I cringe at the idea that beyond a certain level one stops writing code.
You never stop writing code, unless you truly just don’t enjoy writing code, and if that’s the case please don’t manage engineers.
You do eventually stop shipping critical code, because at a certain point your managerial leverage means there are many other more productive ways to spend your time.
But the day you “stop writing code” is the beginning of the end of your effectiveness, because when your job is augmenting the impact of others, you need to have a deep familiarity with their daily experience.
Consider that any manager who “stopped writing code” five years ago has (probably) never had the daily experience of being a fully remote developer in a fully remote organization, with all the collaboration challenges and focus opportunities that entails.
And a manager who “stopped writing code” two years ago probably doesn’t get how the process changes with the assistance of LLMs, what they can dramatically accelerate and where their limitations introduce risk.
Never stop writing code. Never stop building a local version of your code base. Never stop using your internal build tools and dev environment. Never stop watching production logs and chasing down the occasional bug.
_Do_ stop assuming your code is production-ready. Do stop commenting on code reviews. Do stop assuming that the code you write has meaningful value (except as a way for you to keep your situational awareness.)
Most importantly, stop letting “writing code” be a source of stress or an obligation, and start having fun again doing it. Your organization will thank you for it.
Additionally, code is an excellent tool; leverage it even if you don't ship any code.
One of my friends, a senior director in a reasonably large corporation, still manages his various financial data pipelines for analytical purposes using code, writing stuff in Python / Pandas / SQL. I bet it gives him a much better visibility into what he wants to discern in the data.
I live in the Caribbean, and we get a lot of hurricanes. A few every year.
We build for extreme weather. Our building codes (and common sense) protect us. My house has 10" of concrete on all our exterior walls and 1" concrete shingles on the roof, with no electrical system below waist height. We have 1/4" galvanized sheets of metal in the shed that we can bolt over all our windows when a cat-4 blows through. Don't get me wrong - a cat 2+ is still a giant pain in the ass to live through, but it's not a long-term problem.
Also, most people don't bother with home insurance (unless they have a mortgage) covering storm damage. You build your house in anticipation of repairing it and thus build better.
A lot of our current situation is only possible because we had an island-wide reset in 2004 (https://youtu.be/NzzeDGICjbA), that may be what it takes for Florida.
As the study concludes, wind will absolutely tear apart a cheap house, or a structure not built to be resilient to wind. And most aren’t.
_But_ once you’re ready for wind , as we are, you live in fear of the storm surge accompanying a major hurricane. Especially since it lasts 4-6 hours and can overlap with high tide, that’s a 15-20’ sea level rise of churning water. No house can be practically hardened against that, and when wind is gusting at 100+mph it’s not safe to run or move.
When we anticipate a major storm surge + storm, we plan for an island-wide evacuation of 50,000+ people to seven small shelters.
Our house is above the prevailing level, built on a cement slab foundation. We have no basement, and water would have to be >3' high above the land to get into the house, but that's only ~10' above sea level.
We have no electrical wiring below waist height, I think 3'? Our floors are tiles and our load-bearing walls are cement, so if we just had flooding we'd be able to get to ~13' above sea level before being in real trouble. Our furniture would be written off.
Our house is actually a bit more durable than the country. If we had a 15' storm surge, the house might survive, but the island would be toast. That would submerge nearly the entire island, and it would be happening during a hurricane. It would take months to recover even basic infrastructure. Our plan for that is to give up everything we own and return in a year or two to rebuild.
_But_, for a variety of reasons, a 15' storm surge is meteorologically improbable here. It's a once-in-a-millennium event, even accounting for the worst of global warming. Nothing is impossible, but there's no point in planning for it; it's like living within a thousand miles of yosemite national park. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As I said in a different response though, when you have a hardened home you fear storm surges, and we do. Our house would probably be obliterated by a 12’ storm surge at high tide.
We’re built on a 3’ high cement slab foundation though, so if we had only 1’ of water around the house we’d be fine. (This is a building code here, it’s nearly impossible to build a basement and your house must be floored 18” above your prevailing level.)
For a variety of meteorological reasons that’s exceptionally unlikely for my specific location, but it’s something we’re acutely aware of and plan ahead for.
I am an experienced engineer with twenty five years of infrastructure and protocol development, and my experience setting up an all-Sonos home system is a _saga_ of epic proportions.
Unbelievably frustrating software decisions for otherwise excellent hardware. My favourite(?) part is the “Sonos net” independent network which takes over when one speaker in a group is connected via Ethernet, taking the rest off wifi silently and creating a dedicated wireless network. Then when you connect Ethernet to another speaker in the same group it loses its shit silently, creating and destroying new wifi private networks in an unending cycle, without any notification or visibility in the app. And speakers on a Sonos Net network announce and are discovered differently than spec, which adds a hop and breaks any other subnet connections in a way which is _very _ hard to debug.
And that’s just the setup. My partner and kids use them strictly as airplay targets, and refuse to use the app or voice assistant because of the UX and bugs.
If I didn’t have 5k sunk into the hardware already I wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole.
I bought a Sub Mini just last week and it took me about 3.5 hours to get it working.
First, I plugged it in via ethernet and my entire network went down. The second I unplugged it, it worked again. Unifi have a dedicated help link in their UI that's displayed next to any Sonos products. I followed the instructions on Unifi's website, made a few ethernet cables for my wireless speakers, disabled WiFi on everything, and it no longer broke. Progress.
Then I tried to adopt it to my system with my Google Pixel and the app hung. I repeatedly tried, both ethernet and WiFi, no joy. Called the helpline and was walked through factory resetting and tried many more times. It just hung at "Adding Sub Mini...".
After a long slog I gave up. I borrowed my dad's iPad the following day and it worked first time.
The entire process was opaque,I had no idea why it failed. Had I not already invested I wouldn't buy any more - and definitely won't recommend.
But I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind last night and it sounded pretty amazing.
> Had I not already invested I wouldn't buy any more
And that's how they get you.
Makes me wonder if the horrible setup process is intentional to emotionally lock you in. Once you get it working, you don't want that effort to be for nothing.
Here's the page. The wired approach worked perfectly for me. Sonos's own networking features seem to introduce infinite loops when mixing wired and WiFi.
The fact that this page exists and the suggestion is to connect your wireless devices physically to avoid weird networking loops is astounding. I assume wireless sonos gear does not come with an Ethernet patch cable, right?
Fair play to Unify for making this page in the first place, and making it easy to find for their users. It clearly and rightfully shifts the blame to the right party.
But wow. How many other examples are there of one org's incompetence leading to unnecessary support load for other companies and they have little choice but to provide the workarounds and fixes themselves.
> I assume wireless sonos gear does not come with an Ethernet patch cable, right?
Only recently, but yes.
They used to, though. I have sixteen Sonos players of varying vintage, from the ZP90 to an Arc and almost everything in between, and of those only the Roam and the Move (portable by design) were supplied without network cables. Even the sub-woofers can be plugged in. However I’ve just checked the spec of the recently launched Era 100/300 models - not portable - and indeed, they lack even a built-in interface. Ethernet dongle costs extra. I’m chalking that up as yet another “screw you” from Sonos’s product management to its customers.
Unrelated, but similarly, I am in a weird form of hell in the Nest/Google Home ecosystem, where trying to re-add a camera to my home fails because it cannot successfully connect with the "assisting device" in my home to fetch the wifi credentials from.
When you attempt to connect it to a _new_/unrelated structure/home, it connects fine, because the phone sends that information to the camera directly. When you try to add it to your existing Nest home, it attempts to be "helpful" by connecting it with an "assisting device," and invariably fails.
It fails with an arcane NC013 or NC024 error, and instead of falling back to a manual setup option, it just... cannot be added. They legitimately suggest that you add it to a new "structure" (which operates under a separate Nest Aware subscription), and then migrate all of the other devices over to the new structure. Which isn't reasonable, when I have a dozen of these things, some of which are mounted in very out of the way places.
And worse, it can still fail, randomly.
It's as if the "Nest network" becomes corrupted in some indecipherable way. This was exacerbated by Google murdering dead my Nest Secure alarm system, which was _also_ an assisting device, which took my locks offline. And when they shipped a Nest Connect wifi adapter, I _also_ couldn't onboard _that_ device to the home for the same reason, so I now have a separate structure called "Connect", which features... just my locks. And now, the camera I was trying to add back.
It's absolute unforced errors and complete madness.
My experience building out a Sonos system for onboarding wasn't too bad, but I have had Sonos Amps fall offline and do weird things, and it personally annoys me that TruePlay doesn't work on Android. This shift to a new app that doesn't hit parity, and seems to do the original things the S2 app did markedly worse... woof.
In my case, I use a Google Apps email account so my family has a shared email domain (and I can better handle tech support and manage my kids’ use). That’s slowly become completely incompatible with nest and any consumer hardware or services, and that process of integration degradation was incredibly frustrating.
Google consumer software/hardware is dead to me now, I just can’t use it even if I weren’t holding a grudge.
Though it still has warts and opportunities for improvement, our house mostly runs on Unifi (for networking and security cameras.)
I have a network of them around the house. Incredible sound quality for the price, but the setup experience was utterly terrible.
Thankfully, I can just use AirPlay day-to-day, so I don't really need to deal with the software too often, but I prey it continues to work so I don't have to.
If it starts to break down? Honestly, I'd just pull the trigger and replace the entire thing. I hate the software that much.
They form a tunnel mesh over that private “Sonosnet” wireless network and each player announces an internal bridge interface via STP, including over any regular wifi they’ve joined and any fixed wire network they’re connected to. That could be fine if it was contained to their private mesh, but it isn’t. Worse, they do it with pre-rSTP weights. Consequently electing their own low-bandwidth wireless mesh tunnels as a forwarding path in any nontrivial switched network. If they’re plugged into a hierarchy of unmanaged/non-STP-enabled switches, this will also form a forwarding loop. Either way, they get congested and start to flap, spewing endless topology change BPDUs, and now your network is kaput.
Despite wanting to act as an active layer 2 device there is almost no configurability, management, or monitoring available. A couple of years ago, in a spectacular product management insult, Sonos also intentionally removed much of the built-in port 1400 interface that provided device-level insight such as log messages revealing this misbehaviour.
The solution is to treat them like hostile guests and shove all Sonos players into a wholly private broadcast domain just for them, to avoid fucking up the rest of your network. And don’t let them join your regular SSIDs.
I am almost certain that there is no-one left at Sonos who understands their own network stack.
Compounding all this is a general smug attitude of “our customers are idiots” which is pervasively apparent from the CEO, through their product management, to their frontline support staff. If this fiasco tanks the company, it’s ultimately due to their own shitty, arrogant culture.
I’m constantly amazed at how differently I learned to do things from my father than from school.
My father had all sorts of approaches similar to this, and it’s how I learned to write essays (outside-in) and research (inside-out), and which I later applied to programming. It made school trivial and fun, and it’s what I’m teaching my kids.
I live in a country which has no local auto industry to protect and can import vehicles from nearly anywhere.
I can confidently say that China has won. There’s just no comparison, and this isn’t just about prices. I’m not even talking about EVs (though this goes double for them.)
Maybe they got to this point through government subsidies and are dumping, I don’t know enough to say. But they’re the best, and cheapest, cars by a long shot.
I keep trying to tell people this, the quality coming out of China keeps getting better and this is generally how things go. Japan was cheap crap, then became quality. Korea as well. It's pretty standard practice and should have been expected.
For my inputs the same goods at the same quality from China are less than half the price than from elsewhere. That is an absolutely huge difference - and those margins often makes the difference between a viable venture and an unviable venture.
Now there is Temu, Alibaba, Bangood, Vevor, etc. There is a local hardware store that only sells one brand from China but that brand has everything, super cheap, and really decent quality. Western companies were making a lot of money selling us cheap Chinese goods at large markups but now those companies are able to sell to us directly and the consumers can keep that surplus. If everything ends up both made in China and sold by China with Chinese brands what role does that leave the rest of us. I used to argue that the west was good at quality control with reliable and fair laws but those are rapidly fading away. Without that we only have finalization and real estate left, and how do we keep that ponzi scheme going without something fundamental and concrete to base it on.
I agree, and want to reiterate from slightly different angles.
It drives me crazy to hear people say, "Is that made in China? Because I won't buy cheap Chinese crap!" Are they happy to buy "crap" from elsewhere? The implied causation between Chinese and "crap" is just not there. There has historically been a correlation, but so many people have made the leap to causation in their heads.
The vast majority of Apple's products have been made in China over the last couple of decades. It's easy to question some of Apple's design trade-offs (e.g., gluing batteries in to make things a fraction of a mm thinner), but those tradeoffs are part of the "designed in Cupertino" that is stamped on their products. The fit and finish is much harder to question, and that is done by Chinese hands. It's excellent because Apple, and Apple's customers, are willing to pay for that.
Chinese manufacturers have proven they are excellent at building to whatever price / quality tradeoff their customers demand. For goods sold in the US, it's US companies and/or US consumers setting the price / quality tradeoff.
To the extent there is a correlation, it comes from China being able to build to the cheaper, and therefore crappier, standards that consumers want. When China loses that edge (as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan did before them), they will move further upmarket and others will step in to fill that market need (Vietnam? India? Various African countries?). This cycle keeps repeating... one of the funnest parts of watching "Back to the Future" today is that the line "all the best stuff is made in Japan" went from sounding so unlikely in the 1980s to prescient in the 21st century. And that line makes no sense to young people, whose experience is that the "best stuff" has always been made in Japan.
Are we living in the same universe? Byd is the car company that has had 10 showrooms catch fire. Temu was caught selling children's jewelry with 10x the acceptable level of lead.
Foreign manufacturers are laying off like crazy in China.
Sure, Chinese quality may be getting better but it's a race. Will the quality improve before demographic collapse and over leveraging destroys the economy? And beyond that horizon, is recovery even possible given how much toxic material china dumps into it's own environment, impacting cancer and fertility rates?
"demographic collapse" ah a Peter Zeihan fan I see, well I guess that answers it, we do live in different universes. I don't disagree that China will on average become older but that's not as devastating to China as it would be in the west. The elderly Chinese will die much more cheaply than those in the west and there will still be plenty of Chinese remaining.
"Byd is the car company that has had 10 showrooms catch fire. Temu was caught selling children's jewelry with 10x the acceptable level of lead." - sounds like they're moving fast and breaking things. I don't like what they're doing either but that doesn't mean they wont be successful at it. If I was running the world it would be a lot cleaner and more efficient but I don't get to make that choice. The real questions is, short of a war, can the west effectively punish China and since the continued economic wellbeing of our middle class requires access to cheap Chinese goods I think that answer is no. So while a fuss will be made people will continue to buy things from China.
"how much toxic material china dumps into it's own environment" I don't like that either, but I think you're overestimating the cost of the deaths on the Chinese economy. I hate that toxic shit ends up in food that is not labeled as coming from China and that's a big part of why I go to great expense in buying food where I can be certain of the source. But I don't buy the assumption that the Chinese economy requires a middle class to be financially and physicality healthy to survive.
I think the financial implosion to over leveraging economies will disproportionally affect the west more than it affects China since China still has a large and competitive manufacturing to fall back on. The west had fanciful notions of being able to sell all of China a toothbrush - I think that was Nixon? For a long time expansion into Asia was where corporations imagined their future growth to come from - now they can't compete there and are finding it increasingly difficult to compete on their home turf.
There's a lot to criticize in peter zeihan but the demographics stuff is pretty ironclad. Like I dunno man do you not know how fucking biology works. The CPC is absolutely freaking out about it because they know they are boned -- within a handful of years not only repealing one child but trying to incentivize three and four children families, illegalizing divorce, etc. it won't matter. It takes about 20 years for a newborn human to become productive in modern society.
>cost of the deaths on the Chinese economy
If the economy is what you care about, it's not the deaths so much as the infertility that will hurt china in the long run.
The (likely under-)estimated infertility rate in China is at 16%, compared to US at 8%.
You don't think it's weird that I knew where you got your info from? Peter Zeihan uses an overly simplistic model which allows him to be very confident about his findings and convincing to those who listen to him. He also tells those in power what they want to hear and makes them feel smart while doing it. He seems to believe what he says so he comes across sincerely. These are all great qualities for a charlatan.
One of the problems with the simplistic models is that GDP is often conflated with wealth, GDP is money spent so many things which are damaging to wealth show up positively in GDP. I once did GDP models for people working on HIV vaccines and the result of the modelling was less HIV -> less GDP. I tried to get permission to model wealth instead but those in charge only cared about GDP because that is the only number policy makers care about. We can all safely assume that HIV vaccines are good for an economy ravaged by AIDS but there was a limit to how much I could contort the models to have that presumed positive effect show up in the numbers. Because my assessment didn't show what they wanted to see the report was buried. Someone else redid the report and basically just made up the numbers which was good enough for those interested.
The world has changed tremendously and irrecoverably in just the past few years and will continue to change very rapidly in the years to come. Entire careers are being wiped out by AI and this is sure to continue. How can we both need more people and be facing a likely surplus of people to such an extent that a UBI appears like a political necessity? It must be one or the other, they can't both be true.
I'm firmly in the camp that as the useful skill threshold keeps rising more and more people will find themselves under that threshold and will no longer able to contribute value to society. I'm also of the view that policy makers will promise UBI to stymie opposition and then not deliver UBI for the same reason. There are many people who see a society based on equity as their only hope for survival and I think they've made an accurate assessment.
Tools that increase efficiency exacerbate inequality, there is the idea that the consumer surplus from such efficiencies show up as a general wealth across the board so even the poor will see their wealth increases. In my view once inequality has cross a certain threshold that is no longer true and the poor will become poorer due to being pushed completely out of the market.
Better tools beget better tools, it's a self reinforcing and accelerating cycle. It's my view that the productivity increased from better tooling will dominate the economy much more than losses from deaths or infertility. So much so that even with a massive loss of population there will still be the problem of an unproductive underclass.
I think the CCP is prepping for war and wants a mass of relatively disposable soldiers which means having families with more than one kid is especially important. It would also make sense for them to appear to be panicking over population loss to hide this real reason. I don't hold this opinion strongly as it is a bit too conspiracy theorist even for my liking. I can certainly believe that the CCP thinks population loss will be devastating to their economy and I would still disagree with them.
Why do you think I "got it" from Peter zeihan? I was aware of this long before I found out about Peter zeihan, because I have been watching china. And like I said, when pz entered my algorithm, I identified that he was getting some things very right and also many things wrong.
Look, if you are so convinced that China has shit figured out, go put 10,000 on a china index. The markets just collapsed a bunch so it "should" be on an upswing. You can't lose!
I think you toss around a lot of glib shit like "move fast and break things" without really thinking. Look man china really breaks things a lot, like bridges, or whole ass crumbling luxury residences. In the end, "breaking things" alone is not enough, you must also have the introspection to learn from your mistakes. I do think the Chinese in the small are quite good at learning from their mistakes but it's clear that societally there is a problem that policy is reactionary, often driven by goodheart's law, and there is little to no introspection or incentive to "do better".
But by all means, don't let me stop you from putting your bets on that sort of a system.
I think the markets in China are subordinate to the government so I wouldn’t use them as a proxy for how well China is doing. I see markets as a proxy for financialization which I consider in general to be a net negative. The supposed benefits of efficient allocation of capital seems to always give way to Ponzi schemes and those are very inefficient. There are some that argue that the frenzied investment in boom part of the boom bust cycles pays off in the long term, e.g. investment into telecoms. But I’m not one of those people, it’s hard to AB test it.
My example of ‘moving fast and breaking things’ was not an endorsement, I was making the general point that your example is not necessarily a sign of a things going bad.
It is hard to bet against a Ponzi economy as there are no limits, but my general thesis that there will be a crushing of the middle class and with that a transition from a high trust society to a low trust society. The society will still largely function but will be less efficient because of the increased security costs. So I’ve been investing in private security ventures which as you could imagine are booming.
That correction occurs when the currency collapses and the newly impoverished continue working at massively reduced real wages and living standards. The inability for Spain, Italy and Greece to inflate their currency is one of the things leading to high unemployment. If this was to happen the trade with China will still be beneficial - the question is how much loss of wages and living standards could the west tolerate. And since much of our current living standards is based on continued access to cheap Chinese goods then there will be a loss of living standards either way.
China is still a big importer of raw materials so there will always be that. But it's not like we can all become farmers and miners.
I can't really see what you're saying, and I tend to suspect that's because you don't know either.
But here, look at it this way:
The worst-case scenario is that "the rest of us" continue producing the things we already produce, and the Chinese aren't willing to buy them, so we have to use them ourselves.
Is that what you're afraid of, or did you have something else in mind?
I thought you were eluding to an idea from Macroeconomics where two countries can both benefit from trade even when one country is more efficient that the other. But you have now entered into a nonsensical realm so I'm starting to consider that maybe I misunderstood.
So I will address your most recent comment directly; that's not the worst-case scenario - we produce the things we already produce but our customers would still prefer to buy from China instead and we are now no longer able to sell our same goods to the same people.
Let's say I'm a cobbler and I make shoes. New efficiency gains in China mean that the exact same shoes from China can be bought by my former customers for below the cost of my production. Who would continue to buy shoes from me at my necessarily higher prices? I can't sell them to China. I can't sell them anywhere as China sells the same shoes everywhere. I already have more shoes than I need and I can't use the shoes for other things. Even if I could, it would be cheaper to buy the shoes from China than to make them myself.
There is no option to keep things same, we can't stop China from becoming higher quality and or cheaper, the best we could do to try is to increase tariffs, but that would apply to local customers we would still lose the international ones. Sure we could try to race them in efficiency gains we should have been doing that anyway and whatever we're currently doing is not working as we are losing ground.
> Let's say I'm a cobbler and I make shoes. New efficiency gains in China mean that the exact same shoes from China can be bought by my former customers for below the cost of my production. Who would continue to buy shoes from me at my necessarily higher prices? I can't sell them to China. I can't sell them anywhere as China sells the same shoes everywhere. I already have more shoes than I need and I can't use the shoes for other things. Even if I could, it would be cheaper to buy the shoes from China than to make them myself.
In order to make this paragraph work, you're assuming that your customers, and you, are producing things that are valuable to China. (How else are you going to pay for their stuff?) This already contradicts your premise that Chinese superiority will mean you and your customers have nothing valuable to do.
If you don't want to start with contradictory premises, the most that Chinese superiority can mean is that you and your customers can't afford to buy Chinese products. That really can shut you out of consuming Chinese products, but it can never shut you out of consuming what you produce yourself.
“New efficiency gains” suggests a before and after. We are talking about china becoming more efficient from a previous state where they were less efficient. As circumstances refer to different times there is no contradiction.
What is a cobbler going to do with a bunch of shoes that will cost him more to make than it would cost to buy. What good would it do him to be able to consume his own products - are we still talking about a cobbler or have you somehow mixed in the notion of a nation state? Are you suggesting the cobblers consumption needs are met by his own production? Is he to eat his shoes?
Even if he was, he would still be better off buying them than making them.
> What is a cobbler going to do with a bunch of shoes that will cost him more to make than it would cost to buy. What good would it do him to be able to consume his own products - are we still talking about a cobbler or have you somehow mixed in the notion of a nation state? Are you suggesting the cobblers consumption needs are met by his own production?
If the cobbler is the only person with this "problem", what are you worried about?
> Is he to eat his shoes?
> Even if he was, he would still be better off buying them than making them.
Please think about whether what you imagine is logically possible. What is this cobbler going to use to buy imported shoes?
In this hypothetical I am the cobbler, thus I'm the one with the problem. Even if I wasn't the cobbler, if the same circumstances are repeated across a large number of industries I have to be worried when a large number of people are made effectively unemployed and unemployable in a short period of time.
The cobbler has money left over from before the time China became more efficient. Remember how I mentioned there was a change from where China was less efficient to a time where China is more efficient.
Since you apparency have great difficulty with the concept that things can change with time I'm going to consider any further discussion on this pointless and will not respond to you any further.
> if the same circumstances are repeated across a large number of industries I have to be worried when a large number of people are made effectively unemployed and unemployable in a short period of time.
You were just complaining that you didn't want to think about what would happen if this "problem" occurred at a systemwide level. What would happen is not compatible with your worries.
If you're then going to insist that the cobbler's problem matters because it happens simultaneously to everyone else, you need to consider the systemic effects. At the system level, this problem cannot exist.
NA hasn't produced the best or cheapest cars for decades at this point. Auto manufacturing has been an extension of geopolitics for decades --- most of the time the cars we can buy are the cars we can buy because the government and trading partners made it that way, rather than some actual survival of the fittest, battle royale, last man standing exercise.
I find that German cars have really dropped in quality. My dad changes car leases every 2 -3 years. Over the past decade, he's driven Lexus, Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Genesis. They were all brand new when he got them. He's only ever had problems with the German brands. His BMW crapped out twice, once on the highway and once while waiting at a light. My brother bought a BMW and he's constantly having to take it to the shop for repairs because something keeps dying. Over the past 5 years, my other friends that drive German cars usually always have issues. Meanwhile, my friends that drive Japanese or Korean brands seldom have to take them in aside for regular maintenance purposes.
Germans cars have never been particuarly reliable, that isn't the same as quality. The low reliability is mostly due to excessive complexity in the upmarket models they sell in the USA- too many features and exotic performance focused engines. The simple and reliable basic models from most of the german car companies aren't sold in the USA. It doesn't change the fact that the components, materials, and engineering are excellent, and they will last a lifetime if maintained well. The safety, performance, and driver experience are unparalleled.
That is utter bullshit. European brands are aside from Japanese ones the best at quality control. Even the oldest Volkswagen in my family is still in use, even it is over 30 years old. I mean there were some series of BMW that were bad, but those days are gone for good.
Apart from the engines (specially high performance and the diesel ones - forgetting the emissions scandal), and brand German cars do not have any real competitive edge. If you are willing to pay the price tag you can find craftsmanship, driving dynamics, safety, reliability elsewhere.
In an EV world where software and electronic quirks are the main demand drivers (ev power trains cannot offer differentiation), Chinese are very well positioned to take over the lead.
I agree with the reliability, but haven't seen that in the rest of what you mention. I'm definitely a car snob, and have driven high end luxury and sports cars from the Japanese and American companies, and they just don't have the driving experience, attention to detail, etc. of say, even a base model Porsche. It's tiny details most people probably don't notice- keeping the wind noise down with the windows and/or convertible top down, using corrosion resistant fasteners and coatings everywhere, perfectly tuning the pedal responsiveness and steering feel, balancing the weight, getting the gear ratios and/or shifting programs just right for performance driving, putting pillars in the right place for road visibility, etc. Also things like massively over-sizing the cooling and braking systems so they don't overheat under extreme conditions or hard use.
There is also the effectivness of the traction and stability control systems- which I think is related partially to oversizing the brakes. Even "serious" offroad vehicles from Lexus and Toyota don't have nearly as good of traction control offroad as a basic German passenger car.
So what would I get from China instead of a BMW M4 or Audi S5? That would be on par for craftsmanship, dynamics, safety, reliability, price. I'm quite curious.
For ICE? There is no Chinese competition, but Kia stinger and Lexus RC are direct competition.
In an EV world even the Hyundai Ioniq 5 can smoke the M4 or the S5. Take it for a test drive you will be shocked. For Chinese both BYD and Xiaomi have offerings in the space.
(Btw I own an RS5 and would never trade it for an soul-less ev, but there are very few of us who care)
Those byds are really bad, just like the Xiaomi ones. They are falling apart and disturbing the public safety; one of the panels almost hit a passenger
I mean who says that gas prices will not 10x in the next 20 years ? Crude oil is a scarce resource and it has become very inefficient to extract. Which is why even fracking is nowadays viable (at $100/barrel)
If you sell me the said futures I will happily buy because nobody else sells.
Hint to not go bankrupt before you decide to sell me, check the average current costs per barrel for the giants like xom and cvx. This is the price floor.
It will be more reliable because of its simplicity, but it won't last longer if they're both maintained to a high standard. You can't really get around the fact that a much higher end car using more expensive materials, construction processes, etc. is going to wear better over time. All of the highest mileage cars in the world are old european cars- mostly Volvos and Mercedes.
It also depends on how you use it... a Porsche isn't as reliable in daily driving as a Honda, but the Honda could be destroyed immediately with hard driving on a race track, and you could do it everyday for years in the Porsche.
I drive an old VW and old Porsche that are both decades old, with high miles, and basically both in brand new shape still. They get used very hard- the VW is used for camping offroad and heavy towing, and I both daily commute and race the Porsche.
China is a great place to start your journey in e-car making. Less regulations. Cheap materials. More fun with inventions. Lots of trials. Lots of low cost errors.
> middle class that is still growing instead of shrinking.
You should update your facts on that. Although accurate numbers are hard to come by a lot of analysts and indicators point to this starting to reverse as of this year.
Even if that is the case today, how long will it stay like that, and how much will it increase the cost to get it too comparable quality? It's only going to get better, and likely it'll get better faster than other manufacturers can get their products cheaper to compete.
Apple still designs better phones and laptops than any Chinese, Taiwanese or Korean company. Italy and France still make better clothes. Japan still makes better kitchen utensils, gaming consoles and games. I could go on.
Of course, quality of Chinese goods increases over time, it's stupid to deny that. However, it appears that in many industries and product categories there's an upper limit that Chinese products just can't breach.
Are aftermarket services (parts, service) available or are those throwaway cars? It might be looking good now, but in few years it could be a nightmare to keep the car running.
I guess my question (genuine question, I do not know much about this topic) is whether the safety features in Chinese cars are on par with those from American and Japanese car companies.
Are they "better" only in ways that are immediately obvious, but "cheaper" because they cut corners on the stuff you don't notice until it's too late?
Or are they genuinely doing a better job even comparing apples to apples with other cars?
Given that the US allows the Cybertruck and certain pickups to be sold, with complete disregard for pedestrian safety, I'd rather question whether Chinese cars are up to European standards.
Pick one single customer and fanatically meet their individual needs. Then add a second. Repeat until you’re no longer needing to tweak your system to delight a new customer. At that point you need sales and you have a business! :)
We had a high touch service for B2B installation: we charged clients for consulting (business analysis) to configure and integrate our system.
The cost to clients for the consulting was approx 1 year of our SaaS fees. The up front consulting helped heaps with our cashflow, but it also significantly limited our growth rate.
But it worked for us at the time (mid 2000's).
Definitely hard to avoid over-customisation of software for one client: but you need to avoid that problem with any software product servicing multiple clients.
Previous company with a similar product depended too heavily upon ongoing consulting fees and that caused a variety of troubles for that business.
In the idealized solution that I would build/provide, I'd already be meeting the needs of many individuals with "just" one top-of-the-line product. The only issue, and the need for quotes, is because this no-compromise product that would likely be competitive with the best in the industry, would also be quite expensive.
This, fortunately or not, kind of circles back to the "make more expensive products" aspect.
Though I share your pessimism, “fortunately” the drug companies don’t make much from dementia directly, the cost burden is borne by children and care facilities.
And for what it’s worth, if there were a drug I could buy for nearly any amount of money to get just a few months of slightly improved lucidity for either of my parents, I would pay it in a heartbeat.
Shit, I think the US spent several times that per year, without even a good plan to pay it back. Does that mean the United States is irresponsible, or the amount is just so trivial they can't be bothered? Who cares, it's some other administration's problem.
Solving global warming, turning off the earth iceball machine when it's time? Easily worth $100 trillion. OP just has no supervillain potential.
"I demand the sum of... $1 million dollars!" -- Dr. Evil
It's not solving if they can turn it back on, it's a subscription. The elite want renters, 'you will own nothing and be happy'.
It should give people pause that with all the push for more renewables in California and Germany, they now have among the most expensive electricity on Earth.
Or if they care for their descendants in their later years.
(Not saying fish do this, though I wouldn’t be surprised if giant elder fish clear out predators. A lot of people forget this bit but it’s suspected of being a big factor in insect and lobster longevity, which both capable of recognizing their offspring and not being territorial to their presence.)
I went down this rabbit hole about 15 years ago, I ended up hand-rolling a transparent .gif which I think was 15 bytes? Small enough that we inlined it as cdata data urls. (Is that still a thing in HTML? It’s been so long…)
I think I recall using a base64 encoded png at one point for a different project in the same way.
Minimizing bytes was not the reason for this. It was to tidy up the directory listing as this html was used as a self contained local file. I didn’t want a separate logo file hanging around and risk getting lost.
The primary way we used it was as the body of a tracking gif, returned as binary. But we also used it as a spacer here and there inline in HTML using the data URI. When embedding in HTML the file size is mostly relevant for brevity.
You never stop writing code, unless you truly just don’t enjoy writing code, and if that’s the case please don’t manage engineers.
You do eventually stop shipping critical code, because at a certain point your managerial leverage means there are many other more productive ways to spend your time.
But the day you “stop writing code” is the beginning of the end of your effectiveness, because when your job is augmenting the impact of others, you need to have a deep familiarity with their daily experience.
Consider that any manager who “stopped writing code” five years ago has (probably) never had the daily experience of being a fully remote developer in a fully remote organization, with all the collaboration challenges and focus opportunities that entails.
And a manager who “stopped writing code” two years ago probably doesn’t get how the process changes with the assistance of LLMs, what they can dramatically accelerate and where their limitations introduce risk.
Never stop writing code. Never stop building a local version of your code base. Never stop using your internal build tools and dev environment. Never stop watching production logs and chasing down the occasional bug.
_Do_ stop assuming your code is production-ready. Do stop commenting on code reviews. Do stop assuming that the code you write has meaningful value (except as a way for you to keep your situational awareness.)
Most importantly, stop letting “writing code” be a source of stress or an obligation, and start having fun again doing it. Your organization will thank you for it.