Mediocrity is a good thing in the context of commodity goods. To use the author's example, you CAN still get unique custom made shoes and still buy hand-grown heirloom tomatoes at the farmer's market. The shoes will cost you $1,000+ and you'll pay a couple of bucks a tomato - prices which adjusted for inflation haven't changed since such practice was the only way people got shoes and tomatoes, and they got a lot less of them.
Mediocrity and mass-production have made shoes and tomatoes accessible to everyone at far lower cost, and are not inherently bad.
As an introverted tech nerd, the underground club/rave experience changed my life so much for the better, including numerous trips to Berlin. But, all culture is a product of its time - to freeze these venues in time as a Disneyland of the millennial experience is missing the point (especially with techno, an inherently futurist genre).
It has been interesting to grow up with clubbing and see it go from an underground youth subculture that seemed to radically reinvent itself every year to a crowd of the same people but now middle-aged. I wonder if this is what happened to people who kept going to 80s nights, or if people in their teens and 20s just don't "go out" in the same way any more.
So just like the grunge nights, northern soul all-nighters, lindy-hops and penny socials before them, a cultural form of creative destruction will see this too fade into history to be replaced by whatever expression the new generation finds to express their situation, which is different in every way to the world that birthed Berghain.
> It has been interesting to grow up with clubbing and see it go from an underground youth subculture that seemed to radically reinvent itself every year to a crowd of the same people but now middle-aged.
Society has aged and there are just fewer youths now. The millennial population boom let everyone ignore this reality for a few years.
And the youths who remain don’t have nearly as much time for clubbing; it hasn’t exactly become easier to get started in life lately. Not to mention that many zoomers who do go to clubs tend to loathe exclusivity so they wouldn’t even consider Berghain.
But the Berlin club scene long predates millennials and is not going anywhere.
"Gen Z... in the survey pool". It's a good study, and used solid methodology for finding participants (Harris poll). But the pool of people who will self-select to do a 30+ minute personal finance survey in exchange for points that can be exchanged for gift cards is inherently going to skew towards the kind of people with the aptitude (and, for the young, parental influence) to start saving early.
Still a useful stat in the relative sense to compare inter-generationally, or to previous surveys.
Something whispered about by the MBA set right now is how the recent hard RTO push at these companies is a form of "stealth layoffs". Don't have to pay severance if someone quits voluntarily.
I doubt TikTok has too many old-school types who just love being in office given they had barely a few hundred employees in the US prior to 2019, and didn't exist as a company until 2016, so it's a good control for the "outdated middle managers just want butts in seats/so they can exert power" theory (which as a prior middle manager myself I just didn't see in any of the hundreds of other tech EMs I interacted with).
TikTok did however scale from <500 US employees in Jan 2020 to >8,400(!) today. They set an aggressive hiring target of 10,000 employees by 2023 when the economy was going strong. Lots of biz dev and recruiting people amongst them who aren't required in a (predicted) recessionary cycle. So by forcing RTO and making it unpleasant, the rational conclusion (imo) is that they're hoping to thin the ranks.
The late 60s was a wild time! My mum had the full set, recently repurchased them off eBay and have enjoyed reading them.
Can see a lot of the counterculture mentality that drove early Silicon Valley and still sort of bubbles underneath in the writing from that time - eg. Talking to some younger devs about where the name “Slack” comes from.
It is rare that stacks go away entirely. There's still a bunch of folks in their 70s employed writing COBOL, just as I'm sure there's at least 1 operating blacksmith within driving distance of you. The option to rest up and ride out one stack is there, but yeah the fun new work stops going to that stack.
I went through a similar mid-career burnout where I couldn't face jumping in with the 21 year old fresh grads to ramp up on yet another round of bloated frameworks. Shifting to management was the route out for me where I get to direct high-impact work and provide guard-rails that stop my reports from repeating the mistakes I made. They are all far better programmers than I ever was, and I've been doing it enough years now where it's profoundly satisfying to see my early hires thriving and far surpassing me professionally - while none of the code I wrote even 5 years ago exists any more (another existentially depressing thing about our profession).
If you love coding and want to keep working on green-field stuff, the freelance (contract, consulting, freelance, etc) route might be good for you. Change in this field is inevitable, and only going to get more rapid. You will need to either keep adapting, or find a way to incorporate or shift to something that has more ever-green skills.
I know a dev fresh out of college who became proficient in COBOL, got a govt job offer, and now is working as a lifeguard because places that hire COBOL programmers take forever to process their paperwork. Presumably he'll start his real job in late summer when they get their act together.
I don't know if I would call it "atrociously" bad rates but a quick scan of Cobol listings on Indeed somewhere between $90K and $110K. I'm sure there are outliers on both sides.
Honestly I feel the rates for all software devs have gone down from a year ago which I am sure has something to do with the massive layoffs from the big companies.
The Acorn was a rebadged Psion 3 rather than a precursor. I remember as I lusted after the Psions on display in Boots as a (dorky) child, and was ecstatic when our school piloted the Acorns.
(Psion and Acorn, two more examples of how the UK is capable of developing world-leading tech but not at successfully marketing it...)
Wow! I stand corrected. I was led to believe that Acorn went bust and sold to Psion. I thought it went Acorn Pocket Book 1, Acorn Pocket Book II, Psion 3.
Psion did the software bundled with the Sinclair 16K/48K ZX Spectrum that was bundled at launch. It also wrote the bundled apps for the Sinclair QL.
Then it did its own line of pocket computers: the Organizer, the unsuccessful MC solid-state laptops, which it then miniaturised into the very successful Series 3, 3A, 3C and 3MX.
Acorn licensed these and sold them with changed software in the ROM, with an schools/educational focus instead of PDA functions.
Psion followed on with the Psion 5, using Acorn's ARM processors and a whole new OS, EPOC32.
That evolved into Symbian and powered the 1st mass-market smartphones. It's now FOSS.
Acorn made it big because it designed the first mass-market RISC chip, the ARM.
Acorn spin-off Arm is alive and well and the Arm chips are the most widely-used CPUs in the world, with about 10x-100x as many sold every year as all x86 put together.
Microsoft Press' "Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art" is a good deep dive into the subject.
Found it via a talk by Jakob Persson at Drupalcon many years ago, he recommended a template-based spreadsheet approach where you estimate a project by splitting it into components and giving each a "confidence" level from 1-5, then adding fixed padding for various items like project management (20%), deployment (5%), buffer for unforeseen problems (20%) etc that essentially came down to "2-3x the initial estimate" but with some calculations to back it up, and made estimations systematically easy.
Noting that his more recent blog articles now recommend a value-based pricing approach for the consulting model (which I agree with and also shifted to in my freelance days).
Good to see more writing on estimation for engineers, Agile's story points model is nice for teams doing the work, but in many kinds of work when you're running a team there's someone above you who signs the checks that wants to know what something's going to (approximately) cost before they sign off on it.
Anecdotal but as half of a DINK couple who recently relocated to an exurban vacation property, our main reasons for being in an expensive city (office, culture, social gathering) have evaporated and I'd be surprised if they came back the way they were for years. Speaking as someone whose main desire in life was to live in a big city, the suburbs are looking pretty nice right about now (as, again anecdotally, they are for a good number of our friends in similar positions).
> I'd be surprised if they came back the way they were for years.
Depends on what you're looking for. The police managed to find and shut down an underground club mid-April[0]. I'll bet the police didn't find the only one.
I'd be very surprised if it takes more than a year. Thinking back to the airline industry post 9/11, the airlines were strongly motivated to reopen the skies. The situation's different, but as we learn more about COVID-19, we get a better and better picture on what is necessary for it to be safe to reopen. The Hubei restaurant airflow study[1] says it's possible to be in the same room as an infected person and not get sick.
We shouldn't rush to reopen, but we can be more proactive than just "hope it goes away", by, eg expanding testing.
If you have the technical/management chops to know what work can be offshored successfully, package up the work, evaluate the shop, ask very specifically for what you want, assess the quality of what comes back and push back when it needs to be fixed, they can be a great option.
Don't know specific salaries but in my experience work is 30-50% cheaper to have done offshore on a project scale (imagine savings are better if you are paying salaries for full-time engineers). Those savings quickly evaporate if something goes wrong or takes longer than expected (very common due to communication issues), then rapidly become multiples of the original cost if you need to throw it away and have it re-written. This isn't necessarily because the offshore developers are bad, but because communicating software requirements is hard enough even without cultural/language/time barriers.
Offshore shops are a tool in a toolbox, one with a more specific use than most people think, that when deployed can be incredibly powerful but when deployed wrong can be catastrophic to a project.
As with all service relationships, building a partnership over time is the best way to get good work from vendors regardless of their physical location.
Never start with a large, mission critical project - give a small piece of work to a vendor and see how they do, and ramp up from there. Even consider giving the same small project to 1-3 vendors and see who does well - the redundancy is a sunk cost but a small price to pay for long term success.
Mediocrity and mass-production have made shoes and tomatoes accessible to everyone at far lower cost, and are not inherently bad.