ironchef253

Typical ad hominem attack on writer which refuses to propose the actual solution that you are planning: “government censorship of the internet.”

Let’s be very clear about what you are alluding to when you are blaming the free market - You are saying the government needs to “do something” to ensure that Google and Facebook surface “correct” and “fair” results.

Do you really want that?

Megan is VERY rightly not stepping farther than what she said because the next step is to install government officials who attempt to tweak search algorithms and review what gets ranked in Google and what doesn’t.

This is exactly what China is doing, it is the exact opposite of Net Neutrality.

Are you able to articulate a solution to this problem that doesn’t involve creating a censorship department that is embedded into every major tech company? Once again, this is how China does things currently.

The people in Hacker News comments scare me to death, the combination of lack of awareness and obedience to what they see on Twitter is genuinely frightening and dangerous.

This is not the logic of the article.

The article says that Title II is pointless over-regulation which creates danger for ISPs, which it is. Imagine if I created 700 rules for what you can do every day and promised to “selectively apply” those rules based on how I feel today. Would you be ok with that? Any mood change on my part (correlating with a change in FCC leadership) and I could ruin your life. Those are not good conditions under which to build a long term business. If you had that hanging over your head, you wouldn’t be happy either.

People have been brainwashed to think that Net Neutrality == Title II regulation. That is incorrect. The principal of Net Neutrality is far more important than Title II. Title II is just the wrong tool for the job and causes a lot of additional damage in addition to supporting Net Neutrality.

Watching Facebook, Google and Twitter demoting and removing opinions and websites they don’t like (aka not advertiser friendly) is much more sinister than what the ISPs are able to / are likely to do.

Censorship by search algorithm is far more dangerous than removal of Title II, which has downsides but is not anywhere near as apocalyptic as what people are saying about it online.

I am frustrated at how many people on here do so little research into their own opinions, they just look online and see what Twitter or reddit are saying and say: “ok, sounds good I believe that.”

Please take the approach of trying to poke holes in your own opinions before adopting them.

People really decided to hate Peter Thiel during the last election. But he is right about the fact that you can’t do anything in the physical world in the United States anymore.

Between housing and real estate prices, insurance, taxes, lack of government support, environmental protections, requirement to pay for health insurance for employees,layers of regulations, minimum wage laws, sexual harassment lawsuits (it only takes one and your company is over)...you just can’t operate a physical space with drills, laser cutters, saws, advanced electronics and machinery at a profit in America anymore.

TechShop was the last gasp of American industry having any sort of future. With Tech Shop, we can also probably say good bye to a good deal of real trade skills people learn at these locations. They really tried to make it work. I have spoken to some of their founders myself - The amount of work it takes to set up even one of these facilities is simply staggering. If I were to show you the spreadsheets, business plans and research these guys invest to open ONE shop it genuinely rivals that of a full startup per location.

My heart really breaks.

There are a few companies able to survive with physical presences like this in the Bay Area now, but they are all backed by the power of Jabil, Flextronics, Autodesk. Some small indie chain can’t make it in these conditions.

Unfortunately, we can expect more of this as a country. We are one recession away from a full republican route (they are doing a spectacularly awful job and deserve to be thrown out) and all signs are pointing to a fully socialist government being next in line.

Socialist governments are not known for their desire to roll back worker protections, undo environmental protections and regulations, nor is their focus on enabling businesses. Although I will say Canada seems to be doing better than us in many ways when it comes to accelerating genuinely valuable little companies like TechShop.

I am genuinely beginning to advise people to consider moving to Asia where innovation is able to happen, it won’t be done in a America anytime soon.

Between Trump and his socialist successor - and the wonderful incompetent state of California I don’t have a good feeling about American innovation anymore.

I work in technology in a very high scale environment. Tons of people, lots of new faces all the time, hundreds of emails, social media pings, birthdays, need to change the cat box, car overdue for an oil change, organizing a conference, my direct reports are being lazy and I have to find a good way to motivate them, oh shit I agreed to send that guy that thing in the mail, the sales guy is pissed at me because I accidentally talked to his customer and didn’t loop him, oh shit haven’t been into the office this week need to put in face time, ten LinkedIn invitations, oh what about that webinar....

Jesus just found a stack of business cards from that conference two weeks ago and this one person wanted to meet and I never got around to it. Did I complete that sexual harassment training? I just got four reminders saying I need to read some new policies. Oh look three calendar invites for meetings tomorrow I didn’t see earlier. Did we get that vendor under NdA? My admin in the back office is on vacation I need her to finally sort the statement of work. Fuck it’s almost Friday I need to write that monthly report. My boss calling me about that thing hold on...

Like me, A college professor is defined by having hundreds of students pinging them with shit all the time and it is a rolling cast of students and faces you can’t remember with a monotonous list of shit you can’t possibly keep track of.

A younger me wouldn’t have understood what this does to my brain. The older me walks around in a state of being near to burn out and fried all day long.

It’s the volume of requests and things to think about. Keep in mind most of these things aren’t event my job, they are just overhead I have to deal with before I can even do my job.

I’m with the professors on this one. It’s brutal.

Often there is a form of mutually assured destruction at play. Qualcomm and Intel have cross-hired major executives like Murthy and no one got sued.

I feel like non-competes are similar to parents these days. Everyone has tons of patents and everyone is infringing on everyone else so they just agree to pay licensing fees to one another and never go to war.

I’m certain AMD has hired their share of Intel people by now, its a no win.

Intel needs a CEO that skates to where the puck is going to be, not where it was three goals ago.

A few things:

Grad students from foreign countries are not crippled with debt. They get affordable educations and can afford to be in school longer in America. Comparable American students have been consumed by debt and must get real jobs to pay it off.

If undergrads were paying $7K / year for those degrees instead of $50k, things would be very different.

Second, universities who are rich from plundering their undergrads by way of massive administrative overhead resulting in skyrocketing loans...grad students are a source of labor for the schools at low cost.

By importing foreign students who are desperate and cheap, these universities are able to continue adding administrative bloat while exploiting foreign workers for the research tasks they once gave to their American contemporaries.

You want American grad students? Reform the loan situation, stop allowing universities to have their cake and eat it too. If they charge astronomical fees, they shouldn’t get to outsource that work to foreign students and then whine about not having more Americans.

These articles are utter nonsense.

Large tech companies are beloved by the vast majority of consumers and workers. The only groups of people dissatisfied with them are: (a) members of the government, who don't like to see anyone becoming more powerful or influential than them without being subjected to numerous regulations and restrictions and (b) the media, who need articles to print to get people to click on ads and who often have ties to the groups who fall under (a). Finally there is (c) companies who have to compete with large tech co's.

Most people reading what I just wrote will assume I am some kind of troll - I assure you I am not. Aside from perhaps Amazon, many people would kill to work at these companies and most of the workers at these companies would not quit if given the option. It certainly isn't the average tech worker that is unhappy!

For consumers: Go outside on the street right now and ask the first person you see how they feel about: Android, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber, Netflix. Chances are, you are going to meet someone that rabidly consumes services from all of these companies on a daily basis and couldn't be more satisfied.

The idea that Facebook and others are "beleaguered" is fairly baseless. They are doing better than ever! If anything, these companies are likely to get tax cuts and incentives under Trump so they can keep doing better. The idea that there is going to be any regulatory restriction or anti-trust claims against these companies anytime soon (especially under Trump) seems far-fetched. We are talking about 3 - 8 years before anything is really done to them by government regulatory agencies.

For this reason: It is really strange to see these articles being written when they are so far away from reality.

Keep in mind, Trump's goal is to support the US economy. Why would he attempt to start dismantling key corporations that compete with many, many Chinese and overseas competitors on his watch? It will never happen.

As for Facebook's "Fake News" problem:

Allegations that Russia used Facebook to "disseminate fake news" are a thinly disguised power grab by the government, nothing more. The evidence that the small ad purchases threw the election is completely baseless, despite what you have read in the media. The entire "Fake News" angle is the covert that is being used to attempt to implement Chinese-style censorship in the United States. Anyone who really believes in "Fake News" is just begging for censorship of all Internet content.

Watching the media printing and re-printing this storyline is very similar to the "Trump campaign melting down from within" stories that came up every week during the presidential campaign. Not only where these stories not true, they were politically motivated.

Imagine the 30+ year backlog of material across all the rich and powerful men in Silicon Valley. What is going to be left once all of that is outed?

Plenty of blame to go around.

I have turned into Rick before. I was a super productive engineer and I would work way ahead of the company in isolation and get things done super fast. This was caused by me being a workaholic and enjoying my work too much, not really caring about or paying attention to what was going on around me politically. It never occurred to me that pulling way ahead of the company would only result in severe damage to myself and the team.

Being this kind of engineer is like putting a Ferrari Engine into a Volkswagen Beetle. The Ferrari Engine is going to tear the Beetle apart and the result will be bad for all parties involved. The longer the Ferrari engine is allowed to run, the more damage it is going to do.

When I behaved this way in the past, a strong mentor or manager would have helped me immensely. Instead I had managers who were scared of me because I was more talented than they were and just wanted me to go away. As a result, I received no input as to how to better structure my working style and failed to mature and grow. The result was I ended up getting laid off after becoming deeply frustrated with everyone around me.

Companies need the right sized engine that provides the correct amount of forward momentum, not an engine that rips the team to shreds. Learning to hold back, Pay very close attention to my surroundings and communicate much more carefully is required. This is generally the work of program managers, but there are very few good ones. Lead engineers need to learn to program manage themselves or they will just end up getting twisted around the axle.

The reality of this industry is that software developers are disposable parts. Rick spent years building these systems, asking him to rebuild them would have been impossible. Once he got to the point of becoming toxic, he had to go. The Volkswagen Beetle (rest of the company minus Rick) needs to proceed onwards.

Former / occasional programmer here.

I was categorized as having ADD / ADHD and never bothered to take anything for it although it has caused me tremendous problems in my career and school life. If you know you have this problem you can either drug yourself into a coma or make significant life choices (and learn to master your condition) to steer you into career where your strengths come into play and your weaknesses are minimized. I tried both, I like the second option better.

I no longer believe there is something wrong with me, I believe society was built for people different than me (sit still, pay attention, do one thing at a time, obey etc) and I am expected to follow and obey their rules. I believe that ADHD is a real condition but the drugs are a false solution that are driven more by pharmaceutical company marketing than reality. If they can make you feel bad about who you are, they can sell more drugs. That is wrong - if you are unhappy its because something deeper is wrong in your life that you need to change and you should find what that is.

The Good:

There are massive benefits to being an ADD-er in my experience: I can simply handle more volume of work faster and more efficiently than anyone I know. My brain is a 40-lane highway and I have no problem multitasking across many different contexts. If my brain decides to become interested in a topic, I can learn everything there is to know about that topic faster than anyone...I now learn to recognize when something interests me and feed my brain information in that time slot while the opportunity presents itself (I think its called "hyperfocus"). I have learned to work with the peculiarities of my condition and take advantage when the wind is blowing in a useful direction.

It wasn't until later in my career that I learned to be extremely detail oriented.

The Bad:

The ADD super powers come with many downsides. I am chronically bored out of my mind and single-tasking is a challenge (e.g. sitting through a lecture or boring meeting). At most jobs I found myself growing completely bored in six months and being unable to focus on my job. This resulted in a lot of useless job hopping which I now recognize in retrospect as being a symptom of my underlying condition.

Learning material which doesn't interest me is impossible, killing my academic performance. I felt strongly that other people around me could simply absorb boring "stuff" without issue and just deal with it and take the pain while my brain simply turned off in that situation, remembering nothing.

Finally, I have difficulty communicating with people. When I talk I jump all over the place (often off topic) or I skip three steps ahead. Most people's brains don't work like this.

Some Solutions:

The most important fix was to find a job or career which, by definition, involved lots of crazy stuff going on all the time. Being a programmer working on a single product for years was simply impossible to me to sustain.

Many smaller, single-product, companies work like this: Here is the one thing you do for the next two years. If you have ADHD that isn't going to work.

Many developers I know (with more normal brains) prefer to focus on one technology (Say, Ruby on Rails) to the exclusion of everything else for years. I have embraced being a super-generalist.

If you are a programmer, I recommend finding one of the following: (a) an agency which has dozens of ongoing projects in many technologies (many digital agencies are like this) so you can never get bored (b) a large company with a lot of interesting stuff going on (e.g. take a company like Microsoft which has ridiculous amounts of different technologies, products and initiatives underway at any given time).

In my case I decided that software wasn't for me and found a related career (technical marketing) which was more varied in nature (lots of new products, unexpected surprises and events going on all the time).

I thought a large company would be horrible, I was wrong - My current job is like an endless "all you can eat" buffet where I am allowed to eat as much as I want and work on projects that interest me all day long. It probably depends which department you land in.

More Immediate Solutions and Strategies:

1.) Lose weight and exercise regularly.

This will physiologically change your body and brain and make it easier to sustain focus. Can't recommend going for a run regularly enough.

2.) Embrace a single page "Shit to do" list.

Everything you need to do should fit on a single page. I tried many different techniques for time management including any number of ToDo apps etc. Everything was less efficient than Evernote or notepad.

If I have something to do, it goes on the list. Then you can ignore it or check it once a day and cross stuff off. I used to be really bad about dropping tasks and forgetting details, now I am at 100% all the time.

3.) Build your entire life around Evernote

I now completely live in Evernote. Every meeting, everything gets an Evernote page that I can come back to. The really important stuff goes in Shit To Do.

I tend to multitask through every meeting and only have part of my brain in a listening state. I take notes for that meeting in Evernote and come back to them.

People with ADD suffer from "poor working memory" which means you forget things much faster than normal people. The cure is to rely on Everynote or some other method to store all the details for you. That way, you can get around the poor working memory issue by letting the computer do the remembering.

With so many APIs...the company with the best DUX will win more developers. Offering services like this cant hurt.