walrus1066

"But of course, the CCP is ideologically opposed to self-representation."

Don't think it's to do with ideology, just desire of a small cabal of people to have absolute power and control over a country and everyone who lives in it.

The ideology is a pretext.

In my view, accidents aren't the main issue, it's more the disruption caused if an AV, with no human driver, encounters the 'freezing robot problem' (I.e. When traffic lights not working, with policeman directing traffic) & gets stuck in a busy city centre, blocking traffic all around.

I'm not aware of any fallback remote takeover mechanism that can be used to recover AV's on this situation.

EDIT: I'm convinced, that until we majorly overhaul our road infrastructure to be more 'robot friendly', it's hard to see _fully_ autonomous AV's work in major cities I.e. electronic beacons on lane dividers, electronic signals on traffic lights, vastly stronger GPS network or replacement thereof, six nines level mobile network coverage at high bandwidth.

I'd honestly just walk out if a company asks this stuff, yet the actual work is maintaining a CRUD app.

"AI is the phrase behind which magic hides and people love magic. Everything that has the aura of “humans don’t fully understand how it works in detail” will be used by charlartans, snake oil salesmen and conmen."

100% this!

How does a profitability dial work for companies like uber, which don't have the network effect monopoly that the Amazon's, Facebook's etc have?

Hike prices for passengers -> passengers leave platform & switch to local/regional alternatives

Cut wages for drivers -> drivers move to do more shifts for better paying competitors

"Uber/Lyft do have a VCs-will-not-race-to-the-bottom-with-them moat, and tomorrow they might as well raise their prices to turn profitable."

That's the multi billion $ question, if they hike prices to become profitable, will customers swallow it, or jump to local alternatives. My feeling is the latter, I don't think you get economy of scale for running a taxi business, because your biggest cost is paying local drivers.

I presume it's because they're contracting? It's the way to cash out in software in the UK, I believe in most companies, contractors get to sidestep the HR/salary budget hierarchy, usually because the company is really desperate, and they tell themselves "they're only temporary, so won't apply salary banding on them"

"10 teams of 3 each owning their own little slice of the pie sounds like an organizational nightmare; mostly, you can't keep each team fully occupied with just that one service, that's not how it works. And any task that touches more than one microservice will involve a lot of overhead with teams coordinating."

I guess that's where the critical challenge lies. You'd better be damn sure you know your business domain better than the business itself! So you can lay down the right boundaries, contracts & responsibilities for your services.

Once your service boundaries are laid down, they're very hard to change

It takes just one cross-cutting requirement change to tank your architecture and turn it into a distributed ball of mud!

I think other professions emphasise past experience and referrals more. That and official credentials, especially in certified professions (I.e. Medicine).

That said, I think all interviews have an element of silliness to them. I know a financial consultant who was quizzed over articles published in the days financial times newspaper. Also know one of our analysts makes candidates do long division on paper! Don't forget the infamous how many golf balls can you fit in a jumbo jet kind of thing.

Personal experience on this. My degree (physics) was nearly completely orthogonal to my career (software engineer).

But I have no doubt it helped me get not just my first job, but also subsequent ones, probably due to 'his code/tech talk could be better, but he seems smart and has a physics doctorate from a prestigious institution'.

Think software hiring+quality would be much better if we had an apprecticeship culture, instead of based on perceived prestige from excelling at University.

"The ways engineers are terrible managers non-technical managers are often terrible too. In addition to that, they also know less about work itself and are more likely to be insecure about that."

I would put that as another human/personal trait, the ability to openly acknowledge ones limitations and delegate/defer when someone else has more expertise than you. For example, when making a technical decision, deferring to the tech lead & individual contributors.

If anything, a technical manager whose tech skills are/have slipped away is more likely to be insecure than someone non technical.

"Non technical management - this should speak for itself. I've done it before to much regret."

I wouldn't put this as a con, I've seen lots of engineers turn into terrible managers, because the skills are completely orthogonal, they also then lose touch with the tech - because that's what happens if you stop coding for even a few months.

Vice versa, I've worked with lots of good non technical managers, who respect and defer to you for technical decisions, planning etc

And of course the other way round, also seen good technical managers and bad non technical ones.

In summary, technical experience of a manager is not an indicator for me, what is are the human factors, do they micromanage? Are they happy to cede control and delegate? Do they give realistic deadlines instead of death marches?

I understand anther part is, they can't afford to have unemployment either, especially in the restive uighur and Tibet regions.

Having millions of unemployed young men, without a political channel to air their grievances would surely spell trouble for the regime there...