ShabbyDoo

"Most modern office layouts seem to be designed to screw with people's fight or flight instincts all day."

And I thought I was the only one who felt this way. Facing a wall in an open office space causes me to react defensively to noises around me. Is someone sneaking up on me? What's happening in my immediate surroundings? This is not rational, but I don't see any way to make myself stop other than to "handicap" my senses via headphones. Thankfully, I don't get reflections off my monitor, the wall, etc. When our cat stays out all night, he invariably comes in and sleeps for hours, even in the summer. We suppose he doesn't sleep while outside because he must constantly be aware of his surroundings. In an open office environment, I feel like our cat.

I get calls all the time, and I live in Cleveland. Where's this lack of jobs you're talking about?

Yes. How many people have you observed in BigCo's whose value lies mostly in knowing some internal, proprietary process/technology/etc.? They might make $100K and be worth that amount for awhile to the BigCo compared to someone from off the street who doesn't know how to help out CustomerX who has been stuck on a customized version of the company's flagship product from 12 years ago. Maybe this person is compliant, polite, and completes near-menial work as asked. So, whenever a round of layoffs happens, he or she never gets cut.There are a bunch of reasons why those with scant technical skills end-up sticking around. However, the divide between this person's salary and that which he could get at another company grows ever wider.

Whenever I read stories about out-of-work "older" engineers, I presume them members of the categories I described above. What never seems to be said is that their plights usually are the results of decisions they made over a decade before. Stick with the current company doing crappy technology X? Yeah, it's boring, but the benefits are good and the work is low-stress. Go out on job interviews? I know deep down inside that I'm a mediocre developer, but my current company seems to put up with my crappy code and low productivity. SO, I 'd better stay right where I am. In this latter case, it could be argued that the "older" person's previous employ-ability was an accident or aberration.

There probably are few on HN who can imagine being like these people, so it's hard to relate. I just turned 37 and think that I'm a better dev than at 27. I've been thinking a bit about how my thought processes have changed. One thing I do now is mull through a lot of ideas before bothering to write code. If there are 50 ways to do something, it's worth taking a way to get a cup of coffee and think through a few possibilities. Along with that, I am less likely to believe that my current view into a problem or situation is accurate. What's the probability that the design I mulled over in the shower this morning will actually work out? As I've aged, I've assigned lower probabilities to positive outcomes, and I don't think my thoughts are of worse quality. So, I experiment more, and my experiments (iterations, or whatever else you want to call them) are faster, dirtier, and prove me right or wrong faster than the paths I embarked on before. My ability to hold a large, "working" model of a system in my head an perform experiments on it has improved over time. This is really what debugging is all about. I now ask better questions about how a system ought to function based on experience. What should happen if the async remoting process fails? How will humans know that a failure has happened? I think of these things because I've endured the pain in the past of finding out three days later that some background process has gone haywire.

So, what are the negatives? I'm less likely to run off and push a new technology into an important system. Around 2001, I wrote a macro-processor-y thing in Python (1.5x timeframe). The company I worked for was a Java shop. I was intrigued with Python, so I decided to learn something. The thing I built worked really well, but it was later converted into Java so that any one of N competent developers could hack on it when issues arose. Today, I'd suck it up from the beginning, look at the realities of the organization, and end-up writing the thing in Java from the beginning. Maybe I'd use some alternate JVM language, but I'd have to think hard about doing so. I'm still regarded as a loose cannon when it comes to dragging additional open source dependencies into codebases, so maybe I've never grown up. Who knows. I really can't think of any downsides to having gotten older other than feeling agitated when "kids" don't know how a hashtable works. Back in my day....

So, for what demographics does this publicity stunt improve the perceived legitimacy of Google+? I can't think of any negatives.

It bothers me that the VOIP providers don't, say, play a special message explaining the issue. If it's not illegal for them to block these numbers, then why not at least explain themselves? Perhaps they could offer at-cost connections? "Press 1 if you are willing to pay $0.08/minute for this call"

I wonder if executive compensation schemes are at least partially to blame for failures like these? After all, next quarter's numbers will look a lot better if you stop spending money on R&D which, if it ever does pay off, won't for a few years down the road. So, if you're running Kodak in 1992 and you don't expect to be the CEO in 2002, why negatively affect your stock options by ensuring the company's future? Investors aren't given a breakdown of R&D spending by expected first payoff year, so no one can tell that your earnings look good because you've sold off the future.

I'm glad this obituary pointed out that Kodak's demise fits a common pattern among successful behemoths -- failing to react to disruptive technologies. It must have been easy for Kodak to ignore digital photography at first when professional photographers, its core customer base, derided the first digital cameras as inferior toys. I am yet again reminded of an essay Dan Bricklin wrote (I couldn't find a link, anyone?) where he noted on a train how mobile phone users gladly traded the fidelity of landlines (dropped calls) for convenience (speaking while riding) -- a rational trade-off which cost AT&T dearly. Digital photography didn't produce better photos than film for quite awhile, but it offered up advantages which professional photographers probably didn't care much about: convenience, lower skill level (due to instant review), etc. And, of course, the rest is now history.

In summary: Those in the 99th to 99.9th percentile of wealth may be richer than those in the 98th percentile, but they don't enjoy most advantages implicitly granted to the top 0.1% of Americans.

The owners understood quite well what made for an amazing experience, but they didn't feel they could ensure that each customer would receive that experience given the issues they had in hiring and retention. One thing that shocked me was that I didn't get pushback on the likely increase in credit card usage. While 1.6% is a horrible portion of net margins, it's a small price to pay for keeping greenbacks out of employees' hands. There's a shortage of competent people in America who are willing to serve food at [Chain X] for more than a few months while finishing up school, etc. Most who will opt into serving long-term will seek higher-end restaurants.

You aren't unusual. A good server will beat automation hands down. It's the power of a bad server to fore a bad experience upon me which makes me love the tablet as an option.

How about a mobile app which would allow me to pre-order from food trucks? I work in downtown Chicago, and there are a bunch of trucks around everyday (but not within 200 feet of a "real" restaurant entrance, of course!). Imagine that the food trucks all posted their menus to foodtruck.com in the morning along with their schedule of locations/times. I could then see a menu of food available within an N minute walk of my building, pre-order and pay, and then go pick-up my bag of food. The food trucks would just have a net-connected tablet onboard which would alert them of purchases. They could mark menu items as unavailable when they run out. By taking the uncertainty out of deciding to leave one's desk and find a food truck, business could increase. Perhaps owners could also be given geospatial/temporal demand pattern information with which they could optimize their positioning.

He seemed to be focused on the idea that people would want to play games on the tablet -- nevermind that handheld game machines existed before he even opened.

Casual dining chains are very scared of change. Deciding to feature a different sandwich in the most prominent sections of their menus is what they consider a huge decision. All execs believe that their customer service experience is much better than in reality. So, they compare their "ideal selves" to the experience of using a tablet and cringe in horror. Also, most folks managing in the restaurant industry came up through the ranks, so they've all self-selected into an extroverted, interaction-intensive occupation. Their views don't mirror those of Americans as a whole.

A McDonald's outside of Orlando was experimenting with self-ordering in 2003. I saw it in action when I was working on a tablets-at-the-table start-up. It worked well. In the Midwest, Sheetz "gas station" (quotes because it's so much more) has done self-ordering for years using a system from Radiant Systems.

One possible argument for proprietary tablets is that the value to a potential thief is much less than a commodity tablet which could be repurposed. Perhaps the maker of a "standard" Android tablet could be convinced produce a version slightly modified so that their standard distro would not work without modification? While thieves clearly could hack the standard distro to make it work, would they really achieve high enough theft numbers to justify the effort?

A social event with the waitstaff? No one is saying that you can't talk to the restaurant staff, even when using a tablet -- you just aren't beholden to them for service.

The value in high-end processing is the multimedia upsell. Replacing a paper menu doesn't require much processing power, but it's worth a lot to increase the check average and/or improve margins by promoting higher margin items.

I spent about a year in 2003 trying to launch a similar start-up. Restaurant owners told me that they would gladly trade a normal distribution of customer satisfaction for consistent-but-average experiences. Why? If you have a great experience, you might tell a few people. However, when you have an awful experience, you'll tell a hundred.

This purchase says to me that IGT thinks the US will allow domestic online gambling operations in the near future. Why else would they spend so much money on what appears to be quite a diversion from their current business model?

The problem I have with the shoplifting analogy as presented is that someone unfamiliar with SOPA might conclude that the website at risk must also be the victim of the crime. How about analogies to other crimes like stealing from another customer, assaulting another customer, etc. What's ironic is that the bar/nightclub industry is effectively governed by such a law. It seems that, when patrons decide to do bad things in a bar, the government can revoke the establishment's liquor license. Even the number of police visits to an establishment due to customers' bad behavior has been used against the establishment. While I might have sympathy for the government if the bartenders were encouraging drunkenness, few other establishments must worry about their own culpability when a customer does something bad on premises.

I talked to a guy in Chicago who just opened-up an upscale bar/restaurant. His description of the corruption and bureaucratic hassles reminded me of stories told to me by Indian friends about getting basic stuff done in India. Apparently the Chicago liquor permit process required standing for hours in lines only to be told that you were in the wrong line, had the wrong documents, etc. This guy gladly would have paid a couple hundred bucks for a "guide" of sorts.

I'm sure there are high-end, lawyer-run advisory services which handle these issues for large clients. Perhaps the opportunity lies in the middle-ground? People who don't have complex needs but don't want to waste hours of their day? I'm thinking about the walk-in, "Minute Clinics" at CVS and other pharmacies which are run by nurse practitioners. Nurses there know how to treat basic stuff and how to decide if someone's needs might be beyond their expertise. It works out pretty well for the patient who just wants to confirm that he has strep throat and get some antibiotics.

Let's take it a step further. Uber could provide a futures market for car service. The same economic incentives which drive cattle producers to lock-in the prices at which they will sell their cattle at the same time as they lock-in their feed prices exist for car service. Thinking about staying at the swanky hotel that's located a few miles from the party? Buy a forward contract on car service at the same time you book the room.

The issue I see is that, without standardization of "product", it would be hard to create an active marketplace. To a driver, taking someone away from the city to the suburbs isn't as valuable as a route which leads to another customer's point of departure. This, of course, implies that the drivers would also be participating in the futures market. If they noticed, before considering taking NYE off to be with their families, that they could earn $200/hour, they might reconsider.

Furthermore, would customers be willing to lock-in service at a particular time? What if the party is still going strong at your appointed time? You could sell your service slot to someone else, but would you be willing to put your contract up for sale while sipping a martini with your significant other? Is there a market design which provides sufficient certainty and price/demand visibility in a way where transactional costs don't destroy the value proposition?

Perhaps the ubiquity of pocket "trading terminals" will usher in a new era of dynamic pricing which will require the design of new market models? Next up, concert tickets.

What saddens me about this story is the real but largely unexamined cost of war -- the appropriation of talent for projects with no positive impact on humanity. Yes, this satellite project was valuable in that it perhaps helped avoid future wars. However, what benefits could we all have received from the work of these obviously talented engineers? I'm not suggesting that such a satellite program was not a good governmental decision given the state of the world -- just that, in the absence of such adversarial relationships between countries, these engineers could have made the world a much better place somehow. We might mock the allocation of engineering talent to the latest group shopping or social networking "fad", but at least people are getting some possible benefit.

In corporate environments where outgoing, non-HTTP traffic is blocked by default, individual developers can get their jobs done without going to 17 meetings over seven months to plead their case.

Hmmm.....could the terrorists cryptographically encode their flight schedules along with techniques, drop the encoded versions on public repositories, and distribute the keys to the media upon successfully killing people? This way, they could prove their involvement.

Your point about the compound nature of risk is valid, but doesn't it also suggest that the actual risk of allowing electronics during takeoff/landing is quite low as well?

I have used this sort of reasoning when arguing against low speed limits implemented in the name of safety. Surely, for each 10 MPH decrease in highway speed limits, we will observe a decrease in the number of deaths per year? Presuming both this fact and the presumed political validity of speed limit reduction to decrease death rates, shouldn't our vehicles be limited to walking speeds? The reality is that most people implicitly choose an overall level of risk in their lives and optimize the apportionment of that risk among activities in a way which maximizes their happiness. If it took me four hours to commute to work because I drove 10 MPH to be "safe", I could either spend less time with my family or move my family closer to the office. Would my children end up successful in life if they rarely saw me? The end game of everyone moving closer to the office might be little specs on the globe of uber density -- an unhappy way of life for most. How about subsisting on ration kits (like those currently sold to doomsayers) as a way of minimizing the horrific risks associated with un-necessary trips to the grocery store? Obviously, people have some threshold of risk at which they choose expected quality of life over expected quantity. Airplane travel, either with or without restrictions on "portable electronic devices" can be evaluated similarly. And, given Americans' propensity to drive places at high speeds, shouldn't they be equally willing to incur what seems to be a trivial risk in order to have more productive time?

Let's presume for a moment that some sort of interference which could be generated by a box the size of a laptop might have a non-trivial risk to passenger safety. Now, think as a terrorist might. How about sending your minions onto planes with devices which look like standard consumer electronics devices but are capable of generating high levels of interference? Around the holidays in the US, someone checking or carrying on what appears to be an A/V receiver in a box would not raise suspicion -- just a gift for a relative. Now, inside that "receiver" is a battery and a transmitter (I'm not an electrical engineering sort of guy, so substitute the appropriate components) which emits what signals the terrorists hope will interfere with onboard avionics. Via a remote switch, the terrorist turns on the device during take-off and landing. If the plane crashes, is forced to make multiple attempts at a landing, etc., then the terrorists know they're onto something. They will refine their techniques until they can make plans fall out of the sky. If not, they try other experiments -- different frequencies, etc. Could such experiments even be carried out through transmitters on vans which could be temporarily parked on highways near airports? What if the terrorists could purchase airplane components with which to conduct their own testing and refine their "weapons"? Surely such an avenue of attack, if feasible, would be less effort than training your minions to fly an airplane, even if learning to land was not required? That no known terrorist attacks via this vector have been reported suggests it implausible. A problem with most terrorism "experiments" is that, if the experiment fails, the experimenter ends up imprisoned and thus incapable of further experimentation. Given the obvious recruiting issues the likely outcomes of either imprisonment or death present, terrorists ought to take like ducks to water toward techniques which allow repeated experimentation and refinement. That no incidents have been reported due to avionics malfunction suggests the near impossibility of actual passenger risk. QED?

Your comment made me think of Netflix' "Chaos Monkey" -- the system which randomly disrupts PRODUCTION systems:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/04/working-with-the-ch...

Perhaps eliminating restrictions on electronics use would have a similar effect. What if the FAA started out by allowing use on a select number of flights where the pilots were highly trained and aware of the supposed risks? Over time, restrictions could be lifted more broadly presuming these initial experiments showed no cause for concern.

Economists call these differences in incentives "agency costs". I learned this term in my MBA program :)

"isn't driven only by profit"

I will argue that establishing such a reputation, even at the expense of short-term profits, likely is profit maximizing. So, you are profit driven -- just in a way which also happens ot feel good ;)