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Agree with you here. Some of the worst engineers I’ve worked with have been at Google, especially the younger newer ones. There’s a combination of impostor syndrome driving people to dogma (thus lack of thinking) as well as annoying arrogance towards anything that not orthodox.

There are of course many great engineers as well (especially the more OG ones) but the ability spread was way larger than any other company I’ve been at. I think it’s something about its cultural image and incentive structure...

The authoritarianism is a red herring IMO. The real issue is economic incentives trumping everything else. For example in Japan if you test positive the hospital gets quarantined losing tons of money. In the US, you can end up payong huge medical bills. The fear is the same.

The lesson from WW2 should have been that people are all the same when pushed to extremes. This includes the people who make up the communist party leadership in China and every moral philosoher in the west as well.

My armchair belief is that China has ended up absorbing at a global scale, all of capitalism’s externalities. It is an integral part of the world that gives us many things we take for granted like cheap iphones and many others. We do NOT have the convenience to look away and scapegoat one aspect without taking into consideration the whole.

This ended up kinda ranty but every time coronavirus is used to bring up something whose purpose is to draw an “us vs them” line between the world and China I want to throw something.

Have been inside google and have friends who have worked, work there. There’s some truth to the asshole thing. Though I think it’s more like snobbishness. That is, conditional super niceness if you demonstrate you’re googly.

I like this argument. At a less lethal level it works for guns as well. WW2 taught that you can’t drive countries to the point of having nothing to lose. A potentially positive spin is that we advancing to societies that prevent this from happening to individuals. Though the cost...

All behavior is selfish. Each level is supported by the lower level. Upper class has a smaller support of semi-elites below them they must appease. Many things are zero-sum so most actions at this level take from the majority for the minority. Thus unethical behavior baked into hierarchy.

At certain large tech companies it’s the difference between an all terrain vehicle and laying frikin tracks for a frikin train.

Do humans happen to get more cancer than other animals? There’s this weird idea, I forget the source, that a less efficient cell garbage collection mutation allowed increased brain development, connections, etc... but at the cost of increased cancer, depression, ego, etc...

Regarding the grow and thrive part, some of my Chinese friends mention that they feel China is unjustly cast as the villain as many of the economic issues in HK like the super small living spaces are a result of unchecked and corrupt capitalism. With China rising and HK having lost it’s monopoly as the doorway to China they don’t have anything to really drive the economy anymore. the gist is “Why don’t they go make themselves useful instead of blaming China for everything.”

Not commenting on its validity but thought it was an interesting perspective to share.

I’ve seen this issue at many “engineering” focused companies where many people write their own DSLs. for CSS in particular there are many people who just hate it and come up with many ways to not write it.

CSS however is very much like drawing rather than engineering. Some aspects are just not scalable. You can draw many things in vector by conbining shapes for example but a pen or pencil is still very necessary for many parts of both exploratory creation as well as something polished.

The same goes for HTML and Javascript to an extent. While it’s great to build railroad tracks, you can’t take a train everywhere... any abstraction has to also have the ability to easily break out of it to handle edge cases. Clean and Pure abstractions almost never have the grittiness necessary to reflect a fractally complex problem.

This feels so against so many "Modern" ideas like Redux (one giant source of data) and anti pub/sub. (message passing)

Is this the opposite of global state management paradigms like Redux?

Using the global state requires a lot of contortion on each user's end (bureaucratic hoops) for the safety of the global state. It technically empowers every individual user with the whole state but the combination of not having to think about messaging and just brute force contorting into the global state creates terrible code IMO.

Would recommend the book: The Courage to be Disliked.

Here’s a story of why China is a rather paradoxical state. It’s not pure authoritarianism.

Many people who can’t return loans have their name and id number shown on large digital billboards. The goal is to shame them into returning money.

Sounds dystopian right?

BUT the reason this is done is because these people can squat in their houses (which may bot belong to them) and the police and law can’t do anything. The social backlash of kicking someone out of their sole living space would be huge.

Some lenders do things like send thugs to harrass them or get a court order to freeze their bank accounts.

Yet the “core” of the issues is that “the law is the law” is NOT followed. It has flexibility rooted in human understanding. Often lenders have to meet halfway per a judge’s order b/c otherwise the lendee wouldn’t be able to make a living.

China is actually very liberal in that it believes the future must be better than the present. (Vs the present being the maximum with the future only having downside potential) Technology and new ways of thinking are embraced very quickly. (Unfortunately, the new cultures are only what the market can provide, consumerism)

Tradition and culture has too much negative associations for conservatist views to have much sway. (Great leap forward, cultural revolution, etc...)