OP, my personal recommendation is to run for the hills. if you have the money, quit now and do a thorough job search. I recently took that bold step and I'm glad i did.
I can't recommend this enough. find a job you really do have the best of both worlds, and stop settling for advantage/disadvantage positions.
I worked with an awesome team, but the company was sketchy, and something tells me you're in the same industry i was... E-commerce. The team was awesome, and i still have real friends there because of it. but the management and business ethics were terrible, not to mention that non-technical folks were making technical decisions that overrode us. the hard part of leaving is that i felt trapped, that if i left, i'd be unprepared for the positions i wanted. but thankfully i was wrong.
i decided that i'd really take the time to interview companies as much, if not more than they interviewed me. asking questions i had come up with that would spot companies like this. I even cut a few interviews short because of these questions, but it helped me clarify what i wanted, and where i would be happy.
to measure out my results:
* was already well paid, new job paid 40%-60% more(range for discretion)
* new company actually cares about code quality, testing etc.
* mgmt leaves tech decisions to us.
* better, more flexible hours.
* smarter people than myself, things to learn, and people to learn from.(education wasn't big at my last position)
* a bit more stressful, in a good way. I feel like i have more responsibility, and that i truly own what i do.
* path for career growth. i can see where my next steps lead me
yes some of these are subjective, but thats the point. these are the things i wanted. you might have different needs, but i'm confident that this approach will make you happier, more in love with your career, and less jaded like i was.
I'm not sure where you all play, but I play in big Corp, with my own ethics and make a strong impact. You don't have to tow the line, sale ially if you kick ass.
If you do indeed have values / ethics that STAND OUT (as opposed to just expressed on forums / on your sleeve) and you're a solid PRODUCER, nothing else matters. Go get it man!
My experience (15 yrz in big Corp operations and now IT) is that your ethics / values "get out" on their own and make a deep impact; IF you're skilled at what you do.
To others reading this thread (especially people new to industry), the line "You don't have to tow the line, sale ially (especially) if you kick ass", while it seems completely reasonable (and you would think literally impossible to be wrong, is very often wrong.
Politics, and quite often outright fraud (disguised as something else, it's not at all difficult to obfuscate decisions when it comes to software), are very common in all businesses. The idea that you will win because you are correct is not necessarily true. It's probably a pretty good strategy at small startups, it could very well be career suicide at larger firms.
I've had a similar experience in big companies. While you're learning and you're challenged technically, all is good. Once you master most of it and start asking the deep questions about how exactly you're helping the world (and sometimes more importantly, the means for that), that's when trouble starts.
E.g. "kicking ass" improving infrastructure performance and having fun, then your boss asks you to delay (or never implement) certain improvements because it will be hard to justify the body shop headcount next month.
they have times they broadcast figured out there. if you enjoy this kind of stuff, i suggest picking up an SDR yourself, i know i do. my $20 RTL-SDR works well for playing around with this.
I was going to say something about Uber and traditional taxis in the same vein.
But then I was also going to say something about doctors, lawyers, and other professionals that form some kind of barrier around themselves... being someone who is in one of those groups.
the further I take this down the road(no pun intended), the more perplexed I find myself.
Me too, the question mark in my post is real. Although regulatory capture is a problem, it's rather easy to use that as justification for the idea that any regulation is simply a boondoggle and exists for no other reason than to hinder the economy.
but the actual definition of regulatory capture is that regardless of the reason regulation exists (which usually is a real reason, not an invented one as in the article - the article doesn't have regulation resulting from anything any member of the public actually objected to), the regulating bodies will be captured. So take a real reason: let's say we (the public) want to improve Comcast's level of (notoriously bad) service, even in areas where they happen to be a sole provider. So how do we do this - we can only do it through some regulating body. So, okay, let's improve Comcast's atrocious service. The idea of regulatory capture is even though we have a great reason to do this, Comcast can still capture that body, and be better-off than before the regulator existed - at the expense of the public. Which is why we don't do it!
But the general argument applies to all regulation, yet we still have regulation. And Comcast's business was literally created by regulation: it is a municipal monopoly.
Your argument needs more nuance. Regulatory capture happens when no one in the general public is organized or invested enough to be part of the lobbying pool, or generally due to attrition caused by government corruption.
So some guy lists a side project of putting a fantasy spin on startup valuations(which i guess is fun for some people?) and thats the straw that breaks the camels back for you?
the exit is to your left, don't let the door hit you on the way out.
i wasn't taking issue with exchangel.co, per se. i was taking issue with the responses to it on HN. "Best idea ever!" "You should be able to short!" "How about an 'Index Fund' version!" "I wan't to make money and pretend I know investing!"
The TDD analogy works when youre trying to objectively quantify and rank a person, based on their test result, but i don't think it works as well when youre trying to test a student body, or more roboticly put, a body of objects(really, thats not so TDD as much as it is ranking outputs of a black box)
When it comes to testing teacher/school performance through its students, if you reconsider a test framework is given a body of objects:
* instantiated outside its control(students are brought, not created at school)
* instantiated with unique and unknown inputs(vs given known inputs)
* have hidden independent variables(personal traits)
* have hidden linked/shared variables(external traits, economic environment, local crime, family etc)
* have _few known inputs_ (teachers, school staff, grounds)
and then ONLY test pass/fail based on those _few known inputs_ and the results from each individual object, you will learn that the inputs pass/failed, but determining what the cause is will be far harder(strong linked variable or teacher? intelligence sapping virus?). unfortunately the frameworks executors believe that the tests clearly show that given the inputs they control, the results are repeatable.
I don't think testing a body of objects-- err --students is pointless, but directly linking their results to teachers and schools discounts so much more than this testing framework can account for. They should be a starting place for conversation, but not a litmus test.
I wonder, (and wouldn't be surprised) if the M&M factory already has something similar in place for Quality Control. Anyone working in/near the food industry know the answer to this?
I am pretty sure they get made 1 color at a time, they wouldn't be combined before being inspected... Why combine then go through a new machine to uncombine?
The real joke is the Marketing concept: that making coffee starting with water, those dirty, scary soil colored grounds, and having to wait 5 minutes is too much work for a cup of coffee.
> and the second group is big businesses who can most likely hire lower wage workers.
They're called Billionaires Without Borders. And it sickens me to see them feign interest in diversity and globalization, when really they're looking for cheaper Tech labor, because heaven forbid capitalism from ever working in the american employees favor.
This seems to be downvoted because it goes against some ideal of a meritocratic job market or other illusions.
Even if you think that allowing more foreign workers is a good thing in principle, you have to consider that the implementation as it stands is quite a bit messier than that. Plenty of these workers are hired by consulting companies that base their business on hiring foreign experts and exploiting them, paying them less than market rate and restricting their mobility and freedom.
Obviously, this isn't a net positive for society or the job market.
Good catch. Being a selected chapter in an otherwise obscure book(to me, pardon) i would have never known. It looks like the root site is littered with various articles, origin unknown, at least after a quick browse. Still, Since the title mentioned 'Involution' on a site about tech/startup growth, i am curious what the poster wanted to point out, if at all.
The system used on TrueReddit is nice: submitters are required to post a submission statement with every post, explaining in a few sentences why the post is interesting.
Yes, that's one reason I bumped it up in my submission queue: nuclear bombs are an unusual area of engineering/science - a field which has basically perfected its craft as far a it will be permitted by the surrounding society, and is experienced that rarest of things, the endgame of a field.
I can't recommend this enough. find a job you really do have the best of both worlds, and stop settling for advantage/disadvantage positions.
I worked with an awesome team, but the company was sketchy, and something tells me you're in the same industry i was... E-commerce. The team was awesome, and i still have real friends there because of it. but the management and business ethics were terrible, not to mention that non-technical folks were making technical decisions that overrode us. the hard part of leaving is that i felt trapped, that if i left, i'd be unprepared for the positions i wanted. but thankfully i was wrong.
i decided that i'd really take the time to interview companies as much, if not more than they interviewed me. asking questions i had come up with that would spot companies like this. I even cut a few interviews short because of these questions, but it helped me clarify what i wanted, and where i would be happy.
to measure out my results:
yes some of these are subjective, but thats the point. these are the things i wanted. you might have different needs, but i'm confident that this approach will make you happier, more in love with your career, and less jaded like i was.Best of luck OP.