Hm. While good advice, this seems like just general life advice not specific to programming.
If you're the kind of person who says things like "TextMate is for n00bs" (or some variation of such) you're probably just a super annoying person in general.
> I would love to see one single company that isn’t dominating a market with no cash cow in-flow that can succeed without strict discipline, sharp focus, hard work, and hands-on management
I've worked for plenty. I'm not going to name them because it's tactless, but they were both huge monolithic corporations and small-ish companies that were pretty profitable. I'm sure others have too. Those companies that you think to yourself, "how the fuck are we making money when we're so fucked up?". I wouldn't say it's a rare scenario. The idea of companies as "hyper-efficient market machines" is pretty laughable.
In fact, I've met plenty of people who worked at IBM (the company he alludes to being one of these strict discipline companies) who said IBM was/is a complete mess.
> why have the majority of initiatives at Google either failed or been financially inefficient and unprofitable
The majority of initiatives full stop are failures, or unprofitable. This is kind of pointless without comparing Google to other companies.
> When interacting with sales people at Google, I am shocked to see how untrained and inefficient they are
This is admittedly one of Google's faults: they're awful at customer support and the like in general. Well known, but it seems to be working out fine for them.
> If there are known companies with great sales cultures such as Oracle,
Google is doing considerably better than Oracle in most senses of the word. One possible conclusion is the author's, that Google succeeds in spite of this because of their search monopoly. The alternative is that maybe a strong sales culture doesn't mean as much as the author thinks for the bottom line.
> everything else in the Google world, you get $5 billion or 10 percent of Google’s revenue. Peanuts!
Peanuts? Facebook's revenue last year was $8 billion.
> Google is in a situation of monopoly with its search business
Why do they continue to be a monopoly? There are certainly competitors. One explanation is because they continually offer the best results, because they hire the best software engineers, because they have free food, and offer "20% time", and etc...
> Working in an Amazon warehouse is a pretty average blue-collar job these days.
Eek, I hope not. That doesn't bode well for blue-collar work in America. Working at an amazon warehouse will net you roughly $13/hr according to Glassdoor, which will put you roughly $10k above the poverty line.
Unfortunately, outside of skilled trades, blue-collar work in America is slowly disappearing and being replaced with jobs like this. I had a really rough time surviving on $13/hr in college (granted I wasn't working full time), raising a family on that seems damn near impossible.
Median household income in 2013 in the US was $51,939.
For 40 hours a week, 48 weeks a year at $13, your salary would be ca. $25k. A household with two working adults at that kind of salary would fit pretty close to the median.
Yep! Not a cushy job by itself, by any means. Certainly requires two people working full time, all the time. This is in contrast to 30 years ago, where one working spouse was sufficient, though perhaps not comfortable.
This isn't even to mention the costs you're incurring by requiring two working spouses: now childcare becomes a recurring cost, maternity leave needs to be short (or non-existent in the case of paternity leave).
Doesn't bode well for blue-collar jobs if warehouse work is the average blue-collar job.
Compare this to what I would consider the remaining true "blue-collar" jobs - skilled trades. The median salary is roughly e.g. $52K for a plumber. That household could absorb the cost of only having one working spouse temporarily (or permanently) - the warehouse family really can't.
Interesting. The detour at the end about weed is also kind of weird. Not sure how I feel about it.
Sure, addiction of any kind is something we should probably investigate and help treat.
It's still weird to hear what amounts to a "Reefer Madness lite" scare at the end given that what I took from the article. That is, widespread drug abuse is almost assuredly a symptom of other problems (unemployment/dim prospects in the case of Georgia), and that banning harmless drugs (e.g. Subu) will just lead people to seek dangerous alternatives (e.g. Krokodil).
If the author's point is that we should look from a high level at why widespread drug usage occurs and how we can make beneficial steps towards reducing that (like increasing social mobility, as nebulous as that phrase is) then I'm on board. If it's that we should be concerned about legalized marijuana because it'll lead to glass pipes littering our parks, I'm less convinced.
> Most companies provide better benefits than what is legally required
Cool, let's just bank on the generosity of companies.
> Unlike something like cancer pregnancy is not an accident. If you can't afford to pay for children, don't have them.
Did you even read the article? These people can obviously afford to have children. They can't afford to become unemployed because they had children. Short of being independently wealthy or raiding your personal savings, no one can afford to become unemployed for an extended period of time because they're raising a child.
Let's not even get into the fact that this is obviously disproportionately affecting women. I don't need to take sick leave because my wife gave birth - I don't have anything to physically recover from.
> Cool, let's just bank on the generosity of companies.
Because banking on the generosity of the government works so well for people. I'm suggesting precisely the opposite of this. Rather than everyone seeing themselves as victims maybe they should take some responsibility for their life choices.
> Short of being independently wealthy or raiding your personal savings, no one can afford to become unemployed for an extended period of time because they're raising a child.
Not true. Many women choose not to work to raise children.
> Let's not even get into the fact that this is obviously disproportionately affecting women.
Sure, where "this" means "reality". It's not a corporation's fault that women give birth and men don't.
> Cool, let's just bank on the generosity of companies.
Or, how about you think about this when finding a job, and weigh the pros and cons of various employers' benefits and policies. We don't always need top-down guidance from bureaucrats in D.C. to solve societal problems.
> Or, how about you think about this when finding a job, and weigh the pros and cons of various employers' benefits and policies
Sure, if you are in high demand you can probably do this. If you work an entry level job you won't have much leverage and since you probably can't afford to take extended time off, you may find taking care of children somewhere near impossible.
> We don't always need top-down guidance from bureaucrats in D.C. to solve societal problems.
I'm glad you qualified it with always. But a look at U.S. history shows a lot of societal problems were helped by those bureaucrats in DC and elsewhere (school segregation, voting rights, equal access to public transport, public accommodations [restaurants can't deny your service based on your race], equal opportunity employment, etc).
YOu do understand that all of the problems you say "bureaucrats in DC" solved, were infact created by bureaucrats in DC and bureaucrats in local government.
Almost the entire Civil Rights act was about ending GOVERNMENT entrenched racism and repealing laws that forced business owners to discriminate.
But hey do not let facts get in the way of irrational worship of government like it was a deity
I'm not sure I find this article all that compelling because I think it's founded on a faulty premise:
> Email is the "dumb pipe" version of communication technology, which is why it remains popular.
Email might be a dumb pipe. Gmail is anything but that.
Data mining personal emails is an advertiser's dream. The second I start sending emails to my spouse about purchasing a house, lo and behold Google can show me an ad for homeowner's insurance. Given correct semantic analysis, it's incredibly persuasive and highly targeted advertising.
It's arguably akin to wiretapping or spying on my text messages - and lest we forget, there was a huge class-action lawsuit against Google that argued just that.
> Carriers resist becoming "dumb pipes" because there's no money in it
There's a boatload of money to be made in email, even as a 'dumb pipe', if you're an advertiser targeting ads at people based on the contents of those e-mails.
Further, and this I could easily be wrong about, isn't the whole American telecom industry the complete antithesis to the argument "there's no money to be made as a dumb pipe"? Even if net neutrality is maintained, I don't see anyone realistically arguing that Comcast will become nigh-unprofitable in the near future.
Maybe there's no money to be made as a newcomer onto the scene, and competition can be fierce at the lower tiers, but Gmail is certainly an established player in the e-mail game.
To support the statement that dumb pipes can be incredibly profitable: Intelsat. They openly admit they are a commodity business focused on MHz and Mbps, and have no problem consistently hitting 70% margins.
Businesses like Intelsat's have high barriers to entry (literally!). If the business were easier to get into, competition would be fiercer, and the margins would be quickly erased.
I don't disagree that competition would destroy those margins, but isn't a barrier to entry just a barrier entry? And the telcos like ATT and Comcast will still have the good fortune of being on the other side of the barrier, no? Whether it's launch costs, thousands of mile of cable, or spectrum rights, fat margins are supported all the same.
It's well established that high barriers to entry reduce competitive pressures on margin. If nothing else, it discourages outsiders from trying out new business models that drive down prices, because it increases the amount of capital necessary to test out a new approach (and the capital is harder to raise if you're using a new strategy.)
Consider Uber vs taxis - if there were massive entry costs to the cab / private car category, a company like Uber would have trouble raising enough money to get launched. So the existing cabs wouldn't ever experience the competitive pressure from Uber, because it would never enter the market.
> Is this just one of those cases where, if you made it through medical school for an obscene number of years, you "don't care about the money"
I think it's more like "holy shit I have $300k in medical school loans, I better put up with whatever I have to in order to become an attending."
> makes market forces impossible to act on it
I believe (though I could certainly be wrong) that market forces are actually mostly responsible. Because a medical intern's negotiating position is pretty weak (they're saddled with medical school debt, they still require a great deal of on-the-job training), hospitals are well aware that they can torture interns because the alternative is pretty grim - even if you went off and became a software developer at Google, $300K in student loan debts will eat up pretty much all of your salary.
But logically if interns were being exploited by hospitals and burdened with tremendous debt then potential MDs would stop going through the program seeing that on the other side you are just abused.
Is that happening? Last I heard enrollment in medical programs was still at capacity. Which just goes back to my "don't care about the money" stance, because that seems to have to be the motive if students see whats on the other side yet willfully put themselves through it.
> then potential MDs would stop going through the program seeing that on the other side you are just abused.
Not necessarily, for the same reason that people join fraternities/sororities even knowing that 'hazing' happens: they think the rewards are worth the temporary punishment.
> Which just goes back to my "don't care about the money" stance
I don't think that's a conclusion you can draw from the circumstances, because there's a big payoff for sticking it out through 4-5 years of abuse. Especially in fields like dermatology, the payoff for 4-5 years of abuse could easily be a 7 figure salary.
I would wager a large sum that medical students and interns are well-versed in delayed gratification (I mean, that's sort of how they get to become interns to begin with), so putting up with a few years of hell for a big payoff is something they're quite used to already.
In many ways it's similar to other high-pressure fields with insane initiation periods like investment banking, though deciding to quit in your 2nd year of investment banking involves a lot less risk than deciding to quit in your 2nd year of residency (because of both debt and alternatives).
Then how is the situation bad? It would seem like market equilibrium - students have full knowledge to know the hell they have to go through post graduation before they get a respectable position with a salary worthy of their effort, and apparently the medical system even under such physiologically unhealthy conditions still has all the MD's it needs. If it was ever actually "bad" then potential doctors would stop going to medical school and we would have a doctor shortfall, and the industry would have to stop being so antagonistic of its recruits or better compensate them to regain enrollment.
I was just worried the problem was that students were not aware of what awaited them after 6+ years of bank breaking schooling, and were stuck between a rock and hard place after graduating.
Sorry, just going through I just saw your comment, but I thought you deserved a reply.
> apparently the medical system even under such physiologically unhealthy conditions still has all the MD's it needs
Interns will agree to work 100 hour weeks because they have no alternatives, but I don't think that it's necessarily efficient from an economic standpoint. They have all the MDs they need, sure, but it's highly arguable about whether it's efficient from an economic standpoint. We'd have to compare the cost of medical errors (which is non-negligible) from interns due to fatigue vs. the cost of hiring another intern.
> I was just worried the problem was that students were not aware of what awaited them after 6+ years of bank breaking schooling...
We're talking about basically a decade between when you make the decision to become a doctor and when you receive a MD. Even if you start out on the path to be a MD with perfect intentions, people change heavily over the course of a decade (and especially so at that age).
The grim reality is that even after undergrad (halfway in), if you chose a typical "med school" major you're still in a bit of a bad spot unless you decide to go into research in the life sciences. After graduating med school, your MD qualifies you for 1 thing and comes with the heavy cost of crippling debt. Deciding you don't really like medicine in your 3rd year of med school is incredibly costly and practically unfeasible for most people going through school.
It seems like the major gripe is against passwords like "p@assword", not against passwords like "correcthorsebatterystaple".
If you truly choose 4 words randomly, the number of possibilities is > 1e24 (at least 1 million words in english language, likely not including slang or names).
You could also use _ or CamelCase to be a bit more friendly towards stupid password inputs.
My biggest problem with the passphrase system is how hard it is to use with lots of services. Plenty of places still enforce stupid requirements like maximum lengths, one of each type of character, or no spaces.
Having lived in Boston, SF, Seattle, and now NYC (and having visited LA on numerous occasions), not at all surprised to see this. Even considering the population differences, NYC wins by a large margin if the goal is 'best public transportation', and by proxy 'best metro area for commuters'.
NYC has (by far) the best public transportation system in the US. Nothing even comes close, though obviously MTA is not perfect. The BART stops running at midnight and doesn't go everywhere, the T is basically an east coast version of the BART, and King County Metro is just a shit show in general.
Granted, NYC obviously has the population to support such a great transportation system. But I wonder if it's a self-fulfilling prophecy: NYC public transit is good, and so more people are willing to live in the metro area and commute. Commuting from Westport, CT to NYC daily isn't a huge deal. Commuting from Brentwood to SF every day would be a nightmare.
The trains are only one part of the puzzle. Where I live in Brooklyn I can walk 15 minutes to two different subway lines (DR!), but I can also bike entirely, take the ferry to two different stops that then either travel on a third subway line or let me bike share the remaining 15 blocks, drive to work in an emergency via 2 different bridges or a tunnel, or take the local car service either entirely on the same route (or Uber taxi) or half way to a fourth subway line. Amazingly all of these combinations result in the same 35 minute door to desk commute. The redundancy in the face of bad weather or emergencies is what really pays off in the end when you must get to work. If you live on a far away train line you do have public transportation, but way fewer options if something happens to take out the train (failure, snow, flooding, etc.)
> and King County Metro is just a shit show in general.
Ah, yes, I was wondering if I was going to read this here. In the same sentence that you give BART a pass for stopping at midnight and not going "everywhere," Metro gets written off completely. Even thought it has a 5am to 1am span of service, 14 night owl routes, daily express service from as far out as North (freakin') Bend, and is the most-used mode of transportation to jobs in Seattle, it's a "shit show."
Sorry, any public transport system that relies on buses as the backbone will be a "shit show". Buses are uncomfortable, slow, unreliable, get stuck in traffic, etc etc. "Bus rapid transit", dedicated lanes and so on ease the pain a bit, but at the end of day, they just can't compete with any service that has fully dedicated right of way.
Unless you've dug a subway, how do you get people to the rail lines? Park and rides? All that does is encourage suburban sprawl to drive to a rail station.
There's no reason for buses to be uncomfortable and unreliable beyond popular perception. I've ridden trains in Dallas that have worse onboard conditions than bus routes in Seattle.
You do what everybody outside the US does: build housing within easy walking/cycling distance of the stations.
And it's a simple matter of right of way, not "popular perception". A train runs on its own tracks, so it can be scheduled to the second and stops only when needed. A bus shares the road with other traffic, and is thus subject to traffic jams, traffic lights, other cars driving crazily and breaking down, nutcases running across the road and so on, which means lots of unnecessary stop-and-go (compared to a train) and a chronic inability to stick to a schedule.
Yes. There are still many places the subway doesn't go. The buses are also crowded, and sometimes you have to wait in line for a couple of hours even to get on (especially to/from the suburbs). Of course, you might have to wait for 30 minutes to get on the subway during rush hour (e.g. finding enough space to fit in to an open car).
My only point here is that everything is quite relative (i.e. first world vs. third world problems).
As for bus rapid transit, I found the new West Seattle service to be quite fast and efficient (although West Seattle was already pretty accessible before).
Unless it's changed DRASTICALLY in the last couple years, yes it's a shit show.
I would frequently walk home from Fremont to Ravenna because it was 2 AM and there was no way to get home aside from getting in a cab (and good luck competing with the million other people trying to get a cab that time of night), or waiting maybe an hour for a bus to maybe come by when it was supposed to. At least in SF there was no illusion of public transportation to get me anywhere very far after midnight.
As to why it's a "shit show" as compared to other cities, Metro is constantly in limbo and notoriously unreliable. Didn't they just cut a bunch of routes because of budget shortfalls? http://metro.kingcounty.gov/am/future/service-cuts.html
EDIT: The whole reason OBA is/was even remotely popular is because of how notoriously unreliable buses are in Seattle.
They cut some low-hanging fruit (and route 47) because of a budget shortfall, yes. But if you read the same link you posted, you'll see that the remainder of the cuts have been dropped. Seattle is even holding a vote in November to buy service for expansion.
As for being notoriously unreliable, I suppose we'll have to chalk it up to different circumstances. I've regularly commuted from Lake City and the CD to the Eastside for years, even during off-peak hours when there aren't any one-seat expresses, and have been late maybe twice. Metro's collection of buses seems to work great for me.
They cut 20+ regular routes. Even if they're "low-hanging fruit", that's a lot.
> Seattle is even holding a vote in November to buy service for expansion.
I wish for the best. Seriously. I think Metro is doomed to live in a constant state of limbo, where only serious service cuts will spur Seattleites to do anything about it. I think it's a greatly under-appreciated service in the city.
> As for being notoriously unreliable, I suppose we'll have to chalk it up to different circumstances.
That's fine, but again, OBA serves as solid proof that I'm not the only one who was frustrated by Metro's unreliability (otherwise timetables would be perfectly adequate).
EDIT: This has gotten off-track. Even if you disagree about how bad it is, Seattle public transit absolutely pales in comparison to NYC's public transportation system. I don't think that's really up for debate, and anyone suggesting otherwise I posit is delusional.
"best public transporation" for New York City? Bah. I categorically reject the notion that any city which has the longest commute times in the entire country as having a good transportation system [1].
I had a friend who was born and raised in the New York City area. I couldn't tell you what borough specifically. He was used to that insane commute. Wake up early, ride the train(s) for 90 minutes, work, ride them for 90 minutes home, have dinner, and go to bed. This is what he considered normal. When he moved to a city that doesn't have a broken transportation system and his daily commute time went from 3 hours to 30 mintues he said "Wow. So this is what it's like to be alive! I didn't realize this is what being an actual person was like".
> I categorically reject the notion that any city which has the longest commute times in the entire country as having a good transportation system
By how much? What's the variance like compared to other cities? Are we comparing NYC commute times to cities that don't have public transportation systems used en masse? If I live in Houston and drive 15 minutes to work, is it really fair to compare it to spending 30 minutes on a subway?
"Average commute time" isn't extremely relevant if we're including cities where most people don't commute by public transportation, given the subject of the article.
> I had a friend who was born and raised in the New York City area...
I spend 15 minutes commuting to work each day in NYC, compared to 45 when I was in SF. Based on that fact, I can conclusively say that SF's transportation system is 3x worse than NYC's based on my personal anecdote.
...what? It's highly objective that New York has the worst commute times in the country. I shared one link on it. There are countless more. Here's another that has more numbers for other cities. http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/best-and-worst//longest... If you object to their methodology
31.5% of NYC workers have a commute time longer than 60 minutes. That's insane.
While NYC definitely has nice public transit coverage, parts of the city are kind of a mess (cough cough G train cough cough). Hell, even travelling from Astoria to upper Manhattan can be a mess, or crosstown, or whatever. I def had a shorter commute from San Jose to Mountain View than I did within NYC. That said, if you are wealthy enough to live in Manhattan or off one of the nice train lines in Brooklyn, life can be pretty good.
I question if you can spend 90 min on a train in New York. It's only like 50 min to Connecticut on the metro north.
Also, my commute these days is about an hour and 20 min each way. 45 min Amtrak, 20 min walking, 15 min metro. Way preferable to a 30-40 min car commute.
Ya dude but Metro North isn't making tons of stops. East New York to the Bronx Zoo is def approaching two hours, kinda long for a weekend outing with the family. Factor in time spent waiting for a train, walking to the train, etc, and the number gets higher.
> I think that even if we implement basic income, I think after a little while we'll all be back to work.
The point of a basic income is that people will go back to work on things they're truly passionate about, without fear of becoming homeless.
e.g. a mailroom worker might be really passionate about woodworking, but isn't skilled enough (or confident enough) to make it his profession. With a basic income, he might decide that he can make a go at woodworking without starving to death.
If you're the kind of person who says things like "TextMate is for n00bs" (or some variation of such) you're probably just a super annoying person in general.