thomasmeeks

Snopes has a great write up on it that points to primary sources, including a “60 Minutes” interview.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/george-soros-ss-nazi-germa...

The tl;dr is that such accusations are weird, false, propaganda about Soros.

Unfortunately not any that still exist. The only companies that seem to be able to accomplish it are early stage startups; because it is orders of magnitude easier to do with such a small group of people. Code School & Envy Labs are my personal examples.

I do think it is possible at large companies. I've built, been part of, and talked with managers that have created teams that obviously have low load (due to how much they produce, satisfaction with work, and level of trust). But it never lasts for long. Inevitably something like Radford is implemented by HR or some VP gets the reorg itch and tears down the system because these sorts of details haven't made it into boardrooms beyond "two pizza teams". Pluralsight and Amazon are my personal experiences with large companies.

So I haven't found any of the common measures of intelligence (self-reported IQ, presence in honors/accelerated programs in school, "seems to learn new concepts quickly," etc.) to be indicative of anything particularly useful in a work environment. So how are you measuring intelligence to make these sorts of statements?

I ask because reading your comment leaves me with the impression that there's some conflation between intelligence & empathy + humility going on.

Senior leaders and people that want to get there take note: cognitive load is the base problem one solves for when scaling development organizations. This article is a pretty good introduction -- especially building with empathy and emphasizing "what" over "how". But one can also look to any tech company that provides an API devs like (my fav: Stripe) as an example of what low cognitive load relative to the problem looks like.

Truly talented leaders tend to realize that high cognitive load comes from lots of places besides technical considerations too. It can be hard to think about a problem when you're also dealing with a toxic team member, untrustworthy leadership, lack of organizational focus, shitty HR policies, feeling unsafe at work, etc. Unfortunately, fighting against those elements is a never-ending battle.

Leaders that mix low cognitive load with clear direction and an interesting problem start to approach that highly-sought-after "early startup productivity" that so many companies can't seem to figure out. At least until a re-org, acquisition, or change in the c-suite comes along and blows it all up.

Yeah, I think so.

The players in the industry that went after enterprises are doing well, the players that stuck to selling mostly to individual customers are having a rough go of it. Udacity definitely had some big enterprise deals with their specific nanodegrees, but it never looked like they became an enterprise sales company from the outside.

I believe most marketing departments (along with people trying to make a name for themselves) have massively cranked up the amount of free content they pump out in the last few years. It is making it terribly difficult to become big in the education space while selling to the masses.

Enterprises, on the other hand, _really_ want to lower their salary expenditures through training and will happily throw money at a company like Pluralsight to train up new employees. For what its worth, I think they're correct that training can drive down payroll costs. But the company I worked for was acquired by Pluralsight, so there's some bias.

The answer is a quick Google search away, diversity increases innovation: https://www.google.com/search?q=diversity+increases+innovati...

If you don't agree with that, I'd love to hear why, and why the related studies are false. Can start with this one, which is the first result: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.685...

There's quite the bibliography to pour through there, though, if you really want to shatter the science behind why diversity is a good thing. Good luck!

Thanks for this, it resonates with me strongly but somehow I didn't pick it up from the book.

Looking at it from a strictly "benefit to government's tax coffers" standpoint (since that's the argument for the tax breaks):

Would those new Amazon jobs cause 25k people to move to NYC? Or is it more likely to just make the local market more competitive? How would other businesses react? Would they move? Embrace remote? If they increase salary across the board and live with unfilled positions, how does that affect tax revenue? Even if those people do move, how does that influx affect people with lower paying jobs? Will they be pushed out? How does that affect tax revenues?

Those are the kinds of questions I saw raised by opponents, and it seems like there weren't clear answers to them.

Do you really think it is that simple?

As organizations scale they find that teams just can't communicate enough (while also programming) to solve these problems through human interaction. That's kind of OK when it is just one or two teams that have the problem and rotate through devs for the communication responsibilities. But when most teams starts doing it, feature work will slow down too much.

Contracts (api, documentation for those apis, documented processes, etc.) are important to scale and greatly reduce communication load. Microservices aren't required to make that happen, but they sure help.

That's a good point. Trust seems to be built on repeated interactions no? Could the doctor spend that time building the trust so that the education sticks?

Yeah, though it is bad form to comment on up/downvotes, the voting in this thread is super weird for hacker news. It is putting some other conversations on the site recently in a new light for me, though.

This is true with regards to measles. It is also true that babies tend to have some level of immunity for the first year (assuming their mother is), which is why the vaccine isn't given until the 12 month mark.

https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/childrens-health/...

That's true. But what about the people that never do take the time to educate themselves on their own? Could it be worth the extra expense to society to have a (presumably) trusted individual take a bit of time to explain some basic concepts about health?

I don't know the answer, but I do think it is an interesting question.

I own one of each. They are very similar, and use the same motors & control boxes.

Jarvis upcharges for "extended range", uplift has that by default. Uplift also has a little bit more reinforcing that makes it less prone to side-to-side sway. But only just barely. Not anything that would make me buy one over the other.

We have one of each purely for aesthetics. Uplift had what I was looking for, and jarvis had what my partner was looking for.

I read and thought about your comment for a while because I am also a white male, mid 30's, low end of the socioeconomic status in my childhood, and at one time had a lot of the same thoughts as you.

Here's what changed my mind. I'm speaking just about my own experiences, it may or may not be useful to you.

1. I realized that survivorship bias was clouding my judgement. This was tough to accept because I first had to philosophically accept that life isn't fair and random chance plays a meaningful factor in everyday life.

2. I realized that this movement isn't about me. When I get defensive over a statement that is statistically true about white men, I'm trying to find a place for myself in a movement that has very little to do with me. I realized that there is and will continue to be a wide gulf between what is true in general and true statistically. Both are important, but in different contexts.

3. I discovered that I had a very poor idea of what non-male and non-white people experience on a day-to-day basis. Even after hearing it I didn't understand until I found myself quitting a job over what were essentially microaggressions towards something I cared a lot about.

For example, when I was in high school there were several different ways to go through school. You could be college-bound by taking the right courses to meet entry requirements. Or you could take a more vocational track through high school, and so on. My guidance counselor assume I would go to college -- it was just treated as fact. A female friend of mine that had a similar GPA to myself had to threaten to sue to get her counselor to schedule the right courses for her. She was successful in college.

One instance of that is trivial, a lifetime of that bullshit weighs you down.

4. I understood that I cannot call for fairness in my own life because I'm way beyond what's fair already. Life isn't fair. It isn't fair that people die of cancer. It isn't fair that people can work themselves to the bone all their life and remain destitute. If I want to yell about fairness for myself, it only makes sense if I'm willing to yell about fairness for everyone else (because if life is "fair" for me, but not anyone else, it isn't really "fair" is it?). If we were to make the world a fair place in socioeconomic terms, given that there are 7 billion people on the planet, is is exceedingly likely that I would lose some privilege. Thus, if I lose some privilege over the course of my life, I choose to be thankful for the extra privilege I had when I was younger, rather than fretting about how much I can accumulate for the future.

5. I stopped engaging with people that were very angry or very toxic about the subject. Though I have a much better understanding now of where that anger comes from, I realized it was subtly affecting my own perceptions and thinking. There's value in limiting the noise a bit.

In the general sense I don't think frontend or backend web development is more difficult than the other. It has more to do with the problem being solved and the expertise of the individuals involved.

For example, your comment made me wonder what I would point out as example of maximum complexity in either field -- distributed systems, tight performance constraints, exceptionally magical functionality, and so on. Everything I thought of is something that's done in both backend and frontend systems.

I do feel that the industry perception is that backend development is more technical. But I don't believe that is true anymore personally, and I think that perception is rapidly changing.

For what it's worth, I'm much more of a backend developer myself.

I think there are a few different factors at play:

1. Javascript has a massive and diverse community. Developers that would otherwise avoid the language must learn to use it. So, where other languages would rally around one framework (because of the self-selection), Javascript rallies into sub-communities around methodologies and architectures.

2. Javascript is gaining new developers at a very high rate. All these new minds bring new ideas, new combinations of ideas, and lots of re-invented ideas too. All of it, even revisiting old ideas, pushes the collective industry in new directions.

3. Frontend developers have had to layer on top of a set of tools barely adequate for what we're trying to accomplish. For example, jQuery should never have been necessary, but was revolutionary when it came out. Today there's still not great solutions around storage, security, performance, etc. Solving these problems improve the abstraction and allow higher-level frameworks to appear.

4. Based on what I've seen there appear to be very few UI toolkits that aren't kind of garbage. Human interaction and rendering pretty bits is hard. Generally I think the industry (even outside webdev) is still looking for the "right answer" to the problem.

It sounds like you're being hit with a retargeting ads (you look at a fridge, and then suddenly the entire internet showing you fridges from that, or related, retailers).

Retargeting is considered to be a pretty efficient ad spend. Though sometimes I do wonder if the numbers are inflated by people like me: I'll tend to look at an item, throw it in the back of my mind, and purchase weeks/months later after some consideration. It's a longstanding habit, and I block the very vast majority of ads -- so retargeting doesn't factor in as far as I'm aware.

I believe we have very different personal experiences with this sort of thing. I'm jealous of you! I am constantly surprised at how many people are very much not serious about a subject -- even when they think they are -- because they are more interested in winning than learning.

I am, of course, guilty of this all the time. The nuanced difference is when the individual no longer cares about correcting that vice (I know because, well, they've said so).

You're right, I am exaggerating the danger. I will assert, however, that the danger is nonzero and deserves more than dismissal. Mostly I urge thought about how the weight of these sorts of jokes can subtly affect the perceptions of people rather than insisting on the triviality of a single event.

I don't believe that is true. I've witnessed too much satire of that sort become reality, both offline and online. Of course, I can't speak to the rate at which it is harmful.

It demeans the scientific process to call this fake news. If you want fake news to stop, probably don’t do that.

But it is true that it is a difficult battle to fight.

They do prefer that, yes.

Curious, let me construct a bit of a straw man. Would you be ok with their data collection if that data was only interaction data? What features are you using, sans tracking features that may reveal who you are and what sites you visit? Assume for the sake of this question that it has been verified by 200 third parties to be the case.

What about bug reports?

I’m just curious if the line is “absolutely no data” or “nothing identifiable to me or my habits”, or something else.

I hadn't heard that bit of history, found it interesting. Though apparently they spent $10mm in cash and $90mm in stock to acquire the company.

I agree with everything you wrote, and have found that by and large companies don’t reward the good managers you described. The lack of recognition gets exhausting and eventually those good managers either leave management or start focusing on managing up for their own sake.

It has made me extraordinarily picky about any future management positions I may pick up.

Given RSU vesting schedules this is absolutely a better deal for hourly workers. Especially seasonal. I’d take the cash too.

Well you comitted the blessing of helping me feel heard so hopefully that balances out the sin. :) Exactly my point.

We differ on worldviews I think. I don’t find conversations interesting or fun if a bullshit pass has been granted. The point of a low stakes conversation to me is learning something about a person or subject — so distoring overmuch causes me to disengage (if & only if low stakes).

Interesting to me. I don’t feel like I'd find this tough but taken one step further (veganism) it’d be disappointing. I have the unfortunate luck of being allergic to things like chickpeas and pea protein, so the various vegan substitutes are likely to be painful.

Not something I’d do, but I am curious how it pans out for them.