Well stated. Until I saw it, I did not realize how many people went from rich (interpretations vary based on your experience, so "comfortable") suburbs and homes to "good" schools to "good" companies and professions. This is my experience, but that tends to be a common path and results in little diversity of "thought" (meaning ideas and experience).
It's become apparent to me that diversity is an ambiguous terms and its interpretation can vary a lot over many factors and time. I am not discounting any definition of it. When it comes up, it feels like people are on different pages with it. It could more prudent to state the definition when it is said.
I appreciate your enthusiasm, but this is like comparing apples to pitbulls. Both of these goals are big milestones, but fundamentally different.
With space, everything that was created and invested was brand new. There was not too much worrying about existing infrasture. Often, there would be thousands of people working to make 1 individual mission happen. Energy in the US is a lot different. For instance, you have to keep the massive machine that is the electricity transmission and distribution grids running.
Here's a scope of the challenges of 100% renewables, for anyone without a background in this (one should view challenges as opportunities):
First, there's a lot of existing generation that would need to be sunsetted and even more that would need to be created. In fact, given the intermittency of renewables, there would need to be a multiple more of capacity than there is now given the capacity factor, usually divide 1/CapacityFactor (see more on that here: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/57582.pdf). So, 4 GW of installed wind capacity is really only expected to output ~1 GW at any point in time, given the intermittencies.
Second, there will have to be a lot of upgrades made to the transmission grid (sending power long distances from large scale renewable generators to population centers), and the distribution grid (sends power to all the buildings and homes in a city). The distribution grid upgrades to be made will have to help it handle a lot more rooftop solar, home batteries, and electric vehicles.
Third, there will have to be a lot more storage installed. Electric vehicles can have a large impact here, but there will still be a need for in-home and grid-scale batteries. Batteries are also just getting to the point where they're economically-feasible in some uses. There is still a ways to go for batteries to be economical enough to be widespread, especially grid-scale. Physical storage of electricity will likely have to grow too (think: pump to a higher lake when prices are low, and let it flow back down and turn a turbine when it's needed).
Fourth, and this is definitely my opinion (and what I'm working on), is that we are going to have to make everything work together more. We can't have all these batteries, solar panels, and other connected appliances and thermostats do whatever they want at the distribution level. We will have to change to time-varying rate structures for end-consumers, but this won't be enough either. Communication and coordination will yield the best results.
I tried to be brief. If anyone has any more questions or thoughts about this, I would love to hear them!
So are you saying that non-salary benefits are bullshit?
Besides work flexibility, culture, purpose, and equity, how is a new venture supposed to compete with an entrenched monopolist that is essentially printing money (see: Alphabet)? Sure, equity is a multiplier that can return a huge amount of money with huge risk, but even equity+salary can't come near total comp offered by these juggernauts. I mean, these companies generate mountains of profits after paying crazy salaries and perks.
How can a startup compete for talent against these behemoths?
> So are you saying that non-salary benefits are bullshit?
I'm saying the reasons startups typically give to justify their low salaries are largely bullshit and not persuasive.
> How can a startup compete for talent against these behemoths?
Outside of paying more, they really can't compete head-to-head with the behemoths. They should really focus on hiring junior people who can't or won't work for Google/Facebook. Case in point: someone wants to work on self-driving cars but Google won't hire them to work in that group. That's someone a self-driving car startup has a shot at hiring.
> They should really focus on hiring junior people who can't or won't work for Google/Facebook.
This is also antithetical to (some) startups' way of thinking, which is that they must hire only senior/"top" engineers because that's the only way to get a product out fast enough.
Similarly, mentorship (something TFA does advocate) is seen as too much of a time/resource sink, a luxury only behemoths can afford.
This attitude makes some sense at seed stage, but after a few dozen senior engineers on staff, it loses credibility.
Either raise more funding or have technical cofounders who stay technical? You are essentially asking how they can compete with money against competitors with more money. And the answer is that they should focus on culture/flexibility/equity as you mentioned. Especially culture and flexibility, since for small orgs these can easily be set from the top. Allowing fully remote working is a great move because it allows you to widen your talent pool and potentially pay less (at least less than Bay Area market rate)
> How can a startup compete for talent against these behemoths?
Breath and depth of responsibility, and rapid growth in your responsibilities. I can't pay you as much, but I can put as the lead on our main product, and when you go for your next job, you can point at that and say, "I lead the team that made that happen".
Pay the 10x developers 3x to join your company. A lot of startups are just groups of very skilled engineers who have identified each other and left a behemoth together to work for themselves.
It's very hard to give 15+% raises at behemoths so there's always people who are very underpaid for what they do.
I get the point you're tryin to make, but, then again, who are we to judge what is and is not worthy, especially this early? A lot of "unworthy" things have been extremely value to us as a society in hindsight, let alone things that have stemmed from them.
> countless B2B products truly worth it?
"B2B" is a very vague and extremely overarching term. Computers, internet, and cell phones were all, at one point, very much "B2B".
> Who could possibly, genuinely want to work at such places?
For starters, I can imagine some people would fancy having a large impact on the world and the subsequent 10-12 figures attached to their name from all the value they created. Microsoft was "B2B", Amazon was an online bookstore (some people would imagine "instant food" in a category close to that), etc. It can be hard for many to see the value of something at its origin and not be able to see how that would shape a society, let alone an exponentially changing one. I think Peter Thiel would call some of these things "secrets".
Look, I don't much care for Facebook as a company or as a product. FAIR is a bit separate and does a lot of pure research. FAIR has put out a lot of good work, tools (it supports PyTorch), and has a lot of good people working there with good intentions.
Not everyone that works for a company that a given person dislikes is "evil" or acting malevolently. No company is homogeneous.
I'm from the rural Midwest. It may seem pedantic, but _no one_ from the Midwest uses a space in the name. That and the spelling errors reinforce that this is just an inflammatory bait comment.
I am actually from coastal cities. I shouldn't use the word `midwest` to hurt your feelings. Sorry about that. But I do hope that some of that money will get funneled into reviving the Midwest states and also the northern states that is struggling. From Mars.
I'm not from the rural mid west, but no one from the mid west uses underscores for emphasis.
But seriously, there are 65 million people living in the US midwest. I can promise that thousands of you guys use 'mid west', underscores, italics, and just about everything else.
With all due respect, but it seems apparent that you are not familiar with how electric distribution utilities work, especially in a deregulated state like California, how CAISO and its market mechanisms work, or how CPUC works.
If you are a reader that is not well-versed in how the grid works, please disregard the parent's comment.
I work in this space. I view this noisemaking as harmful to the public as they likely do not fully understand how the electricity delivery system (the grid) works, and this only serves to infuriate them and increase distrust.
With no actual details to back up your rather rude accusations against the GP, I'm not sure how useful this mini-rant really is... Care to lay some education on us instead of just hand-waving in a smarter-than-you manner?
To be honest, the GP's post itself reads like a rant and actually does not back up any of its claims. So while I agree that this post did not add value, neither did the GP.
Funny thing with utilities. They are a sort of commons, yet always regarded as evil until proven innocent.
And yet, how many utility poles and wires do you want in front of your house? I don't think we really want anything other than a monopoly doing our distribution.
It would be much better for the perception if there were a clean split in the business of the utilities where the distribution monopoly does just distribution and nothing else. But I'm not sure if that would actually solve any real problems.
I'm a bit confuse here. I thought utilities are regulated what is the reasoning for them being evil?
Yeah they're natural monopolies but they also regulated. I get that Enron mess California over but they got caught. What shady things that the electric companies in California are doing?
The post above yours is actually correct. I didn't read it as rude either although maybe a little dismissive. If you work in this space, you quickly realize just how complex everything is as the electric grid is the largest most complex machine on planet earth. The legal, economic, regulatory, and engineering aspects of it go pretty deep.
Utilities typically own generation plants as well as the high voltage transmission lines that transport electricity to consumers which then have their voltage lowered (think of a transformer as a device that lowers pressure) before going over smaller distribution lines into your house. Long ago, competition was fierce, so utilities went to the government and asked to be regulated. This caused forced consolidation and they began to effectively serve as monopolies and make a modest return on investment each year. In those days demand was fairly easy to forecast. The utility would make sure they always had enough generation online plus some extra to cover any emergencies like a unit tripping offline. The grid worked like this for decades and costs were fairly cheap. If the utility needed to build a new nuclear plant (example) they would have to go to the state commission and get them to approve raising the rates. Now, although rates were fairly cheap, there was a push to deregulate things. In theory, markets are less efficient in some ways, but more in others such as incentivizing new and more efficient technology. Remember the regulated utility doesn't make any more money by doing research and risking new technology.
With deregulation, we moved to the RTO/ISO model where lots of utilities band together and work with an RTO/ISO. The RTO/ISO chooses which units run via optimization. It wants to find a way to serve all the customers in the region, plus provide backup power, and do it very cheaply. Remember how the utility has to keep extra units online in case one trips? By banding together into what is known as a "pool" you can save lots of money as far fewer units need to be online as backup. The RTO/ISO does this as well. It also knows the cost of each unit and chooses the cheapest ones. This is slowly forcing more costly fossil fuels to retire as they simply aren't as economical. This causes an issue as even though wind/solar is awesome, it isn't as reliable as a massive coal plant with months of fuel waiting to be used. Making sure there are no blackouts is VERY important to grid operators. The industry is scrambling to address these issues as fast as possible, but it is a tough issue. Deregulation is a weird word as utilities are still regulated, but there are now market forces coupled into it as well helping push progress forwards. I hope that helps a bit!
I used to aim people at "PJM 101"[1], which is PJM's tutorial on how the power grid really works. But they put it behind a login for a while. I asked them why. Now, it's out from behind the login.
But now it's in Adobe Captivate, which is apparently what Adobe has convinced some former Flash users to use. Doesn't work in Firefox and tries to get me to install Chrome. Useful info, though. Explains clearly what a power grid does every day.
A related question to the community, if you have ~5 years of experience, is it okay to have a resume that is more than one page? This includes other sections besides experience (i.e. skills).
What are the communities' thoughts on length of resume?
You can attach a GPU for free, and, if I recall, even a TPU. See https://colab.research.google.com/notebooks/gpu.ipynb