cupofpython

If you give someone your email instead of your AIM then there isnt more to remember. You would email each other instead of using an always on messenger service. AIM was a place you logged in and logged out of, and all conversations were contained within those signals. It was a different experience which made it something worth remembering a new username for. If we take away the signalling that made it different than email, then why use a messenger service at all?

The current messenger systems seem designed to increase expectations, and then we wonder why people expect too much. they offer things like "online, away, busy, offline" but in reality no one cares. It all ends up just being part of your pile of notes that you will respond to when you can. So it might as well be email, which is built around that level of expectation.

I mean, I dont mind having to remember separate email and messenger accounts. I am just saying that if you are going to bring it up as a problem, then the solution is to drop messenger accounts, not email, because they barely provide anything new anymore over email except ambiguous expectations and stress

Also, I'm not sure why that point came through like a quote, it was just the point I was trying to make.

>one more username and protocol to remember

maybe i am old, but the messenger service is the "one more username" to remember. i would drop messenger services before i drop email. messenger services tend to be linked to email accounts anyway - so im sure low friction solutions could be developed.

  The point is to isolate sync communication from async to preserve the simulation of live conversation as an option online.

the issue is compounded because the person who sent the message may not be available when i see the message. Messenger was developed for people to talk at the same time. Honestly, it seems like product overreach for it to accommodate any async communication.

Async communication is a very important form of communication and should be managed appropriately and not shoe-horned into live chat UI's.

IMO async should always be threaded. If I would be changing my messaging behavior based on whether or not someone is online (which is sort of necessary to avoid confusion) - I would rather optimize that behavior change with two different (UI) systems than trying to use one chat box and one log for it all.

If someone is not in the room anymore, you cant talk to them. Full stop. Leaving the room is a signal that needs to be respected. It is one of the few powers individuals have in an actual conversation. Getting rid of simulated "rooms" online was a step backwards. Even if it happened during a simultaneous step forward for mailboxes.

An open door policy with a bouncer for anything frivolous

>If you were offline, there was no away message, and no way to send you a message at all.

This was a feature.

email already existed. phone calls already existed. AIM provided new information about a persons availability in that they were currently online and open to communications. If I didnt want to talk to people, I could not sign on to aim. Respecting peoples personal space was a default.

Now it is ambiguous. Does this person want to talk right now? They are online, but that means absolutely nothing now.

and then google happened

"I used to lay bricks and now im a general contractor"

>____ are in those roles not because they cannot do other roles, but because someone needs to _______

Honestly, this applies to a whole lot of jobs and can be reversed for SWE too. I am a business analyst and have a few stories of working with SWE who would belittle my input to them about anything involving code because I did not code on the daily. More often then not, we would talk in a circle - I would get frustrated and comply with their suggestion, some random issue would come up, then it would be their idea to do the thing I said we should do in the first place. And this wasnt with one-off arrogant SWE that are hard to work with. Just normal people trying to be polite. but I built my initial specs as the bare minimum necessary to fit my need, and because I could not identify off the top of my head exactly what issue would arise from changing those specs (even though I could be sure there would be some issue) - they ignored my specs and did it their own way.

I lean on the SWE as the coding expert overall and would listen to their input.. but sometimes I think SWE forget that they are doing things other people do not want to do which is not necessarily things other people are not capable of doing or understanding. And sometimes a non-SWE can see what is wrong with some structure of the code despite not being able to code the solution themself.

for mobile, i find it easier to have 2 calculators. One bare bones for "i just need to add a bunch of numbers" and one for "i need to use parenthesis and division"

for the latter i use maple calculator on android

>engaged staff/high touch verification process

this does not scale well either

> Are they working for stock options that are going to make them millionaires?

Maybe, maybe not. But now they are working for a well known company that looks good on a resume, and I have no reason to believe they are not being paid fairly for their work.

Seems comparable to the big law firms. those might be worse tbh. Do it for the experience and Resume, then get out.

I cant name them directly but some quick math suggests Elon has indeed made many millionaires.

Tesla IPO'd in 2010 with 13.3 million shares

Tesla had a bit under 1000 employees in 2010

Tesla stock price was $17 in 2010

Tesla had a 5-for-1 stock split in August 2020

Tesla Stock price is $748 a share today

1 share of Tesla in 2010 is equal to $3,740 today

It would take 268 shares of Tesla from 2010 to be a millionaire today. that's $4,556.

Elon's success with Tesla should have produced at least 1,000 millionaires if his early employees believed in the product.

I cant say that still translates to today's workers, but if his vision is that there is still just as much room to grow - then he would be making a lot more millionaires if he is correct. Even amongst todays newer employees. Idk if I would bet on that growth at this point since it is already a household name now and it wasnt before, but I have no actual reason to think one way or the other

we have AI based dancing robots now, maybe they can figure something out for this

alternatively, given his obsession with conspiracy - maybe he was unable to establish deep connections with anyone in his life

I think you're right about the state of leveraging over seas labor today, but the gap is so large between life over seas and life for SWE in USA that I have no doubt that a middle ground can be found to put SWE in USA out of a job once overseas experience reaches a satisfactory threshold. There is a lot of negotiation to be found between $2 and $50 per hour.

If nothing else, Land Price will be a big driving factor. If both sides have equal budget for commodities and investments, overseas wins on home budget.

>off-shore contractor

this does not need to be a contract arrangement. The person hired overseas could be hired indefinitely to support the product, with typical transition plans in place. same as today with local workers.

>coming up with specs is a frustrating and unsatisfying process, and is akin to writing code, except that you don't actually get to run the code and see the fruits of your labor

We might be operating with different levels of "specs". I am not saying you need to tell them exactly what to write.. it would be the same as a manager talking to a subordinate at a tech company today. You tell them what needs to be done and they have the skill and autonomy to do it.

I agree that this arrangement does not work with low-experience overseas workers. However, the point I am trying to make is that I think overseas experience will catch up way faster than the local need will become more complicated. So even if local employees maintain a lead in skill and experience, overseas does not ever need to catch up to them - they only need to catch up to necessary qualifications. Local people can offer more, sure, but this is a field that discourages over-engineered solutions. That implies there will be significant diminishing returns on all the extra skill local employees provide.

Again, this is not the case today because the lower experience workers are not just lower experienced but too inexperienced in general. Some time in the future they will still be lower experience, but they will be experienced enough. the only question is when, which is a gamble, but i think soon. On the order of 5 - 20 years would be my bet. It already happens but is a rare exception to the rule - so that timeframe is how long for it to become a common occurrence.

i dont think that is cynicism. ideas need to be commodified for corporate use or else HR / recruiting does not know what to do with it.

Why wouldnt an overseas employee have all the exact same incentives and challenges to maintain their code as a more local remote worker?

I think you are assuming I was implying overseas work to be all short-term contract work but I am not saying anything about the paperwork. The paperwork will write itself such that the relationship between a remote worker and the company is identical whether they are in texas or india. And itll happen that way because of financial incentive to do so

It's already happening. People from NY and CA are moving to Texas and Georgia, and then their salaries are being reduced to adjust for cost of living - but they still make really good money for Texas or Georgia. Maybe those SWE think they are irreplaceable, but what they have effectively demonstrated to the company is that the work itself can be done entirely remote, and so when it comes time to replace them - they will look for a cheap remote worker. Maybe today it is tough to find good replacements in India, Ukraine, etc, but over time (on the order of 1 generation would be my bet) those replacements will be much easier to find over there.

>I believe your vision is to replace all satisfying work with soul-crushing work. If all your work is done by people who don't want to work there

I am hesitant to believe what I think you are implying here. Do you think everyone in cheaper countries would prefer to live in more expensive countries? Even if provided a stable income far above everyone in their area?

I also dont know what would be soul-crushing? It's doing what we do here, just over there.

i like that bet, I was ignoring AI in my observations. The server running the AI will probably be cheaper overseas all the same though

yes today. overseas is still behind on raw skill. they will catch up, and SWE does not promote complicated work - it does the opposite. it promotes the simplest code that works, because that makes it easiest to maintain.

Yes there would be logistical issues if we tried to actualize this future today, rather than allowing it to naturally progress over time as I stated. Foreign culture is irrelevant, as you can bring people in to train them on-site and then let them go back home to work.. or send someone from here over there. Also remote workers will evolve to meet whatever is necessary to make the arrangement work because the financial incentive is HUGE and isn't going anywhere.

the point is that lower cost of living areas will promote remote work to transition there from high cost of living areas over time. The pandemic already showcased this.

Youre right that the end result will probably be worse than what we have today, but that will not stop it from happening. they will figure out how to be good enough

>but mortgage principal is not an expense.

this isn't entirely true either. You need to live somewhere. Yes you own the equity, but it's always going to be locked away as "home equity". It has an advantage of giving you higher debt flexibility by taking loans out against it - but to say it is the same as banking cash as compared to renting is wrong.

Unless you downsize your living or sell the house without buying another one (which means you will be renting) that money is effectively gone as far as liquid cash is concerned

this is a feature, not a bug, of globalization. Work that can be done in cheaper countries is allocated there.

On a related note (and I get negative feedback whenever i say this, but) this is the future of all software developers as i see it. If you can do your entire job remotely, then "remote" is going to get optimized over time.

It does not make sense to spend your time in USA (for example) coding when you can stop at developing the specs and send it overseas to be coded for half the cost or less. Architects dont lay bricks, and brick layers dont need to understand architecture. Accumulating knowledge of many different types of syntax for expressing the same principles is something that is only going to depreciate in value over time.

>It quickly leads to creators sanitising feedback to prefer only positive feedback

I dont see this as a big issue. It seems to be a place for podcast community members to gather and discuss instead of making yet another discord. If you dont have positive feedback for a podcast why comment at all to begin with? The podcast medium is entirely built to taste and fits well with being a bubble (despite bubbles usually being a negative thing).

The hidden issue would be power to cover up a scandal, so I would hope that for serious issues users can report a podcast and site admins can handle it appropriately.

fair enough, but pooling them assumes all orders are created equal - which could be a tight game-design constraint. but i agree what i am saying is in the same spirit as that

I agree 100% with this and havent found the right game for it. not exactly RTS, but friends and I play Civ5 with 1-2 minute turn timer and it's a pretty good balance.

what made you choose IDE as the medium for solving this?

I think there might be enough of a market for something in-between.

There is an itch to be scratched by people who want to fight with a balance of quick and strategic decisions. Where "quick" is fluid. For example, when your 1 second decision is a really good 1 second decision, and you realize that with 10 seconds you wont improve it much - then you want to be able to make the decision in 1 second and then not be punished by someone who took 5 seconds to make an equal decision, and spent another 5 making it only slightly better. You also dont want to be punished by people making your quick decision obsolete through brute force of action.

Basically, something that promotes thinking before acting - while also promoting thinking efficiently over thinking exhaustively.

I am not sure yet what design principles best bring this out in a game, but I have been thinking about it a lot.

turn-based is great (big civ5 fan) but it has the opposite problem - it favors the player who takes the most advantage of the turn timer.

Ive thought a lot about possible hybrids, but havent settled on anything really catchy yet. Some ideas are cooldowns instead of turns, or turn timers that are so aggressive that barely anything is accomplished each turn - but you get a lot of turns so it's okay to burn some rather than commit to a mistake

Make actions have cost, and / or put cooldowns on orders. Still allow the ability to burst out a high APM for a short period of time, but design it so overdoing it is suicide.

Give the kids a fighting chance, ya know?

I've whiteboarded some very similar ideas to this! If multiple people are coming to similar conclusions, there might be something here.

In my thoughts, my hesitation is that I think I might have a bias for unit management, which is a new "thing" typical MMO players would need to start doing and optimizing in order to keep up.

So I wasnt convinced it would stick.

I think the new V Rising game has a well thought out and related mechanic along these lines in that you still have 1 character, but you can get "servants" which you send out on missions to collect / farm materials from areas you've surpassed

>and if you disappear from view your audio will stop after a while

I sure hope this "feature" can be turned off in the settings