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You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

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Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#131

Post by th0ma5 »

molteanu wrote: post #23

I've told myself countless times lately, that it is simply not possible for young graduates to come to work knowing basically nothing, surfing fb and youtube all day long and then go buy cars and going to Greece as their very first vacation. Something, somewhere, just stinks badly. I've literally never seen a challenging and well run project in almost 10 years in this business. Always late, always overstaffed, always…

> I've literally never seen a challenging and well run project in almost 10 years in this business.

I'm not sure the direction of causality here. Reminds me of "In theory, practice is just like theory, but in practice it rarely is."

I think your ideals are pushing you to great places, but your experience is showing you that it either doesn't exist or at least you haven't found it yet. I've been a part of projects that I'm very proud of that have all kinds of awfulness that I'd rather have not done. Still pretty good work in my opinion, and I'm not sure that good work is fully purposeful and correct at every point.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#132

Post by wbl »

bsenftner wrote: post #118
headmelted wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“I've literally never seen a challenging and well run project in almost 10 years in this business. Always late, always overstaffed, always endless meetings and poorly trained people that nevertheless earn well above the median wage so the incentive to improve onself is almost zero” This was actually painful to read because of how much truth there is in it.

It take a stabilization of the technologies and processes. In the early CG and VFX animation industry it was chaos too, but now many production studios are run tighter than a military operation. Experience in a moderately recent war feature with a good sized VFX budget, the military advisers remarked how the film set and following post production was better run than their real world military campaigns.

"In war everything is simple, but the simplest things are difficult."-Clauswitz. I would trust SNAFU exists for a reason.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#133

Post by DennisP »

I'll just mention there are a bunch of privately-funded fusion reactor projects, including TAE, General Fusion, Commonwealth, Tokamak Energy, LPP, Helion (funded in part by YCombinator), and others.

There are also lots of companies working on molten salt reactors. In theory that's easier than fusion, but governments are more prickly about letting you work on fission.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#134

Post by stereolambda »

molteanu wrote: post #23

I've told myself countless times lately, that it is simply not possible for young graduates to come to work knowing basically nothing, surfing fb and youtube all day long and then go buy cars and going to Greece as their very first vacation. Something, somewhere, just stinks badly. I've literally never seen a challenging and well run project in almost 10 years in this business. Always late, always overstaffed, always…

Some of this rings true, although I know some idealistic people in their twenties (I don't hang out that much in CS circles though).

But I would argue there are also legitimate reasons to choose computer tech over hard science. In the former you have the chance to potentially do some independent, self-directed work or at least achieve financial independence. This means you could do something with your agency. The latter puts you into the bureaucratic machine with fierce institutional, metrics-driven competition. You hardly can do anything without a grant given by some political or commercial interest.

Many people would also be anxious about what our current political and economic system could do with further major breakthroughs - on the scale of nuclear, say. More concentration of power is likely. This is also what the "communications-driven innovation" (per the article) seems to have brought, but this seems trivial compared to impact of biological engineering, tampering with the actual nervous system or whatever.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#135

Post by ethbro »

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #124
headmelted wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“I've literally never seen a challenging and well run project in almost 10 years in this business. Always late, always overstaffed, always endless meetings and poorly trained people that nevertheless earn well above the median wage so the incentive to improve onself is almost zero” This was actually painful to read because of how much truth there is in it.

I can say I worked on one. But because it was well managed, small team, everyone listened to each other's areas of respective expertise and authority, we wrapped it up in a year on a 6 digit budget. Meanwhile, a previous project elsewhere i have experience with, had a team of approx 30 cycle through, 10 to 20 external consultants (some flown in and put up in hotels, but who had no actual experience in the things they…

From my experience in consulting and internal, there are two major things you can do.

1) Use objective KPIs + encourage a culture of admitting, taking responsibility for, and being forgiven for failure

Failing to admit failure is incredibly toxic to ongoing corporate functioning, and a culture that doesn't allow for it endlessly moves goalposts until there is success (by some metric) without motion (by objective metrics).

2) Don't allow anyone to overscope sprints

If all the "team" can accomplish is a "Hello World" in the next week, then that's the goal. Better to be honest than slide down the slippery slope of lying to ourselves.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#136

Post by peruvian »

chrisseaton wrote: post #33
molteanu wrote: post #23

I've told myself countless times lately, that it is simply not possible for young graduates to come to work knowing basically nothing, surfing fb and youtube all day long and then go buy cars and going to Greece as their very first vacation. Something, somewhere, just stinks badly. I've literally never seen a challenging and well run project in almost 10 years in this business. Always late, always overstaffed, always…

> I've told myself countless times lately, that it is simply not possible for young graduates to come to work knowing basically nothing, surfing fb and youtube all day long and then go buy cars and going to Greece as their very first vacation. Something, somewhere, just stinks badly. What is this in reference to? Where do buying cars and holidays in Greece come into this article? Is there a stereotype of programmers…

Last year and this summer Greece was the trendy vacation location for millennials aged 23-30, most of which work in the tech space and thus can afford such vacations (often in lieu of retirement plans/savings though).

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#138

Post by foobaziod7363 »

base698 wrote: post #116
undefined3840 wrote: post #90

I’m surprised this article is so upvoted. 1. The author took this nearly word for word from Thiel/Eric Weinstein, who have both discussed this point extensively, most recently on Weinstein’s podcast. 2. The author is using this click bait headline to discuss his own industry/company, and this looks like some content marketing piece.

Link?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM9f0W2KD5s

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#139

Post by ethbro »

jbay808 wrote: post #85
molteanu wrote: post #23

I've told myself countless times lately, that it is simply not possible for young graduates to come to work knowing basically nothing, surfing fb and youtube all day long and then go buy cars and going to Greece as their very first vacation. Something, somewhere, just stinks badly. I've literally never seen a challenging and well run project in almost 10 years in this business. Always late, always overstaffed, always…

I think the reason software pays so well is because the world is simply littered with computers. Today's software developers are earning a fortune from the fertile soil that has been spread around in the form of computers in everyone's pockets. Making those computers x% more useful to y% of their owners scales as a function of the number of computer owners. The fruit keeps hanging lower and lower to the point that it…

It's generalizable and something I'm confused they don't teach kids in career counseling.

Max(salary) = unit_value * number_of_units_impacted

Software generates a high ceiling because number of units impacted can be huge, so unit value can be low.

In contrast, you can only pay teachers / doctors / firefighters / police officers so much, because their number of units impacted has a fundamental cap (the number of people they can physically interact with in a given day).

Which is... unfortunate. Because (IMHO) they deliver a lot more value to society, and work harder, than I do.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#140

Post by buboard »

DennisP wrote: post #122
buboard wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why would NASA want to drive down the cost of space? I mean, they would want to drive it down in order to go farther in space, but their mission is to explore space, not be the uber for space the criticism of their research budget is valid though, they need to be more ambitious and driven

Then NASA should completely give up being the uber for space, instead of spending gobs of money on SLS. But if you are going to get into the launch business, then do it right.

i mean, they also want a cheaper kind of flight, but for different reasons
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