This is the sanest answer. No amount of leadership is going to help an incompetent team. A codebase with massive technical debt, tight coupling, and accidental complexity will be hard to improve incrementally. Impossible without competent engineers.
I agree it's the sane answer. But I don't think these engineers are incompetent. They lacked direction, accidentally followed worst practices, and _still_ came out on top.
I would say they are good engineers but perhaps bad project managers / architects.
Or be a bona fide 'script kiddy', learnt some WordPress PHP or whatever and got a job as 'webmaster' or something straight out of school (UK-sense, I specifically mean no university), no formal CS/software eng. training, never properly an intern/junior trained by people who know what they're doing.
I'm sure it happens. And then you get the next job with 5y PHP experience or whatever, employer doesn't mind no formal training (not that I'm saying they should in general - but if they're non-technical hiring someone to 'do it', or first hire to build the team or whatever, then they probably should as a reasonable proxy!), rinse and repeat.
If such a team of 3 people comprised of script kiddies and 5y PHP coders are going to create a $20m/year product, you can be sure that they will take precedence over anyone who was 'properly' educated in cs when it comes to hiring.
> I'm sure it happens
Yeah it does happen. While using the Internet, quite frequently, you are looking at such products developed by such teams, making millions of dollars a year. Even as the good engineering that is being done at FAANG is now being questioned over profitability, with even Google talking about 'inefficiency'.
The shitty software probably isn't the product. It could be some sales/inventory management tool or whatever, that before they got some 'script kiddies' in was just some forms in Microsoft Access (is that what it's called.. the forms on top of database tool we had to learn in ICT at school) orwwhatever.
I think many people here are reacting to $20M forgetting not everything's a SaaS/in the business of selling software (but mostly still has some (in-house) software somewhere).
The shitty software is what sells the product, from the description. Even if the shitty software is a sales/inventory management tool or 'whatever', from the description it is obvious that it is vital to whatever business they are doing.
It doesn't matter whether it was built with Microsoft Access and Excel files. If its contributing a major part of that $20m /year, its not shitty, its golden.
Anyone who understands the trials of modern business, including any tech lead who had to deal with even merely stakeholders and low-level business decisions would prefer to have a $20 m/year sh*t before a well-crafted, 'properly built' architecture. The difficult thing is getting to that $20 m/year. The difficulty of rearchitecting or maintaining things pale in comparison to that.
> I think many people here are reacting to $20M forgetting not everything's a SaaS/in the business of selling software (but mostly still has some (in-house) software somewhere).
Everyone is aware of that. Many are also aware that getting to $20m/year in WHATEVER form is more difficult than architecting a 'great' stack & infra.
Well, I don't agree. You'd struggle to do it without any software at all these days, but you can certainly do it without anything written in-house.
My point about Access (or Excel or whatever as you say) was that that would be the very early days of something starting to happen in-house, that wouldn't even be the hypothetical 'script kiddies'.
> but you can certainly do it without anything written in-house
Nope. Not really. Your average SV startup idea in which the end users will do some simple, but catchy things with your app - yeah, go all no-code if you want to get it started.
But, in real business, in which there are inventories, sales, vendors, shipping companies, deliveries, contracts, quotas, FIFO and LIFO queues and all kinds of weird stuff, things don't work that way. You may end up having to code something specific in order to be able to work with just one vendor or a big customer even. They may even be using Excel. You do it without blinking because millions of dollars of ongoing revenue depend on such stuff.
Not a developer, but I was onvolved, and are again involved, in some crucial dev projects on which the future success of my employer depends. Any developer who deploys to production without testing, or worse, develops directly in production is by every definition at least incompetent. If not an incompetent wannabe rockstar ninja cowboy without even realizing it. And those devs are dangerous.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Free Software is actually GNU/Free Software. GNU/Free Software is not an ecosystem unto itself, but rather one component of a fully functioning GNU ecosystem.
Is this some kind of annoying autoreply for everyone who mentions RMS? Sorry for saying the guy who started the Free Software Foundation started Free Software, and not Open Source. Open Source, which is different from and often hostile to Free Software, which is also often hostile to it.
> The two now describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, essential respect for the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that nonfree software is an inferior solution to the practical problem at hand.
> For the free software movement, however, nonfree software is a social problem, and the solution is to stop using it and move to free software.
edit: of course it's a bit Fine Gael/Fianna Fáil, but it's hard to throw a rock without hitting an OSS advocate who thinks that Free Software is communist fascism.
> The version with Linux, we call “GNU/Linux.” It is OK to call it “GNU” when you want to be really short, but it is better to call it “GNU/Linux” so as to give Torvalds some credit.
It's so funny how he didn't actually disagree with the content of the message. Just pointed out mistakes and then went even further than the original shitpost ever did with the "it's just GNU but we should give that Torvalds some credit" thing.
> Is this some kind of annoying autoreply for everyone who mentions RMS?
Yes. I remember there was a 4chan Stallman interjector written in Perl. The script would reply to anyone talking about Linux with that text. I can't seem to find that code anymore but I found newer incarnations of the concept such as this Telegram interjector.
Why are you so triggered that M2 is the best chip on the market? I'm pretty sure that is relevant in a discussion about the CPU market. AMD did a similar thing to Intel with the Ryzen launch. Intel is currently stagnating. They need a miracle at this point.
There is no such thing as a "best chip on the market". Best chip for what? You're confusing the word SoC/CPU with "chip" which is a very generic word.
The best "chip" is the one that best suits your individual application or business needs, but there is no such thing as a best chip on the market. That's why Apple is only a tiny fraction of the computing market share and so many other chip vendors are still in business, because every application requires different chips.
M2 doesn't solve every needs neither as a CPU (since you can't buy it outside the Apple ecosystem), neither a a generic "chip". Why can't you accept that?
Why are you so excited? Did you design the M2? Do you manufacture the M2? Did you fund the M2? If so, feel free to be proud of it. You made a technological advance happen. But if you just walked into a store and bought one, I dunno, I think you're arriving pretty late in the evolution to take a personal interest in its success.
Not sure about others but I personally am not a big fan of generalising that much: I'd prefer it if people would ideally say that it was for example the "most power efficient general purpose CPU/SoC" or at least something in that regard, not just "the best".
For example, have a look at https://openbenchmarking.org/vs/Processor/AMD%20Ryzen%20Thre... (user benchmarks of M1 and Threadripper). Compiling Linux on the 2990WX appears to be about 4 times faster than on the M2. (There are lots of other examples of one of the two CPUs being faster than the other but compiling Linux is the most time-expensive task I regularly do on my 2990WX. The energy usage in this task on the 2990WX is almost certainly a lot higher of course; this will be true for most tasks. However, the 2990WX is also 4 years older of course, manufactured in a different node, not very optimized for power saving and not operated in a very power saving mode.)
That is by design. A person with complete knowlege is a liability. Workers should be replacable with minimal disruption. It's also less intellectual property to take with you when you leave.
You don't want many people with top-to-bottom knowledge because those people command higher salaries, and because most jobs don't require top-to-bottom knowledge, meaning those higher salaries wouldn't translate into commensurate value being returned to the company.
Also people with top-to-bottom knowledge will tend to want to be promoted, and most won't (because employment is a pyramid, and also see the Gervais Principle) so you'll be left with a pool of frustrated, overpaid employees.
I think a decent rule of thumb might be to have three people with really deep holistic expertise. If there's so much context that it's hard for people to have and maintain that depth, then the organization is successful enough that it can afford to pay a premium for a few of them. And when one of them moves up or out, you have two more to pass on the knowledge to a new third. Maybe two or four or five would be fine too, but three seems to me like it might be about the optimum. But it's very risky to have either zero or one person who knows a system from top to bottom.
Six months, worth it. The best thing you can do is create a product that you yourself want. Trust your instincts and don't doubt your vision. Ignore advice that isn't coming from an entrepreneur.
When you start talking about your company literally everyone will give you advice. You should ignore all of them, apart from your entrepreneur friends.
I don't believe in luck. There are mistakes in strategy and timing. People look at stats like "90% of startups fail" and associate it with casino odds. It's deceptive. You don't just get one shot at this. Learn from your mistakes and never give up.
A corporation took my best ideas and went to market before I could even get started. I didn't make any money but at least I have the feeling of community. /s
I know right! It's much more soothing for me if I have a giant Ideas.md so when someone actually does all of the hard bits (implementation and execution) then I can say "I thought of that", and take comfort in rationalising my lack of discipline and drive to factors outside my control, further re-enforcing my intellect and egos tight binding and creating excuses that had circumstance not looked unfavourably on me, I would also be a billionaire, rather than accept the actual truth of my own inadequacies.
Further to that goal here's my list:
- Flying cars
- Life extension though gene editing
- AGI to do all of our mental work
- Humanoid robots that do all of our physical work
- Teleportation machines for instant travelling between points in space
- Warp engines on starships
- Mind uploading
Now when people come out with these things I can say "I thought of that" like somehow that entitles me (even though these ideas are where everybody else gets to too - i.e. there's no creative originality) - now I dont have to do any work!
His example of music as a balance between order and chaos is interesting. If you play entirely within the pentatonic major scale, for example, the sound will be something like a nursery rhyme. If you play a note outside of the scale (introduction of chaos), you have to resolve that dissonance or else it will sound like a bum note. This is true regardless of what scale or genre you choose to play. Other scales simply include more dissonance within them that still require resolution. People who say these things are subjective do not understand music theory. It is argued that people in the classical era had far less of an ear for dissonance, but this is unprovable. People today still find it offensive unless there is resolution.
Why did it take them 2.5 years to make this discovery? It's not like scientists have been sitting around this whole time. Is the bottleneck a lack of computational power, manpower, or brainpower?
I've heard of massive dust storms on Mars. This is the first I've heard of deadly dust. It's also bombarded by X-rays and gamma rays. So Mars is completely uninhabitable. Astronauts would need an airlock with chemical shower and secondary breathing apparatus to be able to even consider taking off their space suit. The base would have to be underground. To be clear the plan is to fly past the moon and through space for nine months for that? Sounds half baked.
I don't understand why "the base would have to be underground" is such a deal-breaker for so many people. I mean it would suck if your whole environment is like a typical basement, but these could be quite large living spaces, well lit with plants and trees and big empty spaces. Lava tubes on Earth that are spacious and miles long aren't all that rare, and on Mars I think the expectation is that lower gravity should tend to result in larger lava tubes.
The perchlorates are a problem, but not one that's impossible to deal with. One possible workaround is to have space suits that you never actually bring inside, you just sort of climb in and out through a hatch in the back that docks with the habitat. Similarly with vehicles, they could dock with the habitat so you can get in and out without going outside.
Mars is made of solid volcanic rock covered in dust. If the hypothetical lava tube idea doesn't work, not much else will. My skepticism begins with SpaceX releasing illustrations of a planned above-ground base.[1] Elon has said for the base to become self sustainable they will need around a million people. There is a fine line between genius and insanity.
I agree that an above-ground base is probably not realistic without substantial shielding. The illustration I'm inclined to interpret as marketing fluff.
I don't think lava tubes are the only option, though -- they're just probably the best option in terms of most space for the least effort. Mars has a lot of sulfur which can be used to make a kind of sulfur-based concrete that isn't used much on Earth because Portland cement is much more useful and convenient. But let's say you can make building blocks out of sulfur-based concrete or some other native material. (Worst case you make them out of something light and bring them with you from Earth.) You dig a big hole in the dusty soil, then stack blocks igloo-fashion to make a dome in the bottom of the hole. Then you stack some more blocks to make a (relatively) dust-free stairwell, then pile the Martian soid set aside from digging the hole back over the top of everything else. So now you have a strong below-ground compressive structure that you can line with plastic or something and put in an airlock. The weight of the soil above counteracts the air pressure inside.
Ideally most of the habitat-construction work would be done by robots before people get there; that would be some tricky engineering though.
