fogetti

That's a good point. Everything, even the coronavirus has this narrative attached that prevention should be the utmost priority. At the same time the same narrative is completely missing in case of depression.

I guess the difference is that depression has been learned to capitalize on for a long time now.

But this idea is completely invalidated by the fact that many foreign companies (European and Chinese) are listed in U.S. exchanges, which means that the investors can only make informed decisions about the their investment if they are awake 24 hours/day

Where was he criticizing the individual? I can't find it in the text

The reddit reply is neither condescending or arrogant. Why do you think so?

This is an extremely limited and uninformed view of the world.

Especially considering what Boeing goes through right now, I would say the best aircraft engineers right now are located in Europe and they work in the Airbus headquarters.

But other than that: most recent innovative payment providers are coming mostly from Europe these days. Transferwise or Revolut comes to my mind as two such examples. Out of which Revolut reached a total valuation $1.7 billion not so long ago.

Also let's take a look at the online music streaming landscape: Tidal, Deezer and Spotify are all European companies.

There are whole industries (or segments at least) where SV is lagging behind.

So this environment argument doesn't hold any water.

Maybe there was a very narrow time period, let's say 10 years or so, when SV was really ahead of the pack in terms of technical skills, but those times are over.

And BTW, I didn't even mention machine learning and AI, where China is basically becoming the world leader right now.

According to a government survey from 2017 or so, the number of single parent families was hovering around 1.2 million. This is almost exactly 1 percent of the population which doesn't seem much until you compare it to the number of children under the age of 14 which is 15.53 million people. Now their ratio gets closer to 8 percent.

That doesn't seem very low to me.

That's a fair point. My impression is that most hard startups are started by founders who come from academia.

Is it though? I worked in 4 different jobs across 2 different countries and this was unheard of. Not even a single one of my friends do this.

I am curious. Where do they work? What do they do?

It didn't happen in the US but back during the 2009 global financial crisis Nokia let about 15000 employees go. Many of those were employed in Germany (I am not one of those though) and I heard they were pretty well protected by their union and up for a generous allowance when their time came to leave the company. If it were not for the union, the company would have let them go empty handed.

I think you didnt fully understand the parent poster. The point is that in this thread many people are questioning the case for unions in software engineering and the parent comment responds to that. He just gave examples that unions protect all kind of workers, software work included, to make a point in case.

So it's you who seem to be without arguments.

I on the other hand think that the comment as yours is why the rest of the United States thinks tech is full of a bunch of entitled pricks.

Sadly this is the case in our company. I worked as a dev team manager for the last 9 months and I was constantly wondering why do we work on these features...

The more time I spent with our CEO though, it turned out that he wanted to decide everything feature-wise. When I proposed that we should maybe do some market research or user interviews instead, he boldly declared that he knows the market the best. So go figure. No wonder that the whole company is a shit-show and we're losing a ton of money each year. Also when new features are prioritized I dared to propose to other managers that maybe we should tie the priorities to our business plan. Again our genius CEO told us that the business plan numbers should not be taken very strictly.

The more I thought about this why would anyone give money to such a moron, I figured that he is basically a very effective sales person. He can easily convince you how great he is and his vision, but he lacks all kind of strategic or operational skills. And as someone commented here in HN before, he also has management myopia: "If I can't understand it, it must not be hard" he probably thinks.

There was even a case when we looked for a product manager. This is not exactly the CEO's fault, but even 8 months were not enough to find one, even though that we interviewed perfectly capable and matching candidates. But there was always at least one person in management who found some excuses to ditch the candidate. Now in hindsight I think these people were afraid that the current status quo of the feature factory would change, so they sabotaged the whole PM candidate screening.

So now everything in our company is as it is written in this post. Success theater (this might be the same BTW that is called vanity metrics by Eric Ries), no connection to metrics, no connection to user values, hand-offs, etc.

While I like the idea of traveling by train, and I even took a night train from Munich to Budapest in the past, but on that specific route I had to share my cabin with a guy who just got released from jail a day earlier so I was not pleasantly relaxed. The fact that the cabin only had 2 bunk beds and I was pretty much isolated from other passengers and I had no way to keep my money and other important things in a safe, made me worried a lot.

The big advantage of air travel is exactly this, you don't need to spend much time in the actual plane. And the passengers are by definition under full-time supervision by other passengers, so stealing or attacks are not so easy to get away with.

Having said that, I would still prefer to take the train when it's possible. Central railway stations are usually pretty much in the best locations of most European cities, where the connections are really good.

But there is one more thing that even the article mentions: > In general, there is strong demand for reliable and frequent services between large cities

I second that: even in Germany the I.C.E is notorious for the delays and the poor passenger experience. So there is a lot to improve for the rail operators.

I am not sure anyone mentioned it before, but in many occupations you are required to take standardized tests which you are required to renew each X years. This way if you hold the credentials than you don't have to actually demonstrate your technical skills when applying for jobs, since your certificate proves them.

And guess what?! Your diploma is actually such a certificate, at least something that's close enough. Still our industry largely ignores that for some reason.

To get to the point I wouldn't mind to renew my credentials with supplemental diplomas every X years on standardized tests facilitated by educational institutions to avoid the stupidity of the industry's current trends.

I think FAANG has too much money, so they try to solve all problems with money, which could otherwise be solved with better planning, allocating more time, changing the mindset and/or better understanding the problem at hand. That might explain why they pay hire salaries than the rest of the industry.

I don't think that there is necessarily a causal relationship between the salaries and the competence, but that line of thinking is common in those companies.

You could make transatlantic calls in the 1920s. Sure, it was not that fast or capable as the internet, but the fundamental capability of connecting the world together has been around for a century or so. So it's not that strange as you try to make it to be.

This is right from the website: "Join the Global IT Burnout Index"

And then there is a form to select my country. So even if HN is a US centric site, which I dispute actually, still the website in this post has nothing to do with the US.

And I get that it's different in the US, but I doubt that people don't care if they get fired. I very much doubt that.

Except that this is not true. The average salary of a software engineer in Japan, Germany and other highly developed nations is only slightly better than let's say an accountant's. If we take the amortized hourly wage by considering unpaid overtime then it becomes even worse which is on par with an average high school teacher or alike. In some cases considering the unpaid overtime plus the unpaid self-studies it can get amortized to the level of a janitor. And this is a systematic problem across the industry.

On the other hand the health insurance doesn't make any difference in these countries since it's the same for all citizens so I am not sure how is that relevant.

> completely lost momentum

I am sorry but you are really talking about 2 days of time interval and projecting predictions based on that? Unbelievable...

So what's to stop the competitors to do the same thing that your friend did to invest 2-5 hours and catch up on the third day???

I wish I was good at ascii art, then I would draw a nice facepalm here.

I think you are conflating the seller and buyer side. In Google's case the CPC is actually a revenue and they do not see it as cost as the marketers you described. So from marketers' POV, yes, conversion makes more sense. From Google's POV they couldn't care less I think.

And the important thing is the trend, not the actually quarterly numbers anyway. Which I assume would be the same even if we took a look at the conversions.

I would be interested to know if they are actually using SAP. These companies are so much better at software development and they are swimming in so much money that they could even implement something by themselves.

I have to ask. Does this mean that maintenance is always someone else's responsibility and never someone's responsibility directly?

Because of OKRs. Management is setting it so that no-one can reach the objectives. Then there is some speech that OKRs are not really meant to be completed fully but they will still hold it against you if it's not 100%

Nope. I think if two CEOs are not enough to make one business strategy that's incompetence. Is there any reason to think otherwise? They failed at what they were supposed to do and now they can't take any blame???? WTF?

Exactly, this is a recurring theme regarding Revolut which hits the media headlines frequently, how Revolut also sucks when the shit hits the fan. I guess there are also similar stories in case of Stripe too.

The point is the same cost can be sunken and future cost too. It's not binary, and your implied false dichotomy (either a future cost or a sunken cost) is wrong

You are basically just playing with the words, but you also seem to contradict yourself: > you're just using the lessons your learnt while making this investment

That's exactly what honoring sunk costs mean. Making the investment means the cost factor. And using the lessons your learnt means honoring.

I am hesitant to write this, because in general I agree, but let's say a product manager stops a feature short of completed in some sense, even though there are some aspects which would make the feature more robust, secure or optimized, the code gets released and one would need a tombstone as a visible nuisance and indicator for these aspects, wouldn't it?

I mean the best place to communicate important ideas and warnings about code, is the code itself isn't it?

> For example if we predicted how likely a vegetarian is to purchase bacon, Aito could return that it is very likely, because based on data, that's the common average.

Why is this a good thing??? Maybe it's just me who doesn't understand the point of this? I see this "fetaure" as a benefit in some cases, but this makes me very doubtful very quickly in most instances.