azanar

Each of the three reasons he lists can be traced back to manipulation of one's political image: you fail to take the absolute most cynical view that everyone's failures from above will come crashing down on you, and cover your ass accordingly; you fail to wave your achievements around, because you believe someone is actively paying attention or gives a crap about anything you're doing; or you fail to appropriately hide your boredom and lack of motivation by plodding on at the same rate as everyone else like the good cog that you are.

None of these have anything to do with actually doing anything. You could be accomplishing next to nothing, and still be able to hit all of these points; you could be working miracles in code, and manage to flunk all three and get thrown out on your ass. They are all the departmental equivalent of spin control, and are the sign of a broken department and quite possibly a broken company. It is a sign that people have stopped caring about doing things in favor of appearing as though they are doing things. This sort of thing is a slow death of a thousand cuts to an organization, and will result in people getting fired anyway, when the lack of revenues from people not getting anything done force staffing cuts anyway.

I understand that a lot of companies are run like this; I don't need to be reminded about how the real world works, and especially not with the usual condescension. I'm not trying to convince myself or anyone else that the corporate world is not stacked this way; what I am doing is yelling in the same way Dan Pink did about motivation by incentive that this sort of ass-covering doesn't work. It results in an organization that will steadily decay from the inside, and will ultimately end up shafting the same people who thought they could save themselves by just hunkering down and playing the political game. All these people bought was a little more time cower in fear, and convince themselves this will all blow over if they just behave. It doesn't work, and people need to stop convincing themselves, for the sake of themselves, their coworkers, and the organizations they purport to work for, that it does.

Life is too short, peoples' time and effort is too valuable, to put up with asinine wealth tarpits like this. No one, not even the person cowering, is benefited in the long-term in any way by this sort of attitude.

Ugh, I need to go take a walk to unwind.

But, depending on the investor, I can't imagine they're quite like working for The Man, who conjures up really unhappy images of cube farms and dress codes. I guess I can't really gauge the investors of Mint; maybe they were that bad.

And when people say they have their family to worry about, and I ask them to elaborate, starvation is brought up in many cases. Maybe it is just hyperbole in an attempt to preempt my probing.

But this opens up another probably off-topic discussion on the bounds of beholdenness, and how much of that is self-fulfilling.

But I think it's stuck because, for a lot of people, it is buying a Caribbean island money; it is their chance to say "fuck you" to everyone who still has to work for a living. Their ambition is to display their wealth conspicuously, and otherwise sit on their asses while other people envy them.

I can't imagine someone working because they want to saying "fuck you" to someone who works because they have to, and especially not to the degree that the perpetual vacationer would. In fact, I can imagine the Caribbean island owner being condescending to the willing, but rich, worker because they aren't projecting the image of a rich person. Rich people don't work; but this one does, so he's a misfit.

I think for the crowd that gathers here, "fuck you" money should really be called "next level" money. They likely have that ambition you refer to, where getting rich is just a means to even greater ends. It's hard to quell intrinsic ambition, even if one of the hopes of that ambition has been fulfilled. And it's hard to develop ambition, even when one has the means to become so, but didn't rely on ambition to get there (e.g., lottery winners, etc). This is why most people call it "fuck you" money; it's where they can stop faking ambition and show how little they actually had before getting lucky.

You seem to assume that being a hugely profitable company is the right thing to be, and that anyone who isn't is bitter and requires a outlet to vent about how their failure isn't their own fault.

What I've seen 37Signals blog posts advocating is building a business such that it is enjoyable enough to run that it doesn't matter if it has a potential multi-million dollar exit. There is nothing wrong with them advocating such a philosophy, and nothing wrong with running a company that holds to such a policy provided no one involved was bullshitted about the terms.

The terms that Mint was running on are different, though, partly because there are investors and founders involved who entered into the deal expecting a profitable exit. Nailing them to a cross makes no sense, because their goals weren't the same, nor do I think they were ethically compelled to be.

But please, let's not make this conversation about flinging one line barbs at Jason and 37Signals so they can send one line barbs flying back. All that does is raise the heat level in the room.

And you don't need FU money to have more than one option available that prevents your family from starving. Others may disagree, but I thought this was a bit hyperbolic and cliche. There are millions of shades of gray between $170 million and poverty, and I can't imagine the Mint guys, and their families, were going to go hungry if they didn't accept this deal.

But I get what you mean, and I'm inclined to agree with your larger point. The founders of Mint aren't beholden to anyone but themselves and their shareholders, and I wouldn't expect them to put their lives on hold for my comfort, convenience, and need to have faith in the goodness of mankind. In the same position, I'd have done the same.

The solution to this, if Intuit completely drops the ball in managing Mint well, is for someone else to launch another competitor to take Intuit on. That gets the best of both worlds, people getting rewarded for creating something great, and people always have another option outside of Intuit.

Let's assume the author is serious for a second; the company he/she is describing is just asking to get fed to the lions by a company that does not embrace mediocrity-as-policy mantra, and shows they actually give a damn about their product and their customers. Those customers they are pissing off, but aren't seeing leave, are staying because there isn't another option; as soon as there is, the exodus will begin. As it does, this company is screwed, because the mediocrity they worked into their codebase assures they will be able to react about as swiftly as rock can to someone threatening to kick it.

This is not the first appeal to mediocrity I've heard, but the authors or orators I've heard make this same appeal in the past are really offering an apology for their own apathy. They want this to be true, regardless of veracity, because then it will justify their own desire to not give a shit. They hope that their self-fulfilling prophecy becomes the same to everyone else, so no one is forcing them out of mediocrity. No one is making them actually work for their monthly lifestyle installment, and instead join them resting on past achievements, hoping this grants all of us a perpetual annuity.

On the other hand, if this is satire, it's really bad satire.

Oh, and to reflect on his clever quip about spelling: yes, I did catch the spelling mistakes, and they did piss me off. And I did finish the essay, in hopes that I would find a paragraph loosely reading "jk lolz" at the end. Since I didn't, this blogger now has the bozo-bit set. So much for mediocrity being good enough.

Why? Outside of the arguments of freshness, which could be dealt with by a more efficient distribution mechanism, I don't see any net benefit.

I'll admit that the argument toward supporting local farmers carries little weight with me. Outside of the freshness argument, it strikes me as little more than small-town sentimentalism. There are a number of other industries where we did far better when we dispatched that argument; I'm not yet convinced that food production is any different. I can imagine all sorts of economies of scale that could be exploited, but we have to let the economy scale first.

I worry that it has become to tied up in people's sense of identity. Not in the sense of an environmentalist lashing themselves to a tree, but in the sense of two neighbors attempting to win a battle about who loves and cares for their families safety more by buying expensive items. It might still be true that one of them loves their family more, but it is irrelevant to the battle; the real battle is who can buy more of the expensive shit to prove it to the person they are fighting against. This is a class conflict, above everything else that is going on.

And hence the problem with organic food; it provides a more expensive option that is, ostensibly: better for you, better for the environment, better for the farmers, better for the rest of the population, better for wildlife, and likely any of a number of other groups of people or things.

Do we know if any of this is true? No. Do we know if any of it is false? No.

Does any of this really matter? I'd like to believe it does; it does for me. But I'm not convinced it does for most people.

We can argue that we know the above is true, but the data we have is relatively limited. Even when we have data, it isn't entirely clear what it is measuring, because people have such confused definitions of what "organic" actually means. It has nothing to do with local farmers; it has nothing to do with the complete elimination of pesticides, herbicides or fertilizers. It just limits the types of substances used, based on origin, not known health effects; organic farmers are required to use "natural" farming aids. What we have to go on is gut feelings that "natural," whatever we define that to mean, is "better." We also have the gut feeling that "artifical" things, whatever we define that to be, are "bad." This falls apart the instant someone points to something artifical that is better than the natural version -- as an example, please see Canola oil. But it can so fuel the senses that food we consider to be artificial will taste noticably worse. Does it? Who knows; we need more double-blind studies on this.

The problem is that the debate is working from an assumption a priori, that organic food is the better option, at least by the organic proponents. I am not pro-conventional food; I don't believe that most of the people who still buy conventional produce are that religious about it. They'd like to see data on both sides of the debate, and would like to sit down and have a reasonable pro-con discussion. But that can't happen when one side of the debate is screaming "YOU'RE KILLING YOURSELF AND THE PLANET!" It's like the guy who buys the more expensive car seat while screaming at his neighbor "YOU'RE KILLING YOUR CHILD!" The poor neighbor now has a choice: submit to the religious fervor of expensive car seats, or deal with the continued condescention of his neighbor.

We need to start having a rational discussion about this; I'm surprised, given the level-headedness by which we approach other topics, that we are so unabashedly biased on this one. Maybe it's just a vocal minority?

Link: http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Delight-Henry-S-Warren/dp/0201...

I have a completely off-in-the-weeds hypothesis that is based on some anecdotes of those around me. This hypothesis is as follows: the good, experienced hackers -- like your uncle -- are getting thrown into an faceless aggregate of all other not-so-good, experienced programmers of their generation. This bucket has a lot of assumptions that don't fit everyone within, but are applied to everyone all the same.

One of the things this bucket assumes, and one of the stereotypes we don't confront much, is that programmers don't develop any new skills after they leave college. They are useful so long as the technology du jour is the same as the day they graduated; as soon as it isn't, kick them to the curb and get the next batch.

Of course, this isn't true of all people. The problem is that they are lumped in with what I'll call the vocational programmers, who's titles are conspicuously prepended not just with the technologies they know, but the only technologies they will ever learn. It doesn't matter if they aren't capable or they just don't care, the net effect on their perception by others is the same. For a person to declare they are a loyal Blub programmer, for any value of Blub, is already the first nail in the coffin; more nails are driven every time their value of Blub gets more marginalized. That these sorts of programmers seem so common begets the assumption that every programmer has a defined value of Blub, and part of culling them is figuring out what their Blub is, and if it matches the required Blub du jour.

The bitch about stereotypes is they are almost never entirely false; there will often be some core group to which the stereotype applies, and then potentially a satellite group that gets falsely included into stereotype.

Something needs to change that changes the application of the stereotype; the easiest way I can think to do that is to make it extraordinarily painful on the people who would perpetuate the stereotype before they end up in a position where they do. Get the people who would cast disparaging labels on the bucket out as fast as possible, so the rest don't have the added weight of convincing everyone they're not like the others. These mediocre workers are not the people I hope to become, and though it may make me a heartless bastard for saying so, I have little reason but to forsake them. I think only by doing so will I avoid forsaking those that I do want to become, by making it clear that there is more than just a narrow band between the two groups.

Maybe I'm just misinterpreting what distinction is drawn between a solution and problem domain. So far, my interpretation is as follows:

* You build objects to represent the machinery involved in the computation (databases, processors, interpreters, etc). These represent your solution domain.

* Anything that explicitly represents the data being computed, rather than just being a container for data collections, is kicked to the weeds as unnecessary and wrong-headed. These would represent your problem domain.

Do I have this interpretation correct? If so, I worry.

I have seen data processors objects become near unmanageable hedges of thorns because the entire conversion from input data to output data is rolled into a GiganticBlobProcessor object. That object containing hundreds, or even thousands of lines of code that means absolutely nothing on their own. This seems prone to its own pitfalls and need for revolutionary changes.

How is this extra scaffolding a net-win? Why can't I take all this processing code, and move it into the definition of the data being translated, which is probably split amongst multiple classes to model relationships?

For instance, I have something representing a sphere within a graphical rendering system, which is capable of responding to requests for its radius, area, volume, intersection with other shapes, etc. Have I already done it wrong? Should I have just a radius primative and then have a SphereDimensionalEvaluator which does the task, being passed the radius?.

I understand the point made by the LtU commenter that TaxReport itself is probably little more than a container, since reports don't really do much in a metaphorical sense. But a customer does: it can request actions and computations from other things, and other things can ask the customer things and tell the customer to do some action. Is my thinking about things this way leading me down a very dark alley?

I am now really confused.

The thing that concerns me most is the lack of new jobs that absorb the redundant workforce. However, my concerns are probably somewhat unorthodox in that I think this represents a number of ideological problems rooted in both the employees and the employers.

The best way to encompass all of these is by the following truism: you are only capable of one specialization, give or take, in a given lifetime. And what we've been defining as specialization has been narrowing as rapidly as specializations have been getting deeper and more involved.

To play off of the analogy above, our society would look at these people, assert that it has no further need for "apple preparation specialists," and discard this class of people into the bin of history. At best, they go through retraining in some new specialization, but that takes a long time, and they are considered entry-level in their new specialization at the end.

It is this mentality where you get the laundry-list of "key proficiencies." The unwritten assumption is that all jobs are still a matter of rote memorization and repeated execution of steps, and as the years of experience with a particular technology accrue, the unconscious memorization of these steps improves.

The problem with this approach is that it is completely wrong. We do not account for people's ability to deductively reason, and we therefore do not account for the parts of the new skillset they'll know without being told by someone. The tragedy is that people believe they can't: employers, recruiters, and even the employees. This last part is the most tragic. The rank-and-file employees who believe this philosophy are so common that I become animatedly excited when I meet one who doesn't.

So, yeah. I think it goes deeper than just saying there aren't any jobs; we should really be deeply analyzing what assumptions about the nature of skill and work ethic we've been falsely believing all this time. So far, most of the analysis I've seen has just been repetition of these assumptions, with calls that we psuh forward initatives that work around them.

Scratch all that stuff that defines the where and the why, and just focus on the what. You eat produce: fruits and veggies. That alone is likely why you are much less likely to develop a lifestyle disease than those who chow down McD's. The fact that it is local farmers or organic produce is at best trivial, and likely is statistical noise comparatively.

I realize, searching around in the HN history, that this is a matter of identity for some people; I have no intention of starting another pro-con propaganda war regarding organic food in yet another thread. But can we at least concede that produce, regardless of its source and classification, is significantly better than a Big Mac and fries?

The last thing we need is for people to decide that, because they can't afford the high class choice in food -- which organics are -- they might as well not bother at all, because someone is going to heckle them for not caring about their health enough. Enough people, especially in neighborhoods like the ones we are discussing, can't decide that organic food is better for them than conventional food. The added cost may drive them into eating sufficiently little they start suffering from malnutrition. The McD's food might do that too, but if you're going to end up in poor health either way...

The benefits of the organizational system Dan Pink lays out include increased satisfaction, increased autonomy, and increased productivity and increase responsibility. There are drawbacks though; things such as increased workload and increased responsibility, and a sense of decreased security.

This last point is extremely problematic. The current primary purpose of this thing called a job is not to be productive, creative or anything positive. A job is aligned as an mechanism to avoid a negative; you have a job to protect the security and comfort of you and your family, and perhaps to protect your sense of social class. The other purposes are tangential except to where they help distance you further from the negative.

In the case of attempting to avoid a negative, a road map on where to go comes in extremely handy. By following the map, you are reasonably well assured not to fall off any cliffs. This is where incentives and requirements come in for the business world; they are like a road map on how to keep your job.

However, by following the road map, you also miss the chance to discover parts of the area few if any other people have explored. Where you miss the lows, you also miss the highs. But, when you are scared almost motionless of the cliffs, this would appear a net win. So goes the thinking: new discoveries are interesting, but cliffs are deadly.

Then someone like Dan Pink comes along and says "you'd be happier and more productive if you had more autonomy," and you think he is completely insane. More autonomy means more responsibility, and more responsibility means less to separate oneself from the short-term negatives. You don't give a damn about happiness; your focus is entirely on survival. Your intrisic motivation is to follow the extrinsic motivations, because anything else seems like suicide.

The problem that Dan didn't allude to that I will is that by focussing on survival, you completely screw both. Where people assume this sort of extrinsic motivation, and the lower productivity that comes with it, a feedback loop kicks in. Lower productivity begets lower revenue begets lower available cash begets lower headcount, and repeat until either the equation stabilizes or everyone is gone. The difference is that the employees remained another six months or so, and no one in the future will hold them responsible for the death of the organization. No surprise, they constructed an entire organization around not being held responsible for anything.

Hell, even as a society we don't -- at least in the USA. It just occurred to me; if you need proof of that, look no further than our unemployment insurance system. The entire premise of that system is that, if you were laid off from an employer, it was through no fault of your own. The system even encourages you to get back to a place where you can't be held at fault again, and threatens to cut benefits if you aren't actively looking. If you were fired, in many states you don't get UI. If you quit, even fewer if any provide UI. If a business you built goes bankrupt, you are likewise screwed.

The entire incentive system in this country is based around cowering in a cubicle, because everyone is convinced the risks are an absolute certainty, and outside of a narrowly incentivized path there is no hope for survival.

As I mentioned above, the problem with this is that it screws us in the long term really badly. We end up running like an extremely badly tuned engine, operating at some small fraction of our total possible productivity. We make ourselves less rich than we might otherwise be, we make ourselves less secure because we flirt much closer with the break even point of productivity in a monetary sense, and we make ourselves less happy because we are all abjectly aware of our own precarious condition. I don't have the data for this, but I honestly wonder if cracks in this precarious balance aren't what drove some of this recession we are now in.

For what its worth, this is where I look very positively upon the startups of the world. To all of them on HN who are listening, huge props to all of you. Likewise, props to the other companies who have figured this out. You all give me the hope that by serving as a testbed for some of Dan Pink's ideas -- perhaps by necessity --, you push all the people who drag their feet into the better world they are so desperately afraid of.

sigh. And sorry about the length of this; it would probably take me some time to edit it down to a smaller size, and I'd rather get the ideas out there now.

Motivation is a vector, not a scalar. The problem isn't that the people who are incentivized by reward aren't motivated, it is that the motivation they are given makes them behave a different way. In the case of largely creative work, the motivation they are given modifies their behavior in entirely suboptimal ways.

It's not just that you motivate people, it is what you motivated them toward.

Nonsense. Unless you are going to insist on two things: that everyone has the same cognitive capacity, within some delta; assuming the first, that anyone in a conversation who leaves anyone else behind in understanding is at least a narcissist, and possibly otherwise degenerate.

People don't get difficult just because you are intentionally condescending to them. People learn at different rates, people reason at different rates, and some people take the mere acknowledgment of this fact as condescending and narcissistic. They also take the fact that a conversation amongst friends went down a particular thread faster than they could keep up as a sign they are being patronized and degraded. Social etiquette would dictate that the conversation always slow down to the point that everyone keeps up, but that has its own drawbacks, not the least of which that it turns being able to think and reason fast into a psychosis -- so this looking down upon can go both ways, and usually does if even behind the veil of social propriety. Neither party is guilt-free here.

You only annoy people by asking questions at inappropriate times, if you were really that much smarter then you would know when to ask and when to shut it.

As I pointed out in a different thread here, what happens in the case when the inappropriate time is unreasonably restrictive -- for instance, there is no appropriate time. Are you really going to assert that a smart person show unwavering obedience? Do you realize the consequences of such a philosophy?

I'm not defending the OP; I think his list of correlations is presumptuous. However, the responses here (so far) are likewise very presumptuous about the poster -- perhaps it is to dose the poster with his own medicine, but that it is done under the auspices of discussion social skills is quite ironic. I really wish this were not the standard knee-jerk reaction of the community to these sorts of posts.

The way the original posted phrased this, I don't believe he meant so much asking questions to clarify something obscure, but more accurately to stress something inconsistent or inaccurate. There are two aspects to this: noticing the inconsistency, and then notifying others. As I understand it, pattern recognition is something at least moderately related to intelligence. Revealing that pattern to others, and choosing when and how, is much more a matter of following social protocol, which may go even as far as to dictate that such patterns never be revealed.

Difficulty in dealing with average people is a social skills issue, but 'average' and 'below average' people might have that same problem.

This leads to a what I think difficult question that in general seems to have a suspiciously certain answer: when is it appropriate to disregard social etiquette and protocol? The obvious answer is: never, because no good ever comes from people being annoyed and offended.

This seems suspiciously clear-cut, and historically inaccurate. I can think of a number of very detrimental philosophies that would still be adhered to today if everyone's foremost goal was to never cause offense, far more detrimental than the offense fighting against them may have been.

Provided that there is some correlation between intelligence and noticing abnormalities in patterns, this point ties back to the first, in that the person deemed difficult may just be seeing a pattern that few others are able to see, and as a result of continually bringing up aspects of that pattern are considered difficult and a lackluster teammate.

I don't think just saying "stop being such an anti-social dickhead" is an all-inclusive solution. Further more, I don't think we want it to be when thinking about long-term concerns.

I would rather a more sophisticated metric than this. The metric of stickiness seems to work off of the idea that, in the average case, every reversion is a net win for content quality. My intuition might be serving me wrong, this sort of game mechanic seems prone to causing all sorts of ill-effects, gaming and odd edge cases.

For instance, who gets credit for a reversion of a reversion? How can you keep someone with a sufficient value of x from camping on an article and reverting whatever changes a well-intentioned and clueful but relatively new user posts? Since that new user has no more x to spend, the user camping gets rewarded for having his trollish reversion "stick", and the new user gets disenchanted and leaves.

The flag day for this, as alluded to in another thread, will be when fund-raising and faculty appointments stop being closely tied with dead tree publications. There's been ample time for that transition to happen, but not all the interested parties seem so motivated to change things.

Those random factors don't even have to be nefarious; an expert in an area may not have sufficient sub-domain knowledge to fully understand the work of another author. The hope is that the publication is clear enough that they can, but every publication has to make a trade-off about how much knowledge they assume the reader has.

Each of these random factors chisel away at the intended meaning of the certification. If enough of these accrete, you end up with something that tells as much about a potential publication as a GPA does about a high school student. But then, people depend on things like that for hiring and promotions as well. It would be a damn shame if this is really sufficiently optimal that everyone stops working for better.

But it is also a realization that this isn't just a shallow local minimum. The lifestyle and security of many researcher are tightly coupled to getting funding out of this system, and thus is tightly coupled to following the rules of the system. Either some external force is going to have to shove this system aside, or the members of the community are going to have to collectively accept the pain of a governing body seeing the writing on the wall and attempting to regain control. With the system as entrenched as this, it would have to be a coup of epic proportions to unseat it. The only other option I can see is this system remaining in perpetuity.

I noted above that being in a similar position, I'd probably work this system the same way most everyone else does. I might provide the usual excuses as well: family, food, survival, lifestyle, etc. I don't know, because normally it takes a person being put under considerable pressure before they decide what is truly valuable to them, and to what degree they are willing to sacrifice one goal for another.

I took a third option while going through my undergraduate years; I decided to not even get involved. I am not saying this as a sanctimonious thumbing-of-my-nose at those who did; these people have my respect for being able to work around the flaws and not be driven mad by them. The allure of being able to work on interesting problems with smart people tempted me toward working to get involved in research, but the glimpses I caught of the politics, mechanisms and incentives chased me away. My significant other at the time was involved in a research effort in computer vision, and the amount of inanity she tolerated, and even in some cases manufactured, killed the desire for me.

Since then, I've been told by a number of people I have the mind and personality for research work. Even if that were true, I know I don't have the personality for all the bullshit that comes with it. My philosophy on this is the same that jwz suggests for people thinking of working at a public company: "sometimes the only way to win is not to play."

It largely depends on where one sets the threshold to define something as functioning. I've noticed at least a couple of different thresholds being argued about in other threads.

This I don't think is true anyway. It has always seemed to me like a socially manufactured platitude to keep people erring as much on the side of safety as they can possibly reach. For the average person, it might be a very reasonable default, which is why the platitude tends to stick.

Otherwise, I don't know if the social reservations are worth worrying so much about. It's hard to tell how much of this is people legitimately looking out for you, and how much is them preemptive prevention from having to envy you and what you did that they couldn't bring themselves to do.

You believe that a layoff could ruin someone's life for years to come. This sounds severely melodramatic even if my hearing it is quite common. If this is your perspective on what would happen if you were laid off at some point, you are probably right. If you believe that you will lose your house, force your kids into a lifestyle of poverty and guarantee no post-secondary education for them, you are probably right again. You are probably right because you will probably make yourself right; either that, or you will count yourself one of the lucky few to survive.

On the other hand, you might find an even better job than the one you had; you may have not even been looking before you were laid-off, and didn't know -- or didn't care that -- you had any other options. A company might find an even better use for your's talents, thus guaranteeing that said talent is not lost forever.

Self-fulfilling prophecies are quite powerful things; they fundamentally change a person's behavior. I don't think a layoff has to be the end of the road. Even if one has a mortgage and kids, it is how you handle these challenges that determines whether or not it was good for you or the industry. You can either grow and learn, or lament and wallow in self-desperation and resignation.

And I have to take on this point about it being no fault of their own in particular, because it has always seemed false to me. If they are put in the position you describe, of being unable to feed their family or keep their home, it is most certainly their responsibility in part. They were not owed that job, and that they lost it is not tragedy. They were not owed anything; they already had little security, as much as they may have convinced themselves of the contrary. That they were in a position to get completely screwed as soon as that job vanished and before they could find another one, that is a tragedy. But it is a tragedy of their own making. They were relying far too much on the security they had supposedly accrued, and too little on keeping themselves in a position to survive misfortune. And I have yet to know someone who is talented being unable to find a job for so long that even with financial preparation they end up broke. Maybe I just know the wrong people, and reality, in an absolute sense, does suck as bad as you go on about.

But I think this is way too sensationalist and melodramatic, and I suspect for that reason my grip on the real reality will be called into question.

As a random aside, I've heard tales on here a few times of people with mortgages and/or children starting companies of their own, taking on a similar amount of potential pain as someone who is laid off (probably more, because there's no UI payments in the mean time). I'm interested in the perspective of these people on this, because if being laid off is the reading of one's eulogy, it sounds like that doing a startup under similar circumstances is like running oneself through with a knife.

Does having a high GPA indicate that this is what the person was trying to prove? Does it even suggest that following rules was the motivator that got them where they are? As I pointed out in my earlier comment, maybe the graduate's GPA was high due to motivations that had very little to do directly with wanting to achieve a high GPA or wanting to please other people.

The meaning is ambiguous; as are the meanings of everything someone might rely on to assess someone's ability. You need context to figure out what each individual indicator means, and this includes the GPA; it might mean absolutely nothing, or it might be the thing that pulls two or three other indicators out of ambiguity and makes the true ability of the person become more believable.

Wow, really? High marks is an indication of a person's servileness? It can't be that they were fascinated by what they were learning, and as a result to perform well even though they didn't care that much about getting a high GPA, or have that much discipline or deference to authority? It seems there are two options here: do well and be branded as a servile, unmotivated toady who can't learn a damn thing on their own; do poorly, and be branded as an independent spirit who just might be brilliant depending on the results of further probing and research.

From this comment and its parent, it seems that colleges are being paralleled to boot camps, where the real goal isn't to develop knowledge and/or body strength and endurance, respectively, but to develop a psychology of doing what you are told instinctively. That you learned something along the way is completely immaterial, because that has nothing to do with the average you came out with. If you are capable of any independent thought, you would've known the material before taking the class, and scored low out of sheer boredom and apathy. Doing well shows you both didn't know the material before, and you were more interested in impressing upon someone else your knowledge of the material than actually learning anything at all.

If this is the case, I did it completely wrong. I suspect, however, that this is not the case, and that people are taking the metaphor of GPA to Obedience Average way too seriously. It can mean that, but it very much depends on the institution and the student, and probably a number of other variables.

In the spirit of full disclosure, my GPA in college was rather high. I will not say how high, because then the replies to this comment will be about that instead of the larger point. I worry just mentioning this much will dilute what I am saying, but not doing so seems disingenuous.

Conversely, I have been prodded by managers, coworkers, and friends repeatedly to be more disciplined, more respectful of authority, and more interested in pleasing people. I suspect I was this way in college as well, given the similar comments friends made there. Being too deferent has never been a problem for me.

Maybe I'm one of the outliers people discount to show a nice, clean correlation between two groups; it is merely misfortune that I am then rolled up into the correlation to suggest that I am as all the evidence I've gathered so far suggests I am not.

In all honesty, I'm not totally sure how I ended up with a high GPA. Maybe the institution I went to was too easy. Maybe my curiosity for the material I was learning was motivating in the same degree as the need to please authority was in the other high performers. Maybe that I had a curiosity for the material is a mark against me; it shows I was either curious about the wrong things, or not curious enough to learn it on my own without "structure" there to force it upon me. Maybe one or both are true. Maybe I, and those I know, are completely wrong about me.

I'm not saying either of you are wrong about what Joel is looking for by taking GPA into account. I'm not saying your right either. This is just about what high marks "mean" on their own. They can have more than one cause: it could be a sign of obedience, or it could be a biproduct of some other force that had nothing to do with the marks. The other metrics being taken into account will probably clarify which case it is.

Oh, and one other thing:

Coding a one loop bubble sort in hex blindfolded while juggling eggs, playing 12 games of chess, solving a 100 x 100 sudoku, providing an alternate solution to the 4 color theorem, teleporting tonights winning Powerball numbers, and cooking dinner would be a more applicable barometer.

Please, can we ease up on the machismo when discussing what makes for a great developer. The best metaphor I can come up with is the overly muscular guy at the gym claiming to bench some obscene amount of weight, and staring down everyone else to intimidate them from benching anything at all. Yes, it may be part of the culture to be over the top like this, I've always considered it one of the more unbecoming traits; it just seems excessively primal.

Wrong interpretation. I am not saying we not intervene at all. I am saying that we understand our cure may, in some cases, be worse than the disease. And not out of respect for the planet, but out of a desire for our own continued survival. Curing cancer is one of those cases where I think the cure is better than the disease; there are issues of increasing population from people dying, but we've shown ingenuity there in the past (thanks, Normal Borlaug). Preventing tropical cyclones is one of those cases where I worry the cure is not better than the disease, at least until we find a cure for all the other implications of doing so.

For that matter, modern life already tolerates deep, profound respect for processes on this planet. Research being done right now into the formation of tornadoes in the plains every spring is being done with the goal of greater detection. Tornado prevention is not something I hear a whole lot about; the goal is to get people out of the way while something of immense energy plows through a region.

Building tornado shelters, much like building stilted houses along the coast, or buildings ables to withstand repeated ground waves along the West coast, are a result of people coming to understand these forces and how they behave. This to me rings of a pretty deep and profound respect; a recognition of something to be studied and understood, not just prevented, and maybe not even to be prevented once we understand the implications.

Maybe I am discounting too much the power of our ingenuity; maybe I am calling for too much humility. Perhaps, in time, we will discover a way to do what tropical cyclones do without unwanted side-effects. Depending, I might even want to help work on it. But I am not optimistic that we will.