521–530 of 560 posts
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I'll take intentions over wilful ignorance any day
Ignorant/mistaken good intentions can do great harm. The difference comes when someone is told that they are doing harm. Do they stop or carry on?
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> This kind of post-facto justification for poor working conditions or wages needs a name, so it can be dismissed out of hand. This seems to capture the current intellectual zeitgeist very well. Once we name something, we can dismiss it without engaging it. I was going to read the rest of your comment, but I decided it was "Jacobin whinging" so I realized I didn't have to.
> This seems to capture the current intellectual zeitgeist very well. Once we name something, we can dismiss it without engaging it. In the internet age, this is a necessity because the other pattern is the same claims repeated over and over again with the expectation that a comprehensive rebuttal must be provided each time. At some point you have to name the thing so it can be added as an entry to Wikipedia and move…
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The difference is the nuclear arms race was inevitable. The soviets would have made it eventually anyway, and then what would we (the US) have done? Facebook on the other hand is not inevitable.
If Facebook hadn't succeeded another, similar network would have
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Generally it's FAANG (minus Amazon, plus some unicorns), for the reasons mentioned above: a very good balance of excellent compensation, talented peers to work with, and interesting work. Joining these companies in the right teams is literally what makes it possible to have an exciting technical career AND the guarantee of being able to retire (or more generally, gain financial freedom) in your early/mid 40s, if one…
> Seriously, it's the only decision that makes sense if one has the chops to get into one of those places. For you, sure. There are better ways I can think of spending my 20s and 30s than just setting up for retirement in my 40s, because when you're in your 40s, you're not in your 20s or 30s anymore.
- It allowed me to immigrate to the US and become a citizen in 8 years, coming from a poor European country, thanks to my engineering background I obtained by getting a BS + MS in computer engineering while other acquaintances were going down an easier path (e.g. "I don't want to waste my early 20s studying").
- It allowed me to live in San Francisco, an absolutely amazing city where I am having the time of my life, cultivating relationships with my diverse group of friends, exploring nature, ...
- It allowed me to work on very interesting projects and technical work.
- It allowed me to travel without worrying about budgeting, I take a month of international travel every year and in between jobs I took a 4 months break to explore more deeply SE Asia.
- All that hard work allowed me to be incredibly well compensated, and in my very early 30s my liquid net worth is in the 7 figures now (started from exactly 0 out of school), which gives me an immense freedom for the rest of my life.
So, I didn't "_just_ set up for retirement", and had I been in FAANG I would have likely done exactly the same (since that's what my friends working there do), just being paid more so right now my net worth would be even higher.
I'll certainly agree to disagree since my statement was perhaps too strong, but I just wanted to bring the perspective that one can work hard with an early retirement goal without giving up on the things that one could "otherwise enjoy" if pursuing a different goal.
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Mission statements are always bullshit. The reason being that I have never seen a case where, when push comes to shove, that a company would forgo needed revenue if it contradicted their mission statement. Instead what happens is that leaders go through mental gymnastics trying to show "No, it still aligns with our mission statement, you just have to twist the meaning of the words in the mission statement beyond any…
Usually mission statements are crafted to align incentives between employees and customers (or users, if the product you sell to customers is users' attention). The company's mission should focus on what the customer is trying to achieve with the company's product. As the company works toward that mission, customers accomplish their goals, they become dependent upon the product, they fork over lots of money, and the…
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"Pay is determined chiefly by supply and demand in the labor market. Jobs that are more fun pay less because the supply of workers is higher. Fairness is literally not part of this equation." I think the implication is that society and technology have advanced to the point where, ostensibly, work that can't be automated away should be work that would demand a living wage. If it's tenable for my job to still exist, it…
> I think it's funny that you mention $50/hr for delivering papers as if we should be aghast at the mere thought. $50/hr for delivering papers would most likely cause the prompt and total collapse of the local economy. If you think otherwise, why stop at merely $50/hour? I'm only aghast that the proposed cure is actually much worse than the disease! > But as a society, at some point it would be prudent to look around…
I imagine it would merely cause the prompt and total collapse of the paperboy position, until efficiencies were created to support it (e.x., there's only one paperboy for n square miles, they oversee a swarm of paper-delivering drones, and the number of papers they deliver justifies a $50/hr salary); people simply decided that physical paper delivery wasn't worth the cost; or they decided that it was worth it, and had their pay and expenses adjusted commensurately.
>I'm only aghast that the proposed cure is actually much worse than the disease!
I'm not sure you've proven that.
>I agree wholeheartedly, but I'd guess we probably disagree on the remedy. I'd defer to the market which would of course require a free market to exist in the first place for things like housing.
The laissez-faire approach to market management is what "innovated" tent cities into existence in the first place, man.
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> In western societies, no job should pay less than a living wage... Pay is determined chiefly by supply and demand in the labor market. Jobs that are more fun pay less because the supply of workers is higher. Fairness is literally not part of this equation. > On the other side of the ledger, you have immigrants with medical degrees, who are driving cabs for minimum wage. Medical licenses are controlled by the govern…
All snark aside, why should we pay a high school paperboy a living wage? Because we, as a society, are paying that paperboy* a living wage one way or another. The alternative is to let him starve to freeze to death. So, we build robust safety nets to catch these people - food stamps, housing assistance, etc. Wouldn't it be more efficient to simply pay the person a living wage vs pumping the money through government p…
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Actually, we know from the Milgram Experiment[1] that most people just compromise their morals for authority figures regardless of pay. Most people aren't bad inherently they just do what they are told and then alter their world view to justify what they've done because internally we generally don't think of ourselves as bad people. So if you do nasty things to someone because someone else in authority tells you to,…
This is a good point, however, I think this would apply more to workers who have already been employed for awhile. Anyone joining should have the sense they'll be subjected to dubious practices.
None of the subjects had been through the experiment before.
They were all commanded by an authority figer (man in a white coat with a clipboard) to shock an unseen but heard fellow subject with increasingly large voltages. The "victim" was an actor who begs for mercy with each shock and then suddenly goes quiet. The experiment goes on with the subject shocking the "dead" actor when it finishes.
Most did what they were told with no complaints.
Some complained that what they were doing was wrong but still did it anyway.
Only a very few said "no I won't do that, it's wrong" and left the experiment.
There's no reason to think that the people working for Facebook or Google are any different to those test subjects. They'll spread fake news, dodge taxes or compile massive amounts of data on people just because they're told to by their boss. Just like most other people would.
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Hey what are the top challenges that Facebook offer? I dont work in tech and follow HN as I find the less technical posts interesting, and I can’t grasp why people want to work in many of these companies, like where is the buzz from working at Facebook now?
Downvotes but no responses... But seriously, its already built to a huge scale, its core product that people actually use (newsfeed / apps) havn’t changed in years(functionally - I’m sure the code base has..). is it the appeal of working on a product used by a significant proportion of the worlds population or just working at a huge company?
Here for a preview of something that is completely led by Facebook due to their scalability needs, and that most small/mid/large employers would never have the resources to fund, or the need to pursue: https://code.fb.com/open-source/linux/
All these projects have had major contributions during 2018, so not everything has been "figured out" yet.
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> IMO, what we really need is more automation, plus a Basic Income so that people forced out of work by the automation can still enjoy the fruits of society's success without having to toil in some pointless bullshit job, and perhaps use their free time and efforts to do something more productive (like start an innovative new business, write a best-selling book like Harry Potter's author, etc.). How do you decide wha…
>How do you decide what is a pointless bullshit job? Market forces: if you have a universal basic income in place (so people don't have to work to avoid starvation), coupled with ever-increasing automation, then there's going to be fewer and fewer pointless bullshit jobs. Businesses aren't going to be able to afford to employ people to do bullshit when they have to pay enough to make them want to come to work, and wh…
"Pointless" and "bullshit" seem like value judgments, not economic judgments. Why not simply say they are "cheaper to automate than to pay a human for"?
Suppose, though, that they are economic judgments. If the market were persuaded that working was a good whose value outweighed the cost savings of automation, then wouldn't said jobs be perforce, uh, "pointful" and smell better?
> They're jobs that provide real value to the employer, and which they can't just automate away.
In that vein, why should it be that employers should determine the value of a job? I'm genuinely curious in your opinion here, not trying to beg the question.