The issue I think you're outlining is whether someone builds because they believe in their product and its value or if they are profiteers charading as believers.
I'm not saying profit isn't a factor, but a lot of these founders are five year founders, they are using the company as a means to their end. Basically I'm criticizing short sightedness and what it does to our economy. That's why I've turned against the stock market. The high liquidity means you are beholden to thousands of people who view your company as a roulette wheel amongst thousands, who want immediate gains and have no stomach for any losses. And many of the founders are the same people wearing a different hat.
> The issue I think you're outlining is whether someone builds because they believe in their product and its value or if they are profiteers charading as believers.
I do agree with your overall criticism of short-sightedness and the short term incentives of VC and the stock market, etc.
But the people involved are not quite as binary as you lay out in the quote above. You can't discount the group of people who really do start out as true believers and who become seduced/deceived by VCs. Some of these VC types are real vultures. They'll convince the founder that the best way to share their vision or product with the most people and do the most good for the world is to let the VC guys use their capital to scale up and expand the reach of the product, etc. The money surely helps to lower one's skepticism/cynicism, but I can imagine that it must be very hard to say no to getting your dream project out to millions of people.
>The high liquidity means you are beholden to thousands of people who view your company as a roulette wheel amongst thousands, who want immediate gains and have no stomach for any losses.
This sounds a lot like Warren Buffett's opinion of stocks. The Berkshire Hathaway Class A stocks are 780k each because he wanted people to act like investors, not speculators.
That is exactly what is happening to Reddit. Made famous by its submitters and moderators. Business decision driven by metrics based on view counts because that sells ads. Let this be a lesson: metrics are not the only way to measure success. I worked at a company where metrics were viewed as a way to cut through dissonance and bias. Newflash: leaders should be opinionated and have visions that do not yet exist. They should be investors in their product and its culture. Metrics should play a role in that decision, but perhaps a tiny one. Because what metrics you choose, how you measure it, and most importantly, what is even measurable, have a tremendous impact on the effect of those metrics.
You keep using the word "should", but what makes you think these business parasites aren't getting exactly what they want by making their products complete garbage? The CEO caste doesn't care about making good or unique products; they don't care about their users; they don't care about company culture; they don't care about their effects on society or the environment; they don't even care about the long-term financial success of their company. They only care about the immediate short-term gains that directly benefit them, and clearly paint-by-metric is a tried and true way of optimizing for that at the expense of everything else. If it rots the company from the inside out (or even society as a whole), who gives a shit? They just fly off and find a different company to parasitize.
By the time our society is collapsing and our rivers are catching fire and our government is being overthrown and our oceans are boiling and our bodies are full of plastic and we can't even escape to another planet because of Kessler syndrome -- all due to their actions -- they'll be old. That will be their kids' problems, and we know the CEO caste fucking hates their own kids.
Once we are aware of these neural pathways I see no reason there shouldn't be a watcher and influencer of the pathways. A bit like a dystopian mind watcher. Shape the brain.
Your excerpt is a bit misleading, here's a wider cut:
When it published the article, the newspaper reported that it had delayed publication because the George W. Bush White House had argued that publication "could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny." The timing of the New York Times story prompted debate, and the Los Angeles Times noted that "critics on the left wondering why the paper waited so long to publish the story and those on the right wondering why it was published at all." Times executive editor Bill Keller denied that the timing of the reporting was linked to any external event, such as the December 2005 Iraqi parliamentary election, the impending publication of Risen's book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, or the then-ongoing debate on Patriot Act reauthorization. Risen and Lichtblau won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2006.
In an interview in 2013, Keller said that the newspaper had decided not to report the piece after being pressured by the Bush administration and being advised not to do so by The New York Times Washington bureau chief Philip Taubman, and that "Three years after 9/11, we, as a country, were still under the influence of that trauma, and we, as a newspaper, were not immune."
And the NYT only published when Risen's book was going to come out, meaning the reporting that they paid for was going to get published in a book and embarrass the hell out of them
The question of facts are clear and admitted by their executive leadership. That the Bush admin gave them a bunch of scary stories isn't relevant - they knew the NSA was illegally spying on all Americans and, under pressure from an administration running for re-election, made the conscious decision to keep Americans uninformed of what power was doing to them.
That's the old grey lady, same as she ever was. Take a gander at the rest of that Wiki page, this isn't an isolated incident.
'Pressure' doesn't mean fear necessarily. It could just result in different calculations of concern or risk.
More importantly, the word 'pressure' upthread was written by a random Wikipedia editor. It's not quoting NYT editor Bill Keller. I think reading much into it - or even relying on it at all - is risky.
From what I know, do I think the Bush administration attempted to pressure the NYT? I wouldn't be surprised. But the evidence says the Bush team made arguments about risk to national security. Those certainly could have influenced the NYT, and I think the NYT said that.
Since profit controls everything in this society and we are in a regulatory capture government, there is only incentives to build murder robots, not disincentives.
I see that a lot from the Go crowd. That's why I consider any strong opinions on languages to be a poor indicator for ability. Sure there's differences, but a language does not make the engineer. Someone who is attracted to flashy stuff makes for an indulgent planner.
> That's why I consider any strong opinions on languages to be a poor indicator for ability.
Hmm. Can't say I agree here - at least not with the literal text of what you've written (although maybe we agree in spirit). I agree that _simplistic_ strong opinions about languages are a sign of poor thoughtfulness ("<thing> is good and <other thing> is bad") - but I'd very much expect a Staff+ engineer to have enough experience to have strong opinions about the _relative_ strengths of various languages, where they're appropriate to use and where a different language would be better. Bonus points if they can tell me the worst aspects about their favourite one.
Maybe we're using "opinion" differently, and you'd call what I described there "facts" rather than opinions. In which case - yeah, fair!
Absolutely. Anyone senior should be able to fairly quickly get a handle on the requirements for a particular project and put forward a well-reasoned opinion on an appropriate tech stack for it. There might be some blank space in there for "I've heard of X and Y that actually might fit this use case slightly better, so it's probably worth a brief investigation of those options, but I've used Z before so I know about the corner cases we may run into, and that has value too."
Language matters quite a bit when deciding how to build an application though. I see having no strong opinions on language to be a sign the person hasn't developed a wide enough variety of projects to get a feel for their strengths and weaknesses.
The more senior I get the less opinionated I am. Someone wants to do something in some different or some different way.. why not. In the end the language matters little the tech stack doesn't matter unless you are going down a specific path and even then it probably doesn't matter that much if you have a choice on what to use.
I honestly couldn't disagree more. Having built very similar systems in Golang, Python, and Java in different companies, and having used MongoDB and other NoSQLs
as well as Postgres to similar ends, I have very strong preferences about which I'd rather use in the future.
Even simple requirements can rule out languages for me. Like, if you need async or concurrency, Python is awful. If you need SQL in your code, Golang isn't great. If you are building a simple CRUD backend, Java is waste of time. If you aren't doing anything compute heavy or embedded, why even consider C++ or Rust. The list goes on.
You are trying to choose between languages based on differentiation.
This language is better for x so it should be used or it's a waste time or capability.
But in reality it rarely matters. If you were only allowed to use Java as a backend and your competitors could use anything your company would succeed or fail based on marketing and sales. The backend doesn't matter as long as they both have the same features.
I understand developer preference and different languages make things easier and make programming funnier. Languages have different limits.
As you become more senior you realize getting around those limits is part of the magic. If you come on to a project where the existing developer wants to write the backend in javascript because that's what they know I would rather use Javascript then wasting time trying to push a more 'pure' choice. Because in the end I am capable of writing it and what we will be judged on is if it works to achieve an objective not if it was the best language choice when using differentiation.
Then why do companies try to move so fast if if doesn't matter? Seems like your opinion runs counter to the observed behavior of the entire software industry.
If speed of execution matters, then the language and tools you use for something also matters.
There’s also the practicality of hiring or maintenance as well as what you get from the ecosystem, as well as understanding the wider business context.
I might personally love to kick off a greenfield project with Elixir, and it might tick all the technical boxes and meet the requirements. But then I have to pay a premium for senior engineers that know elixir or have to price in the time needed to upskill.
Or I could just do it in Rails where I can dip into a much larger talent pool and still meet the requirements. Much more boring but can get the job done just as well.
Python is great for library orchestration and has tons of support for almost anything you need. So if you aren't building a large application and don't need concurrency, its great.
Java is great for building large applications with large teams, since it limits how code is shared and how libraries are built, and has a culture of convention. Golang has greate concurrency support and meta programming support, so its awesome for web servers and plugging into systems that incorporate orchestration technologies. C++ and Rust are fast and efficient as hell when you need that. JavaScript is your only viable option when you need complex and interactive UI that's OS agnostic.
And I see people who assume choosing a language was done for "flashy stuff" the less capable.
See, we can all generalize. Not productive.
Only thing I ever saw from Golang devs was pragmatism. I myself go either for Elixir or Rust and to me Golang sits in a weird middle but I've also written 20+ small tools for myself in Golang and have seen how much quicker and more productive I was when I was not obsessed with complete correctness (throwaway script-like programs, small-to-mid[ish]-sized projects, internal tools etc.)
You would do well to stop stereotyping people based on their choice of language.
> how much quicker and more productive I was when I was not obsessed with complete correctness
That's pretty much another way of saying that stuff becomes a whole lot quicker and easier when you end up getting things wrong. Which may even be true, as far as it goes. It's just not very helpful.
Obviously. But I did qualify my statement. There are projects where you're OK with not getting everything right from the get go.
FWIW I very much share your exact thoughts on Rust skewing metrics because it makes things too easy and because stuff almost immediately moves to maintenance mode. But that being said, we still have some tasks where we need something yesterday and we can't argue with the shot-callers about it. (And again, some personal projects where the value is low and you derive more of it if you try quickly.)
I am a builder trained as a computer engineer. I scoff at languages as abstractions over fundamentals that do not change. This isn't like a hammer and a screwdriver, it's like fifteen different hammers. Just give me the thing, I'll build the house. A guy spends three hours talking about the hammer, he's probably not focused on building the house. Tool preferences show ego of the builder.
What do you think all programming discussions about languages, typing systems, runtime, tooling etc. aim for?
EXACTLY THAT.
If it was as easy as "just give me thing" then programming would have been a solved and 100% automated problem long time ago.
Your comment comes across as "if only we could fly, we would have no ground road traffic jams". I mean, obviously, yeah, but we can't fly.
Your comment also comes across a bit elitistic and from the POV of an ivory tower. Don't know if that was your goal, if not, I'd advise you to state things a bit more humbly.
I'm not seeking your advice. When I look at a cathedral built out of sand and call it meaningless that is not elitist, that is humble. Engineers who think their tools make all the difference are the pretentious ones. Things are not that complicated.
Do not be addicted to metrics. Steve Jobs would tell you that while you might help profits in the short term, you're undermining the long term product experience. Don't sound like an executive whose compensation is tied to profit metrics. That is not the only form of success just because it's the most measurable. Measurability does not necessarily equate to most impact.
He's probably rational, but he's certainly not democratically elected and has ousted all his enemies. What do you define as a dictator? He's accountable to no one.
Unrelated but I cannot imagine anyone on this site still using Chrome. It's an advertising tool and with the change to remove Ublock and enforce DRM every more aggressively, it has so little to offer. I only use it for casting. Hard to see why anyone would use it for anything else at all.
I'm not saying profit isn't a factor, but a lot of these founders are five year founders, they are using the company as a means to their end. Basically I'm criticizing short sightedness and what it does to our economy. That's why I've turned against the stock market. The high liquidity means you are beholden to thousands of people who view your company as a roulette wheel amongst thousands, who want immediate gains and have no stomach for any losses. And many of the founders are the same people wearing a different hat.