tom-_-

If art has little value, why is the annual revenue for the global entertainment industry over $2 trillion? No one is being forced to pay for a Netflix subscription. The markets have spoken and have assigned it a large value. Whether you view art as frivolous is subjective, the numbers aren't on your side.

No, the author is saying the share of revenue the distributors (tech, music industry) are receiving is misaligned with the value they're adding. Compare content creators with a SWE. They both produce the product being sold, what percentage of the revenue should they receive?

Close relationships can having negative value and it's apart of the question (see parenthesis). Gaining and keeping a relationship are not the same but also not particularly relevant here since the purpose is to quantify the value of close relationships when making a rational decision. Parent to child, child to parent, spouse to spouse, etc relationships have very different value but if you've never had a child, then your estimations of value can only come from your own relationships or asking other parents.

Wrt to bailing on your child, many single moms and dads will tell you that's a thing, not a noble thing but it obviously happens. Also consider marriage, in the US divorce rates are around 40% and can cost more than half of your total assets, which is often far more than the cost of raising a child. In terms of expected value (depending on your income), more risky to get married than to have a child.

A thought experiment for those without children approaching having one from a rational perspective. What is the value of your closest personal relationship; your mom, your spouse, your pet etc? Let's say you have a choice, for that relationship to have never existed, meaning all memories (good and bad), and everything you've gained (and lost) from that relationship would be erased unless you paid a price. How much money and time would you sacrifice for that relationship to still exist?

Increasing human prosperity/reducing human suffering is largely a function of technological advancement, wealth distribution and avoiding wars. All of these require a large population of educated humans to drive forward and since yours will likely be educated, probably net positive.

I think people are reading this line the wrong way. The author isn't implying Instacart is as important as the transistor, that would be ludicrous.

He's simply drawing an analogy between the output of laboratories like Bell Labs that produce breakthrough scientic research and "economic labs" like YC that produce breakthrough businesses.

Yes, AirBNB, Instacart etc are breakthrough businesses in the sense that they disrupted long-standing and deeply entrenched business models. The ideas themselves are not extraordinary but building and scaling a business from zero often against much better financed competitors is no easy feat and takes a unique amount of persistence (and often good timing) to succeed.

CS fundamentals can be readily learned without obtaining a degree. If you don't think so, then you've never met a self-taught programmer and are probably (no offense) someone with limited professional experience.

The similarities in my experience between big tech (FAANG) and big non-tech are heavy process/communication burden, deep tech debt and perf review driven culture.

The main differences in tech are:

Engineers seen profit centers instead of cost centers, therefore treated/compensated as "talent"

Many (but probably not most) big techs are bottom up, much less common in non-tech

There is at least as big of a process and cultural difference between small startups and big co's.

You seem to be implying "software engineers" require much more than a business degree, in which case I believe you to be a young person (< 30) and I forgive your naivety and the trolliness of your comment.

SWE is not a profession that requires deep education in math and science, like a physicist or neurologist. Having anything beyond a bachelor's in CS is not worthwhile outside of maybe ML..maybe.

A person with business degree who grinds toy problems on LC will almost always do better on FAANG coding interviews than a CS new grad with no grinding full stop.

The degree is just a stamp for junior engineers to get their foot in the door, which is no longer needed once you have a stamp from a reputable tech company.

"You don't have to write any software to build and manage that production system."

It depends on the scale and complexity of your application. At some scale/complexity, it absolutely requires writing software because your IAAS provider doesn't provide you with automation that covers 100% of your operational needs and even they recommend using infrastructure as code tools to manage your infra.

If your production system is a CRUD service with 3 application nodes and a managed PostgreSQL instance then you do not need to write software to manage it. But if your application is that simple, then I'd suggest you probably don't need a software developer to build it (Wordpress, Wix).

Construction vs custodian is not a fair analogy because their training and evaluation doesn't really overlap. The training and eval for both "dev" vs "systems" engineers is very similar; most have CS degrees and have to do some leet coding to get the job. Devs generally need to be better at algos, systems engineers need better understanding of networking, os, system design.

The website is NOT a power plant, it's just code. In software, "operations management" is basically infrastructure automation, incident response and build and release. All of these require some software development or at least code literacy and familiarity with software development practices. If there's large overlap in technical skill between the operators and the builders, then it makes more sense to see them as the same but focussing on different problems.

Site Reliability/Infrastructure/Production Engineer typically have three focusses:

Managing and scaling "software infrastructure" (Kubernetes, cloud services, databases/caches, job/message brokers, etc). SREs tend to have expertise in these systems that generalist SWEs do not.

Incident response. Many production incidents are not caused by a bug in application code, but due to some cascading failure of some piece of the software infrastructure, often due to unexpected load, performance regressions or network/hardware outages. Because SREs have a broader picture of how the various pieces of infra fit together, they're best suited to start root cause analysis and determine whether it's an infra/code issue or some combination of the two.

Devops/developer productivity. Many SREs work on build/release systems, internal tools and enforcing best practices.

1. Dangerous means causing injury, not just death.

2. How many times has autopilot disengaged and would've caused injury without human intervention?