In short, employers have some degree of power over you, and if you perceive people who wield power over you as wielding that power arbitrarily, that is nearly universally experienced as frustrating.
In GP's case, the arbitrariness originates from their potential employer not taking the effort to really evaluate GP's relevant skills in software engineering, but instead resorting to lazily ticking boxes on a checklist. And what's on the checklist isn't even particularly relevant.
What I imagine this does to GP's view of the world (based on what it would do to mine) is: "I believe I am competent because I've built up a set of subtle skills in software engineering over many years, and this is what I take pride in. But from an employment point of view, this is wasted time: I should instead have focused on optimizing the checklist (and I only found this out after years in the industry)."
COVID makes it worse, but the erosion of participation in structured social groups (fraternal organizations, sports leagues, churches, etc.) has been on the decline for a long, long time. Less participation means less funding means less outreach means even less participation means less groups in total, means less participation, etc.; down and down it goes. Now even the paycheck-compelled participation in the office environment is eroding.
For many people, making new friends as an adult gets harder with age. Part of that is that we're not compelled to join things like we were as children. Part of it is that we have the cumulative time and means to create our own favored environments - my house has some kick-ass stuff in it and air conditioning, so why would I leave it? :D I kid, but kinda not.
As I've gotten older, I've made a point to get more involved in entirely voluntary organizations (collector's groups, church, etc) and it takes work. It's rewarding on the balance - good for my personal growth and good for the group assuming they would agree that I bring a modicum of value to the table - but it takes a dedication that doesn't come easy. Kind of like exercise, right?
An antipattern here is expecting to replicate your quality childhood friendships quickly. Friendships, particularly intimate friendships, take a long time and many shared experiences. 80% of the job is just showing up, so nothing kills budding friendship opportunities like flaking out one too many times. Show up!
What is trying to be expressed by "highest form of wealth" is usually about agency.
The problem with agency, unlike what 'power' connotes you to believe; you can't just have and store it for later. Like others rightly point out in this thread, there are many avenues in life you want to be agentic but cannot solve with anything you possess, but only through becoming a required thing through transformation; examples are health, skillfulness, being understood in a relationship, an equanimous existence etc. Even then, you're to an extent up to the whims of misfortune and fortune, or if you're not allergic to that word; to fate. There is at least one thing you can't be agentic about with any wealth, and that is your fatality; which connects to the original meaning of fate.
But that's not even the only problem with agency; most of the time you don't even know when you have it and also when you don't have it. This is the bread and butter of psychotherapy; you either misattribute blame where it doesn't belong or fail to hold people/yourself accountable when you should; or you miss what and how you could solve a problem but instead invest your energy and emotions in an avenue that just won't work.
Which means agency, capability of doing things that get you towards your real goals, whether you've realized them or not, is deeply tied to wisdom; knowing in which manner you're deceiving yourself be it through buying things instead of being things, or getting out of being confused about whose agency exactly lies where and where is the way out of an agentic entrapment.
Which ultimately means, there is one and one only form of wealth, that thing you constantly need to aspire to build, and that is wisdom.
I know many new college grads who got offers from multiple tier-1 and tier-2 silicon valley software companies in the same range as what I got as a senior engineer with 8 years of experience a few years ago. I'm talking base salary $160K-$180K, $300K equity grant, 10% annual bonus, sign on bonus, relocation...the works.
Not to say that everyone can simply walk in to these jobs (and they shouldn't!), but if a graduating CS major cannot find any decent software job today I'd be more inclined to suspect their skills than the industry itself.
Selling is just convincing the other person that you have the (best) solution to their problems and that it's cheaper than dealing with the problem.
Good selling is invisible, because the customer convinces themselves. You don't remember why you picked your car model or why you thought an expensive sugar drink would cure your thirst better. Don't copy "salesmen".
Problem mastery: I once interviewed for a job selling oscilloscopes. The guy who interviewed before me was charismatic; I doubted I'd get the job. But I was the best pick because of technical ability. The boss said that sales was easy to learn, but the customers didn't care about your sales skill, they just wanted to know that you understood the oscilloscopes and weren't bullshitting them.
Dance: Nature has mating dances. There's a kind of sales dance too. It's a suit. It's a cup of coffee and a sandwich. It's "Are you free for a zoom call Monday or Wednesday? We give free t-shirts." It's the Product Hunt newsletter. The other person has to know they are being sold to and consent to it. The sandwich helps them think they didn't just waste an hour.
Storytelling: It's a natural way to communicate. Testimonials are the most effective. A video works too. A list of features works for some people (see dance) but it helps if they can visualize the solution. An effective trick is to inspect element their site and plant in your solution, then email them the screenshots.
Keep it short: A pitch is like a joke. The longer it is, the less impact it has. Cut out as many syllables as you can.
Follow up: Very often the timing is wrong or they have to compare options. Sometimes they won't reply at all. If there's one sales "trick" that works, it's following up.
> The public key is only written to the blockchain when you spend coin from that address
As Canada points out[1], there is a window when it's revealed to the mempool but not yet committed to the blockchain. During that time, even a single-use address is not QC safe.
> There is a core group annointed by someone legendary who doesn't really participate much, a senate of old guard who run things in the background, some quirky legacies who are tolerated but marginal, a few social queen bee types who gatekeep and police the tone, and then a lot of social butterflies who promote and attract people into the gateway funnel. It's the model of leader/essentials/influentials/interchangeables model.
I recently started a new role at a large Enterprise after having worked in startups for the past 10 years and have been annoyed by the culture in the company. What you describe seems to fit more or less my feelings about the business. There is the typical clique around the CEO of bonus collectors, they want to hire loads of people "to go faster" and do things "different" but at the same time people who have been there for a while (often a long time) want to keep people out so they can keep working in sleepy town and have business as usual. etc. A similar dynamic. Interesting.
Very little. This is a result of the private equity market growing so large that companies can put off going public for very long (Coinbase raised $800 million and the last round was "Series E").
10-15 years ago, it was much more difficult for companies to raise this much before going public, which forced companies to go public much earlier, before all upside was realized by private investors.
The result is private equity and VC funds benefit from the early gains, and by the time the company becomes public (and is accessible to retail investors) there's typically not much of a lucrative near-term upside opportunity.
The same thing will happen with Stripe once they finally IPO. They'll debut at an insane valuation, and there won't be much upside opportunity for retail investors to benefit from. Because if there were, they would be able to more easily raise the capital from private investors rather than the public market.
I'm a firm believer in leaky abstractions [1]. I often found with JPA that I would be fighting the framework to get it to produce the SQL that I wanted. I encountered (then) ibatis and it was a breath of fresh air. It took care of much of the tedious column-to-Java mapping and didn't introduce another DSL.
As soon as anyone tells you "you don't need to learn X with our framework Y that sits on top of it", all that means is you have to learn X, Y and the X->Y and Y->X translations and all but the first is proprietary.
This was my core issue with GWT (Google Web Toolkit) too. Too many engineers who weren't interested in learning Javascript saw it as a way of avoiding learning Javascript.
It's been many years at this point since I've used it so this may have changed but I recall that query verification was a runtime error issue and there wasn't a good way to essentially check that all your queries were valid. I mean you could write this yourself but it seems like some CI/automation could've done a lot of the heavy-lifting.
IIRC the same went for integration testing and stub databases for reading and writing via ibatis/mybatis.
I worked on a team that interfaced directly with the semi-technical "Customer Account Managers" who did the technical setup for customers on our system. The system itself was pretty old, written by people who no longer worked at the company. There are often a number of things that are wrong with the system or don't scale, and every week there is a new issue that would bring down the system.
Without the right manager/PM, other teams would constantly blame my team for fucking up. But every time we tried to work on things that would improve system behavior, a new feature would take priority, or some other thing would blow up requiring the entire teams focus to fix it.
So even though we wanted to fix things, we were in this state where we couldn't put out fires long enough to fix the fundamental problems with the system.
> Says Cramer: What's important when you're in that hedgefund mode, is to not do anything remotely truthful, because the truth is so against your view, so its important to CREATE A NEW TRUTH to develop a fiction...the great thing about the market is it has absolutely nothing to do with the actual stocks
Who would have eaten at a place like this? e.g. wealthy tourists, middle class, laborers? I’m trying to contextualize this in the cost of living in the region in those times. This is the best source I found, but there’s no entry for takeout food, and it’s not clear what all these wages mean in terms of, say, monthly income:
This reminds me of a Burning Code celebration my team once had at ocean beach in SF.
We'd been slowly migrating from Angular 1.X to React (internally: the Angularpocalypse) for a few years and we'd finally migrated over our last few pages. The result was about 100k lines of JS and Rails code that could be safely deleted in a single PR. It had been such a long slog, though, that we felt the team deserved some catharsis.
We took a team-offsite day to gather on a nearby beach and burn the deleted code. In the interest of not wasting that much paper, we burnt a complete list of the deleted files in super-tiny font on a couple pages. We also each grabbed our least-favorite areas of the codebase to print out, including several dramatic readings. My selection was a section of code from about 4 years prior with a comment like //TODO: replace this asap.
I highly recommend it to anyone facing a long, clearly-delineated migration. Gift your old, shameful code to the flame.
I want to add my own advice. You remember that culture fit part of the interview that every company does? It’s never about finding out if your young dumb and ready to fuck. It’s about are you willing to put up with a certain management style. That’s the job offer, you are being offered money to be able to professionally handle their people system. If you are okay with handling it, you can work there.
Things that will help probe in that phase of the interview:
- Ask about deadlines.
- Ask about requirements, how much do they have, how often they change, who makes the final call, how are they scoped initially, how involved are the stakeholders.
- Beyond unit testing, how is QA handled, how is user acceptance testing handled, how does all of this affect timelines.
- Ask for a roadmap, can they tell you what they plan on building in the next year. Some managers don’t share this information with their team in general, so expect a solid ‘not sure, but we have stuff promise’ type response (which gives you an answer on transparency).
- Why do they need one more person on the team? Here you really want to find out their current bottlenecks. Then probe deeper and find out if the bottlenecks are a lack of labor, or systemic issues (see above bullet points). Scary answers include ‘no roadmap, and everything is on time’ - so why do you need me?
- The dance with the manager at a startup could eliminate you as they are still looking for people that will put up with absolutely anything. But, they might also be ready for more process oriented people. Again, you have to signal who you are. If these things don’t matter to you, go with the ‘I eat sleep and code answer’.
If you sufficiently annoyed them at the end of those questions, both you and the company will agree in a non-spoken dance that you won’t be happy in their management style.
If you really really just need a check, don’t ever ask questions like that. Just say, ‘I build stuff on my spare time constantly, and I just love development, so I think this would be a great opportunity to grow’. You are signaling you are desperate and ready to fuck.
Small things to consider, if you ask those questions to a regular dev on their team, you will get feedback that you might not fit (so don’t ask the team these questions). Save it for the manager, and negotiate with the unspoken dance directly.
Best of luck, culture fit is definitely how the manager and you maintain healthiness, what you can put up, and what they can put up with. Even the most toxic manager has some humanity, and it is also exhausting for him/her to deal with unhappy people. Work together in the culture fit part to parse if everyone’s expectation is within reach.
The end goal of all of this is you don’t walk away from the job because you didn’t know what you got yourself into. You’re an adult, go into everything with both eyes open, no crying at the end.
Well yes, for many of the young working class - rent is eating up over 2/3rd of their paychecks.
We are being scammed by the Bourgeoisie with inherited wealth.
This explains our situation well imo:
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"So where did our land system come from?
Weirdly enough, the land system that we have today has its origins in a problem specific to medieval kings, which is ‘how do I fund military campaigns and defence, without paying to keep a standing army?’
And it was William the Conqueror who perfected the answer. It was a piece of paper. And on that piece of paper was basically an agreement between the Crown and a noble, saying ‘if you provide men for military campaigns when I ask, in exchange I will grant you a monopoly over your own private fiefdom, where you can levy as high taxes as people can bear to pay’.
So effectively — rent is the original tax, paid via lords to the King.
In fact the word ‘feudal’ derives from the latin word feudalis — for ‘fee’. In other words, rent. So the whole system of government by which the Normans ruled over the Anglo Saxons was based on rent.
If you’re a King, there’s only really three groups of people you’re scared of: other kings, your family, and your nobles. So over time landowners managed to engineer a set of concessions, whereby increasingly taxes were levied directly on people and business, leaving them (the lords) as the owners of a monopoly right to extract privatised land tax.
So what you’re left with is a set of power relations in society: an enforced system of servitude and control. As the economist Henry George pointed out, it is essentially a diluted version of slavery.
“Ownership of land always gives ownership of people… Place one hundred people on an island from which there is no escape. Make one of them the absolute owner of the others — or the absolute owner of the soil. It will make no difference — either to owner or to the others — which one you choose. Either way, one individual will be the absolute master of the other ninety-nine.”
Fast forward a few hundred years, to post-civil-war America and that’s exactly what played out. The plantation owners could no longer own slaves, so what they said is ‘Ok, I’ll pay you, say, $2 dollars a day’ — but by the way, I own the land, and the rent is… $2 a day.’’. Which, incidentally, led to the invention of a clever invention called a ‘chattel house’ which was a kind of kit house that gave families of plantation workers the ability to relocate to try to escape exploitative landlords."
Fast forward again to today, and land is still the fundamental mechanism of racial inequity. To be blunt, all across the UK and the US, there are tenants with black and brown skin paying rent to landlords and mortgage lenders with white skin. Or commuting for hours. Or both.
I imagine all of you have seen the speech made a couple of weeks ago by a young American writer called Kimberly Jones — if you haven’t, do — it’s absolutely the most eloquent piece of public speaking I’ve seen in a long time (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llci8MVh8J4). In it she uses this incredible image of getting white people to imagine what it feels like to play “four hundred rounds of Monopoly” with the game rigged against you, enforced by violence. There’s an interesting backstory here, that you may know, which is that the game of monopoly was first invented by a woman called Elizabeth Magie — and originally called ‘The Landlords Game’ and it was created so that… basically one day someone could make exactly the speech that Kimberly Jones just did.
So, broadly speaking — and I’m simplifying here — there were two positions in this power diagram. Tenant and landlord.
And over time that piece of paper became a tradable asset, as well as an inheritable one: so you can literally buy the right to extract taxes from people. And it’s amazing to me that we don’t find that more weird than we do — it’s right there hidden in plain sight in the language we use: landlord.
But such an extreme overclass/underclass diagram is politically hard to sustain. So, over time we saw the slow emergence of a middle position, which is for those who could get together just enough money to buy their own freedom from rent. Again, that’s why we have the word ‘Freehold’; it’s not free as in ‘no cost’ it’s free as in, ‘liberty’."
"There are many kinds of monopoly, from utilities to pharmaceutical patents, but the greatest – the ‘mother of all monopolies’ as Churchill described it – is land. Land rents are a weird leftover of the medieval feudal system: a privatised location tax that is suffocating every Westernised economy today."
"It is worth remembering that there is no political argument —Left, Liberal or Right — that even attempts to justify economic rent-seeking on the basis of principle. You will not find one in any book. Adam Smith was against it, Karl Marx was against it, Keynes was against it, Friedman was against it. Even Ayn Rand was against it. Economic rent-seeking survives only in the dark, by obfuscation, distraction, corruption and perverse incentives. It endures only because it has not been part our political language for the last century, and in the tussle of everyday life, we are all susceptible to quietly putting our own short-term convenience ahead of our principles if we can get away with it (then justifying it to ourselves later)."
In GP's case, the arbitrariness originates from their potential employer not taking the effort to really evaluate GP's relevant skills in software engineering, but instead resorting to lazily ticking boxes on a checklist. And what's on the checklist isn't even particularly relevant.
What I imagine this does to GP's view of the world (based on what it would do to mine) is: "I believe I am competent because I've built up a set of subtle skills in software engineering over many years, and this is what I take pride in. But from an employment point of view, this is wasted time: I should instead have focused on optimizing the checklist (and I only found this out after years in the industry)."