laboratorymice

> Best case people find out that people are getting paid rapidly different amounts for the same job, get angry, and leave.

This is only a problem if the disparity does not match the difference in contribution. I'm sure most of us have been in situations where ourselves and two other people have the same job and are earning roughly the same, and we perceive the situation as massively unfair because one of them should be earning half as much, and the other twice as much. I've been in teams where I would have been perfectly ok with specific people earning twice as much as myself. It's ok to admire someone's skill, be motivated to reach it, and accept that they should earn more in the meantime.

In practice ego makes truly merit-based compensation impossible to implement. We just often think too highly of ourselves. The other obstacle is that the difference in contribution from a low-performer to a high-performer varies widely with profession, with software development being (in my opinion) one of the widest.

This is true in theory. In practice, most managers either do not understand what "performing well" for an engineer means, or willfully go against what they know to be true due to internal incentive structures. For example, favoring those whose contributions are more visible in the short-term, even if net negative over time. Through such a lens, someone who is competent at executing a longer term vision, or refuses to do only those tasks that are visible, is a low performer.

I don't say this to bash your statement, I agree with you in principle. Just useful to keep in mind that the context matters. Sometimes, the people complaining about having to compensate for the low performer, are the actual low performers.

regardless of "process", work items should be tracked (in the problem solving record for our future selves sense, not time keeping sense), so you can follow those. If you're a non-technical manager, then either a) the implementation goes super smoothly and the estimate the dev team initially gave you is all the progress update you need, or b) it doesn't go super-smoothly and you should be involved in any discussions that arise. If you find yourself asking "when is it ready?" you've likely gone astray.

This actually sounds like a workable idea, but the implementation would be extremely thorny (impact on covenants, governance, voting rights, non-listed companies, etc) and take forever to get done. It would also punish everyone equally, even though they clearly do not share equal blame.

You probably want, in addition to your proposal, executive stock-based compensation to be awarded in a different share class, used to finance penalties in such cases where the impact is deemed to be the result of gross negligence at the management level.

Don't know the details here, but email is still very much broken, and a number of large companies, including in the financial sector, are spoofable even after checking the usual boxes.[0]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37438478

Just watched the second video and I am confused.

It starts with some general points one could summarize as defining a "good culture" and how that should pay off for both employer and employees, but then later tramples all over it by excusing or outright endorsing the exact type of political behaviour that was criticized at the beginning: upward perception, the favour economy, finding influential friends, connectors, not burning bridges, and facetime.

edit: The mentioned plan B (leaving) is really the only option for what they call a "hostile corporation". I don't agree with many of the plan A "learning to play the game" recommendations. This just changes you for the worse.

> 2) assuming that what you are building is something the user wants - until people use it, you have no proof for this. Lots of startups fall into the trap of building stuff that nobody wants or needs.

> You have to pitch and explain the thing to them and even then they still might not get it. Only when you show them the thing and they like it will you get some confirmation that this might be something they want/need.

If you have to build first in order to pitch and show it, then necessarily you've had to assume that what you were building is something they want. Maybe your point was to get new features quickly into the hands of users to test the assumption early, but that has its own significant downsides.

I like the way you phrased it though, in terms of "don't assume foo" instead of "do bar", because it implies that there's really no replacing good old-fashioned _thinking_ with blindly following a 5-step plan to success.

I can accept that this is effective with most companies, and I don't blame you for doing what you can to increase your chances, but in an ideal world each side is their genuine self.

I understand that some people see an interview as a sales meeting, but in the end, if it works out, what results is both sides having to interact with each other on a daily basis ideally for a long time.

An employment relationship is in the end a relationship between people. Embellishing in an interview just makes that relationship uncomfortable.

Fully agree, and it's probably intentional. It's not entirely fair, but I suppose most countries would do the same given the chance. Clearly it's not how you want to get ahead as a country, since all it takes is for the world collectively to decide it no longer wants to bear that cost, and then you can only keep it through force. Inflation becoming a well-understood phenomenon with the general population also threatens it.

If China plays its cards right, the US is going to start having a bad time still this decade. The US should be aggressively trying to reach a more balanced economy. The distribution of not just wealth, but of the ability to generate wealth, leaves the US on very shaky ground.

> If you actually printed money, which does not have interest to be repaid, then the amount of circulating money would've increased permanently.

You have to get your head around the fact that this is an open-ended system, the music never has to stop so long as the sun rises and we stay on this monetary system. The same way people still get "wealthier" from stock market appreciation, even though there is a buyer for each seller, so too does more debt indeed mean a permanent increase in money supply[1].

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MABMM301USM189S

The argument that this is simply the market rate required to attract a person with the required skills can be proven false in so many ways, for example:

1. It's not a market, there is no job advertisement for the CEO role that the general population can apply for. If there were, and if it were to offer a fraction of "market", there would still be thousands of applications, and the top 1% of those candidates would absolutely do the job as well or better than the typical hand-picked candidate.

2. There are several roles in society that place enormous responsibility on those professionals and that only a handful of people in the world can do well, yet those jobs still pay low 6figures max. For example, nuclear engineer, aerospace engineer, state leader, and yes, ironically, most public hospital directors.

The sad reality is that executive pay is simply a result of incentives and the fact that corporate hierarchy gets very thin at the top. It has no relation to the competence or direct value-added of the executive.

This sounds strange. Banks typically hedge their fixed rate loan portfolio because there aren't many equivalent long-dated fixed-rate funding sources available to them. If the US market is such that borrowers can repay early or renegotiate long-dated fixed-rate mortgages without penalties, the banks are practically guaranteed significant losses when fixed-rates decline. Do US banks just charge higher spreads than European ones to compensate for this? That sounds undesirable, similar to tax loopholes: everyone pays more to compensate the enlightened few that actually take advantage of something that _everyone_ would want to do.

> What used to be a common journalistic intent of "let's find out who else this might have happened to" is completely gone, replaced by sensational clickbait titles.

> > A similar incident occurred last year when a Canadian Tesla owner was told it would cost $26,000 to get a replacement battery for his vehicle, Fox Business reported.

Unless you're based in some lawless jurisdiction, a privacy policy absolutely does protect users. If you believe otherwise, it's probably not a good idea to verbalise that opinion, especially if you are offering mailbox services :)

Might be a stretch for cloud services generally, but for public dns resolvers there's definitely an argument to be made: a) you pay nothing for the service, b) providing the service costs money, c) the provider benefits indirectly from the added insights and market power of user traffic

This would be good advice, if not for the fact that that approach essentially means you become just another politician. Being _aware_ of office politics is important; _focusing_ on it means you're a politician. Just focus on doing the best job you can, and if that's not what's rewarded at your place of work, leave.

Do you have a source for either of the numbers? Not sure a credible source even exists for the figures we are looking for, but I would be surprised if they showed the difference to be that large nationwide. A quick search gives me significantly lower medians for the US (maybe you wanted mean?).

Even with reliable figures, you definitely cannot just "do the math yourself pretty fast". You are ignoring a whole bunch of things like cost of living differences, working hours, working environment, anything that comes on top of the "gross" like employer pension and insurance (not just health) contributions. For example, the average working hours in developed Europe is 10-20% lower than in the US[1].

Also, as others have mentioned, you can't really take one specific profession and extrapolate. The European labor market is definitely less free-market and by design slower to adapt to shifts. There is a cultural preference for more equitable pay even at the expense of the so-called meritocracy. Software developer salaries in the US have perhaps increased faster than other professions, and less so in Europe. Maybe that's unfair, but the inequality that results from allowing labor markets to move at market-speed causes its own problems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...

It can't be assessed by a single dimension, but it doesn't have to be. A high quality engineer absolutely can rank the technical competence of other engineers in his field (not just computer science) with a high degree of certainty, and that's all you need. The "it's complex" argument is similar to the "it's a tradeoff" argument in that both are easily abused to justify any bad decision.

This is setting a very low bar for entrepreneurs. What else should be only a "mature company" problem? Should startups also not have to care about doing a good job in other fields orthogonal to the product itself like recruiting, marketing, governance, accounting, security? These are all things that come with the territory of starting your own company. Managing your own finances is just one of them, and it absolutely should be the startup's responsibility. It can delegate if it wants to, but "I'm too small to address it at all" is just naivete or incompetence.

These programs should have been blocked by the EU before entering into force. When you're part of a free-movement union, you shouldn't be allowed to create such programs without the consent of at least a majority of member states (maybe that did happen and I'm just ignorant to it), since otherwise you are unilaterally making immigration policy for the whole EU.

Genuinely curious, why do you use that web app over whichever bare-bones editor is available on your system?

Somewhat related and also amazing: https://www.youtube.com/@animusic6837

strictly speaking UTC is not a timezone

> You will continue to get the short end of the stick until you gain leverage.

How you gain leverage is situational. At some companies, going above and beyond actually _reduces_ leverage, because you may find that after five years working at said company, the value you add is mostly tied to your knowledge of company internals (processes, systems, people, etc), and you may have actually fallen behind in the actual "transferable" skills that the market values.

> consensually decrypted by the Blockchain system

how would this work in practice? if the contract is to guarantee decryption, wouldn't the key(s) also need to be on chain? how do you keep the secret?

I vaguely recall reading that Google uses time spent on a page/domain as an indicator of the relevance or quality of the search result/content, but I just googled to try to find that source and only found articles stating the opposite [^1],[^2]. Does anyone know if it is indeed used, and if so, why does it not work to demote low-quality SEO-abusing sites? [^1]: https://www.nichepursuits.com/how-important-is-time-on-site-... [^2]: https://ahrefs.com/blog/dwell-time/

Don't mean to take a side here, but just because a rule sounds hard to enforce doesn't mean it doesn't have an effect in practice. People will often change their behaviour out of sheer societal pressure if something is explicitly banned, even if the ban is not enforceable. Saying "our society does not want/accept this" already accomplishes something, regardless of enforcement. An example would be the banned disposal of certain substances in residential solid waste or sewage systems.

Does this apply only to corporations above a certain size? Otherwise, if I can provide my service as a self-employed consultant, then why would I be employed by another company and pay income tax x%, when I could just offer the same services under my own company and pay 0% on the same income?

Hasn't it been proven that showering money on an economy only helps to address isolated disruptions where the system's design prevents it from recovering quickly on its own?

Why do we think UBI is necessary, when there are European countries such as Norway and Switzerland with near-zero unemployment and below-average inequality spanning decades (these two are very different countries, so I don't think we can attribute their success to some specific advantage no one else has).

Imo the countries/people advocating UBI just don't want to come to terms with the reality that their institutions and particularly their culture needs to change in order to tackle the problems that they think UBI will magically solve.