FYI: The linked video is Smarter Every Day dunking on NASA, Boeing, ULA, the pork barrel, and all that kind of stuff in-front of a bunch of big names in the space industry for around an hour.
It's a tough watch with some hairy moments, however really well captures the kind of culture and environment that led to the somewhat dire and/or depressing state of space exploration that we are at today.
Even the infrequent successes like Curiosity were billions (with a 'B') over-budget and years delayed.
> Force startups to aspire to create an actual product rather
I'm getting on to 10 years in the software industry as an engineer at the moment and in my view this is one of its most disappointing and frustrating aspects.
The whole software start-up scene just feels saturated with FIRE-obsessed individuals who prefer just about anything (money, vacation, travel, fame, ...) over company, product, real building, craftsmanship, etc.
I legitimately hear phrases like "5th time's the charm for an exit and payout!" way too often. It frequently just exacerbates the consolidation of technology, knowledge, wealth, and often hurts innovation, let alone can result in the solid team(s) of engineers left out to dry (although some can be also gunning for the payout in the end too).
In my view, there are just too many sell-outs pawning off solid products and teams to the highest bidder. I wish it wasn't that way.
I taught myself to code in high school, and I like what I work on (robotics); it used to be a weekend hobby in college before it became my real job. I also like Michelin star dinners, travelling, live music, skiing, etc.
Expecting people in our industry to prefer "company, product, real building, craftsmanship" over getting paid is how we end up getting paid like nonprofit employees, EMTs, and other professions where people's desire to do good is exploited to drive down salaries.
Would you rather use a product that somebody treats as a vehicle to "Michelin star dinners, travelling, live music, skiing, etc.", or a product that somebody deeply cares about more than those things?
My point is not "care 100% about your job/company/product/idea and 0% about everything else", but rather striking a better balance.
To bring it back to the OP, selling Figma to Adobe was, in my view, part of an epidemic of SaaS companies valuing payout above creating a long-term sustaining business.
This, in my view, is quite a utilitarian (dare I say brutal) look on work and the world.
You are technically correct, in the same way "following the letter of the law" can be technically correct whilst missing the spirit.
For what it's worth, the engineers I have worked with in the past who take this utilitarian view of work often produce the poorer quality work and sometimes be really quite difficult to work with. This is because, with this view, "documentation", "design", "planning", "quality", and all those sorts of things tend to take a back seat in their mind as they become totally engrossed by "MVP", "well it works, so?", etc.
Personally, I think nuance is important here - I agree, there's a time for keeping the lights on, getting something to show, appeasing shareholders, and so on. However, there's also a time for taking a step back and taking some time to design, plan, optimize, ensuring quality, long-term stability, and hell, dare I say a bit of craftsmanship; life is short, might as well enjoy what you are doing for 1/3 of it and lavish in the art.
> Software engineers are mercenaries hired to create value for shareholders, and anything else is just delusion.
Value is a sustainable product, not some shovelware piece of crap. If the shareholders don't see that then that's their problem, and it's probably best to part ways and warn everyone you know from working with them.
In a way I understand why, however I still am always perplexed when a "we are kaput" announcement drowns the message in praise for all the amazing super awesome they have done whilst not including a single character as to why, uh, perhaps the entire company/project/venture is ceasing.
To me, it only communicates that the issues were embarrassing, inconvenient, or otherwise do not shine a good light.
Am I reading too much into this, or does this kind of pithy announcement usually hide skeletons? Genuinely curious here.
No knowledge of the specifics here, but usually the underlying cause is the same: we are running out of money, the business model doesn't work, and we don't have enough time, ideas or both to try anything else - at least no with any confidence of success.
Side-effects of higher interest rates are usually drying up of "easy money" (low-cost loans). Combined with the fact that VCs had a sudden shift (due to the loss of "easy money") and are now actually evaluating whether a startup is actually viable before committing funding to it, it is not surprising that investors demand existing companies that are no longer viable to orderly wind up in order to have some money than the real possibility of losing it all.
Docker is different: it has a name already so it can bleed a lot of money (à la Twitter while it was a public company) and there is generally a significant holding in large enterprises. I'm guessing that Notable didn't have significant notable enterprises using it that will make investors more relaxed with their red sheets.
It's hard to accept something you've poured your life into and had such high hopes for isn't working out. This is why every company that gets bought has an optimistic blog post talking about how they can finally get things done with the support of the acquiring company. They really believe it. They just proved it's nonviable, and they still believe they'll be able to keep trying.
It's not accurate that every company that is acquired is non-viable. For example sometimes it's more about timelines because building your viable business into a different kind of business will take a lot longer than you are up for. Sometimes it's because the principals are more interested in doing something else, etc.
> To me, it only communicates that the issues were embarrassing, inconvenient, or otherwise do not shine a good light.
> Am I reading too much into this, or does this kind of pithy announcement usually hide skeletons? Genuinely curious here.
This line of thinking bothers me. It reads as if you feel like you're owed something from the company. Why does it matter?
If it's fundraising issues, lack of product market fit, founder disputes, team member stole the entire bank account, the end result is the same. They can't run the business. As long as there's a clear message and a path to EOL for active customers, what possible reason could help?
To me, it actually highlights the praise of the team and the products they built together instead of focusing on the details of why they're no longer operable. And reading the other threads here, they did a great job but there simply wasn't large enough captive market.
> It reads as if you feel like you're owed something from the company. Why does it matter?
You paid them money and trusted them with your data. Any usage on your part is an investment in the company. Of course you would feel entitled to know why they are ceasing effective immediately
You paid them money. You got a service. If you bought groceries from a grocery store every week, and one well you showed up to find they were closed, would you feel like you were owed an explanation?
Yes. But only because the usual routine is worth something to me, and i would be angry about a change that is forced upon me. Getting an explanation is a way to release that anger.
> Any usage on your part is an investment in the company. Of course you would feel entitled to know why they are ceasing effective immediately
Going with the Steelman path - This is true if I sincerely believed in the company, likely promoted them to others, and was emotionally invested. I definitely would want one. As a shareholder, I would demand one.
Anyway, based on the OP's tone of this thread, I doubt they were emotionally invested let alone a paying customer - but assumptions.
Even if you don't owe me any explanation, if you freely give me a bad one I'm allowed to say there's something weird going on. Especially if you chose to make a fully public post about it.
Read the comment again. "perplexed" "It only communicates" "Am I reading too much into this" "curious". I don't see any implication of being owed more. It's a criticism that the post is not leaving the message that is intended.
It's not the same, but it reminds me of the quote: My "Not involved in human trafficking" T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.
I would feel like the local newspaper should tell me why they are shutting down, if it wasn't already obvious because they're a newspaper. Wouldn't you?
That's what we're talking about here, not forcing them to stay up somehow.
We’re just curious about what happened and we think we could learn from it maybe — was it product market fit, was it unit economics. Lessons in there!! So it would be cool to see more detailed info.
> It matters a lot if the team goes on to found some other product that will go away in 3 years.
You follow team members' track records and avoid products based on who is there?
Just trying to point out how unrealistic this logic actually plays out. It seems like in general, you'll want to avoid startups or companies less than 5 years old.
You’re not entitled to see the skeletons. The people shutting down their business owe their customers a notice. They don’t owe the world an exposé of their (possible) flaws.
A business can fail just because it’s the wrong time or they were unlucky or many other reasons. If the issues were embarrassing? They don’t owe you those details.
They're not asking to see the skeletons. They're trying to figure out if skeletons actually are likely, or if the phrasing is motivated by some weird fear of saying the business model failed and ran out of money. And it's more about this type of announcement in general than this specific business.
Having been around when one of these was written, it could be:
- this is a very difficult time emotionally for the author, so they aren’t thinking entirely rationally
- the author is exhausted
- the author is ashamed/embarrassed about having lost money for all their friends and family
- they don’t want to expose themselves to liability
- the message was vetted by a risk averse lawyer, aka a lawyer
- the message has to satisfy a bunch of different audiences, so it is generic
- it is almost an afterthought amongst all the other stuff that has to get done shutting down the business
And most importantly, they may not explain why the business failed because they don’t really know. If they knew why they didn’t find product market fit, the business wouldn’t have failed.
If they truly know why they failed, that would be valuable information, which they are not required to share with anybody. If you know why something fails it is the mirror image of why something succeeds. Valuable information.
I followed this company since there beginnings out of Netflix. The original founder Michelle Ufford left with no detail and no explanation. I'll bet there's more to dig into.
* Polish train maintenance company, SPS, was getting suspicious as trains made by a company, Newag, kept on "randomly" breaking and couldn't be fixed. They was getting fined millions by Polish government as they had a contract that fined them for being too slow with repairs.
* They secretly hired literal hackers (Dragon Sector) for 2 months to dig around Newag train code.
* Hackers found out some incredible things, generally that fit under the umbrella of "late-stage capitalism", or more specifically, corporate protectionism, sabotage, ransom, etc.
Some examples of the secret code that the hackers found:
* Breaks the trains if they go into geo polygons that are right around the warehouses of 5 Polish train maintenance companies, including SPS.
* Breaks the trains after 1 million kilometers.
* Breaks the trains if they don't move for 10 days.
* Secret button press combination (basically Tekken, Street Fighter, etc.) to disable the "malfunctions".
Do you know if the low-level technical report is available? I love reverse engineering firmware, and this sounds like a holy grail. I mean a freaking train? Ugh someone should drop binaries.
Not found one yet. The linked article contains a very small amount of detail, such as the lat-long coordinate values they found within the dissassembled code, etc., but not much else unfortunately.
I'm waiting for the stuxnet-like report on this as much as anyone.
Agree with writer, apart from a challenge on the "I get pestered at the office/on slack too much!":
I see this complaint quite frequently about flows being disrupted due to office/slack, having to "mute slack to get anything done", etc. In my experience, those who I have observed IRL complaining about this are, more often than not, those that tend to struggle writing clear and maintainable code, those that struggle writing concise and readable documentation, those that struggle writing up tasks properly, and so on. Equally more often than not, I have found that they often fit into the "Super Smart Engineer Individual Contributor" bin, who are clearly incredibly good at solving very challenging problems, sometimes performing great, field-leading feats of engineering, but fall short on the human side of the job. I know this is highly generalizing and not all fit this description, but it truly is what I have seen.
About me, I have been WFH for a long time, before the pandemic: <2019 60+% WFH, >2019 100% WFH.
* Saved 2,500 hours by no commute - around 100 extra days of life.
* Saved ~15,000-20,000 GBP by no train/car commute
* I'm quite particular about my food and drink, and invest quite heavily in it (some would say too much when it comes to tea and coffee :P). I fear hot drink vending machines, "nespresso pods" (which I disagree with on perhaps a spiritual, even cosmic level), and/or plastic "bag tea". Eeeek D:
* I'm quite particular when it comes to peripherals. My back hates Herman Miller knock-offs, generally any kind of "different" from my at-home setup to be honest. Thunderbolt, in 2023, remains at best a challenge, at worst a mystery for multi-million and a number of multi-billion companies.
* Office equipment in the last ~5 or so years has been on a somewhat downwards trajectory since 2019. Companies don't invest in quality software engineering equipment like they used to (understandable as paying for equipment that few use is a waste). This troubles me often; I fear that the pandemic has sparked a rapidly spiraling, high momentum, positive feedback doom-loop, i.e.:
1) Pandemic --> 2) WFH --> 3) Companies invest less in office equipment --> 4) More employees want WFH for better equipment --> 5) Companies invest even less in office equipment --> GOTO 3
Although LeetCode does have a strong algo slant, choosing the optimal data structure is almost always a key part in solving the problems.
If you think leetcode-like problems is always about the algo, "BFS or DFS" etc., then at best you are not realizing the data structure choices you are making, at worst you may not be so good at solving them or haven't progress that much through leetcode-like challenges.
* Previous studies have used charged antimatter like positrons and antiprotons, which they imply is kind of silly because the electromagnetic force is 10^42 times stronger than gravity, so you have to set up absolutely impossibly precise electromagnetic confinement apparatus to measure the relatively tiny gravitational force
* So instead, they formed anti-hydrogen (which is neutral), and shot them (10^6 at a time, as my understanding of the text goes?) into a vertical magnetic trap
* They waited for the anti-hydrogen to either "rise up" or "sink down" to the top or bottom walls of the apparatus and measured the frequency of annihilations
* They biased the vertical magnetic field to various values, to see, at what magnetic field bias, the "top" and "bottom" annihilations were exactly 50/50.
* If anti-matter is repulsive, they would expect to need a magnetic field bias that would "help the atoms stay down" to get to the 50/50 "top" and "bottom" rate.
* They measured that they needed a magnetic field bias applied to the anti-hydrogen equivalent to "pushing them up" with 0.75g (+/- 0.25g or so), so anti-matter is attractive. No new physics.
* 10^-13 % chance that anti-matter is repulsive
* Rules out quite a lot of cosmological work that used repulsive antimatter to explain various troublesome cosmology roadblocks (dark energy, etc.)
>> They measured that they needed a magnetic field bias applied to the anti-hydrogen equivalent to "pushing them up" with 0.75g (+/- 0.25g or so), so anti-matter is attractive. No new physics.
Antimatter is attracted to matter. Isn't it still an open question if matter is attracted to antimatter, and if antimatter is attracted to antimatter? What if antimatter is gravitationally repulsive? This experiment wouldn't show that.
Not that I think it's likely, but it hasn't been ruled out by this experiment has it?
A mass with negative effect on local curvature, would I think still follow the same geodesics (i.e. fall down).
Same in Newton, though there it would be GMm/r^2 = F = ma but both m have the same sign so acceleration is the same regardless of value (including -ve), though if M was negative then both +ve and -ve valued m would accelerate away rather than towards.
Conservation of momentum and energy is conserved because they're mv and 1/2mv^2, so an isolated equal and opposite +- pair co-accelerating has a total of zero of both all times.
>> Conservation of momentum (force*time) means they both experience the same force.
That's right. I'm just saying it hasn't been confirmed. Wouldn't that be some exciting new physics though? It could explain why there isn't any around, why galaxies apparently aren't made of it, and why there is annihilation radiation sourced from the edge of galaxies. ;-)
> They measured that they needed a magnetic field bias applied to the anti-hydrogen equivalent to "pushing them up" with 0.75g (+/- 0.25g or so), so anti-matter is attractive. No new physics.
That part bugged me a bit. Why 0.75g? Shouldn't we expect 1.0g? (Yeah, I know, +/- 0.25g...)
Did I miss something, or is antimatter attracted less than regular matter?
Interesting, this was almost word-for-word how I was explaining it to a non-space-nerd friend of mine.
I'm still convinced that this theory, in a sort of occams razor way, is the most likely to be true.
If SLS was just "a jobs program", then what is the government's motivation for "a jobs program"? It keeps unemployment lower? Is that true though? If the SLS didn't exist, the engineers would just move on...no?
To me, it seems clear that it is just a knowledge preservation program; a way to keep STEM, rocket science and engineering in America, in-house.
I'm currently based in the UK, and lord knows how messed up our manufacturing sector is today because it got all exported to the rest of the world, because the government didn't inveat and ensure that we maintained a sizable manufacturing worker force. US is just doind what every other government is trying to do nowadays - keep valauble (military, industrial, etc.) skills in-house.
> If SLS was just "a jobs program", then what is the government's motivation for "a jobs program"? It keeps unemployment lower? Is that true though? If the SLS didn't exist, the engineers would just move on...no?
One still can see it as a "jobs program" from the individual states' point of view. From the NASA link [1], I found out that the prime contractor is in Huntsville, Alabama, and important subcontractors are in New Orleans, LA, and in Northern Utah. Highly trained engineers would certainly find jobs somewhere, but maybe not in the same states, and that would be a hit to the local economy.
So, I can see how some senators and representatives from those states could put pressure for a make-work program to continue without regards for costs and results. But still, the Congress has lots of other members, and there is a pretty good chance that those other members did not mount a strong opposition because they saw the defense implications of keeping the SLS alive.
I used UTM extensively when creating an almost-no-touch tool for developers to setup their Macbook devices at the company I work for.
There's really no other convenient way to do this. It was awesome to be able to run the tool on a fresh MacOS install, test the effects, make some changes, then do it all over again with little fuss.
I went down a bit of a rabbit-hole there. Apparently, the current belief is that the meaning is "If the eye is healthy, it functions as the light of the body and indicates that the owner is sincere, generous and helpful." [0]
I find it oddly reductive, unsubstantiated, and meaningless.
It's a tough watch with some hairy moments, however really well captures the kind of culture and environment that led to the somewhat dire and/or depressing state of space exploration that we are at today.
Even the infrequent successes like Curiosity were billions (with a 'B') over-budget and years delayed.