don’t mind the commentary. I’m long past being frustrated about being misinterpreted, and I learned a lot from it, anyway.

As I’ve stated since[1], I was an undergrad when I made those comments. I know how much I’ve grown since then. It feels like someone else said them, and everyone is talking about “not me” when they remark about it today.

I definitely appreciate the love, though. Thanks!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16661824

Watch this talk by the creator of lichess: https://www.infoq.com/fr/presentations/lichessorg-open-sourc.... Do you use Wikipedia?

I personally expect free and open software and services to win in the long run. I think we’ll also see more small companies like Craigslist that completely dominate their segment in a way that’s net positive to society without significantly warping our governments. And in some cases, corporations legitimately are the best stewards. I think that’s fine.

My point is that I extrapolate current trends very differently than you seem to be. You can start a complicated service easier than ever. We’ve reached a point where it only takes one motivated individual to seed a community, build something truly user-oriented, and completely supplant the corporate/profit-driven alternatives.

- Signed by “Loren Terveen, Associate Department Head”, who was a co-author on numerous papers about experimenting on Wikipedia, as pointed out by: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26895969

Perhaps I'm only acknowledging that I'm less likely to downvote someone that I agree with? For example, if someone speculates wildly but it's consistent with my own experience, I'm not likely to downvote. If someone speculates wildly and it's inconsistent with my experience, I'm far more likely to downvote.

Probably where we disagree is whether it's OK to downvote a comment that someone put effort into. I've seen someone ask a question about a particular technology, and someone who clearly has very little experience with that technology posts a long screed where they're ~~talking out their ass~~ sharing their opinion in a way that sounds authoritative. Or maybe they're repeating business-level talking points instead of getting down to technical brass tacks.

I hope that gives an idea what I mean. I don't want to see comments like that on HN, regardless of how much effort or how well-meaning the comment is.

I personally think of "disagreement" as a continuum, where one end is pretty close to my own view, and the other is absolutely abhorrent or incoherent. Certainly part of that continuum warrants downvotes. "Don't use downvotes to signal disagreement," is meaningless in that context.

More concretely, the HN guidelines say nothing about why to downvote. They only say, "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

I think you're totally right with the first sentence I've quoted. The second has some truth to it, but I think it's a more personal effect than you seem to be acknowledging.

The most common complaint of long-time forum members is that the signal-to-noise ratio has gone down. In reality, the signal-to-noise ratio could stay the same, but for any individual community member, we will personally find less signal in the noise. The discussions will inevitably become predictable to us.

When we first join a forum with a particular focus, we likely have an incredibly incomplete view of the topics being discussed, or at least that community's interpretations of those topics (some of which might change our mind). We'll have lots of epiphanies. We'll connect a lot of dots that we hadn't connected before. We'll have real world experiences that we can anchor to discussions in the forum, allowing us to bring our life context into the forum and the forum context into our lives.

Over time, though, we'll be learning less and less from the forums. The forum discourse can initially advance somewhat as we come to useful consensus on some topics, and as the earlier members have more life experiences. For any forum that allows new members, the discourse is bound to hit a steady state of much more slowly evolving discourse. In the long run, forums likely evolve at roughly the same rate as society as whole.

The forum still fills a very useful function for those new starry-eyed members who have a lot to learn and much room to grow. For them, the adventure and discourse and overall experience is nearly as good as it was for the early forum members.

Meanwhile, those early members continue to grow at human rates, not society rates. We outgrow the forums. We start to see similar points over and over again, ones we've already argued to death and assessed for ourselves. We've personally experienced supporting and contradictory anecdotal evidence for many of the forum's consensus viewpoints. The "signal" at this point mostly comes from discussing entirely new events in the forum's focus area. The sorts of things where you might say, "I wonder what HN thinks about this?"

Therein lies the rub. As we personally have discussed to death the technical topics that drew us to HN, we almost wish to give "the HN treatment" to broader areas, especially philosophy, politics, and other current events. But we are not experts in these areas. It might feel exciting to us to discuss these things with our peers, but to anyone looking in from the outside, we're a bunch of bumbling idiots who think we know it all. If these topics start to dominate the conversation, the forum is no longer interesting to newcomers. Foremost experts in these areas have little reason to visit the forum, so any advancing discourse is much slower than it was for the original forum topic.

Sorry, I'm kind of thinking out loud in this comment. I guess my conclusion is that it's probably best to strive to keep the forum on topic, even if it gets boring for the oldtimers. I think it's totally fine for members to realize they've outgrown the forum and move onto other ways of spending their remaining time on this planet. We can take some satisfaction in the role that we played in the forum's early growth, and we can be grateful for the role that it played in our growth. And we can let the next generation muddle on in our stead, experiencing their own adventures while moving the center in their own direction.

Regarding USBs, Dropbox's messaging at the time was "throw out your USB drives", and this was before smartphones or ubiquitous dependable network connections. At the time, if I had to give a presentation in a university classroom, Dropbox wasn't moving the bar much on that particular problem.

You then said, “the grass looks greener, only to realize it was towards the same shit we left behind.” My whole point was that the grass is greener than you described in different parts of the industry than bespoke software.

In other words, it sounds like we’re mostly in agreement, but I chose to get out of bespoke work. You seem to be advising to suck it up and sweep the barn floor.

10 years of focus on the same problem is definitely possible in industry, and your salary will scale with your expertise. It sounds like you’re expected to produce results along the way even in academia, so there’s not a notable difference in that regard.

One other thing worth comparing is the administrative burden. Good engineering teams have a variety of support systems in place to keep high-value engineers as productive as possible (people managers, engineering coordinators, project managers, etc.). It sounds to me like profs end up personally doing a lot of legwork.

You recommend not running, but if you're not in a position to change some of these core practices, moving to a better situation may be the best option. I think one huge quality-of-life factor is working on a team with strong technical leadership. That could be a tech-led company, or it could be an in-house engineering team at any company where the team's director has clout outside the engineering team, generally based on a history of delivering value to the broader org.

Being one of our founding engineers, I have several times identified a need and implemented a solution without "seeking permission" first. When I do want more formal company backing to pursue a project, a conversation with my manager or an email or a one-page Google Doc all sound easier than writing and submitting a grant proposal.

As our company has grown, I have seen my role change, and I have collaborated with my manager to determine a new direction and title for myself. Notably, I tried management for a while, and I ultimately decided to return to an individual contributor role (no direct reports). It didn't sound like Dr. Fratantonio had the option to stop mentoring other PhD candidates.

Freedom is not exclusive to founding engineers. Our company has a prioritized list of features available for development, and devs have a big role in choosing the next feature they work on, even when it's not a current area of expertise. Established engineers and new hires alike have a lot of latitude to pick technologies, architect a solution to a problem, implement a novel algorithm, etc. One relatively junior new hire is embarking on a project to rewrite much of our frontend code, with support from all of us.

Again, that's why I commented. Depending on what type of freedom you're seeking, industry may offer it and pay better and have better working conditions to boot.

The assigned dev absolutely breaks the big feature into reasonably atomic pull requests, ideally no more than a few hundred lines but sometimes a few thousand. The critical difference, I think, is that none of that breaking up is super planned out, and it's certainly not formalized prior to development. The changes often trickle out over several releases. Collaborators may help advise on where to break things up, but ultimately it's up to the dev to use good judgement.

I agree that 6 months of unmerged development is absolutely a horrible situation that's best to avoid.

Every 4 weeks, we release whatever has been merged in the last 4 weeks. One dev might have 8 independent changes in a release or 0. We typically have a handful of significant changes that land each release and a bunch of minor improvements. Still, there's not much effort to estimate when any particular feature might land.

When a large feature is getting close to completion, the dev might choose to push a little bit to hit a particular release. There's not really any external pressure to do that, though.

That's still a sprint?

I was contrasting with that model, though it sounds like I might not be accurately characterizing sprints. We've had some features that have taken over a year to complete, such as a major rearchitecture. The (generally senior) dev assigned to that task has a lot of latitude to break it up according to their judgement, submit individual parts on their own timeline, etc., all while minimizing bookkeeping and coordination with others. As long as they're continuing to make forward progress according to an initially vague, sensible, iterative plan, we tend to leave our established devs to their own devices. For newer devs and where multiple devs are collaborating on a feature together, we encourage at least weekly check-ins.

We now have more than 50 devs, and we've remained quite flat and autonomous. It would be literally impossible for me to track what all the other devs are working on, never mind going over it every day in 15 minutes. It probably works better for siloed dev/product teams that stay under 30 people, but that's not how we work.

I share all this to give perspective on a pretty bold statement: "If you [don't like standups], then I don't want to work with you." Ten people is a good size for standups, and I think you may be overgeneralizing your experience when judging people who don't like standups.

Even still, I'm curious how much is changing daily to warrant daily standups? We have a rotating "release team" who runs QA and ultimately performs releases, and they check in daily. But daily checkins for feature development seem very frequent to me.