chiasson

Capturely | Founding Engineer | Onsite (Indianapolis) | Full-time | $150-$180 + equity | https://capturely.com/

Capturely is removing the hurdle for anyone to create professional quality visual media by putting the power of a photographer in your pocket. Our beachhead product, corporate virtual headshots, is used by some of the world’s largest companies (Google, Netflix, Microsoft, Linkedin, AT&T) to capture thousands of professional headshots each day.

We're looking for a few talented 0-to-1 engineers to help us turn our "man behind the curtain" prototype into a scalable Saas product. We use Python for our backend and ML. We expect you to have scoped, built and launched web products with experience in full-stack and cloud architecture. Experience in image processing, CV, and AI applications is a plus.

We are profitable and growing quickly. We want someone who is excited about building not just a product, but a team and a culture. Send your resume to careers@capturely.com.

Until now, that vision has been bottlenecked on turning fuzzy informal intent into formal, executable code

Software has been and always will be fundamentally a problem of communication. What many don't realize is that the true challenge of communication is not one of transmission, but clarity of thought and understanding. Any tool, software language, or AI coder will still be limited by the clarity and completeness of the specs presented. What is software after all but complete and precise specs? Nothing will ever turn your fuzzy intent into your clear best interest. If you don't have clarity of thought, no intelligence in the world can help you.

That's not to say I disagree with the author, I agree that more complex creative power will be accessible to a greater number of people, but I think the intrinsic efficiency limit of communication will always be more difficult than people think.

I am not agreeing or disagreeing with the conclusions, but I find the statistics as used in the article to be weak. They had a whole article to convince me and I still don't have confidence in whether there is a problem or not. A few immediate thoughts:

Comparing the top 350 firms in 1978 and 2019 is not a fair comparison. There are more and bigger firms today. It is like comparing the ten fastest sprinters at a school of 10,000 and a school of 100. No one will be surprised to find that a bigger pool produces bigger numbers.

Average is not a statistically robust metric. A couple of crazy outliers could skew the statistic dramatically, and may not actually give us a clear idea of the typical case.

It is not clear exactly what metric the author uses for "reasonableness" of CEO compensation. Is it reasonable for the compensation to be proportional to the size of the organization? Was the 30-1 ratio reasonable to begin with? Should everybody have exactly the same salary? Without some kind of standard or reasoning here, you can't claim that any salary is too high.

There are many ways they could rehash their data in a way that I would find more convincing, and it makes me suspicious that I am being fed an inflated story. I would like to see what the median salary-to-market-cap ratio of CEOs in the largest %5 of companies is. Maybe a hard statistic to measure, but we could get a whole lot closer.

Disclaimer: I have almost no background knowledge of CEO compensation or wealth inequality, this may indeed be a serious issue that needs to be addressed. However, as a casual observer I find this article unconvincing.