omarkatzen
Joined 13 years ago
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11
Member since
Dec 12
#15
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Comment · 13 years ago
People still generally want to help people succeed.
Doubt it. Rents and house prices are at a record high due to horrible NIMBY regulations and no one's doing a damn thing about it. Startup equity slices are tiny, and the old Silicon Valley guarantee (that working for a startup meant the founders would take a personal interest in setting you up to be a founder in your next gig) is long gone. VCs are funding lots of well-connected rich idiots, but if you don't come from the "right" social milieu, it's nearly impossible to get.
What used to be a quirky and different society is now a shitty knock-off of Manhattan that copies its worst parts but none of its good ones.
Few cold call anymore, but that's more because we've got better things than phones.
s/call/email/g. You know what I mean. Obviously calling someone you don't know is considered pretty rude these days.
Comment · 13 years ago
This is why it's unreasonable to have any faith in the contemporary Silicon Valley. Cold-calling used to work out there, because it was full of people who just wanted to do a good job and help each other succeed. Now, you need an introduction because it's full of emasculated social climbers who need some way of determining whether a person is of sufficient social status to merit 30 seconds of consideration. Because of that, the positive-feedback loops that occur when hard-working people want each other to succeed have completely stopped in the Valley.
Comment · 13 years ago
The purpose of the college degree is to provide insurance against economic change. Learn a trade, and you're good as long as that trade is valued (and not outsourced). College is supposed to provide general-purpose skills that guarantee residence in, at least, the middle class.
That's no longer true, because college degrees have been overproduced and there's a shortage of people who (a) can actually do things and (b) want to do them.
The real problem, though, is that society doesn't train people up in the trades (and help them relocate) when their jobs go away. They're just discarded, and the fear of that happening is what keeps middle-class people going into college-- which is designed to insure against the ups-and-downs of specific trades (e.g. plumbing). Widespread college is a partial solution that is now clearly failing.
Comment · 13 years ago
Most corporate managers would observe B's rate and demand it of all bricklayers, without bothering to figure out why B built such a good wall. They'd hire cheaply (cost-cutting, HR says this is as much budget as we get) and end up with a bunch of A-type bricklayers, require B-esque timeframes from these A-type people (without bothering to train them in whatever made B so much more efficient) and get terrible walls built by mediocre bricklayers in 2 hours. That is what would actually happen.
Comment · 13 years ago
Any engineer working on a sufficiently complex project will spend 100% of their time in meetings without a PM.
Well, that's just dysfunctional. If "stakeholders" are that demanding of peoples' time, then they are the problem.
If your culture isn't engineer-driven, you have bigger problems and the number of PMs you have becomes basically irrelevant.
Comment · 13 years ago
With put options, you're betting on a timeframe. You make a profit if the price drops below a certain level by expiration.
With naked shorting, you're betting on it not getting above a certain level (the level at which you face margin calls you can't meet). It could go up 10x tomorrow and kill you.
Comment · 13 years ago
Miss. First of all, citing Google as an example in product management is a mistake. Google has, overall, pretty bad product management. Its strength is hard engineering. Being a PM at Google is like having Risk Management at LTCM or Amaranth (hedge funds that blew up) on your resume.
Second, in many tech companies, PMs outrank engineers and the commoditization of tech talent hasn't really gone away. It's just that the titular concept of the "executive" is out of style among the rising generation. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
A good engineer can PM his own work, and doesn't need someone else to tell him what color to paint the bike shed.
Comment · 13 years ago
Shorting Bitcoins would be a terrible idea. I hate Bitcoin, and expect it to eventually crash, but if you nakedly short something and it goes up in the meantime (which BTC could) you can get whacked with margin calls and lose money even if you're right. That happened to a lot of people who shorted the Nasdaq (at, say, 3000) and tech stocks in the '90s. They were right, but they still lost their shirts.
Comment · 13 years ago
I was shocked to learn that this was legal (in other states) in the first place. Disgusting.
Comment · 13 years ago
I'd like to try an IDE, since I usually end up using vim due to the fact that my projects often mix languages (Python, C, Clojure, occasionally Scala). How do Intellij, LightTable, SublimeText, etc. perform on those sorts of polyglot projects?
Comment · 13 years ago
College is like white horses or expensive sports or boats. It's a positional good into which the wealthy will sink endless resources.
The essential cost of a college education is not very high. However, increasing the price of the degree can also increase the perceived value of it, since what people really want (they won't say it, it's not socially acceptable) is access to a higher social class.