kv_hrishikesh

How many employees do the FAANGs have ? Must be above 100K spread over the world. Even 5K talented engineers are enough for all the (admittedly superb) software they build and sell. With those profits still up, the rest of the employees can just be coasting along, endlessly arguing about things.

I was hoping to find many lower level topics like caches, TLBs, locality of reference etc. but it seems the data oriented-ness implied by the author is different.

>Could you point to a specific year in the 20th century after WW II that no Western government was conducting an unethical experiment?

Are you justifying unethical experiments on Uighurs by the chinese government ?

Engineers might organize a hackathon and show off solutions to climate change working day and night, in the next 72 hours. Ha !

Some companies are trying to grow aggressively despite an economic downturn. So what, NY Times ?

There is a reason why Haskell is not popular. But I don't think the impenetrable passages about Monads are the reason behind it. It is more about what you gain by adopting Haskell and powering through the impenetrable passages. If it is not blazing fast runtime performance and fast speed of development and maintainable code, then Haskell is pointless. As such, if there are those kind of benefits available, there is plenty of extra brainpower available among developers to comprehend passages.

Google has at least 50K employees, spread all over the world. I guess it is quite possible to gather and recruit 50K employees who are much better developers than most others outside but I would not (rather cannot) call each one of them elite of the elite !

Look, a great deal of valuable software has been created by Google and other FAANGs. But I reckon most of that value has actually been created by the first or the best 5000 or maybe 10K employees at most. Most of the others in Google are enjoying the fruits of their genius, and they don't really have to perform any greater miracle than moving protocol buffers around. Still, no doubt that they are highly competent software developers and passed tough interviews. Not to imply that Google interviews can even distinguish between a genuinely talented programmer from a diligently-practicing-over-a-year leetcoder.

A congenial but mediocre developer may actually be more valuable than a rowdy and talented one because she pisses off less number of other brilliant developers.

So there goes one more Economics Nobel for telling us that it is good to snatch from the rich and give it all to the poor. Ok, the poor will spend it surely. On beer, bread and weed probably. Thus the money ends up back to the producers of those items, namely the rich. While our poor wait again for the next dole, they steadfastly refuse to earn by a honest day's work for themselves because they no longer need to.

Poverty is not really solved by the doles. It needs real productivity increases among all sections of the society, rich and poor. It can be brought about by investing in education, health care and insurance, not by doling out money to the poor. Inequality exists in societies for a reason - there are sections of the society which are genuinely more productive in this modern, industrial world. Why not try to provide equal opportunities to all sections of the society to be richer instead of temporary fixes like these ?