I have no problem with folks doing this but it feels like hollow, performative grandstanding that allows tech folk to feel like they’re helping without doing anything that will make them truly uncomfortable. How many companies will do this but continue to let talent pipeline issues languish, or neglect unconscious biases create an uneven playing field for employees?
A lot of people are rightly concerned here that Facebook will run this arm in a cutthroat way so as to stifle innovation and competition. Though they might, I have no reason to believe that’s because they want to usurp and control every technology they invest in. I think Facebook knows that their core products and business lines are under threat of attrition, and the margins on ad revenue will get tighter. A venture arm, coupled with one of the world’s beefiest analytics muscle, will probably return more than their core businesses, and insulate them from a potential turn away from social media as a profitable vertical.
That’s what I thought they were doing with Oculus originally. Same with WhatsApp, then they started to commingle the branding.
One aspect of systemic debt that tracks well with technical debt (and most forms of "debt") is that paying down that debt requires you to confront the risk-averse and fearful tendencies of your organization/nation.
The more fearful and risk-averse approach will lock things into a local optimization with tremendous support costs and will accrue debt very fast. The bold approach will break out of the local maximum, but probably upset the apple cart.
Based on the current gray color, this response has seen quite a few down votes. I wonder why?
It essentially restates the premise of the article, and is reasonably accurate from my experience. ("upset the apple cart" may understate the risks of a "ground up" rewrite, but there are plenty of "bold approaches" that are less dramatic).
It would be nice if down voters replied, it could be an interesting discussion.
I have to be internally consistent and agree that it's at Zoom's discretion as a private-sector company whether to host specific content or provide services to specific people and viewpoints, just as it is for Facebook/Twitter etc.
Two things are additional considerations that may change how this sort of action ends up for Zoom:
1. Zoom will be judged in the court of public opinion for their decision to align their moderation of access to their service with the CCP. This is likely a different degree of backlash than you'd see with, say, shutting down the accounts of US-based hate groups.
2. Zoom may come under scrutiny—without concrete evidence—for introspecting the content of communications through its platform that would otherwise be presumed to be private. This is different from Facebook/Twitter etc., for which much of the content that drives moderation decisions is public.
Zoom is not abridging anyone's constitutional right to free speech, nor would they be able to. How they are judged for their specific actions, though, is entirely at the discretion of their user base and public opinion.
They're places where people hang out and socialize or network.
Some have really strict bouncers whereas others will let just about anyone in as long as they're spending money and not shitting the place up too badly.
There are some that are so big and so popular that it almost doesn't matter if you prefer hanging out in another less popular one because no matter how you try, you'll never convince most of your friends to hang out at your favorite dive since everyone is at the big place.
I’ve worked at a global-scale platform for user-generated content doing anti-abuse and anti-spam tooling. In my experience those researchers do exist in-house and there was an imperative to remove abusive and spammy accounts.
The difference in my perception is that the presence of the bots and bad actors on Twitter that come to the attention of reporting like this increases engagement and views, and thus top line revenue.
This isn’t saying “bots count as views, so we get more ad dollars”. It’s that bots and bad actors promote topics and conversations that bring more real users to the platform, and increase the session duration for new and existing users.
I would imagine that Twitter sees spam bots and purveyors of illegal content as unwelcome and probably has an engineering team that dispatches those accounts quickly. But whether deliberately or unconsciously, they probably don’t apply the same rigor to accounts that break the TOS but manage to drive the top line up.
I’d love to hear from an engineer from Twitter who works in this space.
The implication from this litter of thinkpieces on HN is that proximity to a tech hub (SV/NY) is your only competitive advantage as a knowledge worker—your butt is close to their chair. This runs counter to the other prevailing wisdom about SV/NY, which is that those areas are hubs—and essential to the tech industry—because the world's top talent is drawn to it.
As someone who is unable to move to California due to family, I've always seen the biggest benefit I am missing to be not applying to jobs close by, but being the proximity to people I can connect with who can help me (and my ideas) grow.
It's an old cliche, but true, that if you surround yourself with people smarter/better than yourself then you will likely get better yourself; conversely, if you are the smartest person in the room on X (no one is the smartest in the room on everything), then there is no forcing function driving you to get better other than one you artificially create for yourself.
"The room" has lost most of its meaning, hasn't it? You're no longer limited to working with people who live within driving distance of yourself, you can now meet super smart people from all over the world on lots of websites, talk to them, work with them, learn from them, get inspired by them.
> "The room" has lost most of its meaning, hasn't it?
I don't think so. Trust and sense of shared purpose and ability are still largely built in person. The continued productivity people claim during the pandemic lockdown is mostly coasting off what was largely established in person before.
Websites, chat-rooms, and video calls are no substitute for the environment created by the physical agglomerations of people found in industry hubs.
That's not specific to the tech industry, either. It's true for any industry whose progress is dictated by hubs of creativity, including health, energy, entertainment, and transportation.
Oh sure, for networking and contacts etc, in person is still the thing. I meant for the "being the smartest person in the room" thing.
Before the internet, you had to go live in a metropolis to even know of these other people that were also interested in what you like, much less talk to or work with them. That has changed dramatically, and you absolutely can work with very bright people on very advanced things while you live somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
Don't get me wrong, it's still nice to meet people in person, but if you can't find a community online where people are smarter than you and/or better than you in whatever you do, you're either a super genius or you're not looking.
> I meant for the "being the smartest person in the room" thing.
I find the preoccupation over chasing the vaguely defined, but often bandied definition of "smart" a bit dull.
What matters more in my opinion is being in an intellectually stimulating and also psychologically safe environment. Other "smarter" people than me have made this observation too.
I'm not saying it has to be SF, NYC, or London, but the environment matters immensely, and it can turn a motivated person who might not appear "smart" in another context into a
much more creative person.
> Oh sure, for networking and contacts etc, in person is still the thing.
It's for far more important things than just yukking it up with people and trading business cards.
> if you can't find a community online where people are smarter than you and/or better than you in whatever you do, you're either a super genius or you're not looking.
I personally have yet to see an purely online community that fosters creativity without some fundamental anchoring in creative communities in the real world. The only exception I can think of are online game-building communities and competitions (i.e. Ludum Dare), but that's an unusual case. Is it impossible to find more example that? No. But I'd argue that strictly or even primarily online creative communities are unusual, and the online part is more about networking and cross-pollinating between in-person creative communities.
So you think every node.js / rails developer that happens to live in SV and work in a startup is the next Linus? Of course they're lots of ordinary developers working and living there.
And yes, being born American / European is a huge advantage over 80% of the rest of humanity.
Seriously. There are a ton of wannabes up there (entrepreneurial and technical) just like there are wannabe actors in LA. A lot of incredible talent missing at those companies because people simply have zero desire to live there. I can appreciate the Bay Area but it's just not my style (weather, culture, lack of diversity in industry, etc). I'd bounce to wine country or the forests up north if I lived up there now.
Things that don't make sense tend to get adjusted during bad economic times. I've worked with alot of companies as a customer, and at end of the day, none of the stakeholders are getting bang for the buck. Companies set money on fire, employees are mostly living a middle class lifestyle at an insane level of compensation.
I live out in the provinces, and we pay 20-30% of the rate for SV talent. My lifestyle in SV would require 7x the compensation without me being any smarter or skilled than I am. NYC is more of a real place and is probably less inflated, alot of the premium there is really about domain expertise.
> NYC is more of a real place and is probably less inflated, alot of the premium there is really about domain expertise.
We'll see. I'm betting you're wrong - NYC has nothing on SF in tech expertise and the rest of the country (especially outside of the West coast) doesn't have much on it either.
If by tech expertise you mean knowledge of cloud and large scale web applications, then yes. For security though, and I'm sure this is true for other industries, the Bay Area has very little on the defense industry in Maryland.
Security is a small part of the overall tech industry. I live near Bethesda and I would hardly call the region a tech hub on par with any of the ones in the West coast.
While I agree that DC is not on the standard with SF or Seattle (what are the other West Coast tech hubs), DC is definitely a tech hub in it's own right.
The problem with DC is that the talent pool is extremely diluted by disillusioned, rent-seeking government contractors who get a certification, claim a bunch of stuff on their resume, and get bid as part of a 20-person team on a contract that really only requires 5-6 committed (for the sake of argument, "SV caliber") people.
The problem is, hardly anyone that is "SV caliber" wants to work on pokey gov't contracts, but enough people on that team care enough about the mission, the project, or their company to allow the freeloaders to get away with it.
There's no incentive to firing them because a) the client understands that govt work is extremely inefficient so they tolerate it b) the freeloaders are very good at not pissing anyone off (they are very friendly and dress well, etc) and c) their employer literally loses money if they are removed.
So the cycle continues.
Having said all that, in amongst the chaff there is a significant kernel of wheat in the DC area, both in the contracting as well as private sector space.
Capital One has a really good engineering culture and hires a lot of very smart kids straight out of school and trains them very well. Many of them don't stay in DC, however, and go on to work at GOOG, MSFT, AMZN, etc for big salaries after their 2-year stint at COF is over.
NoVa definitely has some strong talent and you're correct in highlighting Capital One specifically (they recruit heavily at my alma mater and I know a number of talented people who work there). You're also correct about talent dilution - I worked for a brief stint at a government agency doing tech work and I would say the majority of contractors are unfortunately, quite untalented and love to hide behind buzzwords.
> what are the other West Coast tech hubs
I would say the Bay is several different tech hubs rolled into one, Portland has a fair bit of tech work, and LA is overlooked but increasingly becoming a big one.
In terms of getting work, I would say there are fewer security research jobs available in the Bay Area than scattered around the beltway. My last search, there were a ton of jobs asking how to authenticate servers to each other when what I want to talk about is how to fuzz or instrument code.
The same set of people aren't saying both things. The people who believe SV and NY have top talent are exactly the ones who think remote work is great. I'm excited about the trend; a bigger pool of talented engineers for me to work with means I'll be able to accomplish more and have to compromise less on my career goals.
The people who worry that remote work will be a disaster are the ones who never believed SV engineers were more talented in the first place.
If someone says SV engineers are talented, but only in some technical way that doesn't really matter, I'd classify that as a claim that they're not really talented.
There are multiple layers. I think SV will remain a hub from a commercial standpoint, so if you're fishing for VC money that's still where you want to be.
From a purely technical standpoint, we'll see, but tbh, as others have said, outsourcing has been happening for decades now and if anything the wave is currently retreating.
I can count three VCs in my immediate circle of contacts that are expanding up and down the West Coast at least.
The NIMBYs in SF are going to get their wish: shrinking the city and collapsing its major industry. As another poster stated: things that don't make sense get adjusted in bad economic times. Things like paying 7-10X for real estate when you're in a digital industry...
I was just reading another piece that suggested the current crisis is likely to accelerate a number of trends that were already happening to some degree. I certainly don't expect the Bay Area to empty out or for Google to move their HQ to Omaha. But a lot of big tech companies were already shifting more of their hiring to new offices in areas removed from their HQ even if they don't make a big deal of it like Amazon did. And, anecdotally, I hear of a lot more people in my circles leaving the Bay Area than moving to it.
VC money being geographically concentrated in SV seems like the kind of ingrained inefficiency that VCs themselves clamor on about disrupting excessively. Dealflow is a solvable problem for distributed futures.
It can be both. Prior to the current situation, many/most companies preferred people who could/would commute to a company office. Which gives more options to people willing to work near one of those hubs and mostly work in an office.
At the same time, many people prefer to live near one of those hubs whether because they just like NYC, Boston, Austin, Bay Area, Seattle, etc. or because they believe it gives them more flexibility in changing employers. (And/or being in proximity to many like-minded individuals.)
immigration doesn't select for the most talented, it selects for the younger, the male, the willing, the otherwise unburdened etc. The intellectual bar to enter SV is not that high. The willingness to relocate, assimilate to the culture etc, is.
Thank you. The naive, incorrect view is that private entities restrict your constitutional rights by refusing to host UGC or by editorializing/annotating it.
An evolved, but still incorrect view is that a private entity is legally or constitutionally obligated to apply their policy about hosting speech consistently across all users.
Disagree that what you wrote constitutes "career suicide".
- Being targeted for layoffs says more about the company you work for and less about your own career.
- Passed over for promotions is again saying a lot about the company, and many folks who work in offices still have to change jobs to get career advancement.
I, for one, believe that cultivating remote work competencies that hedge against either of those things is a valuable career skill. It means you can't schmooze your way in person through career growth, you have to do it by demonstrating real value to companies that will value you fairly.
> Our app designs have become soft, sweet, inoffensive. Bank interfaces use pastels, rounded corners and soft drop shadows to make mundane or unpleasant tasks more "fun.” Animojis have taken over our chats, and our productivity tools are starting to look like Animal Crossing.
This is the part of this that galls me the most. Weaponizing UI design as a substitute for UX simplicity, and using that weaponized design to bluster past the UX shortcomings of your service in your service's marketing.
"Weaponizing UI design" is a perfect description. These designs aren't meant to be thought about, they're meant to push emotional buttons in your head. They're meant to make you feel safe, make you shut down critical thinking, in order to make you more receptive to the marketing message.
