cs137

The trades are often romanticized, but overrated in their ability to reliably provide a middle-class standard of living. There will always be some trade that is in high demand and can therefore offer a middle-class salary... but within ten years, it will be flooded by new people, and that will end. (This is the case unless there is a strong union in place and it stays strong.) That's just how the labor market works. The selling point of an advanced education is that it provides insurance against labor market fluctuations, since you're hired for something other than your commodity labor (in theory). That's no longer the case these days, but that's a problem with our society, not our schools.

As engines of social mobility in the US, colleges aren't great--they're expensive, often very elitist, bloated due to runaway administrative costs, and usually staffed by researchers who consider undergraduate teaching to be their fifth priority if at all--but they're still better than literally anything else our society has in place. Our laws are written by millionaire Boomer scumbags, our businesses exist to ratify an existing hereditary elite as meritocrats while being hostile to actual meritocracy, and our culture is thinly-veiled capitalist propaganda. Our colleges might get a C-minus, but that's still ahead of the F that everything else in this country gets.

Should a kid spend a summer during high school working a "regular" job so as to understand what bullshit average people have to go through (and to do everything possible not to end up in such circumstances)? Sure. Why not? It's a useful experience, when you're 17, to see what life is like for most people.

On the other hand, Game Theory 101 tells us that forced plays are often lousy moves, and that having more options entails higher expectancy. If your kid, as an adult, has to work crappy jobs that damage his career, while others get to make choices that enable them to have better futures because they aren't worried about month-to-month bullshit, then he's going to end up losing through no fault of his own... and, see, this is commonplace. We aren't actually smarter than the poors (the real poors, not non-billionaire "poors"). We just ended up getting dealt better options, whereas they had to operate constantly under constraint.

If you can take stupid obstacles out of your child's life, you should.

This whole thing is a dangerous, scummy lie. Millions of people drop out of college, and most of them don't end up founding billion-dollar companies. Why do they drop out? They can't afford it, they don't have the social support, they get sick, they lack the preparation or are too young for it... all sorts of causes. It is not glamorous. It is not a sign of great ambition, nor is it taken to be such. It is usually a case of failure (that may or may not be the person's fault) and, in the real world, failure hurts. Sure, dropping out of Harvard to found Facebook is a winning play, but most people don't have those kinds of options and can't afford such a major misstep.

Peter Thiel's anti-college push is something even worse. Our education system in this country isn't as good as one might want it to be. It's expensive, often elitist, and of dubious quality (even at prestigious schools) except for people with outlier levels (outlier among those under 25, at least) of self-motivation. All that said, it's the one component of our society that still kinda works and that still, in some privileged subsections, is run by people with decent intentions. It's the last bastion of meritocracy left. Perfect meritocracy? Not even close. But if a professor played favorites as brazenly as an average corporate manager (65% and "culture fit" = A+/executive fast track; 97% without "culture fit" = C/"Meets Expectations") his life would be made hell. Getting "screwed" in college means studying your ass off and making a B, due to some tricky question on the final. Getting screwed in the corporate world means losing your income--possibly, your housing and your reputation as well--over the smallest infraction or none at all.

Education is the one component that's left in our society where a working-class person can outperform his social "superiors". This is the real reason why royalists and rightists like Peter Thiel want to destroy it. Think we lack social mobility now in the US? We do, but scrapping the colleges is going to make it worse... so keep that in mind every time some Silicon Valley asshat says that formal education is a waste of time.

I say the same thing about the SAT. Is it flawless? No, of course not. It picks up a number of cultural or socioeconomic factors with no correlation to true ability. However, without it, though college admissions are going to become more socioeconomic, not less.

When I was in college, I had to enroll in a course called "Structured Systems Analysis" for my computer science major. It remains, to this day, the most boring course I have ever taken. It was essentially a crash course in business for software developers: we discussed topics like software estimates, methods of team management, and company mission statements. It was slow, stultifying, mind-numbingly-boring information. The professor was actually great, but there was only so much he could do with the material. I fell asleep studying for the final - literally. And I was the kind of student who read textbooks for fun.

This is a common experience: finding the most boring class also to be the most applicable one on the job. The jobs are what's broken, not the schools. I find it sad that software estimation is taught at all in schools. See, I'm a believer in the liberal arts education in the classical sense: liberal, in this context, means an education appropriate to a free person (as contrasted with servile arts). Real computer science is a liberal art, but giving estimates (or, say, doing user stories) is a servile art.

The problem with our society isn't that a liberal arts education is outdated or elitist, so much as that our society has very few positions left in which a liberal arts education is actually useful or appropriate. Colleges are forced to take one of two options, neither free of ugliness. One is to dilute the program with servile skills like writing user stories to make graduates more employable in the strata of jobs they'll actually be able to get; the other is to give people an education that wildly overestimates the quality of job positions that will be available to them. (As I said, the liberal arts education is designed for free people, but how many people really are free of the labor market? I'm a leftist, so I'd like to see this addressed, but I'm not holding my breath.) I'm not surprised that a course focusing on software politics turned out to be more useful than any of the others, but it's sad that this was the case.

If one has to survive in the shitpile we call corporate capitalism, though, then it's better to hold a higher rank, where the jobs are more lucrative, less demanding, and easier to keep.

I've been in multiple management roles at multiple places and, with one exception, the role is much more about managing expectations of leadership and playing political games to make sure your team survives.

Indeed, it sucks. But ICs suffer a high risk of random non-survival. The stress of being a manager comes from knowing what fecal garbage most of the people who run your company are. The stress of being a grunt comes from not knowing. It's hard to say which is worse.

On top of that mindlessly solving problems and getting to check out with only 3-5 hours of work is exactly what many of them want.

I find that, when the work is pointless, there's a hedonic adaptation to not having to do much of it, just as there is with everything else: whatever you have becomes, within 3 months, what you consider yourself entitled to. People who are used to 8 hours per day of pointless work might be happy at first to only have to do 5, but soon they'll grow to hate even that. I, on the other hand, don't mind working if there's a point to it. I want zero pointless work. Unfortunately, the current system, which celebrates the proliferation of malevolent bureaucracies, has nothing for people like me.

As for Israelis and support for their government, that is... complicated. Unfortunately, if the Israeli state didn't exist, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Jewish people in the region would likely be murdered by people from neighboring countries. This isn't because Arabs are "innately" warlike or antisemitic (I don't think that's true) but because the states in the region are deeply corrupt, failing states that will (as Russia has done) create an external enemy and launch a war to distract their own people from domestic issues.

The Israeli state is deeply problematic, corrupted by capitalism and some amount of racism (as almost all Western states are). It also has a job that is tough as hell: protecting a vulnerable minority group from millions who would murder them. The middle-of-the-road Israeli understands the need to protect themselves, but isn't a huge fan of the settlements (if he thinks about them at all) and certainly would love to see peace in the region.

I'm only slightly older than you. You do not want a Jira job. It will burn you out. It's not the same as indie development... you will probably work on tickets, adding features no one really cares about or fixing bugs that you didn't create. It's awful. If you were a real quant, you can probably use your CV to get something a lot better.

This is absolutely the case.

That said, you're probably not going to get fired over your politics unless you're either (a) seen as a union supporter (or, worse, organizer), or (b) so far right you've already been cancelled and are now a PR liability. If you're in the middle, they usually don't really care who you vote for, at least not enough to punish you for it.

If the manager was asking in good faith, he'd have explained why he was asking for the estimate and what decisions would be made based on it, and give the employee allowances to give timeframes that no one would he held to... but it doesn't seem like he was that kind of person.

The truth of the corporate world (we say "corporate America" in the US, but we've exported this disease all over the world) is that, as a subordinate, you exist for one reason: support your manager's career and reputation. Do that, and you can be sub-mediocre and you'll still get promoted. Miss that objective, and it doesn't matter what good you do for the company--you'll only piss people off more if they figure out what you're capable of. Bosses fire first the people who make them look bad and second the people they perceive as costing them time; competence is only a third- or fourth-order tie-breaker.

The story starts off as a typical tale of a shitty manager who knows he can't motivate shit to stink and uses abusive practices ("end of the day" requests for things that aren't actually urgent, insistence on hard estimates that will turn into deadlines) because he thinks it's the only way to get work done. Where it gets disgusting (although, sadly, not surprising) and reaches the point where, in a better world, people would be held physically accountable, is where the disagreement with one manager leads to him being blacklisted within the entire organization. It shouldn't be this way, but unfortunately it is.

I don't see a fix for this problem. A union could guarantee your job, but it'd probably be no more than a severance period insofar as the incentives on other hiring managers to circle the wagons (that is, ghost you upon realizing some other manager had a problem with you) are strong. The union would make it harder to fire you, but you'd never be seen as anything more than a problem by management. I know someone who was able to prove his boss was playing favorites--he got his performance review fixed, and his boss fired--and he still wasn't able to last longer than six months, because of his internal reputation as a "boss killer".

The thing to understand is that corporations would rather be wrong and consistent than risk inconsistency, and they would rather put up a unified front of wrongness than allow anyone at the bottom to divide people higher-up against each other. Managers protect their own, always, even the ones they know are shitty--this is the same problem that exists, in the US, on police forces--and those who aren't willing protect the class get thrown aside. The OP had to be blacklisted in service to corporate consistency; to do otherwise would embarrass his manager and, ultimately, the company decided (as it always will, since to render any decision contrary to preexisting rank would be inconsistent by definition) the manager was more important than he was.

Unfortunately, there is a degree to which antisemitism is disguised behind disproportionate criticism of Israel and the Israeli people, and it's impossible to know, at an individual level, why people hold their opinions.

Does Israel's government do awful things for questionable reasons (like most, if not all, national governments)? Yes. Is Israel the worst government in the Middle East? Far from it. To be honest, it's probably the least repressive, racist, or otherwise obnoxious government in the region (that's not setting a high bar). Israeli Arabs (especially women) have more freedoms in Israel than they would in any of the neighboring countries. Should Israel do better? Of course. It's absurd, though, that there's such a strong interest in BDS while the continuing consumption of Saudi oil goes unquestioned by most.

Also: why is it that the behavior of Israel's government comes up in a discussion about memorializing people who were murdered before the state of Israel even existed? I have Irish (American) ancestry, but no one has ever asked me to answer for the Irish government (or connected me to it in any way, seeing as my Irish ancestors came over in the early 19th century). It's deeply weird that some people are so quick to connect anything having to do with Jews or Judaism with the conduct of one government in particular, which is thousands of miles away from where many Jews live.

Javascript is shit, both the language itself and most of the code written in it, but the person who suffers from shitty Javascript is... you. It runs on your computer--that's the parasitic part--and not that of the entity serving it. So they don't care. Until ad dollars stop coming in, it doesn't matter.

Businesses generally think they can scale up with shitty code and inexperienced engineers and "do quality" later. Can they? Well, enough of them can that billion-dollar companies exist. I'm very skeptical that capitalism's signals indicate anything about true value (moral, creative, or otherwise) but the fact is that the "start cheap 'n' shitty" approach works, and it has worked for a long time. (Low quality software has been an issue for my entire adult life, and by HN standards I'm an elder dragon legend.) So long as it keeps working, it won't die. Markets don't punish what is bad; markets punish what is unfit by the definition set by the market.

What's funny to me today is that people tend to underestimate how fast computers are--or can be. Adding a million numbers? You can do that in a fraction of a second. People are so used to the crapware that capitalism produces that we've accepted these ridiculous delays, not for any good reason.

I'm almost 40 and I'm better than ever, but I doubt I'd get hired for a corporate programming job at this point, not that I'd want one.

Have you played the Brave New World mod?

It doesn't help that good programmers get flushed out of the industry due to conscience and age, only to be replaced with cheap, shitty ones.

The fact that they are victims of the system does not mean they are innocent of all charges. Almost everyone who is and remains rich or powerful in this world is a crook; that doesn't mean everyone who is not rich or powerful is a saint.

The kibbutzniks worked a lot harder than U.S. office workers, but didn't have the problem of alienation and the epidemic of mental ill-health (plus chronic inflammation, obesity, et al) that we have.

Almost all of us want the institutional, authoritarian nightmare we call "Work" to die, and it's past high time that it does... but, unfortunately, we've been stripped of our imagination when it comes to the question of how work (that is, useful activity) will get done without it.

This is how a tech boss thinks: having 350 people under you means there are 350 people you can cause bad things to happen to if they don't do exactly what you say. They're not optimizing for widget production, and certainly not for welfare of the human species, but for their own personal careers. What they want is indivisible loyalty; they want to own people. And, if the rich people control the state enough to decide which laws get passed, as they do in the US, they will.

It doesn't work this way.

Money is a fiction we created, a way to measure debts and legal liabilities. (Barter economies never existed; money emerges very quickly, and is used for this purpose.) Time is real, and it's yours. You deserve time to relax. If you spend every hour optimizing for work productivity, you'll burn yourself out and have "unplanned downtime"... trust me, that's not what you want. Better to work at a reasonable pace--in the long run, no one does more than ~1500 hours per year of meaningful work anyway--and avoid the stochasticity of unplanned downtime.

I work on my hard and soft skills through certifications so I can up even more my hourly rate.

There's nothing wrong with that. You've got to do what's best for you. No one eles will.

It's a never ending race, I've been playing this game since 2016, finding new ways to earn more, not because I'm passionate about it, but because I'm anxious everything could come crashing down in a couple of years and I'll need the money.

I hate saying this, but it could. Disaster can happen to any of us, whether personal in scale (sickness) or global (sickness again, because COVID-19 isn't necessarily over). Everyone is in the same boat, even the very rich (Bezos or Musk could get cancer). The negative outliers are dreadful. An air conditioner could fall on you tomorrow. The probability of each of your atoms quantum tunneling into the far reaches of the universe, although so infinitesimally small it's ridiculous, is technically nonzero.

This is probably an unpopular suggestion, but studying religion (don't feel pushed to pick one; study many) often helps. For my part, I think Buddhism has the most accurate model of mind and impermanence, Judaism has the strongest theology and ethics, and Christianity has a great model in Jesus (even if I don't consider him to be messiah, nor believe he considered himself such) of how to live in the world. The ancients were smarter than we give them credit for.

I feel like we are destroying our planet, destroying our economy, we make poor people poorer, stir political extremes, we alienate the younger generation with social medias, there is war in Europe, everything is about politics when it should be about science and people...

This is all true, but if you're not directly making it worse, then you shouldn't feel bad about it. If you're mining Bitcoin, you have something to feel bad about. If you're building websites for restaurants, you shouldn't feel guilty, because even though you are technically participating in capitalism--an objectively immoral system--you're also helping people (who, like you, need to eat) better their lives.

No one can predict the future. Will capitalism throw humanity off the rails? Or will it be overthrown? (And will such overthrow be a good thing, or will it be replaced by something worse?) No one knows the answers. All you can hold yourself responsible for is living one day at a time.

I've tried not caring, going to bars and restaurants and beautiful places in vacation, getting a new car, finding hobbies... but I can't pretend, I don't know how to cope anymore.

This never helps as much as it should. Hedonic adaptation happens fast. Read more, learn more, and while it's good to stay aware of the world and your role in it, this too can be overdone. You're not killing the planet every time you drive to the grocery store--at least, no more than lightning kills the planet when it starts a forest fire, as it has done for hundreds of millions of years--it's far, far more complicated than that and you can't hold yourself responsible for decisions made by others.

Also, I don't think it's true. Most people don't want improved material circumstances as much as they want dignity and peace of mind. Yes, most people in the world are objectively poor and would benefit a lot from having more money; still, the idea that people are obsessed with material gain or envy is endemic to the West under capitalism but not universal. They would not "trade lives". It's the same as with refugee crises and mass migration--they don't want to leave their homelands and families, but have no other choice.

Nothing about the Chinese government is "publicly owned". China is state capitalism at its finest--or worst, depending on whom you ask. North Korea is also not meaningfully communist and has since changed its ideology to juche, a strange mishmash of old-style imperialism, personality cult, and frank absurdity.

    x^21 = x^16 * x^4 * x
    ...   = (((x^2)^2)^2)^2 * (x^2)^2 * x

The "labor shortage" is bullshit. So many good people can't find decent jobs even today, and wages are still hilarious low compared to the outright robbery that capital gets away with.

That being said, I don't think it's necessarily because of conscious racism, sexism, or ageism that companies tend to end up redlined. It has a lot more to do with the fact that managerial decisions are made based on motives that have little to do with business at all. Silicon Valley ageism, for example, doesn't exist because middle-aged men think young people are all geniuses. (Trust me, we don't.) Rather, it exists because the subordinate's job is to make the boss feel young again, to be the Jesse to their Walter White. It has nothing to do with the needs of the business, but it also doesn't get in the way of the business, so it's not likely to be changed.

The typical corporate "cult"--I don't think Google is any more or less toxic than any other company at this point, and the true cult is capitalism itself, not a specific company--is somewhere between NRMs and actual cults in terms of virulence. Companies have displaced communities in modern life and yet they frequently un-person people for economic or petty political reasons. That said, executives usually prefer to keep their child sex abuse and their economic exploitation in different buildings--and, if Epstein is any indicator, on different landmasses--so, there's that, at least.

Of course, part of the problem is that there are concentric rings, increasingly toxic as one goes higher/closer-in. The outer ring is full of gullible normies who do recruiting and PR, useful idiots who have no idea what's really going on.

The problem isn't Python itself. Python has come a long way from where it started. The problem is people using Python for modules where they actually end up needing, say, manual memory management or heterogeneous high performance (e.g. Monte Carlo algorithms).

I'd say I'm between the two.

I'm a radical by US false-consciousness standards, but a moderate by sane-people standards. I do want to bring down the capitalist world order, but I'm not going to behave unethically, break laws blithely, or fuck over an employer who treats me well in service to that goal.

In general, I'm against violence unless absolutely nothing else will work (and I don't think we're at that point yet, although we may get there). Violent revolutions tend to see a transfer of control from the originial vanguard (who were willing to use violence to achieve a goal, but who didn't seek out the opportunity to use it) to mindless thugs who just want to be paid to hurt people.

I also exposed some illegal/unethical hiring and fundraising practices, and made enemies of some high-profile VCs. I don't talk to the press these days (don't trust 'em) but my reputation in the startup world is ruined. I'm enough of a whistleblower that my name will have negative value in Silicon Valley for the rest of my life (which is fine, because fuck Silicon Valley).

It probably doesn't hurt at this point, but certainly doesn't help, that I have PTSD and, in the past--say, 10 years ago--I was not as good at controlling it, recognizing when I was sufficiently impaired to need to pull back from the internet, and doing so.