Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets

> It's not such a favorable outcome for engineers

It's a favorable outcome for people who want stability. There is huge value in knowing that you're not going to get fired unless you do something actively malicious.

Some people aren't interested in climbing, have poor interviewing skills, and don't want to deal with the cognitive overhead of learning a different company's tech stack every two years. Plus, most companies tie vacation time to seniority, so being able to stay at a company for 10+ years means you'll get to have four weeks of vacation every year, while people who switch jobs every two years will always be stuck at two.

"It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission" is actually a Grace Hopper quote, so not Silicon Valley. Depending on the circumstances, it can be good advice.

And "move fast and break things" was about code, not about the world at large. It's a coding "philosophy" for getting shit done, that worked very well for Facebook and did not actually harm people.

> People have such an impetus for Musk's downfall but a few off colour or poorly thought out tweets is nothing compared to...

I thought we were talking about questionable characteristics of these people and how it might lead to their downfall. I could easily see Elon Musk get sued for unsafe working conditions from years ago, or a fraudulent claim about Autopilot's capability, or for libel by attacking people unnecessarily on twitter (accusing a diver of being a pedophile is pretty fucking weird).

I remember talking to extremely well-paid lawyers in the industry before the Alphabet vs. Uber case saying there was nothing they could do to Levandowski. Let's circle back in 5 years and see how Musk is doing then.

Yes, the truth is more nuanced: production is a collective endeavor that requires knowledge, energy, raw materials, labor, and capital equipment. Here in Argentina, the government is still in the hands of landowners, who control the raw materials, just like in the medieval feudal system. The US, on the other hand, is largely run by investors, whose access to capital to invest in capital equipment was the crucial limiting resource in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The difference is that capital equipment is not the crucial limiting resource for programming, or even for building self-driving cars.

Consider a steelworker: perhaps he earns US$80,000 a year, but he is operating two million dollars' worth of steel mill. (More accurately, a hundred steelworkers are collectively operating a steel mill worth two hundred million dollars.) If he (and his coworkers) were to save 10% of their salaries, they could build their own steel mill after 250 years. It's understandable that in such a situation most of the bargaining power is with the investor.

Contrast that with our situation. A typical salary in our profession is US$150,000 per year. A nice laptop costs US$2000. A nice rackmount server, even if you can't be satisfied with a VPS, might cost US$500. (And I used to host my website on dialup in my house, and cable modem connections today are a hundred times faster than colocated data-center bandwidth was 20 years ago.) This is two months of savings, not 250 years. So we have a lot more bargaining power, and that's one reason we're able to demand so much more money than the steelworker.

This is a terrible situation for investors, or for that matter managers of big companies. They are left without bargaining power through ownership of capital goods; they therefore struggle to recapture that bargaining power by lobbying, litigation, and of course illegal wage-fixing conspiracies like the one Google was involved in a few years ago. Aside from its dismal implications for us as individuals, this development will discourage talented young people from going into engineering — law or management will be more lucrative.

Law is zero-sum: a case that one lawyer loses, another wins. Management is largely zero-sum, a popularity-contest game of corporate politics to obtain control over more of the company's short-term fixed pool of resources. Engineering is positive-sum: what one engineer produces, another can buiild off of.

So what does a country look like when its talented young people choose law or management over science, engineering, or medicine? René Favaloro commits suicide; young people idolize Maradona rather than Einstein, and play football rather than experimenting with chemistry sets or building ham radios; its nuclear fusion program is a fraud; it imports its computers from China, then does the last assembly step locally, in order to capture the windfall value of government protectionist measures designed to develop local industry; the talented young people who do go into science or engineering (including programming) usually emigrate, often to a country with better universities. Argentina has been this way for a century or more, and the US is starting to become this way, too.

But it's worth pointing out that, even in the middle of the 20th century, the US wasn't that way, and that's how Silicon Valley was able to exist in the first place.