301–310 of 508 posts
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Would you rather have a nurse who was a vaccine skeptic or no nurse? Honestly asking.
a 75 year old family member was prescribed Ivermectin for light Covid. I would rather no doctor. And family member has decided to seek a different doctor. Literally added a symptom.
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> I think most job salaries can be linked directly to how much of a difference the employee can make. I think that the world's, or at least the US's, teachers are a glaring counterexample.
The problem is that the value that teachers create is hard to compute and hard to capture, so in the end, no one is willing to pay for it.
Part of his thesis is that society undervalues the labor of caring workers, because they get so much "job satisfaction". Teachers and nurses are examples of caring work.
I lean towards Graeber's thesis, mostly because I haven't read any other explanation for this pathology, so Graeber wins by default.
I worked for a company big enough to be in the HN headlines (sorry, have to stay somewhat anonymous) where development virtually stalled for a couple years after a mass exodus event. The CEO went on a rampage and fired some people on the spot for something they weren’t even responsible for, which destroyed the already fragile morale and created a steady exodus of good talent over a couple of years. It didn’t kill the…
The continued success or longevity of an organization doesn't say much about how it's functioning, mostly because it doesn't address how much better it could have been doing or who is not in the organization.
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Gaming abounds with stories like this. A friend of mine went to work for a small game studio in Oklahoma that'd gotten some acclaim for their quake mod pack. They took that momentum and started on their own novel IP as a quake licensee. They made a ahem mildly successful game named Medal of Honor. Some time down the road, the owner of the studio didn't want to share the wealth. As a result the top programmers, design…
I agree with your message though there's a scarier story in there. What if those people never left to make Call of Duty? Under the boss they would have made more Medal of Honor, and maybe the next MoH's were not billion-dollar products. Maybe had they gotten equity, we would never have a billion dollar CoD series!
The good timeline xD
The wedding photographer/videographer business I discussed in another thread last week. All his employees quit and he went under. I've personally been involved with more than one general contractor going under. When I was a young carpenter, I followed my best friend from job to job and contractor to contractor. When he walked off a job, the rest of us followed. He and I and a group of Dominicans (from Dominica not th…
> It's incredibly difficult to find skilled tradesman in the Caribbean that will show up sober each day and perform quality work. There's a lot to unpack in that sentence. Care to elaborate?
On all the islands I worked on, it was rare to find people actually from that island who were capable of that kind of work.
The Dominicans and the Haitians were fine, but the US and European guys mostly treated it as one big vacation. They would stay out all night partying and then come to work and do just enough to not get fired.
As another commenter mentioned, those guys knew they could always find work elsewhere even if only temporarily because skilled trades were in high demand. So they could quickly move on until they burned another bridge.
I was on one job in Antigua where the project managers were able to avoid this completely. They flew in hundreds of people from Indian and had them live in a “tent town” where they never left except to go to work each day. No alcohol or drugs allowed.
Myself and two others were flown in to install all the cabinets and other mill work. With the except of the stone guys from Turkey, we were the only non Indians on the entire project.
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Yes, I'm talking about 2015. The first two Playstation only MoH games were not exactly failures, but they were little more than Goldeneye clones with WW2 themes. The first PC game is really the start of what we think of as the Medal of Honor franchise proper. The team that bailed founded Infinity Ward, which was the origin of Call of Duty, or at least the first like 8 games in the franchise. So yes, my story does in…
You didn't really provide that much detail, how are you expecting someone to understand what to Google? If your suggestion is for people to not question, or be curious at all then I think you're in the wrong place...?
In my opinion the original story was a bit misleading though, reading as if the small game company's novel IP was the original Medal of Honor, so I do think the follow-up was warranted: "They took that momentum and started on their own novel IP as a quake licensee. They made a ahem mildly successful game named Medal of Honor."
I also think the response to the questioning was a lot more hostile than it needed to be but ultimately that there was rudeness on both sides
Famously, the Traitorous Eight left Shockley to found Fairchild Semiconductor. This was essentially the origin story of Silicon Valley. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight https://www.amazon.co.uk/Power-Law-Venture-Capital-Disruptio...
Shockley inadvertently by being an asshole created more wealth for more people possibly than any other single person.
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I could not imagine being a nurse or a teacher in the US right now. I wish they realized that they have the leverage and can go on strike. I imagine that's difficult for many of them as they most certainly need the income. A rock and a hard place. I always smile when I read about a nurse or teacher switching to a completely different career field and finding themselves more content.
They don't need to go on strike if there's an alternative employer available. They just need to quit. Going on strike turns these things from being focused on bad managers to focusing on intransigent employees. Leaving means the management needs fixing or changing.
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I agree 100% with much of the sentiment here that creators deserve respect and a cut of the spoils At the same time, it really depends.... I'm pretty confident that there are very few engineers at FAANG that can't be replaced. I'd also expect there are very few engineers at Epic, Activision, Blizzard, Naughty Dog, Sony, Rockstar, Ubisoft, Valve, etc... that can't be replaced. Sure, if 30%-70% of the team left on any…
If you take the truly non-performing folks, well sad to say you can probably get rid of most of them and improve performance. Otherwise, get rid of any engineer and the minimum impact is 3-6 months code and culture familiarisation before they get up to speed with your particular application/code base/equipment. Can easily be more than a year - especially with some of the big systems. So yes there is an impact on busi…
On a big project, say 100 devs over 3 years, 6 man months is 1/600th of the work, so a single person is replaceable and it's not even noise. If the replacement takes 6 months to get up to speed the replacement is certainly not a very good developer, even on the biggest projects. At that size, there's lots of small side projects, testing groups, and the like, so there should be plenty of smaller pieces to work on, and some on those small projects are always happy to jump into the main work, not needing 3-6 months to be useful to it.
This is not highly damaging on any but the smallest, shortest projects. And even there people move around all the time and don't destroy projects.