michaelochurch

To explain: where this sort of project management actually works is in a short-term, time-limited crisis that large companies might call a "Code Red" or (in the original meaning of the word) a Scrum. See my Quora post on the topic: http://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-developers-at-strong-compan...

When you're a small web consultancy that has landed a make-or-break project that (say) must be delivered inside of 4 weeks, and when you have absolutely no leverage and must accept any changes in scope as they come, Agile can work. You can reasonably expect people to set aside their long-term goals (career progress, tech debt reduction) and solve the problem at hand. Moreover, when you're a big company fighting a Code Red (meaning, money is being lost right now in large amounts) and have to assemble a cross-cutting do-nothing-else-for-now team with no clear manager, Scrum can actually make sense.

In a true sprint-- a short-term reorganization necessary to solve an immediate problem-- unsustainable effort is OK because, well, no one's going to be expected to sustain it. You're under a short term emergency. You can ignore whether the assigned work helps peoples' careers, because they're not going to be doing it for long. You can mandate that people work on the "official" top priority (of which there's only one) and most people will do so.

The problem is the perma-Scrum that's been sold (dishonestly) by the Agile industry. This stuff works for a few weeks and people don't mind doing it. In fact, even if the work itself is painful and the hours are bad and status updates are (by necessity) frequently demanded, being tapped for the "elite emergency team" is something that people generally like and, over a span of 2 to 6 weeks, it gets results. However, when you have permanent "sprinting" and frequent status meetings or impose these rules over the whole organization, it starts to hurt morale. It starts to feel less like being on an elite emergency team and more like a culture of permanent juniority/micromanagement... which is what Scrum/Agile has become in many organizations.

At any rate, I don't think humans are capable of comprehending eternity, so I'm not sure how meaningful Pascal's Wager really is. While there's objectively a huge difference between 10^14 years of torment and an eternity of it, I can't say that I can begin to fathom either one.

Buddhism doesn't categorically outlaw suicide but it's against violent or angry suicide and it definitely proscribes suicide as a way out. The bad karma you were trying to escape, plus possibly more, will be waiting for you on the other side. The self-immolating monk, Thích Quảng Đức, might turn out OK if he had compassionate intentions; but in general, suicide is still very bad.

Also, many suicides involve alcohol (which, in some, produces a volatile state that mixes despondency and extreme anger) and drunk people don't exactly listen to reason.

I think that it can be worthwhile to remind the person that he has friends who'll miss him, dogs to feed, etc. I don't think that laying in with guilt is the way to go. You want to give them images of the people they care about being happy, not images of them being wrecked by their own possible death.

I'd stay away from the drugs, except in a monitored therapeutic context (which is probably still illegal, but may be helpful). Depression can be secondary to anxiety, and drugs can cause panic attacks. A bad trip is essentially a panic attack boosted by persistent altered consciousness. I'm not anti-drug but there are people who shouldn't use them (I'm one of them; I don't even get drunk).

Severe depression also makes it hard to do any of these things. But people don't usually commit suicide in the thick of a depression; they do it in the period of emotional volatility that tends to happen at the end of a depression. They're exhausted by having been depressed, but not depressed at the time of the event.

Anyone who is having suicidal thoughts, even if he's pretty sure he'd never act on them, should see a professional first and foremost and get the depression and, if they exist, panic issues treated. Then taking up the sports (which aren't especially dangerous; even scuba diving is safer than inactivity per minute) is a great call. Developing a meditation discipline is also a great idea.

The difference is that, in the professions, you have to get in early but it's the norm to move up fast enough that ageism isn't a problem because, even if you make a couple of mistakes, you'll be at an age-appropriate level. You may not be a biglaw partner or chief surgeon earning 7 figures, but you'll be substantial enough that you're still taken seriously.

In software engineering, there isn't a well-defined sense of what "up" is or what's "age appropriate". There isn't a published career track and a legible ageism. It's there, but it's hard to tell exactly when it's there. Is being a programmer at 55 age-appropriate? If you're an AI researcher at Google X, then yes, absolutely. If you're checking your Jira every morning to figure out which user stories you're going to be working on, then no one's going to believe that you chose to be a programmer instead of a manager. (Hell, I wouldn't believe you. I might still hire you, because I'm mature enough to separate low social status in one theater apart from low ability. If you're 55 and still have to deal with user stories, it means that you managed your social status poorly; but you might still be a rock-solid engineer whom I'd hire in a heartbeat.)

If you look at the Valley's emerging professional model, it's not a kind one and it's not one that ages well. You choose between (a) a "main sequence" where each jump is a dramatically different job, from engineer to manager to founder to investor, and where there are structural reasons why most people will never make it; or (b) fighting for the small percentage of jobs that are genuinely interesting and age-appropriate at any age.

I think it's much easier to deal with age if you're a consultant, because it leaves you out of the political structure of a firm. It makes people uncomfortable to have a 35-year-old "Software Manager II" overseeing a 55-year-old badass. With age, you just don't fit into the corporate hierarchy unless you've climbed it. If you're a consultant and live outside of the hierarchy, then age doesn't really matter.

One of the things that galls me about this industry is its belief that experience (which is not the same thing as age) is a negative.

If you come from Microsoft or Google, you'll be assumed to be "political". If you come from a no-name company, people will think you're a loser who wasn't good enough for the tech giants or elite startups. If you have failed startups on your CV, people assume that you'll be bitter about the ones that got away. If you were at one job for too long, that counts against you; but if you had too many jobs and were a "job hopper", that ruins you as well.

It's ridiculous. It makes no sense. How are people not able to get past the idea that people are more than their experiences, and that most people improve with experience (even of the negative kind) and age rather than becoming "damaged goods" because they weren't millionaires by age 27?

End rant.

The TV show is (paradoxically?) more vulgar but also more good-natured (being a comedy) than the real thing.

For example, no one would call a VC a "choad-gargling fuck toilet" in a pitch-- VCs share notes more than is appropriate or legal, and have black-balled people for less-- and I doubt that a group of typical startup engineers could pull off a flawless 3-minute dick joke like the one in Season 1's finale. So, the TV version of the Valley is more overtly vulgar. The real thing tends to be crass and exclusionary, but you're not going to hear words like "shit-riddled anal wasteland" or nicknames like "Cunty" very often. The show focuses on superficial abuses that are funny rather than the long-lived, subtle, and often subversive ones that characterize the actual Valley.

Another discrepancy: when Richard achieves a record-breaking "Weissman score", the entirety of TechCrunch disrupt is in awe. In the real Valley, 95% of them wouldn't know what a Weissman Score is. The technical literacy of the people in the show is actually much higher than in the real Silicon Valley. At one point, there's a reference to a "DFT" (Discrete Fourier Transform, I presume) and I'd bet that only 1% of investors and 5% of SV founders know what a Fourier Transform even is.

The show gets far more right than I would have expected, and more right than it gets wrong. One of the things that is true to life is the purely political promotion of Bighead (an incompetent engineer who gets a great job because the CEO of Hooli wants to fuck over Pied Piper). That happens a lot and I'd love to see his career grow and for him to become a VP, a founder, or even get promoted into the investor ranks. The part that isn't true to life (or, at least, very common) is his humility and self-awareness. He knows that he's mediocre; whereas most people who benefit from political or aggressively aspirational promotions tend to believe they actually deserved it, and get quite arrogant.

Another thing that's true to life is Russ Hanneman's unethical use of information, when he poaches an engineer that Pied Piper wants for another company. That may be the core ethical flaw of Silicon Valley: a complete lack of respect for the idea that there are things that one should not do with others' information. That sort of ethical looseness is common and spot-on. Likewise, the herd mentality of the VCs around Pied Piper hits reality exactly.

Finally, you have Erlich Bachmann and Russ Hanneman (inspired by Sean Parker and, some have said, Mark Cuban). Bachmann is a jerk, superficially, but still a bit too good-natured to be a real player, as we've seen in the recent episodes. Russ Hanneman hits the archetype of the Silicon Valley billionaire ("three comma") on the nose. That said, even he's more self aware than most real SV billionaires.

I can see the appeal of that. It also makes you less exposed to changes in window dressing and to political changes.

..and this is the other reason.

Sure, but it's also bad for the world that "market signals" are encouraging engineers to use bad languages for reasons having nothing to do with productivity. We know the real reason why there's so much Java in the software world: middle managers want headcount (they'd rather manage a team of 50 mediocrities than 5 elite engineers doing just enough work) and Java is such a low-productivity language that it forces teams to be big if anything is to be accomplished.

If an engineer who'd be nothing special in the Haskell community can take home $400k per year slinging Java, then what is a half-decent Haskell engineer (who, most likely, makes a lot less than $400k) really worth? $700k? $3 million?

There's so much filthy global money in Manhattan and California real estate right now that it's mind-boggling. And as Malta is a tiny island nation, and real estate exhibits extreme price inelasticity, this sort of thing can happen quickly.

Real estate hyperinflation is a plague that must be fought with any means necessary.

For some examples: (1) frequent job hops can improve your salary, but they reduce your ability to stick with a long project and become good at anything; (2) if you're looking to make the case for a move into management, you do better to take on an ugly-but-necessary project where you'll delegate most of the work, than to stick with the technically interesting stuff and get a reputation of someone who only wants to work on the "fun" stuff; (3) Haskell engineers make about 40% less than Java engineers at the same level of engineering ability. (The difference in medians is only a few percent, but the median Haskell engineer is equivalent to ~95th percentile in Java.) That's because Java engineers can set up multilateral bidding wars every 2 years and get huge pay bumps; in Haskell, that's nearly impossible because it's a small community.

Personally, I tend to go for interesting work. That's because I think, in the long term, it'll play out better for me to have spent my 30s well than to have ratcheted up my salary but not really know anything.

If we want to see engineers paid what they're worth, though, we've got to get political enough that we can actually run companies (let's be honest; 98+ percent of VC-funded startups are run by Guys With Connections Who Therefore Call Shots, not engineers) and take control of the work allocation processes as well.

Today, however, I sit here writing this post as a 32-year-old man with a head of gray hair, a mind that cannot stop thinking a million miles a minute about a million different things, and eyes that have only been open to the digital world. I am burnt out on writing code. I am burnt out on configuration. I am burnt out on automating monotonous tasks. I am burnt out on completing tickets. I am burnt out on completing tickets that undo what those other tickets accomplished. I am burnt out on debugging third-party advertising code. I am burnt out on having 16 terminal tabs open. I am burnt out on contributing to the “connected” culture. I am burnt out on having a “40 hour” work week that actually occupies the majority of my mental time. I am burnt out on sitting at a desk. This state of being burnt out has invaded so much of my out-of-work life that I have decided to take my Life back.

So much of that is congruent with my experience as well. Yet, for reasons that seem hard to explain at first, I go deeper into the beast rather than move away from it (and my choice is in no way superior). I love what technology can do-- liberate humanity from drudgery, improve the human quality of life, make interactions and knowledge and discovery possible that wouldn't otherwise be-- and I enjoy the intellectual challenge. I hate so much of what it's actually used to do: serve the short-term economic interests of power-holders who are incompetent but don't want to give up their seats.

As much as I love being in the forest, I must be a natural urbanite because I have a natural draw toward being in the main fight. Even with the risk and clamor, I like carrying a sword (metaphorically speaking, since my chosen war is cultural and therefore fought by typing rather than swinging a blade). I feel like it is my destiny to be in the fight to take technology back from the current crop of useless power-holders. I want to be in this war, and I really fucking want to win it, but I can't blame anyone for wanting to get the fuck out of it and work on a farm. It's an appealing idea.

I'm not anti-farming (I mean, I like food) but I also recognize that, without technology, life would be a lot worse than it is right now. Not all of us can be farmers, not anymore. Munching Jira tickets to appease some middle manager may be a waste of life (nay, it is) but I still feel like what we do as technologists (or, at least, what we can do) is important. We're a part of evolution and progress... even if many of us get drawn down into nonsense.

Reading the OP, I'm really glad that he found work that enjoys and that gives him a sense of purpose, and I hope that that never changes for him. I also find it sad that technology gave him such a useless, negative experience (munching tickets instead of driving forward progress) and see fit to take that as a warning.

Real World Haskell is solid and was pretty comprehensive for system programming at the time (2008) but it desperately needs an update. Some of the libraries (e.g. persistent) have moved pretty far from it, web programming in Haskell has come a long way over the past few years, and applicative functors weren't even on the map yet.

Real World Haskell is a good resource but it shouldn't be your only resource. Then again, part of the fun and challenge of learning Haskell is that there's so much depth to the language that no single resource suffices.

Stephen Diehl's "What I Wish I Knew When Learning Haskell" ( http://dev.stephendiehl.com/hask/ ) is comprehensive and modern, but not really a beginner resource.

Also, many of the harsh and weird side effects of SSRIs (the yawns, the sweats, and the weird-ass dreams in the first week) are temporary and doctors will usually prescribe anti-anxiety medication if those become an acute issue.

You need to do something about this. Medication's a good start, because it will give you the initial reboot that will make you able to exercise and regularize your sleep. After you're well, the next job is to stay well and get into an exercise routine and start eating healthier foods. Right now, though, medication is the best source for that initial "push", and it helps many people. Once you're out of the depression, establish healthy habits to maximize the probability that you stay out of it.

Also, you shouldn't question whether you "deserve to be alive" because of one job. Most people have been fired at least once. Shit happens. If your depression is interfering with your ability to perform at work, then disclose the health issue before you end up on a PIP. It won't prevent you from getting fired but it will increase the likelihood that you get a severance if you are fired.

Good luck! Depression sucks but many of us have been there and gotten out of it.

What the clueless young engineers tend to overestimate is their likelihood of being a founder in the next go 'round. They're smart enough to realize that their option grants won't make them rich, but they think that if they work 70 hours per week, they'll be promoted rapidly and getting personal introductions to investors, from the CEO, inside of two years. Of course, that's rarely how it happens. If everyone could hop into the founder ranks just by working hard, who would be left to be the employees on 0.05%? The Valley doesn't mislead young people about their equity grants (because that would be illegal) so much as it tends to mislead them about reporting structure, project allocation, and expected career trajectory. Consequently, you have a lot of startups where on a team of 10 people, you have 6 people who think that they're the boss (because of implicit promises made to them in the hiring process).

At any rate, I've met plenty of high-IQ people who are just awful programmers. Smart as hell, but really bad at writing code. I think that attitude is a major factor. If you think programming is important and genuinely want to learn it (and not just "good enough to get a job") then I think it's quite possible for a lot of people to learn how to do it well enough.

Innate talent might matter at the extreme upper end of competitive programming. Just as most people can run a marathon with enough work, but very few will ever get below 3:00, I'd believe that the percentage of people who can reach the top in programming competitions is smaller than the percentage who can program adequately. So there's probably a talent ceiling there, just as there is in athletics. But real programming is more cooperative than competitive and there are plenty of factors (especially design sense and cross-domain knowledge) that matter in the real world more than innate talent.

Programming has a steep learning curve, but what's missed is that a steep learning curve is a good thing. The 10x effect exists because it's possible (especially in the early stages) to improve your own effectiveness by 20, 50, or even 100+ percent per year... and one becomes a true 10x-er not based on in-born talent but by having several 1.5x growth years in a row.

Do you have anything more to say?

Given the amount paid, I see health care as a right, not a privilege. We already have high taxes and high insurance premiums. Yet we live in a society where it's pretty much random whether your insurance even covers you when you get sick.

Doctors themselves often don't know what their services cost. The hospital does the billing, not them. And hospital bills are obscene, bizarre, and intentionally obfuscated. An aspiring costs $70 and a box of tissues becomes $150 "mucus collection therapy".

It's absurd, but it also performs a social function similar to the persecution of witches, heretics, and old eccentrics. (Yes, this sounds like it's coming out of left field. Please continue.) Namely, witch hunts were mostly economic in nature; you had middle- and upper-middle class (but not rich or important) older people, often women but some men, who'd amassed sizable savings that, being weakened by age and declining health and social isolation, they couldn't really defend. Witch hunts were a great way for corrupt clerics (Catholic, Protestant, both "sides" were in on it) and enterprising inquisitors to yank the savings of old and modestly wealthy people, in a way that had enough official muscle (religion) behind it that a large portion of their heirs wouldn't deign to go into the fight (for fear of being labelled heretics or witches themselves). Witch hunting was about many things, but raising money was a primary and overlooked motive.

Older people tend to have savings without the ability to defend it. When you have undefended money, there's a risk that someone will try to steal it. In the 16th century, witch hunting was the means. In the 21st-century U.S., it's medical bills: cooking up a way to suck savings off of people who are close to death and won't need them anymore. (The 25-year-old who gets denied cancer treatment is seen as just a casualty, but she's not the main target.) Medical bills are basically an inheritance tax built to fuck the middle class, yet the conservatives (who get up in arms if you apply an estate tax to double-digit millionaires) have absolutely nothing to say about it.

Usually the explicit quid pro quo isn't needed because self-interest is enough to keep the parties in step. In that example, once the kid is given the job, the guy on the purchasing board has an obvious desire to buy at as high a price as possible, since it's not his money.

These are the sorts of issues that would be considered conflicts of interest, and require the decision-makers to recuse themselves, anywhere but Silicon Valley.

This is a good first-order approximation. One generally admirable thing about American culture is that it's not acceptable to just inherit wealth and try to rule society. Where this backfires is that it means that rich kids get dumped into the mainstream labor market and, with their superior social resources, take most of the top jobs. VC-funded startups are mostly a mechanism for taking parental wealth and influence (a socially unacceptable thing for the child to live off of) and laundering it into shares of newly-created businesses, so that the sponsee looks like a genuine tech entrepreneur rather than the beneficiary of a managed outcome (acqui-hire!) put together by his parents' friends.

There is a lot of technology work, even right now, that improves peoples' lives in immensely meaningful ways. Perhaps the people doing such work are a "silent majority" of technology. The problem is that you never hear about it on Hacker News or TechCrunch, and the contemporary crowd of Valley king-makers runs away from it.

If something is worth doing, it's usually hard to do and even harder to control. If several of the constraints are socioeconomic arrangements (e.g. Joffrey must get at least $10M and a VP-level position in the inevitable acqui-hire; and we must let Squabbling Hen Capital in on this deal, with a board seat, because we owe them a favor) then it becomes a lot harder to actually do anything useful. Instead, it becomes "tech is hard, let's go Snapchat".

It could start by de-degreeing some bad actors, and making it public. Evan Spiegel's earned it with his frat-boy era behavior, and Lucas Duplan with that stupid fucking name (Clinkle) and that picture of him with the fat stacks. I'd go further. Caught red-handed in age discrimination? Degree's gone, and professors will be disciplined if they refer students to you or invest in you. Put stack-ranking in your company? Congratulations, you're no longer an alumnus, and the reason why will be made public.

Stanford isn't a bad institution at all, but it needs to show some leadership if it wants to gain the respect of the East and the North. It very much can. Plenty of the professors and classes are top-notch already.

A linear model is the simplest model, which is sometimes an asset (in some cases, linear regression is the best statistical model for its simplicity) and sometimes makes it crude and underfit to the problem. I was focusing on the latter.

The counterexample to the "C is unsafe" argument is that C is what people use for extremely high-reliability programming. I prefer Haskell, and Rust is promising, but the fact is that JPL uses C. The Mars Rover is probably running C code. While C is insecure as hell under typical corporate use (tight deadlines, unskilled programmers) it can be pretty damn reliable in the right hands.

"I want to be an executive" is a pretty fucking lame vision, as it were. I'd rather be around people who have concrete ideas of what they want to build, and who'll lead when appropriate and follow when appropriate. People who say, "I'm a leader" but don't have a good sense of where they want to lead, are annoying. What they're really saying is, "I think that, based on some linear combination of pre-existing socioeconomic resources and inflated self-image, I have the right to a job where I tell other people what to do."

I don't think that all MBAs are douchebags. I know plenty whom I like a lot. Unfortunately, the culture of business school and especially the elite business schools is one of entitlement and position-seeking. When that type of person founds a startup, you get a lot of the same toxic big-company behaviors and formalities and political structures, but in a small company that can't afford the inefficiencies. Now you have the worst of both worlds between small companies and big ones, and a high likelihood of failure or, if the connections are there, Knewton-esque mediocrity.

Oddly enough, if I had a child I'd recommend that he go to the highest-ranking business school out there. Harvard is going to open doors that are just ridiculous, whereas the #20 school is probably educationally equivalent, but isn't going to make you a CEO at 30. On the other hand, if I were hiring, I'd be extremely skeptical of the Harvard MBA and less skeptical of the Booth MBA and even less skeptical of the UWash MBA. In most educational divisions, the correlation between prestige and douchebaggery is nonexistent, i.e. Yale law students aren't noticeably douchier, or less douchey, than students at middling schools; in MBA school, it's clearly a positive correlation (although Stanford is probably worse than Harvard, though less prestigious, for obvious reasons).

It can still be worth it to be a startup employee if you can get more responsibility and faster promotions than elsewhere. However, if the startup is one of those that always promotes externally, while the engineers who built the original work get shat on for mistakes made in chasing deadlines-- this is a common anti-pattern-- then you're wasting your time and should bounce as soon as possible.