yanilkr

With most of currency being digital, this change of reserve ratio requirements has almost no effect in the way banking and economy works. Added a Wikipedia reference which has more references to empirical studies.

“ Many economists and bankers now realize that the amount of money in circulation is limited only by the demand for loans, not by reserve requirements.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_creation#Credit_theory_o...

Lookup “central bank credit guidance”.

Japanese central bankers figured out a way of creating money for purposes that are good for society. Like AI, Quantum computing or bio technology and any other hyped up stuff you see on internet.

There were many bad consequences in the past because of money created that way.

With the way SoftBank is giving away money, it looks like “smart credit guidance” is still happening with out any public policy or public awareness.

Aim of Academic institutions conducting research is for the benefit of humanity. Their principles are to hire the highly qualified people irrespective of their nationality or religion. It’s a merit based hiring.

There is no secret conspiracy here to bring down wages of researchers. Some people just do it for the likes.

Can someone with proper background explain what’s important about these cancer cells? How difficult would it be to replicate them?

This post was amusing to me for so many reasons. The author did this for his personal project, cheers to him for his passion to try out new technology.

This is roughly similar to what happens in technology teams all across the business units.

Manager 1: We are streamlining all our product offerings to a Kubernetes container cluster. Why you ask? We want to modernize our stack and we want to attract best talent.

Manager 1 and the team collects the rewards

...... few months later

Manager 2: We reduced the cost of operations by x% by simplifying operations. Aka rolling back to something other than Kubernates.

Manager 2 Collects the rewards

Every time, there is a detailed intelligent write up about what we are going to do and what we did and how awesome it was.

Believe it or not, internet has a way of influencing the really smart people with branding and advertising driving them to a form of resume driven development.

Kubernetes to developers is like what Axe body spray is to teenagers.

Just use Axe Deodorant and women will be all over you.

It makes more sense if Bitcoin is viewed as an insurance rather than an investment or a commodity.

It's an insurance against the whole world falling apart. Why would the whole world of finance fall apart? Same reason Roman empire fell part and lost its significance.

Long back 1000$ was a lot of money, later a million $ was a lot of money and then billion $ was a lot of money. In today's news, people are describing events in trillion $ costs. If you extrapolate this trend, money as we know will be losing its value exponentially.

Bitcoin is a money system that is defined very clearly in terms of quantity, creation process and exchange etc. This is a good minimum viable product. It definitely has value just like a commodity. It also has people working on improving it as if it were an ipo'd company.

Just like language and law, bitcoin is a product of "spontaneous order" and our knowledge of traditional finance may not have enough mental tools to value it like another financial product. Some people certainly value it more than other people. Over a long period of time take span of 100 years, it becomes easy to imagine having a bitcoin like digital currency with standardized rules for money creation not controlled by any single party.

This blog post was so painful for me to read.

This is a symptom of "bullshit" going on around in big tech companies. "bullshit" here is an economic term defined in the book "bullshit jobs". https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp...

Reading through the post, I was noticing

So much corporate Jargon which really does not mean anything important.

Dehumanizing language when describing people interviewing and being interviewed and its process.

Too much obfuscation of ideas that can be very simply explained.

glorification of simpler problems into heroic challenges.

Delusions of Grandeur.

Today's such jobs are tomorrows layoffs.

I think I will stop here. I have crossed my negativity threshold for the day.

I would classify this as "Self help" advice based on personal experience. Over all its very good advice to learn to collaborate with others.

There are so many persuasion filters here "Partner at Ycombinator", "Co-Founder", "Director", "Apple", "High Achiever writer in general". With this many strong credentials, it would be very very difficult to critically read such advice and then think of alternative ideas.

"If you don’t retrain your model based on input from the crowd, you’ll never converge on truth." This is true for machines.

Other high achievers believe in the alternate version.

"Reasonable men adapt to the world around them; unreasonable men make the world adapt to them. The world is changed by unreasonable men." Edwin Louis Cole

"truth is my goal. Controversy is my gym. I'll do a hundred reps of controversy for a 6 pack of truth" - Kanye west.

"Your life goal should be not to win any particular game, rather to win the sum of all games." This metaphor of everything is a game really really works well for certain people. I personally witnessed it.

It would be a sad life if you turn everything you do in life as a game where you need to compete with others to win and never question the nature of the game itself.

"Do what you love" is an over all long term approach that sustains your energy and focus for long term.

Most ideas of high achievers are very contradictory, in general its a good idea to listen to so many of them and pick something that meets your style.

Watch this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k53LUZxUF50

It does a good job of explaining how trust evolved in the world and now that we are comfortable using computers to organize our lives, it makes sense to have a global ledger to keep track of "karma" we owe each other.

I did a background check and things do not add up for me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16037746

read the background verification i did for the same

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16037746

Please read more research i did here about this content.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16037746

You decide if there is any merit to the advice given.

You may want to read the due diligence I did about this topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16037746

One other quality of effective engineers is not fall for bullshit and have a scientific mindset of inquiry.

Read full story here.

http://telegra.ph/Effectiveengineercom-is-content-marketing-...

other clickable links

previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16022916

sales copy https://www.effectiveengineer.com/book

http://telegra.ph/Effectiveengineercom-is-content-marketing-...

Author's Resume https://angel.co/edmondlau

Author's Github https://github.com/edmondlau

Author's Quora profile https://www.quora.com/profile/Edmond-Lau

That short bio has no qualifications enough to write a book on effective engineering especially making claims like guiding people to become 10x engineer.

I find it difficult for a person with valid credentials in real life support this content marketing fraud.

Ok I will engage in this conversation.

First let me look up the author. Let me also just say that I have nothing against this author. I respect his entrepreneurial spirit and I believe he has a great future. But I deeply believe this sales page here is just plain wrong https://www.effectiveengineer.com/book and I strongly feel that experienced people like myself have to speak up when situation calls for it. It is fundamentally sleazy thing to do to other younger minds seeking proper guidance in the tech valley.

Authors resume

https://angel.co/edmondlau

First things I noticed. This person has not stayed at any company for more than 3 years. No strong engineering role titles like architecture or design or scaling roles. Mostly soft engineering roles like testing and growth hacking. as a 30 year experienced person like yourself ask yourself. What kind of serious engineering product can one build in that time period at a company with that roles and how many? In many respectable companies I worked for, a person with this experience level cannot even hire/fire people, interviewing someone is not same as hiring.

Next look at the the github profile vs quora profile.

https://github.com/edmondlau

https://www.quora.com/profile/Edmond-Lau

You can notice, this person is more of a content writer compared to code writer. What sort of engineering skills and expertise do you notice about the author that makes him write a sales page like this?.

https://www.effectiveengineer.com/book

Just like how I said it before, this is an effective nonsense garbage content marketing. The author has no qualifications to be writing a book on effective engineering. It is an insult to people who do actual engineering.

This person is milking his past job experience role at brand name companies to an irresponsible extent. This is not illegal but a very sleazy thing to do.

To people who really care about this topic, please get a good mentor in and around your workplace. Just do not fall for this click baits and gossip about tech companies does not make you effective anything. Engineering skill takes a lot of practice and patience, I am afraid there are no secrets and shortcuts.

I see what you are trying to do here. But please go read the sales copy of the book. Everything in that copy is a symptom of "moral decay" in the tech valley.

Which one did you purchase? "The master package" to become effective engineer.

It makes bold claims like it will make you 10X engineer and it some how guides you to figure out which technologies you need to work that will succeed in the future and keep reading, you will find more gems in there. The whole content is preying on the vulnerable.

We have had great advice in the tech industry so far like, "put customer first" or "think lean" or build beautiful products etc but this is the first classic that says to put yourself first and work on things that elevate you at the expense of the team and company and more narcissistic gems bundled with gossip from engineering teams with famous name companies.

I seriously doubt anyone who is looked upon for guidance by others would suggest something like this.

adios while I read the "Tactial Toolkit" to become effective engineer.

You may be right. Only the people who bought that “tactical toolkit” from that sales page are effective engineers. Everyone else may just not be up to it.

We used to call engineers who do tasks that elevate themselves at the expense of rest of the team as bad team players. Now the advice here is to do high leverage tasks.

The whole premise of the content appears to be a “get rich quick” scheme. The most vulnerable people in the industry are the young people looking for guidance and advice from older generations. The sales copy is clearly exploiting their insecurity by suggesting somehow there is a shortcut and by knowing these secrets for a small price, you too can be a 10x engineer.

Hope what ever you did works for you. I am probably not your prospective customer. I found the whole sales copy very deceptive. You are selling "Tactical Toolkit" to be effective engineer.

I understand your perspective about engineers undervaluing marketing and sales skills, but I think it's an example of short term thinking. Credibility is a currency, internet never forgets and I would never build credibility like this because I do not know how this will limit my future possibilities.

Read the sales copy. I just copied the first few lines of the first paragraph.

"The most effective engineers — the ones who have risen to become distinguished engineers and leaders at their companies — can produce 10 times the impact of other engineers, but they're not working 10 times the hours."

Taken from https://www.effectiveengineer.com/book

I will try to elaborate without trying to insult anyone. It might be harsh but I am sure the author can handle it.

First of all look at this sales copy of the book. https://www.effectiveengineer.com/book

It looks like a weight loss e-book product designed to trick ambitious people into impulse buying. It tries to build credibility by name dropping "google", "facebook", "insert big company here" every other paragraph. Then there are testimonials about how great the advice is from "LeaderLeaderLeader" enterprise hierarchy pattern i.e people with big titles from popular silicon valley companies.

Everything in that page is designed and optimized to make you buy the package. For a price of 250$ you too can know the secrets of effective Engineers.

To sell this content first create and exploit an insecurity in jr.Engineers or fresh job seekers in technology by saying they are not an effective engineer unless they buy this book/package and read the content and then they too will be part of the club and work at a big name brand company. Some people in our work places are exceptionally good at social engineering and not so much in actual engineering. The sales copy co-opted the "engineering" discipline to sell some curated content. This looks much similar to team/company "politics".

I do not think people in "effective engineering" business do this. This is certainly what people in content business do.

Now compare that to some other book for a contrast. https://basecamp.com/books/getting-real

Engineering is just like any other skill for e.g., like playing chess or piano or swimming etc. You get better by doing it many times and failing often. To be good at engineering involves many factors like genetics, discipline, irrational love and passion for a particular domain, patience, exposure to better ideas and better people. Even you are good at engineering, to be effective at a company/market, you need to know the right people and have right social and financial skills to get name and recognition.

Some how, effective engineering has become synonymous with what happens at big name company teams which I think is very wrong. If you look at the real world, once companies reach a bigger size, they stop doing effective anything. They just buy other small companies which spend more time on making effective products.

This content seems to be analogous to "founders at work" but a better title would have been "engineers at the enterprise".

This is effective nonsense. Based on my personal experience, effective engineers I know do not follow a formula like this.

This looks like a list of how to be teacher’s pet. A superficial need to be praised by others as effective only takes to “mediocre”.

I found this very useful. https://www.coursera.org/learn/model-thinking

For some reason reading this reminded me of this old conversation about frameworks. http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.219431....

In a lot of ways, this Leader, LeaderLeader thing is lot like Factory and FactoryFactory patterns in java. That FactoryFactory conversation came out when enterprise java was at its peak and everyone else were preaching that was the standard way of doing things. Then nodejs, rails and functional programming entered mainstream and it made java look very very complex and naturally everyone embraced simplicity and java itself could learn to be simple. It is possible the same is true for technology management.

There are a lot of underlying assumptions here. Like for e.g. This many layers are necessary. There is a right way to be a technology Leader or LeaderLeader and Technology Leader has some awesome supernatural powers to make things happen.

I am not sure if there is a great recipe for managing successful products/teams, if there were one, a lot of people with a lot of money would have done it by themselves with out need for "startups" to innovate. After some point, companies like Google and Microsoft tend to grow mostly by acquiring someone else, usually startups and there is very less LeaderLeader pattern in startups.

I am not too sure how much impactful the LeaderLeader pattern is in tech world. But as a creator of things for other people to use, it might be a better approach to see things from your user's perspective. It appears appealing to that many layers of organization leader hierarchy is a drain on human creative energy.

How would you talk to a teenager who thinks "C" grade is good enough? It's all relative. As an adult you can see the flaw in that teenager's mindset.

The beliefs behind your paradigm are important too. If you think one can achieve "growth" only by adding positive value to others, growth is not a bad thing. How is it possible to grow when there is no potential to grow? It would take some "crazies" to try to grow something that everyone else thinks this is it. We know that some people in history beat the prevailing expectations in sports, art and personal wealth.

I understand the conversation here is about when to stop or when should one realize that the idea has reached its potential?

I was at a startup pitching event where a founder was pitching a profitable "presentation software" company. The judge asked "How many billion dollar presentation software companies do you know?".

"Enough" conversation becomes important in software products because if smart people do not understand what is good, better and best they take more risks that only end up ruining the product.

This story is clearly intended to make HR people happy. HR should not be in any role of judging a candidate or employee. They are there to facilitate things and smooth'en things out. If you assume that they have any authority or hierarchy over other departments/staff you are doing HR wrong. Most of the software companies do it right. Smarter engineers do not work for companies that value superficial skills like the one's mentioned in the story.

Whiteboard is a medium to showcase your skill. People who can think in terms of pictures and demonstrate their thinking on white board are pretty good problem solvers. Not all companies and job roles need whiteboard coding. Companies have whiteboards and engineers use it to communicate with each other. It is a very effective tool. Interviewing is an art and bad interviewers make the process dehumanizing and boring. Do not hate the whiteboard. Some of the ideas programmers have are pretty complex, conversation and writing those are low bandwidth medium not adequate for interviews.

I can relate to the pain. The mind seems to never stop and it seems to be in a perpetual state of anxiety.

I dealt with burnout several times. The only thing that helped me deal with it was turn off electronic devices after certain time of the day and before certain time of the day. No tv, no phone, no laptop, not even your favorite meditation app. Do anything which does not involve electronics or information heavy.

Much other advice about how to deal with such issues over long term are easier said than done. Some of my favorite ideas are

Build sustainability into your engineering, product and sales process. It's like running a marathon. If you run too fast in the beginning, you get tired so easily.

Be less outcome dependent and more discipline driven. If you plan to make incremental progress, you will eventually have something stable and it gets easy to continue. If you need a constant rush of positive outcomes to get you to do something, it does not build resilience to last longer.

Ships are safe at harbor but thats not what they are made for. I guess the world needs people who want to work for big companies and people who want to startup. The grass is always greener on the other side, so its not the worst advice to get exposed to wide range of problems and people who are solving them in the industry.

Most of it is good advice for fresh graduates who want to get into big companies. Shouldn't we be telling these young people to aim higher?.

If you derive your sense of worth from a bigger brand and not your own efforts and caliber, you might be complacent for a while then life happens and you will regret not accomplishing anything meaningful in life. Before preparing for your interview and seeking validation for your self worth from big companies, try out internships at startups and get exposed to disruptive ideas. Do not play by somebody's rules. That leads to stagnation. A small plant does not get enough sunlight when it is shadowed by a giant tree. The sunlight you need is exposure to problems you can solve.

Google and Amazon are the new IBM and AOL. They were once the disruptors, now ready to be disrupted by newer generations. Every other day we read about how internet is broken and finance is broken, try starting there.

If you decide to get a job at big company, its not all that bad, just do not take it so seriously.