I took their comment to mean that these people are standing on the massive mountains of progress that have been made, but not acknowledging that a lot of wasted effort was lost learning these things.
It's easy to only talk about what should be done with perfection in mind, it's another to talk about what can realistically be done.
It's no different in regards for anything else the humane race has done, we know the solutions to be done in regards to climate change, inequality; it's another to convince society to then go and try to solve these things with the solutions we thought of.
But there are cases where the interacting with company which engages in said practices is due to a transitive relationship.
Example: My preferred clothing vendor uses a certain of delivery company.
If I, personally, am sending a package then switching the delivery company is usually trivial. Switching clothing vendor because UPS has crappy international package management and you need to say the package id instead of typing it would hurt me more than it would hurt them.
And the other shipping companies aren’t much better anyway. And afaik there isn’t much incentive for trading off something in exchange for pissing parcels receivers less, because see above.
On the other hand, there are great shipping companies, end user experiance-wise. One I can think of is a polish automated pickup station company. Somehow the experience (including customer support in case of a stuck door, etc.) only gets better with time so far. But they were the first and afaik remain the only company in the automated pickup station space that counts in Poland.
This is quite an interesting phenomenon, though it's more unique. I find those kind (can't come up with a sensible qualifier... the best thing that comes to mind is "upper middle class normie journalism") of pieces incomprehensible on the higher strata of the parsing tree. I understand the words (which is not always the case with fiction, eg Blindsight - there are pages where I need to do multiple dictionary lookups, English is not my native tongue thou), the sentences more or less clearly denote facts or ideas, but... the more I read of them the less they make sense together.
Yet another funny thing occurred to me: I'm not sure I'm enjoying much non-technical non-fiction. Is Bret Devereaux[0] technical? Well, τέχνη, the root word hints at craft, art or skill. The articles focus on the "how to" (move armies, organize settlements or even write better fiction) merely using "how it was" as a teaching aid and inspiration. So the conclusion would follow that all kinds of guides are technical.
Then if a published piece of writing is neither technical (guide / manual) nor fiction (art) - what is it? Isn't it just... data?
Yeah I'm not necessarily trying to endorse that style of writing either, and I think "upper middle class normie journalism" is a pretty good name for it.
But I do notice that HN tends to have a hard time with/disparage writing that doesn't state a clear thesis and move towards it directly. Writing that makes its point "between the lines" or through braiding apparently unrelated thoughts together and expecting the reader to finish the splice are not well received here.
I also think that, like consuming only social media probably atrophies your attention span, reading only "direct" prose atrophies your ability to experience the ride of other styles and receive what they have to give.
And again I don't really intend this as a value judgement. Both styles have their place and there is no moral imperative to enjoy all approaches to writing. But having a limited palate accidentally, being blind to that, and thinking the fault is entirely in anything that lies outside of it is in a very literal sense pathetic. And here I often sense that it is perceived as virtuous distance from foolishness instead.
> But I do notice that HN tends to have a hard time with/disparage writing that doesn't state a clear thesis and move towards it directly. Writing that makes its point "between the lines" or through braiding apparently unrelated thoughts together and expecting the reader to finish the splice are not well received here.
I think that reaction's a combination of that sort of writing sometimes being amateurish wankery poorly-imitating better writers with better ideas, and an awful lot of tech- and science-nerd sorts having decided around 5th grade that they were already expert readers and literature and language classes were just a bunch of time-wasting made-up bullshit that couldn't possibly teach them to be better readers or writers. "It's this entire field that's wrong, not me!"
Poor literacy is almost as prevalent as poor math skills, folks are just less comfortable owning up to it. Plus a lot more people overestimate how good they are at it, I think, than do with math skills.
HN's content is entirely nonfiction, which demands a focused and discuplined style of writing: claim, defense, conclusion. Because its goal is to entertain, fiction frees the author to meander, muddle, or mislead — all of which impede making or defending a thesis.
If an article is nonfiction, then get to the point and stay there, dammit.
Yeah see this is the sort of very narrow-minded view of nonfiction I'm talking about. It's fine if that's the only thing you can bring yourself to value but it doesn't put the fault in the writing.
I think believes is the key here. There are definitely people who believe that if they can work on complex graph colouring problem in a real-time processing scenario and the interruptions are minimal - then indeed their talent is utilised well. And I can imagine such a scenario happening at Google in advertising department/division/tribe .
There are plenty of critical, unglamorous jobs which need to be done. It’s not unreasonable for an engineer to value high six figure/seven figure salaries over a feeling of work fulfillment and skill utilization
It’s almost always the case that maxing out your ESPP contribution is a good idea instead of getting the money earlier and investing it in something else. It might even be worth getting a loan and still maxing out the contribution should you require more cashflow (because 10% loan is still cheaper than missing out on ~90% return). But the t return is limited to your max contribution percentage * your salary, therefore you still need to think about what to do with rest of your money.
How making more money in absolute terms in some other investment invalidate the above?
Yeah, the standard ESPP I’ve seen (twice now) is essentially a series of call options (at 6, 12, 18 and 24 months in the future). If the option is not 15% in the money at vesting, the plan resets and it is replaced by one that is in the money.
Look at the price for actual call options at these intervals and you will have an approximate idea of the value of this financial instrument. It’s probably substantial, almost certainly more so than the opportunity cost on your money (unless you must meet critical expenses or pay off credit card debt). And if you always sell the same day you buy, the risk is quite low (if the plan is at its bottom and the stock price falls 15%, basically, but most ESPP dates are just after earnings which limits the types of surprises you’re in for).
> It’s almost always the case that maxing out your ESPP contribution is a good idea
I completely agree. I did say I'm pro-ESPP.
The key point you miss is that the amount you can make is somewhat capped - and for many companies, the cap is 5% of your salary. It's almost always nice, free money, but most of the times it's a relatively small amount of money. It should not rank high in your whole investment scheme.
To take things to an absurd level, I can offer you a deal: You give me $1 (and cannot give more), and 6 months later I'll give you $10. That's a 9000% rate of return. Fantastic deal, right? But is it a big part of your investment strategy? I hope not.
> How making more money in absolute terms in some other investment invalidate the above?
It doesn't invalidate it. The trouble is when people focus on the rate of return more than the absolute amount, and decide to pick ESPP instead of investments that will make more money. When you look at absolute amounts, it's clear that ESPP, even though is good, is inferior.
Not strictly curve grading, but when I was studying electronics one of the professors had a 9-step algorithm for processing raw scores into grades. That involved normalizing the lab scores between different reviewers (so that harshness of a particular reviewer would be compensated for). He also assigned `cos(percentage_from_other_test as radians)` instead of resits if you missed one of the tests for valid reason but had shown up on the other.
On one hand I really like the former approach and could understand the latter (organizing resits is likely a huge PITA). On the other that's the only professor I heard of that was attacked with an axe by one of his students.
I've managed a few projects and IMO the state of the art in terms of wording is "ideas" for the long list of tasks that might be a good >idea< to maybe do sometime in the future and "plans" for the shortlist of concrete activities that we >plan< to implement soon.
As for your a bit sarcastic proposals [did I read that correctly?], I see the following problems:
- "queue" implies meaningful ordering and you don't get to skip or totally rearrange a queue without a good reason in most situations that involve a queue
- "roadmap" according to Cambridge dictionary is a form of plan, which doesn't quite cut if for describing the can-be-postponed-without-consequences part of the backlog.
Regarding the matter of language: I'm assuming [in this context] the presupposition that words are tools. And you can do a good job with crappy tools and vice versa. Yet there is a correlation between tool quality and the outcome. Example: the WIP limit in kanban - sometimes referred to as "work in progress limit". Why the hell would you like to limit progress? But when you change it to "in process" the whole concept suddenly makes a lot more sense. If everything is in process nothing will ever get done, so putting a limit on that ensures output.
How does the real world works? What are the hard parts? What’s wrong with using other people’s software?