My family has passed down through the generations an old farmhouse in the mountains where we go on vacation. When my father was growing up, they would pack the family of five and their bags into a Volkswagen Beetle and head up for a weekend. When I was growing up, we were also a family of five and we filled a minivan to the brim for a weekend.
Unfortunately for the recipient of the violence, we can't bring people back from the dead, or unslash their faces with machetes, so not everyone's gonna be on board with your alternative.
HNers in the Boston area can see a similar feat at the Peabody Essex Museum, where they have reconstructed in detail the house of a merchant from the Qing Dynasty.
I've been to the place this was removed from, Huangcun, a small village half an hour from Tunxi in Anhui. Fantastic place - as in, like a fantasy setting. Covered in subtropical rainforest. Barely connected with reliable roads when I went - several landslides during the monsoon. Nearly every flat surface is a managed cascade of rice terraces filling in the 50-100m wide valleys between straight 30-60 degree slopes, climbing the hollows into the hills; It has apparently been in this configuration for literally thousands of years. The village is a densely packed cluster of old masonry buildings and new modern houses. The masonry ancestral temple survived the Cultural Revolution partially intact. Visitor accommodations are in a side building constructed much like Yin Yu Tan at around the same time period.
They were trying to use the Peabody Essex money to start a tourist industry there without it being as obscenely overdeveloped as the nearby World Heritage Site at Hongcun.
I second the vote to go see this. The museum is really quite incredible. They also have a number of period American homes in their collection, all right nearby. Because the museum is located in Salem[0], visiting in October is highly discouraged.
If you're visiting the Boston area to see the PEM, you may as well take another day and head on up to Manchester, NH. The Currier Museum has two Frank Lloyd Wright houses in its collection.
From the Boston(ish) area, the Smithsonian has a 200 year old house they reconstructed from Ipswich. Really cool exhibit detailing all the different people that went through it and the renovations it underwent.
The popularization of computer science degrees absolutely did push down the price of software engineers on average. The Big Names in SV are outliers; the rest of the industry employs us at wages far closer to other professions than they could a generation ago.
This. People really do forget what it was like just before the peak of the dotcom bubble. There were companies that offered perks like a fully paid lease on a brand new Porsche 911. This wasn't just for the software engineers either.
If you could breathe on a keyboard, you could land a high-paying job.
Demand was that high.
That era of tech minted way, way, way more millionaires on average.
Surely, we can all agree that this is not sustainable. Companies basically throwing money at people that might not have the skills you need is a massive waste of money from the companies point of view.
Nobody was talking about whether or not it was sustainable, we're just comparing salary potential now to a generation ago.
To the managerial class, tech people used to be literal wizards conjuring the impossible and now we're regular commoditized office labor like any other.
Not sure if comparing salary potentials coming from two different socio-economic periods is useful or likely to mislead.
Tech and people versed in it were not common (to people outside tech) and so the high salaries would reflect that. Now is not the case. It was always going to be temporary. As people become acquainted with tech people, the magic vanishes, you see the code behind the pixels. At the same time, tech people themselves did cause this by making tech easier to understand and manipulate.
It's like a magician, the first few times, it is enticing and mysterious but after a while it becomes ordinary. Tech wizards are just like that.
The reality is that thanks to those tech wizards, most companies don't need tech wizards to build tech products and most tech workers don't need to know anywhere near as much as you would need to back in the days.
The same kind of "I just love to code" tech wizard that builds an amazing service/library/product, overworks itself while letting big companies extract max value out of it and contribute nothing or extremely little to the open source world.
Every day I think of the Homebrew creator who got rejected by the company that uses his software daily. This should be in the mind of every dev imo.
Tech wizards wrote their fate on code, compiled it and served it to the market. This is the result
> Every day I think of the Homebrew creator who got rejected by the company that uses his software daily. This should be in the mind of every dev imo.
To be fair, he does not come across as the kind of person you would want to work with, no matter what kind of software he is able to produce. Once hired, others actually have to work with him in such companies. In fact, Apple did end up hiring him soon after said rejection but quickly determined he wasn't a good fit there either. No wizard is worth having by your side if they make your life miserable.
How bad could he have been? According to the parent, his software is used daily by that company. At the very least, they could have just hired him full-time and then stuck him in a remote cubicle by himself, reporting to one manager who just keeps tabs on him, and told him to basically just keep working on that, and if he has spare time, think of other convenient projects to work on that customers might like.
Perhaps they could have, but why? What would be gained in hiring him to sit there and do nothing just because in the past he wrote some code that a company happened to find useful?
I thought the consensus was that he was extremely skilled, and he's obviously proven himself at making very useful tools for that system. Why not hire such talent and put it to some use? Not all positions need to have a lot of team interaction.
You don't know someone else has the same skills and can perform. Lots of new hires don't work out (for technical skill reasons) even after passing the interviews; they're always a gamble.
Well, we know that the person in question has a low likelihood of working out. As before, other companies, like Apple, tried but were unable to make it work. As his personality demonstrates, and as the testing at Google concluded, he is unlikely to be a good fit for such organizations.
Sure, there is a slim chance that Google could have found the right fit for him in the end with the right accommodations[1], but why take the risk[2] when there are others lined up that are far less risky?
Of course there are no guarantees in life, but when playing the odds...
[1] That would have to be invented. Now you are also relying on the implementer at Google, which brings great risk on the employer getting things right even if the worker somehow magically came risk-free.
[2] Especially when the tests designed to try and estimate that risk raised red flags.
>Every day I think of the Homebrew creator who got rejected by the company that uses his software daily.
Why does this surprise you? Google didn’t even employ the chefs that made the food consumed by the employees daily either.
Just because you made a thing that was useful doesn’t mean you have the skills that Google is looking for.
Homebrew was very useful because Mac osx didn’t have a good package ecosystem for one-liner installs. The tech behind it though wasn’t particularly unique or groundbreaking. So the author’s skill here was finding a market with unmet demand for a free package manager. That’s not what Google was looking for.
Identifying unmet demand is probably the most valuable skill any Googler can have, it already has enormous engineering talent. It's the difference between GMail or Android (or Search, obv), vs throwing away hundreds of millions on Google Glass or Google+
Kind of the point - the engineers rejected the guy because (in their perception) he wasn't good enough at leetcode or some esoteric language feature or whatever - meanwhile they were blind to the fact that he possessed a skill that was far more valuable to the company, which they themselves had no ability to recognize or evaluate.
The SWE buzz/boom of the last teens into the early 20's was largely fueled by VC's with access to tons of capital at all time low prices. The game was build a company with a shiny exterior and a radiance of hype and hope it got bought out. It didn't matter that you were burning millions on exorbitant salaries and endless perks. It was the cost of shine and radiance. And it drove up the cost of tech labor across the whole sector.
In a really condensed and simplified version: Big money was placing $50-100MM bets everywhere because the house was lending for basically free, and you only need a few hits to come out on top.
But now that money is expensive again, they game has been crashing down.
US Cellular has great coverage back home (Maine) but shoddy coverage where I live now (New York) and T-Mobile vice versa. I've been on Google Fi for the past ten years because it is the only option (at least when I last looked) that jumps seamlessly between the two, and at a reasonable enough price (for a guy who doesn't use much data). If this merger makes another carrier that has good service throughout the northeast, that could change the game for a lot of customers.
I'm not optimistic, though; the T-Mobile - Sprint merger was supposed to improve their service but ended up [0] jacking their prices.
At least as of 10-15 years ago US Cellular owned their rural markets and leased their urban markets. In NYC they are likely reselling Verizon’s network.
Google Fi used T-Mobile, Sprint, and US Cellular behind the scenes. At least, they did at the time I signed up, which was why I signed up. Sprint merged into T-Mobile a few years ago; Fi dropped US Cellular last spring.
Since then, I've stayed on from inertia. I'll probably switch to T-Mobile's $15 / 5 GB plan soon, since it's half the price I'm paying for now-no-better service from Fi and I rarely use more than 1 GB per month.
The jobs that I both want and can do are all in places where I both don't want to live and can't afford, either. If I and my cohort could buy a decent home in Boston or New York or California, the equation would be very different.
This article started as a nice reflection on the old internet creativities and communities that we used to have and a lament for its loss at the hands of corporate social media. Then it turned out to just be a lament that one of those social media corporations that swallowed the old internet is now being run by the another wrong person, one who's now fashionable to hate. What a disappointment.
The real core gist I'm getting from this article is that "the case against hiring people from Ivy League schools" is that ivy league grads don't want to work ridiculous overtime for someone else's dream -- not exactly a scathing indictment in my view.
The article literally states:
> the people we brought in were working such grueling hours that eventually the money wasn’t worth it to them and we’d lose them.
So the author wants to find workers that somehow look past this risk/reward imbalance and determined that Ivy grads are not it.
That one sentence made the whole piece rather confusing.
I tend to agree with the conclusions about mindset and attitude. These are far more valuable than a specific education in the long run. But these traits aren’t synonymous with a willingness to work grueling hours.
They also admit:
> The thing about desperation (mixed with exhaustion) is that it doesn’t lead to the best decision-making. We needed people so badly that we settled for the first ones who walked in the door
This was referring to the leadership team’s desperation and burnout. Essentially that they were making bad decisions because of how stretched thin they were.
It’s not clear to me that their goal is to find people who are willing to put in grueling hours, or if the mention of grueling hours was more about the need to change how they hire and operate.
If the former, it’s an incredibly hypocritical goal given their own direct experience with the counterproductive effects of overworking.
If the latter, they need to make that more clear in the writing.
I’ve worked with people who feel they’re entitled to everything without putting in effort. This is a very different dynamic than refusing to fall for the BS variety of “work hard, play hard” mentality which is really code for “we expect you to treat your job like it’s the most important thing in your life”.
All said, some good insights in the piece about the value or lack thereof in hiring based on prestige. But I really can’t get a read on their stance re: working long hours.
If the extra mile means 100 hour work weeks then I'd say they are being pretty reasonable. I'll hustle at 2.5x my paid hours if you make it worth my while, otherwise it just sounds stupid.
Have people been getting rewarded with hustling more than their peers? Promotions that aren't popularity contests are exceedingly rare from my experience.
What's the value proposition here for the employee? Go the extra mile, and get absolutely zero benefit, except for slightly smaller odds that your employer will sever their relationship with you?
Maybe Ivy Leaguers are more used to actual partnerships and not exploitative labor relationships.
Court Says California's Age Appropriate Design Code might be Unconstitutional. A ruling has not been made in the case; only a preliminary injunction has been issued.
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