ascendantlogic

How many people got burnt in the dotcom crash? In the financial crisis of 2007-2008? Black Monday of 1987? Did all of those people swear off investing in traditional equity instruments forever?

As it has done multiple times previously. I anxiously await reading why this time is "different", just like all the previous times.

Human psychology and social interaction is infinitely complex and murky.

The face people put on publicly vs their inner monologue can be vastly different. Words and actions can and do regularly diverge.

Somehow I doubt those poor Facebook engineers really have their hands tied and are unable to find work anywhere else to feed their families.

What's the reasoning for that though from the VC perspective?

Never heard of the assertion that VCs hate remote teams. Anyone care to expand on that?

extended exposure to public investment markets tends to do that over time. As investor power grows over a company, all concerns aside from increasing shareholder value slowly die.

> The Internet disrupted companies that weren't ready for it. Do you think something new is coming alomg to replace the Internet?

Yes, this is the way of technology and it's happening faster and faster. One of the biggest reasons Microsoft ended up on its back foot in the 2000's was because it disregarded the threat of Linux, and woke up too late to the mobile revolution. In all these cases there's hubris mixed with inertia and when the landscape shifts these giants aren't paying attention.

As someone old enough to remember when IBM seemed too huge to ever lose in the market, along came Microsoft. Then when Microsoft felt like it was unstoppable, along came Google and Amazon. Now those companies are reaching the same terminal velocity and a new breed of companies will rise up and dethrone them.

Which is why I feel like after 20 years in the industry a good portion of people start consultancies realizing there's good money to be made on this hype cycle churn.

What's old is new again. The inevitable rewinding of the 2012 architecture "revolution" starts now. I look forward to people in 2026 saying "monoliths are bad, split everything out to services"

I'm curious what the application could be for load testing? Tools like locust and gatling are nice but are still synthetic. I'd love to capture X minutes of traffic, then dupe it Y times and replay it as a more accurate representation of traffic patterns for load testing. Is that a thing?

as you rise up the chain and the decision-making power of the people in question goes up I feel the sociopath label starts to stick.

Because there are plenty of sociopaths in positions of power at companies all over the world that would probably gladly hire skilled coders that either have no moral compass or are fine with their moral compass spinning wildly while they cash their paychecks?

They need some sort of LTS versioning. Keeping up with their breakneck development pace is a job all its own.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure deleting doesn't really take the data from Facebook. Really all you can do is stop the flow of new data to them.

those aren't legit use cases?

Any single time you don't want a central entity to control modifications and or the safety of those backups. Voting records immediately spring to mind. Any sort of civic spending and accounting also immediately comes to mind.

A few years ago that would have been peak Silicon Valley but now it would have to be a drone-based burrito delivery service settled on the blockchain to be peak SV in 2018.

Yes, if you want to lie about some drone-based burrito delivery service you're probably not gonna draw the same ire as life-saving medical equipment. Although if you swindle investors for over $700 million in either case I imagine the SEC will be knocking at your door eventually.

Yes, (most) people care that it's a shitty thing to do, but again companies like this do not. Their goal is to grind as much productivity out of you for as cheap as possible. It sounds fatalistic but it's just how it is. Romanticizing things just leads to heartbreak.

EDIT: Note I said "companies like this". There are clearly companies that are run at the top by compassionate, non-shitty people and those values filter down through the org. However, as companies get larger and especially once they are beholden to investors and ESPECIALLY when they are beholden to public investors that seems to die a gradual death.

From the company's perspective it's always a game of getting maximum effort/value for minimum price. From the employee's perspective it's the exact opposite: maximum price for minimum effort/value. If they can dangle that carrot in front of you and get you to give 110% at your current pay scale for 1-2 more years then why the hell wouldn't they do it? And how many people grind away on that treadmill after having that conversation with their boss? For every post like this there's gotta be hundreds if not thousands of people at these big companies that put their noses back to the grindstone to keep chasing that promotion.

To be sure I'm not downplaying your commentary. It's extremely illuminative and very well written. After almost 20 years in the industry I've learned the burning truth of it all, though. Loyalty to individuals is worthwhile. Loyalty to companies is meaningless. Be earnest and caring in your interactions with individual coworkers but feel nothing as you squeeze every drop you can out of the company because that's exactly what they're trying to do to you.

There is a lot of bot-driven trading going on. To the degree it starts approaching HFT-levels of speed I'm not sure. I don't know what sort of algorithmic trading arms race is going on in that space since the order books are still thin enough for a small number of well-moneyed people to impact the price in a non-trivial manner.

Well I honestly didn't know that. Thank you for the information.

Only 16 gigs of RAM? Why do companies still hold that limit in 2018? I was hoping for 32 gigs back in 2015.

Land of the Free*

* must pay applicable fees to be licensed for practicing freedom

I use Vagrant when I want to screw around with Linux without spending money spinning up a box in a random cloud service. I use docker-compose for development.

I think Otto is dead