roosterdawn

> does it mean that if you sell something people actually want, literally nothing else matters about your intelligence, education, character, background, or anything at all

You got it. As always, it's the gross margins. Cocaine has higher gross margins than most prescription drugs, which in and of themselves are almost pure margin -- nevermind that, the market demand for it is broad and deep globally. Cartel operators aren't dumb. On the contrary, they show much of the unsavory, warlord like aspects of doing many kinds of business where there are zero-sum dynamics like this -- they just don't even try and hide it.

Wow, thanks for the scoop! Is there anywhere interested readers can read more about Dave and Chamath's tenure at FB, particularly the latter and the issues you pointed out?

Great points. I think your points are especially salient given GP's points earlier above:

> There's a whole real-life social network out there, and they definitely aren't inviting the programmers.

Is that really the case? Or is it just the case that they're not inviting the kind of "programmers" that GP knows/is (and for what it's worth, I consider myself an engineer, not a programmer)? For what it's worth, as a 30 year old "just an IC" in tech, I know a lot more HNI individuals and "high status" people (supermodels, executives, musicians, scions) /and/ find it way easier to get meetings with folks in /their/ network if I want to than my peers from university who were just as ambitious as I was and who went into law, management consulting, banking, or academia.

While I wouldn't say my experience is necessarily indicative of the average IC in my field or world, it is certainly not unique; indeed, my managers at previous firms took very similar trajectories. But then again, this is based on my experience in NYC. As the world is changing, I do think there is an increasingly accelerating understanding that the wheels of power are increasingly being seized by technology, and that those who utilize it to do so have the world as their oyster.

Thank you for the thoughtful reply! I think that clarifies your viewpoint considerably. If you don't mind me asking, could you elaborate on the kinds of opportunities that money doesn't buy? And furthermore, to what extent have you seen vocation give access to that which is not given by heredity or caste? I think that would help elucidate the subtle distinction between high clout and high social status.

> there's a family of careers were wealth is more a consequence of status and influence than the reverse

That's I think where I disagree. I would say that wealth is almost always a consequence of status and influence than the reverse, with maybe the express exception of CS/tech because of US entrepreneur/startup culture -- even that is debatable, but we can at least come up with examples, in large part because tech is so young as a field. If tech is, say, 50 years old compared to common law which is 2000+ years old, to what extent should we really be drawing comparisons and to what extent should we be saying "well, the /field/ is up in the air even if human socioeconomic relations are not"?

I'm not sure I agree. Either you are conflating vocation, field of academic study, political power, socioeconomic class and status, or things are just different in the UK.

Here in the US, you rarely study computer science to become a computer scientist but rather to be a highly paid engineer or eventually obscenely wealthy founder. The same is true for philosophers, authors, politicians and composers; increasingly, the same is true for biology, physics and even law. You study these (or any of these fields) to show some ability for abstract thought to get you into the career of your choosing.

In the US, notably, the field you actually study increasingly seems to have little to do with what you do later on in life; that all seems to do with your socioeconomic class, who you make buddies with in early schooling, who your parents know. It doesn't matter if you study law at Harvard if you don't come from wealth; and likewise, it doesn't matter if you study CS if you come from wealth. And inside the middle class to upper middle class, studying either field isn't very likely to break you into the upper class; only starting/scaling a business will.

Looking at members of the senate is also not very useful. Sure, "computer scientists" may not be represented in the Senate. But wealthy "applied computer scientists" who started companies (Bezos, Gates, etc) hire lobbying firms that essentially purchase the behavior of these senators wholesale. They have more clout than entire nation states.

Still, with that said, there's a difference between clout and high social status. But I observe that high social status is something that pertains to caste and heredity, not necessarily field of study.

I (do not) look forward to seeing the results of "failing fast" here. The conspiracy theorists are convinced that this is how we got to COVID19 in the first place, and while I'm not really convinced there, I really do not enjoy thinking about the potential of such technology to create bioweapons of a scale never seen before.

> There is value in all 3 approaches but don't make the mistake of thinking they're all the same.

I respectfully disagree, and would gladly take the counterpoint to that argument. You will find the intersection of the three inside of many real world engineering problems. On the contrary, I am skeptical of the idea that applications in any one particular area don't have corresponding mirror images in the other two. Based on achievements in all three (research, engineering and trade), it is my opinionated belief that a focus on the intersection is where you create compounding value. I would love to hear a compelling counter-argument.

> None of ecosystem, long term ownership, iteration, or codebases at scale are relevant to a foundational language (i.e. one that is being taught in order to teach the concepts of programming.)

I cannot agree with this. Embedded in this argument is the idea that syntactic specialization towards pedagogy is a worthwhile goal rather than ramping up a pupil towards where they'd be able to function independently as a software engineer by giving them a solid theoretical and applied foundation.

Part of being an engineer is learning how the quirks of the language evolved, the history of how it got to be that way, and what it means in terms of the long term evolution of the language and ecosystem as collectively reasoned through by the eyes of skilled practitioners. You get to see the decision making process of language design, and how the plan became a prototype became a battle hardened tool that can adequately work in a variety of real situations, well enough to gain a significant plurality (or mindshare) for a specific real world use case.

Just because studying Latin is useful for understanding English at a deeper level doesn't mean it's a good idea to learn Latin before learning english. It doesn't change the fact that a) immersion is the best way to build fluency, and b) fluency is the goal, does it? What makes programming languages any different?

All I see is a list of complaints about warts that Python has, and no real foundational reasons for or against using Python, such as the ecosystem, long term cost of ownership, ease of iteration, or ability to manage a codebase at scale. I think this blog post is not named accurately.

Yup, you nailed it. Most companies are content to let this kind of anchoring and psychological inertia let them lose out on capitalizing on their investments, but let's remember that this isn't necessarily unintentional. Companies continue their ability to function sustainably by adequately utilizing and providing career trajectories for the majority of employees that work there, for many of whom the stress and risk management of trying to figure out how to get promoted "up or out" is not worthwhile. For some companies, it's important enough to retain high performing outliers that they put in place recapture, recalibration, or boomerang mechanisms (as another commenter wrote somewhere in this thread). But for others, it may just not be necessary.

One way to rephrase your question would be to take a look at the sum total of commodities markets, specifically the subset that includes natural resources (specifically precious metals) mineable on mars. How much of that market is bottlenecked by supply?

You can apply this approach to more complex commodities to theorize about the upper limits, but I think this is a good way to get started.

A perennial classic. Still pertinent after nearly twenty years.

Great, practical advice for companies of that size. We can debate about whether it's unfortunate that it's necessary (I'd tend to agree that it is), but learning how to do this is the basic block and tackling required to get things moving at BigCos.