johan_larson

Do you have any people in your company who could build what you need if given the time? Sometimes there are people who are pretty handy with coding who aren't called "programmers". They may be analysts or engineers or something like that. And is there anyone who understands the domain, has solid leadership skills, and at least a bit of tech skill, enabling them to serve as a project lead?

If you have both of these, you could conceivably use your existing staff to build at least a limited-functionality version 1, and backfill the jobs they used to do with new people. If not, you have the harder problem of needing to hire people to do something you don't know how to do at all.

It makes sense that Google would want to push jobs from high-cost centers to low-cost ones. The only question is why they haven't done so more aggressively.

Yo dawg, I heard you like parasites, so I put wasps in your wasps so they can parasitize while they're parasitized.

Yeah, it's not hard to find knowledgeable commentary to the effect that the duty of directors to act in the interests of the shareholders does not mean a simple-minded duty to maximize profits. The interests of shareholders are complicated, and boards can make nuanced decisions about short-term vs long-term profits, risks, reputation, and such things that are difficult to capture using financial reports.

Here's a Cornell law school prof saying just this. https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

"There is a common belief that corporate directors have a legal duty to maximize corporate profits and 'shareholder value' — even if this means skirting ethical rules, damaging the environment or harming employees. But this belief is utterly false. To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: 'Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.'"

"Serving shareholders’ 'best interests' is not the same thing as either maximizing profits, or maximizing shareholder value. 'Shareholder value,' for one thing, is a vague objective: No single 'shareholder value' can exist, because different shareholders have different values. Some are long-term investors planning to hold stock for years or decades; others are short-term speculators."

"More to the point, corporate directors are protected from most interference when it comes to running their business by a doctrine known as the business judgment rule. It says, in brief, that so long as a board of directors is not tainted by personal conflicts of interest and makes a reasonable effort to stay informed, courts will not second-guess the board’s decisions about what is best for the company — even when those decisions predictably reduce profits or share price."

> He is considered one of the most savvy and aggressive tech ceos out there

By whom? I used to work at Snowflake, and from what I remember people on the inside were far more excited about the founders than they were about the CEO.

I got the impression that he was meeting expectations for the CEO job, but no more. Though that's a pretty high bar, given position of the company and the industry.

I don't know about that. Companies generally do regular performance reviews, so there should be a lot of information about who the underperforming or merely adequate workers in each group are.

I doubt the really top companies -- top 10, say -- have any trouble finding staff, at least for low-level positions. These companies are mobbed by applicants, and can afford to pay top rates. But I can believe things are rather different farther down the totem-pole of prestige. How far down do you have to go before hiring becomes really difficult, and you can't just pick the top of the crop, but rather have to make do with questionable workers?

Netflix is the #6 internet company by market cap. Probably no problems there.

eBay is #30.

Digital Ocean is #91.

I don't for a minute believe this number is actually true. But on the other hand, it seems like a very strange lie to tell, because it's so unbelievable. It would be far easier to believe a claim that COVID deaths are simply very rare but not actually non-existent. That would be the sensible lie, the canny lie.

It's tempting to believe that the Chinese government just doesn't give a damn what people think, and are therefore willing to say anything at all. But if they really don't care, why lie in the first place?

The only interpretation that I can come up with that makes sense is that a) the government of China is reluctant to admit to any fault at all, b) the actual number of deaths is low but not impressively low, and c) the Chinese press (including social media) is very tightly controlled, and d) by b and c the government can get away with saying there are no deaths without looking like idiots.

I agree with you that it is not possible to both fix the feature set and fix the delivery date and expect to consistently succeed. But it is also not possibly to tell upper management, who are dealing with a whole other set of difficulties, that they have to pick a feature set or a delivery date and that's all there is to it. If you do that, they'll reject your advice, and find someone else who'll give them a more palatable message.

The best I can come up with is the notion of a double contingency plan. Engineering agrees to a set of functionality to be delivered and a delivery date. This is inevitably going to be a bit optimistic, because people consistently overestimate themselves.

To deal with that, the first contingency plan addresses the question of what should be done if things are not converging to the ship date. The plan here is to keep the ship date, but ask hard questions about what bits of functionality actually need to be kept. What are the actual P0 - MUST HAVE features?

The second contingency plan addresses what is to be done if the first one fails. At this point engineering has already done all they can. They have pushed as hard as they can, and they have deferred every feature that is deferrable. They are down to the actual MUST HAVEs. Now the rest of the organization has to figure out what to do with a product that is inevitably going to be late. What is the alternate ship date? What customers are going to be really unhappy. And so on.

It seems to me any large engineering project should think out these contingency plans in advance. What will they do if making the deadline starts to look daunting? And what will they do if making the deadline turns out to be impossible?

The problem I see with various flavors of Agile is that they don't fit in particularly well with how things actually get done at companies.

For example, teams running Agile are very reluctant to give both a delivery date and a fixed set of features. They're willing to promise one or the other, but not both. And that's a problem, because the whole rest of the organization really wants to know when they can announce the release to customers. Planning for releases tends to be a really big deal, the pressure to make promises of both functionality and delivery dates is very strong.

Also, Agile methodologies tend to assume you are in close contact with the customer, who can tell you what they actually want and decide how things should work. But this is rarely the case; typically you have a PM or something like that who is in touch with the customers, and is supposed to understand what they want. But this person is rarely senior enough to actually make decisions; important decisions are made by a dev manager or a project lead or someone like that, with the PM just providing input and perspective.

Finally, Agile has this notion that everything is supposed to be handled informally, verbally, person to person. And that's fine for small tweaks to the product. But as soon as you start building something big enough that it takes months and crosses team boundaries, it gets really useful to have an actual document explaining how something is supposed to work. Such a document is an invaluable record on what has actually been decided, and anyone joining the project or wanting to contribute to it absolutely should read it. But Agile tends to discourage creating such documents in the first place.

Given that Agile clashes so hard with how actual organizations get things done, it rarely gets adopted in anything approaching a pure form. The practices that tend to get picked up might be called Agile-light: sprints, daily meetings, and task estimation in points.

Here are the current number of deaths per million from COVID for the G7 nations:

Japan - 119

Canada - 696

Germany - 1,093

France - 1,704

US - 1,876

UK - 1,886

Italy - 2,118

Judged by this metric, Canada came second among the major first-world democracies. We did well. To be sure, there were missteps. We should have done better. But we could also have done a whole lot worse.

I worked for Huawei in Canada for a bit less than a year before I left, because my boss insisted on assigning me work I didn't believe I could deliver on.

Of course I was only there for a short time, so I could be mistaken, but I did note that 75% of the employees in the lab (in Canada) were Chinese, as were seven of the eight first-level managers. That said, I never felt badly treated because of my ethnicity, and I never saw anyone else treated badly either. While it is possible things could have ended up this way for innocuous reasons, I would bet against it. I'm guessing some informal "good fit" discrimination is going on.

There is also an awful lot of Chinese spoken at the company. They try to run their foreign operations in English, and I have to give them credit for putting some real effort into it. But given the distribution of their staff in Canada and even more so over in China, in practice things switch over to Chinese quite frequently. It makes sense that they do this, since some of the engineers in China struggle to communicate in English, but when it happens the non-Chinese are excluded. And it's hard to object when one is the only blue-eye among a dozen Chinese.

Given what I saw, I would advise any non-Chinese engineer considering taking a job at Huawei to consider alternatives carefully, and absolutely not take the job if they do not speak Chinese and do not plan to learn it.

Some people just plain don't like Reddit. I'm not quite clear on why, but it predates the current cancellation fights. Perhaps the upvote/downvote system encourages attention-seeking behavior.

Actually, Data Secrets Lox has moved to this URL:

https://www.datasecretslox.com/

The old link will continue to work for a while.

It's an anagram of "Slate Star Codex".

The SSC diaspora is collecting in a number of locations. The two I am most familiar with are Naval Gazing (a blog about naval affairs) and Data Secrets Lox (a new discussion forum).

Data Secrets Lox is set up as a replacement for the SSC open threads, and is run on actual forum software, which means there are topic-specific threads for easier navigation. As membership increases, I expect we'll add subforums, also.

https://www.navalgazing.net/

https://datasecretslox.obormot.net/

I have occasionally been curious about that, but never curious enough to try to make an effort to find out. Call it a mix of laziness and respect for the preferences of others.

Anonymity is not some sort of natural right. For most of our existence as a species, we lived in small groups where you quite naturally knew everyone you dealt with. True strangers were rare, and quite rightly regarded with a certain suspicion. Anonymity only became possible when we started living in groups large enough that you might have to deal with people you hadn't met before, because there were just too many people around for you to know all of them. And even in such circumstances, if you were going to enter into some sort of serious agreement, like buying on credit or renting property, you would absolutely have been required to identify yourself. Historically, anonymity of any sort has only sometimes been possible, and anonymity in serious matters has generally not been possible at all. It is therefore not reasonable to speak of a natural right to anonymity.

My position, strictly speaking, is that anonymity is generally permissible. If you want to try to remain anonymous, that is in many cases fine. But it is also quite difficult, particularly in the face of determined investigation, and is therefore rather unrealistic. Unless you really know what you are doing, your attempts will fail as soon as someone really cares about finding out. This makes combining anonymity with any sort of public prominence or celebrity status a particularly bad fit, because plenty of people care about knowing all sorts of details about celebrities, so there is plenty of reason for both amateur snoops and professional investigators to go looking.

I don't find your example of celebrity pseudonyms particularly convincing. These are simply terms of convenience, part of crafting a public image. They are not true attempts to hide anyone's identity. Pull up the wiki page of most any celebrity that goes by a stage name, and you'll find their real or original name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupac_Shakur

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elton_John

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne

I'm sorry Scott has decided to shut down his blog. He posted many interesting things over the years, and the community of commenters that clustered in the blog's open threads was usually a joy to deal with. I was part of that for years. I'm sorry to see it go.

That said, this decision to shut down the blog looks like an overreaction to me. Scott seems to think that he should be able to be both a prominent online pundit, on the one hand, and completely anonymous, on the other. That just isn't realistic. If you're someone who matters, people are going to want to know who you are. And there are people who make it their business to uncover such information.

A part of being famous is a certain level of unwelcome attention. It's not just the good and kind that pay attention to you. It's the weird and threatening too. This should not be news to anybody. It seems to me Scott got his first brush with real fame (in the form of an article by a top newspaper), and discovered that even a modest helping of it was was more than he was willing to deal with.

Goodbye SSC. It was good while it lasted.

How about something counter-intuitive: lower the limit? There is a built-in hard limit imposed by the structure itself. Set the marked limit to something well short of that, like 8 feet. Then add very obvious soft barriers like light swinging bars to indicate the lower boundary. That would encourage anyone driving anything that might actually hit the hard limit to take an alternate route. (Of course, that means there actually needs to be a realistic alternate route.)

The dollar sign comes before the number, not after it.

$150

"Grit" is a good translation.

English-speakers who try to translate the word usually try something like "courage" or "guts", which isn't quite right. "Sisu" is not really about daring; it's more about tenacity and capacity to endure hardship. "Grit" is better.

For what it's worth, Bing doesn't make the distinction much clearer. Ads have a tiny little Ad icon, but both the background and the text look just like regular search results.

For a long time, the answer was probably performance. Lots of people were trained to use Lisp in their computer science courses, and lots of people admired it. But it was never anywhere near as fast as C, and in the seventies and eighties squeezing every darn bit of speed out of your hardware was what counted.

The language had another chance in the nineties, when it became important to save not just execution time, but the programmer's time also. This is when interpreted languages like Perl and Python started showing up in a big way. I'm less confident why Lisp lost out that time, but its weird syntax is probably at least part of the reason.

I can't help but notice that this post is just below PG's "Having Kids" post. That's a challenging project right there.

I guess 850 jobs moving out of Silicon Valley isn't that big a deal, relatively speaking.

> We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals.

Anyone in the telecommunications industry care to speak to this? Because this guy sounds like a spoiled brat who doesn't realize that good things cost money.

He is talking about the pre-internet landline network, an international communications system that reached virtually everyone in both the biggest cities and the smallest towns, and was so reliable I was nearly twenty before I realized that dial tone wasn't always on if the bill was paid. That wasn't cheap; you needed thousands and thousands of line workers and engineers and administrators and customer service workers to make it all work. And you needed to raise billions of dollars to build the damn thing in the first place.

This is my thinking too. Having to prove, over and over, that I understand how linked lists and binary search trees work is just tiresome. Doing it once and then being able to refer to a trusted credential that certifies it would be a blessing.

I understand nobody is going to hire on the strength of one exam. Every job is a little bit different and some of them call for particular skill sets. That's fine. By all means ask questions tailored to the job at hand. But let's find a way to skip the really generic questions.

> A Corporation is legally required to work only to increase the value of a share, nothing more.

No. That's a misconception. Corporate directors are required to act in the interests of the shareholders, but they have a lot of discretion in determining what those interests are and how they are to be served.

Here's a reference from a decent law school: https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/academics/clarke_business_...