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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

#141

Post by petre »

molteanu wrote: post #43
chrisseaton wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In reference to all the money being invested in questionable places.

Doesn't make any sense though. Most people need a car to travel from A to B and a vacation to relax and be able to continue to work properly instead of quitting.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#142

Post by randomsearch »

ben_w wrote: post #108
randomsearch wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thought: is the migration of manufacturing away from western countries part of the problem? Lots of innovation in software in the US or UK, but less in manufacturing - perhaps because the skills aren’t there?

Is there really a lack of innovation in manufacturing? 3D printers (hyped though they are) are improving rapidly. Nanoscale stuff (not just graphene and chips, but also those) are seeing a lot of progress. I’m not in hardware though, so I can’t tell if that’s part of a trend or not.

Oh, sorry, I mean - as in innovation in hardware products rather than the manufacturing process itself.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#143

Post by sweeneyrod »

mundo wrote: post #84
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…

How much of this is due to venture capital? Like, if it were possible to make a billion dollars by investing in 100 plumbing companies even if 99 of them turn out to have been dumb, would plumbers make $250K out of college?

My impression is not much; high salaries are instead driven by Google/FB etc.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#144

Post by pmiller2 »

gorgoiler wrote: post #113
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…

Product engineers may be a mess but infrastructure engineers in this industry are capable of incredible works of human achievement. The product punks, fresh out of college, throw together all kinds of whacky code in the name of front end product — which to their credit becomes incredibly popular with millions of people. It’s usually also incomplete bug ridden nonsense. The real magic is in seeing infrastructure engin…

This is kind of an amusing metaphor. But, if infrastructure engineers are the zookeepers, does that make the front end and mobile engineers the animals? And what about the backend engineers?

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#145

Post by beefalo »

mundo wrote: post #84
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…

How much of this is due to venture capital? Like, if it were possible to make a billion dollars by investing in 100 plumbing companies even if 99 of them turn out to have been dumb, would plumbers make $250K out of college?

Only if you figured out how to sell a self serve $15/month plumbing service or run advertising through the pipes

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#146

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

ethbro wrote: post #139
jbay808 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peopl…

Bullshit Jobs includes an interesting section about the IT professions saying that 'noone wants to pay to develop a database that is amazing, but people will pay millions to someone who increases clickthrough on an ad of even a 0.1%.'

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#147

Post by itronitron »

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #128
joe_the_user wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as much, if you consider what it would be like, who would want to be stuck on a martian mining colony ... without any social networking . Social networking might have it's downsides but it's rather a boon to people stuck in areas of extreme boredom and isolation. The thing one can regret about the aesthetics of modern life, including social networking, is that it's made the uniqueness of places less (a social ne…

I'd love to hang out on the martian web. Sounds cool as hell, and a lot healthier than earth web.

you could create one here on earth, and sell connected 'pods' that people could live out of from their parents' basements (only half joking)

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#148

Post by pmiller2 »

ethbro wrote: post #139
jbay808 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peopl…

Congratulations. You just discovered the Baumol effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#149

Post by jacobwilliamroy »

shkkmo wrote: post #74
Barrin92 wrote: post #6

I think it's great that there's a renewed discussion about the nature of productivity and growth and that people are starting to become aware that economic profit or consumer demand are not the same as progress on long term fundamental science and manufacturing. For way too long now we have all operated on the mainstream economic view that productivity growth is somehow like manna from the heavens and that we only ne…

What we need is progressively stricter tariffs paired with looser immigration laws. We need to force companies that want to efficiently compete for our consumer demand to in-source process knowledge and manufacturing.

Dunno if we is U.S. or someone else, but the U.S. could at least loosen up its immigration policy a little bit. We're literally putting Mexicans in fucking camps.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#150

Post by ben_jones »

gorgoiler wrote: post #113
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…

Product engineers may be a mess but infrastructure engineers in this industry are capable of incredible works of human achievement. The product punks, fresh out of college, throw together all kinds of whacky code in the name of front end product — which to their credit becomes incredibly popular with millions of people. It’s usually also incomplete bug ridden nonsense. The real magic is in seeing infrastructure engin…

> "foo sucks but bar is actually great (btw I'm a bar)"

I'm a product engineer AND an infrastructure engineer in the common job-title sense, and if I had a dollar every time an infrastructure engineer/devops/full-stack introduced a complex service (elasticsearch/kafka/k8s/etc) without understanding how the service should be configured, maintained, or extended, I'd be able to afford a house in the bay!

Good product managers bridge the gap between engineering, sales, and the executive team, and can make a project successful just by managing the decision making process(es) well.

The bottom line however is that most companies have poor product management and poor infrastructure engineering which will lead to many more Theranos and Yahoo style messes in the years to come (and waste untold billions doing it!).

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