tonecluster

I think you underestimate the industriousness of someone who really intends on committing tabs.

Important point here: kind and nice are not synonymous. It's easy to conflate kindness with niceness, and the OP (from what I can infer) is advocating the latter, not the former. Kind is not the same as nice.

There are several ways to do necessary, un-nice things in a very kind manner. It is a skill, and for some people requires coaching on how to express themselves professionally and kindly most of the time.

(Qualifying this, because there are occasions that warrant a good moderate yell or two. E.g., the 3rd (rejected) and random PR submitted by a Jr. developer that changes all of the spaces to tabs in the repository, or all of the modules/functions to classes/methods.)

"lack of experience is generally pretty opaque to the people who lack it"

Agree! this is a succinct description of a eng management problem. However, it can be mitigated by hiring coachable, trainable (and mature) people. Interestingly, we've had great luck hiring from programming bootcamps; programmers who lack programming experience but have other work experience & who are eager and able to learn quickly, & usually come with some level of intellectual curiosity (as opposed to entitlement).

I hear this much more often from the less-experienced programmers than I do from the seasoned, experienced ones. Once in a while, and usually in a very large shop, I hear it from an experienced veteran. However, usually (not always, but usually) from one who's had 1 year of experience 20 times rather than 20 years of experience.

Or, much harder to beat writer's block when there's a large audience waiting for more work. If the grip of "10,000 people are expecting X from me..." freezes you, you're blocked.

It depends on the artist, IMO. Some people are charged up by a large consumer base waiting for more work, some don't care, and some are frozen by it.

Best if you don't care -- per HR's discussion of Miles Davis. Sometimes Miles left his audience behind, but that was OK because he was being true to himself and his vision for his work.

We have 30 days of time for NaNoWriMo. That's a lot of time! Can get a lot done in that amount of time, or get nothing done, depending on how the time is occupied.

"...disregard for protocol" is not illegal activity. Any indictments, for example? Anything to back up the claim of illegal activity that could lead to a conviction? Again, outside of wikileaks hacked emails.

Can anyone provide any evidence of confirmed illegal activity from a source other than wikileaks? E.g., results of any official investigation, etc.

About discovery:

These days, the barrier to entry for discovery is lower than it's ever been. If you get your music on all of the various internet music services and some of the internet-radio programming, you are much more heavily distributed worldwide than any garage-band in the 70s or 80s could ever have been at the time.

The 'bar for discovery' has two parts: The bar for potential discovery is now very, very low. But for actual discovery it is high because the "signal-to-noise" ratio is very low: by that I mean there is so much crap (noise) to wade through before you find a great band (signal) that the work of curating has shifted from the radio stations and record labels to the consumer. The nice thing is that you can find excellent music the major labels will simply ignore. The not so nice thing: it requires work on your part to seek out and engage with the curators of content.

This is why finding the internet radio programs that feature the genre you enjoy, and following the music-programmers who curate with taste that you share, is vital to a good discovery experience.

I disagree. The ones I listen to do just that: not only flyover country, but Canada, Australia, UK, Italy and all over the rest of Europe. And the facebook groups for the genres I follow frequently post music from excellent, up and coming or obscure bands.

Widespread reach? It's the internet! How widespread do you need to be? ;)

Also, labels != radio. It's not radio's job to nuture and develop bands. But they can expose bands to greater audiences, which allows people like us to "discover" new-to-us bands.

Sure there is. Join the communities that support the genre(s) of music you enjoy. Listen to the various internet radio programs that feature the music you enjoy -- those curators will introduce you to new music, and new-to-you music.

also, best way for you and for the band: contact them directly for their music. It's legal, and I'm sure they'd appreciate it.

They do think about your country, and all of the non-US/CA/UK territories.

But licensing is complicated, difficult to manage, and is frankly a mess. So it's often not worth it to launch in many territories at first; and in some territories, not ever.

I agree, though as an aside I think this takes the conversation in a new direction. Ad-supported FM radio probably did more to encourage, or at least aculturate, people to treat the internet like just another radio station than anything else.

The big difference was that music on FM radio enticed people also to go buy the vinyl LP (at $12 (or so) a pop in 1977 money. Ouch.).

So (taking us in yet another direction), the problem is one of technology: once downloads replaced vinyl and CDs, the only thing left is merch and other branded items, which sell far fewer units relative to the LP or CD of yesteryear.

The labels blew it on technology (they went from shellacs to 45s to LPs to CDs and stopped there).

Amen.

Maybe we can say that they love musicians, but love business even more? Sort of like the way many CEOs in S.V./S.F. love software developers but love business even more.

"Free" is the price the majority of users on Spotify (and elsewhere) think is right. In general, consumers have learned that "music should be free!". The fee that Spotify asks for isn't for music; it's for an ad-free, more pleasurable, and more valuable experience. The music is still offered for free!

The recording industry LOVES musicians. But the musicians they love most of all are the musicians who don't know how to negotiate.

Those genres won't be killed-off, they'll be driven underground and further into the background from the pop genres that are much more easily monetizable. Where jazz and classical are now (not dead, but not profitable) will go various categories of metal, world, and other eclectic-mashups that require more attention from the listener than does, say, a Sailor Twift radio-hit.

She talks about risk/reward and acknowledging the benefit new tech can bring to an organization. Minimizing risk doesn't mean no risk. High risk regardless of reward should not be preferred; risk/reward discussions and reasonable decisions should be preferred.

CEO: "Team, we have to pull together on this one and I need all of you to work through the weekend to get this feature out the door before open of business Monday morning. I appreciate all of your hard work, and we'll all be nose to the grindstone from Friday morning all the way through to Monday morning. I know you can do it, and together we can make this a killer product and a very successful venture going forward.

Team lead at 9pm on Saturday: "Hey, where's the CEO? We need him to review a few things, he wanted sign-off before we got too far."

VP Product: "He's in Vale all weekend with his family, skiing. He's off the grid until late Sunday night."

Volunteering is one thing, and very cool to do to take some of the stress off of people with children. But asking an employee is quite another (IMO). It's a form of soft discrimination, though not intended as such I'm sure.

(Though, thinking about it, I was told once "Yeah, well, you don't have kids, so this [the holiday] isn't that important for you." that wasn't a startup, however, that was a F100)

So many... so many.

me: (up all night fixing bugs in production due to technical debt and mistakes from overworked and tired devs. Sleep from 5am to 9am, show up to office at 10am)

CEO (sales background), walking by as he sees me enter the office: "Hey tone, I want butts in seats, including yours. We have a culture of hard work here. Set an example."

...

CTO: "We don't need to hire expensive devs. Just hire from overseas and promise them an H1B. They'll work for the minimum."

me: "That's not only unsustainable, it's unethical. H1B is a lottery, we can't promise that!"

CTO: "I don't expect them to know that, and you're not going to tell them! Get them on-boarded and working a.s.a.p."

me: (goes home, writes resignation email)

Here's one (not solely experienced in startups, however):

manager: "Since you're single, can you work through the holidays and cover the systems/push this feature/go the extra mile so that the people with families can spend time with them?"

I have also found that the flatness fails quickly when the loudest, most aggressive, least-respectful-of-authority, best-dev-in-the-room type takes the (de-facto) leadership position, bullying others who challenge him. Schoolyard stuff, to be sure, and since most people don't like conflict for extended periods of time, you end up with a local "leader" (scare quotes intended) despite the intention to remain flat. It's the "rock star dev who's also a jerk", and eventually it creates chaos.

"...and cause inter-modulation products in the audible range." AFAIK, this is true in acoustic environments under conditions as described in the original post.

Yep, I read that too. Even so, there are low-pass filters in some consumer gear that benefit from, say, 96k sampling rates and result in better quality sound. This does imply that at 44.1 or 48 they don't represent up to 20kHz properly, of course.

Some [consumer] digital low-pass filter can benefit from higher sampling rates, leading to an overall better representation of the analog signal up to 20kHz. But there are diminishing returns as the filter "folds" the octaves above 22kHz; A rate of 96k for certain lowpass filters is better than 48k, but at some point there's little (if any) benefit by going to 192k or 384k. For recording studios, go as high as you can in both bit-rate and bit-depth. Especially when you're processing the signal "in the box". Give the software as much data as possible to operate without introducing errors and artifacts. There are diminishing returns there as well, but RTFM for (for example) UA gear and software and you're good to go.

Thank you. If there are two things to be expunged from conversations within our profession, they are "FAIL!" and "tl;dr".

Thank you.