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The Who Cares Era

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Re: The Who Cares Era

#541

Post by const_cast »

WalterBright wrote: post #286
bumby wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the time horizon of investors.

The value of a stock is based on long term results. If the investors catch wind of the company sacrificing the long term for the short term, the stock price will go down accordingly.

Stock price is pretty much completely unrelated to the performance of a company because the vast majority of investors have no idea what the fuck is going on in the company.

Look at Tesla. They're doing extremely poorly right now and have been for about a year, and if you look at their stock price you wouldn't think that. They're valued more than, like, every other auto manufacturer combined. Looking at that you'd expect them to hold 50% of the market in all markets they're in. But they don't get anywhere close to that.

The stock market is just gambling. You can't see the other person's hand.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#542

Post by saubeidl »

carlosjobim wrote: post #522
saubeidl wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many Yugoslavs left for America?

Were they allowed to leave? Usually the sign of the fairest and most humane systems of government and economy is when people get shot in the back by border guards if they try to escape.

Yes. The Yugoslav passport was the strongest in the world at the time - the only one you could freely travel both West and East with.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#543

Post by jmb99 »

neilv wrote: post #379
buangakun wrote: post #74

Oh man, I gotta write a comment here. I'm gonna leave out a few details in case this guy or my tech lead/manager read HN. So, I am senior software engineer, got hired into this company. I was tasked by my manager/tech lead to work with another senior software engineer. Overtime I realized that this engineer did not have the proper background in this field. I asked him and I asked my tech lead, and confirmed he did no…

> and go Leetcode. I wonder whether, by refusing to Leetcode as an IC, if you weed-out proportionally more companies of careerist people just going through the motions. (Compared to companies of people who care about what they're doing, not just about jumping through hoops and receiving money.)

I recently switched jobs, and this time I decided that during the first phase of any interview cycle I would ask if there were going to be leetcode-style questions at any point in the cycle. If yes, I ended the interviews there. If no, continue on. I was of course happy to explain my logic and that I was happy to demonstrate technical prowess in a way more useful to the proposed role.

One company lied, I completed the leetcode-style portion of the technical interview, and politely declined their offer (with an explanation that I don’t like being lied to, and beyond that, I don’t want to work for a company that believes leetcode is a useful skill indicator for regular development work).

So far every company that I’ve worked for doesn’t do leetcode bs, and end up being great companies to work for (genuinely caring about employees, good salary/benefits, actual CoL adjustments in addition to merit-based raises, equity, etc). Small sample size, I know. I also know that every one of my tech friends who has worked at a leetcode-interview company has had some kind of issue with colleagues, management, company structure, or something along those lines (not necessarily at every company, but each person has encountered those sorts of things at at least one company).

To me, avoiding leetcode is a very good way to select for “actual good” companies to work for.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#544

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

ryandrake wrote: post #267
aerostable_slug wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without offering anything else, employee attitudes aren't going to change. In my lived experience, unions permanently cement the anti-employer (and often anti-customer) attitude present in some employees. Once in place, they don't produce a massive change of heart where employees are willing to rise above and beyond the exact terms of their collective bargaining agreements, but instead result in a rejection of the…

Employers behave as adversaries to their workers anyway, comparatively wealthy and powerful adversaries. So either you union-up and present yourselves as a united and somewhat formidable adversary, or you don't and remain a (relatively poor and powerless) individual, no match against your (already existing) adversary.

A good chunk of the readership here is in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_aristocracy and have their incentives firmly aligned with their employers thanks to superb pay and equity grants. Poor? Powerless? Certainly not them.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#545

Post by whyowhy3484939 »

gilbetron wrote: post #347

The future is gone. I'm in my 50s, and for nearly all of that time I thought, dreamt, and worked towards a future that I read about, researched, talked to others about, and consumed media about. But over the past several years I realize it is gone. I thought maybe it was just my age, but it seems like the world is doing the same, so maybe not my age. Another thread mentions that no one talks about "life in the 22nd c…

I'm nearing forty and I have a sneaky suspicion it's a weird cultural thing. A bit like the Romans lamenting the fall of their culture right at the start of their golden age and they never stopped doing that. Always looking back saying shit sucks now and how in the old days everything centered on competence and morality. Men were actual men back then. That sort of thing. Some parts of it might have made a tad kind of sense, but a lot of it was baloney.

I suspect we're becoming more realistic now about the nature of our civilization. There won't be any riding of laser-shooting cybernetic unicorns and we have to come to terms with that. There's adulting to do now. We have some climate issues and we have to deal with wealth inequality and finding and maintaining proper forms of government (worldwide). The laser-shooting unicorns have become the "maybe we can sort of survive as a species" and we need that. We always needed that, but we were too busy watching Terminator and playing GTA.

I'm not convinced it's all bad. Maybe some societal existential depression is called for and perhaps we'll awaken from our funk with some fresh ideas.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#546

Post by edc117 »

ryandrake wrote: post #132
toomuchtodo wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Acting their wage is reasonable. Can't ask for a smile and pride in work from those forced to participate in the torment nexus. 60 percent of Americans can't afford to meet their basic needs, for example. If we want better outcomes, employers must provide the necessary comp, benefits, and work life balance to arrive at those outcomes. Otherwise, we get slop because that's what is paid for.

Yea, I was also going to trot out the "act your wage" phrase. As a worker, you can't buy groceries with "pride". And as an employer, you're not going to get a craftsman who cares by paying them bottom of the barrel wages. The labor market is completely broken.

Completely broken on multiple levels. In a lot of industries now, as an employer you can't win even if you buck the trend and lead out your competitors on wages and benefits. The highest paid warehouse worker, waitress, etc. will still barely make ends meet, never be able to afford a house, so on. Decades of devaluation of labor (automation, venture capital, bad laws & regulations, etc.) has really done a number, and I don't see a way to easily reverse the damage. IMO, the top end of the economy needs to be brought back closer to the bottom end, but I just don't see it happening.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#547

Post by antisthenes »

nradov wrote: post #533
antisthenes wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What % of easy carbohydrate energy was Yugoslavia consuming at the time, compared to, say, USSR or USA or China?

Are you asking about diets? During most of the Cold War period, average people in Yugoslavia generally had more and better food than the USSR or China but less than the USA. They ate a lot of bread and potatoes. You probably won't find detailed records with percentages.

No, actual energy. Coal/Oil/Gasoline/Kerosene.

What made 99% of things run in the 20th century. Things like plants, foundries and what have you.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#548

Post by const_cast »

chrisco255 wrote: post #199
buangakun wrote: post #74

Oh man, I gotta write a comment here. I'm gonna leave out a few details in case this guy or my tech lead/manager read HN. So, I am senior software engineer, got hired into this company. I was tasked by my manager/tech lead to work with another senior software engineer. Overtime I realized that this engineer did not have the proper background in this field. I asked him and I asked my tech lead, and confirmed he did no…

> I asked Reddit and TeamBlind how to best deal with this kind of situation > a lot of them, 99% of the answers go along these lines "Who the fuck cares man > So, that was my wake up call Let me get this right, you discovered your team was mediocre, you then asked the clinically cynical folks at Reddit for advice, people you don't even know and people who certainly don't know you, and the conclusion you walked away w…

The problem is that if you start caring too much when other people don't you become a target. People blend in because it works. You can't fix a fucked culture, you just can't. So either leave or become one of the pact.

Companies, for the past 50 years at least, have greatly incentivized little worker bees over revolutionaries. They don't want someone to fix things or tell them they're wrong. They don't want superstars, they want drones, they want yes men, they want useful idiots. And, well, they got it.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#549

Post by saghm »

WalterBright wrote: post #180
toomuchtodo wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GE [1]? Boeing [2] [3]? The stocks go up because management and shareholders pull forward the gains as financialization destroys the long term value of the enterprises. Works until it doesn't. [1] Power Failure: The downfall of General Electric - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44102034 - May 2025 [2] Fatal Recklessness at Boeing Traces Back to Long-Standing C-Suite Greed - https://www.thenation.com/article/poli…

Boeing consistently went up for many decades prior to the MAX crisis. So did GE. Companies have life cycles. They grow until they become unable to function efficiently anymore, then they go down. It's not about prioritizing short term results.

> Companies have life cycles. They grow until they become unable to function efficiently anymore, then they go down.

> It's not about prioritizing short term results.

Why did they need to grow in the first place though? If a company is already profitable, and growing will end up making them less functional and eventually erode profits, that sounds like it's due to prioritizing short-term results over long-term stable profits.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#550

Post by nradov »

antisthenes wrote: post #547
nradov wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you asking about diets? During most of the Cold War period, average people in Yugoslavia generally had more and better food than the USSR or China but less than the USA. They ate a lot of bread and potatoes. You probably won't find detailed records with percentages.

No, actual energy. Coal/Oil/Gasoline/Kerosene. What made 99% of things run in the 20th century. Things like plants, foundries and what have you.

In terms of fossil fuels they had significant domestic coal production but most oil and natural gas was imported.
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