michaelochurch

The difference now is that corporate executives, flush with VC money, are able to monetize the emerging desperation economy (oh, I'm sorry-- I forgot about HN's anti-"negativity" policy-- sharing economy) more effectively than ever before.

The transition started with FMC (Former Middle Class) driving for Uber and subletting their apartments for extra cash, but it does seem to be spreading. For the record, I'm not especially against its existence. I would rather see our legislators interested in fighting the meltdown of the middle class itself than being focused on something that is, at worst, one of the symptoms.

I use emacs and avoid IDEs.

That said, I have no interest in the emacs vs. vi debate. I don't care what tools you use, as long as you don't do things in a way that force me to use specific tools (e.g. enterprise environments that becomes IDE-dependent).

As for me, I don't like mindless churn. This industry desperately needs to improve. It's running at about 5% (if that) of its real potential. But the constant fire drilling that comes with moving from one well-sold crappy technology to another well-sold crappy technology is really irritating, and it's part of why so many good programmers tend to move up into management.

The fact is that it's socially unacceptable to be unemployed for more than a few months, and so people who can't find jobs are then told to go back to school. This would be basically OK (with me, at any rate; but I have a stronger-than-average work ethic) except for the fact that, for some of them, it's on their fucking dime that they don't fucking have.

The price of social acceptability and the difference between having a chance at a career versus being written off as a loser forever is going to be very high, and will increase without bounds if the availability of credit increases in tandem.

A major part of the problem is that universities are no longer non-profit in any meaningful way. They have top administrators making high-six and seven-figure incomes, they evaluate professors based on their fundraising ability rather than their teaching or their contribution to the community, and the cling to the prestige of their non-profit status in order to keep for-profit education a ghetto because if it weren't that way, the likeness of movements on stage would embarrass them.

I don't know how to solve this. The demand for labor is so low in this world (or, perhaps, the supply is too high because society mandates that people work to have an income, being averse even in most liberal countries-- and not for bad reasons-- to redistribution) that people are now expected to do years of preparatory labor at negative pay.

Do you think that Purescript's row typing (as seen in records and the Eff monad/effect system) is a viable replacement for monad transformer stacks? I "get" MT stacks but I find them heavyweight when what is most often desired is commutative set building of capabilities rather than MT-style stacking.

Where's the downvote button, btw? Someone wrote that "Silicon Valley billionaires" are less douchey than regular billionaires and that shit ain't true.

The main benefit to joining a startup isn't even the equity (it's crappy everywhere, these days) but the opportunity for advancement. If you can get a high-level position that wouldn't otherwise be available and get promoted quickly, it can be worth it for the credibility.

That said, many startups actually under-title their people and get into the social-climbing mentality in which the develop a pattern of hiring people above their old hands. If you work for one of those, then you should just get out. Companies tend to be either in a promote-from-within mode or a install-flashy-outsider mode, with not much of a middle ground. The second type of startup is good if you're an outsider, for bumping your comp and title, but not a place to stay for more than a couple of years and certainly not a place where you should work more than enough to hold place.

Rich kids from well-connected families take it for granted. Why do you think parents in New York pay $40,000 per year from pre-school to high school? Because you're an auto-admit at many of the Ivies (Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are still a reach unless you're top-25%, but there's always Stanford) if you attend one of the top 5 prep high schools.

Also, Ivy League is one of the less important elements of pedigree. Pedigreed (read: well-connected, not necessarily well-educated and certainly not cultured) people who don't go to elite schools still have their advantages. Also, the middle-class smart kids and the pedigreed legacy kids tend not to mix at elite schools anyway. A prestigious university provides a bump, but not as much as one thinks. It's not like going to Harvard makes you set for life. I know Harvard grads making $50k as social media whatevers at dipshit ed-tech startups. Middle-class people tend to overestimate the connections-forming capacity of college. It certainly happens, but the tendency for 18- to 21-year-olds (well, everyone, but especially adolescents) is for like to group with like and that means that the middle-class smart kids and the dumbasses-with-family-connections don't mix.

First, there are two types of founders: Made Founders and Hustling (it's a nicer word than "Marginal") Founders. Made Founders (often called "serial entrepreneurs") already have it worked out that, unless they rip off their VCs, they'll get a soft landing. I won't say that they don't work, but they have enough investor-rank friends that they don't really worry about anything, because if their companies tank, they'll be lined up with VP-level positions where they'll probably make twice the salary that they had as founders (typically, founders don't make more than $175k). They probably put in 30-60 hours per week, but they work on the fun stuff and have double-digit equity so... yeah. They worry more about managing up into the investor ranks than running a company, for obvious reasons. (If you build a successful company but lose control and most of your reward, you lost. If you fail but the investors like you and make you a Partner at their VC firm, you won.) It ain't a bad gig, although it's a bit boring because, well, you're a corporate executive. Being a Made Founder is based on pre-existing social class; either something you're born with, or something you luck into. Merit's not a part of it. Hustling Founders are the ones who don't have investor-level people pulling strings all the time and who really, really, really fucking have to pound the pavement-- and hope that a Made Founder doesn't decide to compete in their space, because then they're up against someone who's going to have 50 times the capital.

In the 1960s, all founders were of the Hustling variety because the pedigreed people were still in banking, during the Bateman days when it wasn't a real job (3-martini lunch), and in a time when the pedigreed asswipes still thought the West Coast unprestigious.

What the OP is describing is a cultural shift as pedigreed people with generational social connections jump into the game as Made Founders. They've never been employees or subordinates of any kind (except to VCs) so they don't have the empathy that it takes to run a company, and they tend to be low on competence spectrum (since the mainstream business elite puts its successes in hedge funds and private equity to manage billion-dollar deals, and throws its failures into VC and VC-funded tech).

What hoodwinks a lot of people is that the Made Founders are great at presenting the appearance of Hustling Founders, and thereby they justify getting 100 times the equity as the employees they manage. In reality, most of the Hustling Founders (a middle-class crew) have been driven out and are unfundable due to a lack of social connections, and also because the amount of stress involved in dealing with VCs and abusive investor-level personalities is such a mental-health crusher that even normal people become paralytically neurotic after about 5 years in that game.

Thread over.

Let's have an honest conversation. Haskell is a great programming language. It might be the best. It is not going to get more than a 20% market share in the programming community. It could get 1 percent, which is about 5 times what it has now (measured in available jobs) and 25 times what it had 5 years ago. It could get 5 percent. It might even get 15 percent.

Much of our industry is based on trend-chasing. This 25-year-old language that happens to be really good, but whose strongest proponents even admit that it will never have a dominant (25+ percent) market share like Java or Javascript or PHP, is not a shoo-in for "next dominant paradigm".

Functional programming may be the next important paradigm and we're seeing the best programmers and the most important work gravitate toward it, but it's never going to be the go-to tool for the business-driven Scrum engineering that seems to dominate the mainstream of software.

That's not to make a dig at Scala. It's way better than Java. It's also really complicated, and the need for JVM compatibility is a big part of that. Then you have the compile speed issues, the problematic tool chain, and the fact that average Java programmers, given Scala, will create unmaintainable nightmares.

I'd use Scala over Haskell when I wanted JVM interoperability, or if I needed to train people up quickly. For a "bet the whole farm" play, existing programmer familiarity actually matters a bit less-- "the whole farm" is rarely bet on a one-month project-- and I'd pick Haskell first.

In 2015, Haskell is almost as fast as OCaml, albeit less predictable and therefore possibly still less desirable in certain financial settings. Haskell has a better concurrency story, though.

Hot weather in Seattle is rare but not that rare. In 2009, we had a beautiful summer in New York (the hottest it got was 93 °F / 34 °C, and most days were around 82 °F / 28 °C) while Seattle shot up to a DC-esque 105 °F (41 °C), setting an all-time record. And for reasons that I don't entirely understand (but are probably related to El Nino) we tend to get a mild summer in the Northeast/Midwest when the Pacific Northwest gets heat, and vice versa (the "vice versa" being the usual pattern). Right now, the Pacific Northwest is baking while it's absolutely beautiful (perhaps a bit cloudy, but I'll never complain about 50s °F in July) in Chicago. Hot weather in Seattle is rare but it isn't a new phenomenon.

Anthropogenic global warming is (almost certainly) real and it's extremely dangerous. The OP is just trying to warn us away from attributing specific climactic events to it. This leads to the "global warming can't be real because it's cold in Buffalo" line of reasoning. Weather has always been erratic, and in a globally connected world, there's always been one kind of hell weather happening somewhere and it's dangerous to try to look for a pattern in it.

Personally, I think it's time to escalate the terminology to climate risk. "Climate change" sounds too mild and climates have been changing forever; the difference is that they're now happening at a level that represents a genuine existential risk, because every time that they've changed this fast for a prolonged period of time, it's triggered an extinction event.

The problem is that most people can't evaluate the risks. Take heat. Most people think that a 10 °F (6 °C) rise in summer temperatures wouldn't kill them. That means that the hottest day in a typical New York summer would be 110 °F (43° C) instead of 100 °F (38 °C). That sounds extremely unpleasant but not fatal, because 110 °F in the desert is no big deal. What few are aware of is that it's not the air temperature ("dry bulb") but the wet-bulb temperature that represents lethality, with 30 °C being acutely dangerous and 35 °C being fatal (the hottest days in the hottest deserts, even with dry-bulb temperatures in the 50s, typically have wet-bulb temperatures in the unpleasant but bearable 20s). One possible risk of global warming is that it'll allow heat/humidity combinations that don't even exist right now (except, on the worst days, in the Persian Gulf). Here's a terrifying link on the matter: http://web.science.unsw.edu.au/~stevensherwood/wetbulb.html . Granted, it puts the numbers at hell settings (12 °C rise) but it still shows us what's possible. This model shows the entire Eastern half of the United States (even stereotypically "cold" places like Bangor, Maine and Milwaukee) becoming uninhabitable, along with almost all of Mexico and four-fifths of South America. Northern Africa, India, the Arabian peninsula, Southeast Asia, Spain and France also become uninhabitable, not to mention the entire Australian continent aside from a southern fringe (which will still be hotter than any place today). Unfortunately, the wet-bulb threat isn't something that most people understand, because when you say "wet bulb temperature of 35 °C (or 95 °F)" most people hear the "35 °C", which doesn't sound that terrifying because, as a dry bulb temperature, that's fairly mild.

The existing series is great but it's too good-natured to represent what Silicon Valley actually is. It represents investors as straightforwardly intelligent (one is even female!) and socially awkward rather than as callous manipulators who wreck careers and fund psychopaths to settle scores.

Just as Better Call Saul is a bit more light-hearted than Breaking Bad was (at least toward the end), there needs to be a hard-line honest SV series that focuses on the chicken-hawking and the unethical activity. The existing Silicon Valley is excellent, don't get me wrong. It's just that comedy isn't the best format for representing the tragedy of a national economy losing its ability to innovate due the defective personalities of a small number of laughably untalented individuals.

VCs like to say, "failure is OK, get up and try again" but the truth of the matter, in the Valley, is that you're completely fucking screwed post-faceplant unless the VCs are willing to help you out and place you. You're completely reliant on them for your career and reputation, because they will be the ones who decide (and I use the word decide rather than judge because it really is up to them) whether you failed in good faith or were incompetent and shall become untouchable. This means that you can't buck them, even if they decide to fire you and even if they decide to kill your company (to suit the needs of a competitor that they're also funding, and that they've already picked as the winner over you).

In other words, the soft landings aren't about affection but control. They want an ecosystem where unless they extend something that sorta looks like an out-of-band favor ("sorry that it didn't work out, but my friend is looking for a VP/Eng Post-B, 250k and 3%") the founder is completely fucked.

I have about 6 feet of clearance this morning, so this post can get through, but the fucking high horse has got to go. Sorry, but I don't have space to let it in.

There’s no air cover for startups. You don’t have backup troops. It’s just you versus the world. So naturally, if your product or service sucks, then you die. You can’t just look like you’re doing stuff. You actually have to make it, and almost totally on your own.

Correction. If your VCs don't like you, then you die. Even if your company succeeds, you die if the VCs don't like you. (Just as, in a large corporation, you can do your job very well but have your project taken over because the higher-ups don't like you. Which is, let's be cynical and honest, something we like even less than having the project fail.) If your VCs like you, then they will keep funding you and, if your company fails according to market forces, they'll line you up with an executive position at a portfolio company while you recharge your batteries.

If doing things that aren’t effective don’t get you fired, then what does? Usually making mistakes that make your boss look bad. Big organizations are just groups of people, and people sure like to talk shit. The one thing you can’t do is look like a bozo. It’s fine to work really hard to no effect (hey, you worked hard!), but if you become a social liability, you’re donezo.

The last time I checked, small organizations were also groups of people. And the VC-funded world is just a postmodern corporation in which the VCs have set themselves up as the actual executive team while "founders" are mid-ranking product managers (who might get 8-figure bonuses, and promotion to the investor ranks, if they totally rape the odds... but are, for the time being, still in the second tier and forced to manage up into the man-child oligarchy on Sand Hill Road).

Corporate VPs don't have a monopoly on reputation management at the expense of the corporate good.

Founders care more about their "personal brand" than their companies, and I don't begrudge them for this at all. Fuck, I also care more (far, far more) about my career and reputation than whatever company I work at, at a given time. I take no issue with self-interest, and I don't even necessarily think the "disposable company" model of the postmodern VC-istan meta-company is the wrong one. I just can't fucking stand the high horse. You (rhetorical "you"; I'm not trying to be confrontational to any specific person) fuckers in VC and in founder-land aren't much worse than the existing corporate elite, but you're not better either. You fucking are the corporate elite. Accept it. The fact that you wear sandals instead of a suit when you lay people off doesn't make you a better person.

On one hand, I sympathize with Ms. Morrill's position. I could see myself running a 50-person tech company. By the time it was public, I'd be looking for a replacement and planning to cash out. I hate having to justify my own work to people less intelligent than I am, and that becomes your life when you're the CEO of a publicly traded company.

"Unwashed masses" was off the mark and probably unneeded-- the actual enemy isn't 100-IQ average Americans (who, since it's 2015 and not 1347, are probably as clean as we are) who prefer fishing over running tech companies-- no one has a problem with them-- but management consultants and VC-land celebrities who think they're what I actually am (Dunning-Kruger) and are just so hilariously not, but somehow end up in charge despite their intellectual mediocrity. Still, I understand her sentiment completely and I feel the same way. If I'm CEO, then as soon as my job is begging for permission to do great work and justifying time and expense to inferior copies of myself who have no insight but all the power, instead of just fucking doing great work, then please cash me out and fire me.

On the other hand, I don't think that the VCs are, on the whole, better than the mainstream business elite. Person by person, they're worse: less intelligent, less capable, far more immature, and a hell of a lot worse in terms of organizational and social insight. The steel company CEO may not understand Haskell, but he fucking knows how to lead people and run a complex human organization. The typical Sand Hill Road VC doesn't know either and is, therefore, pretty fucking useless except for the fact that he's a gatekeeper to the man-child oligarchy that holds all the cards. The main benefit that you get as a private company (cf. Ms. Morrill) isn't that you're accountable to a higher quality of people (because VCs are not that) but that you're accountable to fewer people and, therefore, have a better chance of drawing only aces. If you're accountable to as many people as you are, once public, the probability of drawing all aces becomes really low-- and the 3's and 4's (which are found in both decks) often have better social skills and become the dominant decision-makers.

The major reason why VCs want to keep companies private, furthermore, has nothing to do with "long-term vision". Sand Hill Road is essentially taking equity-market strategies (namely, insider trading and market manipulation) that have been illegal for nearly a century on the public market, and applying them to private markets. If you use inside information to beat up the public market, you go to jail. If you pick up a phone and tell your buddies to dump their Quuxbin stocks all at once you can corner it on the cheap and put your underachieving, favor-dependent friends into executive positions... then you're guilty of market manipulation and go to jail. That kind of stuff happens (legally or at least quasi-legally) all the time in Silicon Valley.

The Sand Hill Road cartel (or, as I prefer it, man-child oligarchy) shows us a parallel universe in which pump-and-dump is the norm and businesses soar or fail not according to market demand for their (typically uninspiring) products, but based on the fluctuating needs of self-interested, careerist investors. This is not only ethically problematic, but it also contributes to the geographic concentration of technology funding, which has become toxic (both for the residents of the Bay Area, who pay obscene rents, and for the capital-deprived "flyover" rest of the country). See, anyone who wants to know why VC is so Bay Area-centric need only pay attention to what the VCs are actually doing. Because so many of the conversations that VCs have would utterly fucking ruin them if ever printed, they have to work face-to-face. That doesn't mandate a specific area (e.g. San Francisco) but it does require geographic concentration.

What she's saying about "scrutiny of unwashed masses who don't understand my business" hits the mark. With "unwashed masses", she's not complaining about average, 100-IQ Americans who'd rather go fishing than run tech companies. No one (who's worth taking seriously) has a problem with such people. She's complaining about the management consultants and serial board members who haven't actually done anything for 20 years who (because they think they're intellectual leaders, when they're not) toss out imbecilic suggestions like "Cut R&D, set up stack ranking, and give a speech about 'tough culture' to scare people" when the Q2 numbers come out a little soft. There are a lot of utter fucking morons in the business world with a hell of a lot of influence and power. Some are in tech, some are outside of it; but it's true that when you go public, the probability that drooling rubes will have the power and influence to force your hand on "tough decisions", when you should actually be leading from the front and doubling down on R&D and morale, goes up.

"Unwashed masses" isn't quite the right phrase, because it suggests low social class when the actual enemy is people of high social class and power who think they have intelligence and vision (rather than luck and social connection) to match it, but who are actually drooling, anti-intellectual, sheepish morons. Still, I agree strongly with her sentiment. Everything she's saying is valid. Where she and I may disagree is on the locus of the morons. I think that most of technology's leadership is just as bad as the mainstream business leadership (and I'm not sure that I buy into the distinction). Lucas Duplan and Evan Spiegel and Travis Kalanich weren't shit onto this world by Fenrir. Someone decided to make them founders. Their existence is testament to the existence of drooling rubes in the VC ranks. The difference isn't in the average quality of people (most VCs are fucking morons, just as most management consultants are) but in the number of people to whom you're accountable. If you're private, you're accountable to a couple lead VCs and there's a chance (less than 50% by definition, because most decision-makers are drooling rubes everywhere, but probably greater than 5%) that you got lucky and drew people who are actually worth a damn. If you're public, you're accountable to a much larger number of people, most of whom are talentless and overpaid and full of themselves, and you end up gaming short-term stats in order to keep them off your back.

I disagree, not with the advice (obviously, living up to the new expectations is better than falling short of them) but with the attitude (often espoused by management) that a bump in your compensation comes with a harder job.

Often it comes with an easier job. The intellectual demands may get higher, but the emotional demands of subordination tend to go away when you go from a $90k junior peon to a $135k trusted senior to a $180k VP-level fellow who gets to call technical shots. When I was a junior, I had to maintain shit code written in languages I hated, and if I struggled with something and pointed to the bad code, that'd be met with suspicion because I was lower on the totem pole. Now I get to pick tools most of the time and if I say that something is hard and needs to be done a different way, people believe me.

The technical challenges have become harder as I've risen, but the jobs get easier and way better on the whole. Eight years ago I wouldn't just grab a side office and write some code (I probably could have, but I was insecure and young and felt a need to be in the open-plan environment for 8 straight hours, panic attacks be damned). Now, I know that I have sufficient status that I can do that, and that matters a huge amount. Technical challenges (the part of work that I enjoy) going up and the emotional load of being low-ranking (that slowly kills a person) going down is a win on both fronts.

Of course, if my company gets taken over and everyone has to typecast to a junior ScrumDrone-- "Agile" is "how to be a 2x Junior Developer"-- then I'll be laid off shortly after because I'm massively overpaid for a ScrumDrone. No one who takes "user stories" seriously is worth what I make, so the minute I hear people talking about Scrum (bringing down the 10xers to turn the 0.2x into 0.6x) I get nervous.

If you're planning to ask for a raise, you need to kick ass before you go in and ask for it. And you should really ask for a promotion (not, "boss, I want your job", but more responsibility and perhaps a title improvement so long as it doesn't put you in the awkward position of outranking your manager) rather than just asking for more money for the same job (an unattractive proposition to the boss, no matter what). In general, this happens incrementally. You ask for a 15% raise and only get 5%, so you ask for a title bump, even if it doesn't mean you take on reports. Because of the title bump, you get better projects, you're taken more seriously, you suffer less emotional load and perform better, and you're also in a higher bonus pool. Two years later when the company is flush with cash, you get a 25% raise without asking because you're actually the lowest paid VP and they've decided to correct that.

Working hard matters the most in the 3-6 months before you ask for the new responsibilities, promotion, and of course the pay increase that come with it (or, at least, can come with it). Then you settle into the new role and it doesn't matter that much how hard you work (average to average-plus effort is fine) so long as people like you and you follow the "become part of the team before trying to become its leader" principle. The before- and after-negotiation phases have different rules, but the former is harder on the whole.

Of course, people who are smart about this will negotiate continuously, involving themselves with (or starting) big projects without asking for permission, delegating the less interesting tasks to (preferably eager) juniors even if they don't formally manage them, making changes to your arrangements (WFH, taking a seat with a wall at your back) to improve your productivity, and generally feeling out what their position actually is. If you don't continuously negotiate, you're probably not going to feel comfortable marching into someone's office and asking for $20k more, and you probably haven't done the micro-negotiation ground work (getting your title in line, getting your best projects noticed and your weak spots ignored, delegating the work that won't help your case or make your important projects succeed) necessary to make the raise seem like an obvious "yes".

The major historical selling point of object-oriented programming (OOP) to the Forces of Evil-- not all business people are "Forces of Evil; really, there are some great business people out there, and so I'm referring specifically to cost-cutting mini-Eichmanns who've attempted to commoditize, humiliate, and infantilize us with "user scrum stories" and a culture of mediocrity-- was that OOP (after diverging far from Alan Kay's original vision) would allow the Forces of Evil to replace high-cost experts with teams of mediocre programmers, and thereby ruin the balance of power. Culturally, it worked (the culture of mediocrity is well-established in the software industry); economically, it failed (because large teams of mediocrities are actually fucking expensive, because a "10x" engineer only costs about 1.5-2.5x an average one).

The sales pitch for OOP to the Forces of Evil was that OOP would make it possible to hire a couple of low-paid body-shop programmers too stupid to recognize the OP as either (a) satire or, missing the joke but still correct, just wrong. Smart wizards in the open-source world and at companies like Google would do the actual engineering that made efficient hash-maps possible, and CommodityScrumDrones would staple shit together using topologies thereof, without really understanding any of the technologies they were gluing together, and probably ignorant of why these things are sometimes called "hashes" in the first place.

The problem is that when CommodityScrumDrones grow up and become middle managers and get to start making technical choices, they often make bad ones. They reject PostgreSQL as too hard to too old and use some NoSQL JSON storage engine that was a "Show HN" project 17 days ago.

Even though the CommodityScrumProgrammer phenomenon has been a massive failure in economic terms-- the Forces of Evil have won on ego terms but utterly dominating their targets, but they've lost money-- it has been a cultural success that has inflicted mediocrity, anti-intellectualism, and subordinacy to "The Business", on the software industry. And now we have people calling important technical shots who have literally no idea why the OP is either satire or wrong.

Actual mania (not hypomania) is usually more unpleasant, from what I've seen. (I know quite a few people who've had it.) The stereotype is that the happy mania is the "normal" mania, but the anxious, angry, or psychotic versions are more common. I also think (although phren0logy is going to know a lot more about this than I do) that it's very rare for a person to have only the "happy" mania, unless you're talking about mild hypomania that might not even be classified as bipolar (I tend to think of BP as a spectrum and think that 10-20% of people are "on the spectrum", but that's not the same thing as having BP1 or BP2).

I've only had one actual manic episode (almost a decade ago) and my current doctor's pretty confident that I wouldn't be classified as bipolar based on recent and current state... but the one manic episode that I had was awful and I'll never forget it. There were flashes of the "happy" mania, but it was mostly anger and anxiety, with not a small number of panic attacks.

Let's say that the employee has 0.4% (after dilution) of BuzzFlop with a 4-year vesting cycle. After 2.5 years, BuzzFlop is bought by Hooli for $100M in Hooli stock. The employee doesn't get $250k in walk-away cash, but $250k in Hooli stock, subject itself to a vesting schedule (and possibly a "refresher"). If that employee gets cliffed (which can happen in a merger) then none of that stock ever vests.

VC-istan: you can get dicked out of your bonus for reasons you don't understand (liquidation preferences, vesting resets and cliffing) or that are purely political and lose 6 years' worth of expected bonus.

Wall Street: you can get dicked out of your bonus for reasons you don't understand or that are purely political and lose 11.9 months' worth of expected bonus.

I'd rather have the losses be limited, and have more opportunities for negotiation and revision. Wall Street's system is just better. We may not like that industry, but the facts are clear.

These people called "executives" can. Programmers generally don't, unless they're very good and very mercenary, and even then "rich" means "7-figure net worth and the ability to consult at a decent rate as much as one wants". Which isn't bad at all but isn't VC MegaBux.

Because software engineers are terrible at managing their own social status, both individually and collectively.

Social status determines how your work is evaluated, whether you are punished or rewarded for taking initiative and working on what you think is important, and how often you are held accountable for short-term results and visibility into your work. Manage your social status poorly, and you'll get daily status pings (the other meaning of "status"). Manage it well, and you can work on whatever you want with a low level of interruption.

However, our industry is full of young, delusional people who haven't been burned (i.e. had difficult life experiences) yet and still believe in the corporate "meritocracy".

Most companies are run by short-sighted mediocrities who don't look more than 3 months into the future. I think longer term. In the long term, the transition is worth it. The benefits of moving from Java to Haskell or Clojure, say, are worth a few months of struggling and first-time code. If you have half-decent programmers and a culture that allows people to take time to learn how to do things right, that pays itself off within the year.

The disconnect I've always had with using Haskell for anything is; you never get a result until the entire computation is complete.

That's not really true. If you need strictness, you can force evaluation and you don't need to use monads. I'm writing a Haskell class and I cover `seq` before I tackle monads in all their glory (i.e. beyond "here's how you do some basic I/O").

Oh but monads they say. Well, monads seem an aweful lot like procedural code (to me, the uninitated, unpracticed) so what's the point again? That's not meant as a criticism of Haskell, but just one persons thought process on the issue.

That's a fair point. Yeah, do-notation is a way to write imperative-looking code in a functional way. The truth is that for small programs, imperative code is often much more readable. That's how recipes are written, for example. Five lines of imperative code never killed anyone. It's when a function gets to 4,000 lines (often with multiple authors) that imperative programming completely shits the bed.

Monads, in short, are... a way to abstract around the concept of computational context so we can define what "stateful effects" are. `IO` has access to anything the machine can do. `ST` is single-threaded but stateful. `STM` can update some state (`TVars`) but has to follow the transactional rules. `State s` is a pure monad that looks stateful because it uses explicit state. Then we get to the monad transformer stacks, which are... potentially very complicated. (Phil Freeman's work with row types and the `Eff` monad in PureScript may replace the MT stacks one day.)

The point, in short is: imperative code is not evil, we're not trying to do away with it. We want to segregate it into functions that are preferably easy to read so we can reason about what stateful effects do happen. In Haskell, the monad system allows us to enforce this at the type level. You can look at the type signature and get an upper bound (unless "cheat functions" like `unsafePerformIO` are used; and they generally shouldn't be) on the space of stateful effects that can occur.