151–160 of 457 posts
I was briefly employed by a robotics company in the US ... robotics is too nice: glorified if/then/else is better. The owner was the son of an old school magnate out of PA. Among other things his line has always stuck with me: "A whale that surfaces is soon harpooned." The company never made money. I think the whole thing was run as a loss on purpose for tax purposes. I became tired of the head manager/engineer combo…
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I love how we’re actively cheerleading third worldism now. Boring is good, bland is good, efficient systems that assume high trust are good. Unless you’re Norway or Denmark, you should try to make your country more like Singapore.
Boring is not good if you are interested in something that is not boring! More fun always come with more risk. Everyone has their own threshold. So it is pointless to say that "Boring is good". It might be good for you, but not for everyone.
I think in practice the conditions that lead to high trust societies forming also tend to lead to culturally valuing predictability which translates to a bias against risk. But that's not an inherent part of high trust rather that's just how things happen to be at a given point in time.
I was briefly employed by a robotics company in the US ... robotics is too nice: glorified if/then/else is better. The owner was the son of an old school magnate out of PA. Among other things his line has always stuck with me: "A whale that surfaces is soon harpooned." The company never made money. I think the whole thing was run as a loss on purpose for tax purposes. I became tired of the head manager/engineer combo…
It could’ve been worse, it could’ve been a fraud! But it’s merely a business designed to lose money. It won’t land you in jail but it’s not a place anyone would advance a career.
And yes i can relate to that. In 26 years of career, about half of the money i made and all of the money i saved, came from 3 clients (over the course of less than 5 years), all 3 of them being scams - one swindled investors for a thing he knew can't work, another one did a legit thing but when he realised it failed, exited to a dumb megacorp and ran away (literally vanished) when they started to realise they've been duped, and one more was in crypto field and whole project - which to me, all the way until past release, looked like a legit porn site - had a goal of imitating activity/interest to boost value of a crypto token.
Even before i picked up coding - and i did it when i was in early teens around the fall of Communism - i knew coding as a separate field and a business was invented exactly for that purpose: it's a lot easier to steal money that way because it's a lot easier to inflate costs vs buying physical products.
No surprise the party is over. People can't be duped for too long.
It reminded me a lot of the Bill Cosby skit about the game Keno, he used an example of a Keno Card that had two numbers on it, you picked one and took it up to the cashier with your $1 bet, the cashier drew a number and said, "Sorry not your number, try again."
The sad truth was that a lot of people who had become wealthy because they happened to be working at a company that went public and had stock, were not particularly sophisticated when it came to the reality that even people "like you" were not your friends. I spent my Jr High/High School years in Las Vegas and got to see so many 'confidence men' fleece tourists with so many schemes. There is a great book called 'The Confidence Game' by Maria Konnikova. It is excellent and reading it you'll come to understand that not only is it possible for even 'smart' people to be taken, there are lots of people who work on being good at it.
But taking all of that into consideration, if you worked at a company, did your job to the best of your ability, and it turned out that it was a "fake" job because some third party was using it as part of a scam, you aren't part of the scam. Any more than happening to be in a bus when the driver whose been drinking kills a pedestrian. You aren't responsible for that pedestrians death and you're not being on the bus wouldn't have changed anything. So you can let that go.
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> was it all for naught? I accepted a long time ago that it is all for naught :) Enjoy our time on this earth, do what we can, focus on people and it'll be alright
Ok, but then honestly, spending 40+ hours/week in an office, doing work that's neither enjoyable nor useful doesn't seem like the best way to spend that time. It also feels like willfully abandoning the bit of agency you still have if you don't even try to understand why the world around you works like it does.
For almost everyone, working is not the best way to spend their time, it's just how they can afford the stuff they do the rest of the time. Obviously it's preferable if it's useful and/or enjoyable, but they're not necessary qualities.
>It also feels like willfully abandoning the bit of agency you still have if you don't even try to understand why the world around you works like it does.
Odd. "Agency" usually refers to the ability to exert will. Understanding would not seem to contribute towards that.
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I feel like Worldcom got a modest amount of press coverage at the time but probably would have gotten a lot more if it hadn’t been front-run by the Enron scandal.
Why are these always one letter off from what they actually are? Worldcom-> World-con. Madoff -> Made-off
Fraud aside, I think a more common thought among developers is > Did my old job only exist because the Product Owners didn't realize we didn't have product-market fit?
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At the risk of injecting recent US politics into this, the shipyard I used to work at had five employees laid off under DOGE and replaced by the exact same individuals (there aren't actually that many naval architects in the US), now working as contractors at a higher base pay. I feel like there's a lot of that out there.
The defense and security-related sector is legendary for this. I had a friend who worked at a three-letter agency ~20 years ago who saw multiple colleagues quit, get hired by contractor firms and sold back to the agency to work on the exact same projects they had been working on as employees. They got a 2-3x pay bump, and the government paid 3-5x for their services. In one instance, my friend said, a guy clocked out…
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But if someone doesn't need a big budget it makes sense to decrease it. It reduces efficiency if you force yourself to spend the whole budget.
But what if you need to save up to buy something that you can't afford in one year? Or you're trying to reduce cost in one place enough to hire a team to do some other project?