When human life is meaningless and you don't have to make decisions around a pesky constitution and citizen rights, it's really easy to be prepared for anything.
582 karma · joined April 15, 2020
This is called networking and I don't think it's going away anytime soon.
I'm a consultant and I get along very well with the director of engineering where I'm working now. When cuts happen, I won't be the first to go. The first to go will be the people that have no relationship with upper management.
Career advancement isn't all about the job that you do.
"Basically I'd hope we can prioritise other ways to create trust than building personal bonds (TBH, being good at one's job for a decent amount of time seems plenty enough to me)"
Being only good at one's job is a great way to keep your current job and position forever. If that's what you want, it's fine. However, if you want to get into management or advance, you need to get noticed and build relationships so your potential can also be noticed.
I also think many developers use a single language for work and don't have much time after work to learn another one.
Margins are tight. You need to have enough money in the bank or credit to cover loss. This will happen, especially if you are buying anything overseas.
All suppliers need to be vetted and checked out. Companies will lie to you, just to get your business.
Counterfeits are rampant. If you have a supplier that will sell you something name brand for 1/3 the cost, it's 99% a fake. This will result in: possible lawsuits (if they are in China, our laws don't apply, so the law will go after you), lost shipments at the border (you will most likely eat the cost for this), and losing customer's trust.
On top of this, it's so easy for your dropshipping company to steal your customers from under you.
Creating your own product/service is the best way to have a long-lasting business and you really won't get rich quickly with any dropship business.
In some seller categories, you are required to show Amazon where you purchased your items. The excuse is that they need to make sure they are authentic.
While this may be the case, Amazon will most likely use this information to go around you and put you out of business. In the re-sale business, sources are your best guarded secret and competitive advantage.
You aren't really building a business anyway. Amazon doesn't allow you to access any real customer information, you can't communicate outside of Amazon's communication channels, and you will get banned if you include any advertisements for your own business/website.
When selling on Amazon, you could sell there for a decade and have nothing to show for it.
I see this come up on HN from time to time. How would you feel if a large company made millions of dollars on your open source project, and never gave anything back in return?
"Culture is free. If you didn’t want the world to know about it and use it you shouldn’t have shared your creation, knowledge, invention, or property with society by allowing them to legally acquire it."
This has very dangerous implications. If we have no intellectual property rights, large companies could just wait until small startups came out with a good idea..and it could be ripped off and copied. It only pushes us towards a world that's controlled by a couple of large corporations and governments.
"If I can figure out how my car’s self-driving system works without violating any of the car vendor’s computers, that is my right to do so in order to adapt the car to my needs and desires"
We aren't talking about reverse-engineering a car that you buy (which is legal). We are talking about an employee exfiltrating source code and other proprietary documents to be used at a competing company.
"Then they will clone the tech just like everyone else."
Sure, but who wants to be the first person to market and spend billions of dollars on R&D when you can just clone it after some other company does all of the hard work for you?
Another reason why we need IP laws is that innovation is actually stifled without them. China is a good example of this. I can't think of one thing innovative that came out of China in decades. Most are cheap (and many times worse) copies of technology from more innovative countries.
It reminds me of the current state of new drugs. The majority of new drugs are created in the US and are then cloned and sold for a much cheaper cost to countries with socialized medicine...mostly because they don't have to do any of the expensive R&D/clinical trials to get the drug to market.
"I would expect future cars to have always online functionality to enable self-driving functionality checks simply for road safety reasons and also to deter IP leakage via encrypted firmware and remotely validated automatic updates. It will be interesting to see if any kind of open source challenger will appear in such a future"
This is where most software has gone in the last decade (from download and install a copy to SAAS), so it makes sense.
I disagree. If Amazon had great customer service, there wouldn't be a large volume of people complaining.
"In any case, I do wonder if Amazon's treatment of folk like you would improve considerably if Amazon had competitio"
I agree with you here. The only two marketplaces that actually get traffic are Ebay and Amazon. I've tried them all over the years and the rest combined don't even come close.
I had a profitable Amazon store in 2010. I found niche products that Amazon didn't sell. As soon as I started getting traction on any one product, Amazon would start undercutting me, and my sales would drop to almost zero over the course of a couple of weeks.
I had near 100% feedback and I had a single customer complaint that I sold them the wrong product. Within a few minutes of me receiving this claim, my account was suspended. I had no chance to rectify the situation.
No amount of calling or emailing Amazon could get me in front of someone that could help me. All responses were an automated rejection.
This was a rough time for me as it was my only form of income and Amazon held almost $30,000 of my money for 3 months. I ended up having to close my business and move on, though I did eventually get all of my money back.
I've built multiple successful businesses since then and Amazon has recently had many business reps try to get me to sign up with a business account, because we purchase lots of items on Amazon/month. I always try to get them to re-investigate my old seller account and our email correspondence stops shortly after this. It's crazy to me that after 10 years and in a completely different industry, I still can't open a seller account.
It taught me a valuable lesson not to build my entire business on someone else's platform.
It only gives them more control over you and they will most likely use your customers, data, and more resources to out-compete you, if you get too big. Twitter has also done this to their app developers.
My wife runs a small business on Etsy and it's just as bad. They make random code changes, which bumps listings up or down and you suddenly have no orders for weeks at a time.
What's even scarier is if a handful of companies run everything we use online. Will I suddenly not be able to get a home loan for a decade because of an account closure?
I write lots of PHP for work and for most of my personal projects. Learning other languages is just syntax, when you know the core concepts.
I once converted a personal project over to Python 3.X in a couple of weeks and it was much slower and took more memory than the PHP counterpart, so I scrapped it.
"However, most PHP I run into is not modern"
This may be the case for you, but I've worked with lots of companies that built their apps using PHP and most are modern.
"but I can't really imagine doing it myself just because of all the flashbacks to code that parses query parameters and calls the database in the middle of a templated for loop"
I'm sure there were many poor practices with other languages 20+ years ago.
I think many here on HN are living in a bubble where most companies use cool new frameworks and are looked down upon for their stack choices.
I haven't been out of work in the past two decades, and I work almost exclusively with PHP code bases. I suppose I should be happy for all of this language snobbery, because I make a very good living and haven't spent more than a few days between gigs.
If we really want to stop election interference, we should have voter ID laws in all states. This is one point of security failure that would make it very easy for foreign countries or anyone else to commit voter fraud.
If certain groups of people don't have ID, let's spend money on fixing that.
"Online influence campaigns" are meaningless. Do we know that they actually worked?
Unless we can track exact voter choice back to a fake ad on Facebook posted by a foreign enemy, I'm not really convinced it did much of anything.
Our time and money would be better spent educating the public on spotting fake ads, because it will always be a cat and mouse game.
I'm also curious why we aren't focusing more on China in terms of interference? They have been on a buying spree for the last few years and have major stakes in many media companies, including Reddit.
It's shown in 180 countries worldwide and very popular internationally (Including Russia):
https://bigbangtheory.fandom.com/wiki/International_broadcas...
While I don't necessarily love the show, I've known many PHD students from China, Taiwan, and Korea that absolutely love the show. Hardly from countries that "don't value intellect".
"This permeates western culture across the board,"
I can't speak for Australia, but I went to high school in the US during the 90s. The 'cool' kids weren't necessarily anti-intellectual, they were just more social and were well versed in the ability to make friends. Most were in the top 10 in terms of grades at our school and I didn't go to a specialized or private school.
The 'nerds' and unpopular kids weren't necessarily smart either. Many had Aspergers or were on the autism spectrum, which means they most likely won't do well in social situations and most likely won't ever be popular.
Others were just anti-social or were just never taught how to make friends or be a friend.
Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory is supposed to depict someone like this.
It's easy to say we aren't popular because we are smarter than everyone else, but the actual reasons are much more nuanced.
"The other factor is that westerners really love to coddle and infantalise their children. A 12 year old in Russia is basically treated as a small adult with the associated respect and responsibilities. A 12 year old here is treated (and behaves) like a large baby."
I suppose this is just the result of living in a stable and safe country. 12 year olds aren't adults and shouldn't take on adult responsibilities. It's sad to me that there are children out there that can't actually be kids for awhile, which is something you can never get back as an adult.
On the contrary, progressives in the US outright reject factual information and statistics and instead focus on political correctness and feelings.
There are many anti-intellectuals on both sides.
It's generally much more difficult for junior developers. At my last job, our team comprised of all senior developers. We hired a few juniors and it was very difficult due to roadblocks/communication. I think this is one reason remote developers earn more: you need to be pretty independent and skilled for it to work out well.
I ended up quitting when I found out.