eecsninja

> few who had interest in computers rather than viewing programming as a path to easy money.

FTFY

25 years since I started learning C++ as a kid, 14 years in industry and feeling like a disappointed old man despite still having the youthful looks to pass for a student!

This is exactly it. There's a lot of apex fallacy going on in the discussion of tech.

Most of us in tech don't have any say in the direction of the industry. Many of the rank and file workers would actually prefer to live someplace cheaper like Seattle, but it's the leadership of the tech industry (VCs, execs, etc) that have been slow to geographically diversify the industry.

There's too much blaming of all techies for the actions of the people at the top of the tech hierarchy.

"Tech bro" describes a few people at the top (think Adam Neumann or Travis Kalanick) known for their bad behavior but unfortunately is used by the media to paint the rest of the men in tech with the same negative light.

The irony is that these people don't have a strong technical role -- they are mostly founders and executives. It's the people working under them with less influence who are doing all the hands-on tech work.

The problem is that large organizations like government agencies and corporations don't want alternate opinions, except in the rare cases where they specifically have a devil's advocate position to test the validity of ideas.

Better performance isn't an argument that sways these organizations that care more about preserving the status quo than about success in their stated goals.

This is significant because it is a company that pays very well. Not because of where it stands relative to the US average.

I'd like to know what this person actually did for work. The media tends to ambiguously use terms like "tech worker" without specifying whether they are technical or non-tech employees at tech companies.

Googler not on Cloud team, but using Google Cloud Platform for an internal project. I've encountered my share of bugs and other flaws while using this platform. I think all these platforms are just too damn complex and brittle. It's easy for even a smart SWE or SRE to overlook one little thing that will bring down a bigger part of system.

The problem with your example of Office 2003 is not that they added sharing in later versions.

It's that they replaced the old toolbar with the awful ribbon interface, instantly breaking years if user familiarity.

Good article but why does the HN title include"silicon valley"?

The article doesn't include SV in its actual title, and mentions SV only twice.

Not to mention that the old SV model is mostly dead, and the new SV is highly corporate and rewards conformity.

How do you find these fixit jobs? Are you brought in as a contractor/consultant?

Maybe many people you see are Asian foreigners (Chinese, Korean, Filipinos, etc) and you just don't realize it. I hear Chinese spoken on the streets all the time.

I had a travel plug adapter (for conversion between US/UK/EU-style) that had a bright blue LED on it to indicate power.

I don't know who thought the choice of blue was a good idea, because as a travel adapter, it would be plugged into the hotel room where the user would be sleeping. /facepalm

I ended up taping a piece of paper over the LED.