The most surprising part about this to me is that this matters at the top. Sure, for a middle manager it makes sense that it matters quite a bit. I'm pretty surprised that it matters much at the top, though.
If Elon Musk decided to head a major grocery chain I wouldn't stop to consider whether his lack of experience in retail groceries mattered much. But maybe it does?
Really interesting to see the analogy extend to sports, too. Professional sports teams, even successful ones, are almost universally run (coaches, GMs, etc.) by people who didn't play at a high level. Without actually pulling the numbers up, I'd estimate with high probability that the number of "all-stars" either managing or running teams is countable on one hand.
I mean, hell, this year's superbowl is being lead by two coaches who played D3 football, and one GM who played football for a Canadian university. One of said coaches is pretty universally considered one of the greatest coaches of all time.
For the most part these coaches/GMs absolutely could not do the job of the players on the field, nor could they ever.
I don't disagree with you, but that isn't really what the article is saying. The article is all but making a blanket statement that "unpredictability = bad in any context":
> Behaving unpredictably with one group — customers, employees, competitors, suppliers, etc. — means exposing your unpredictability to all.
Not sure I totally find this persuasive: The author tries his damnedest to draw a distinction between "unpredictability" and "secrecy", but it ends up being pretty murky.
For example:
> Keeping secrets can protect competitive advantage. Imagine the D-Day invasion of Normandy if the Allies had announced dates and locations.
> But secrecy is not the same thing as unpredictability... Unpredictability bluffs, postures, and palters to gain advantage through uncertainty and misdirection.
Wasn't a big part of the D-day strategy to feed misinformation to the Germans? Weren't the beaches at Normandy significantly depleted on the German side because the Germans thought the allied invasion was happening somewhere else (Italy? I don't recall offhand).
His other points are similarly iffy:
> The leader — the strategist... They propose a race rather than a duel.
Isn't proposing a different contest a fairly unpredictable move? Secrecy and unpredictability seem more-or-less synonymous when viewed through the lens of your competitor.
It seems like by "unpredictable" he means "making moves that seem to provide no net benefit," not actually "unpredictable."
I hate to get into an internet pissing match, but I think this is important (especially so if you're a healthcare professional, because this obviously has ramifications for you). Still, I really have no desire to argue with strangers on the internet, so this is the last I'll say about this:
Both are untrue.
> But if you know they have a weak pulse, then clearly you did a pulse check, and CPR would not be indicated.
Re-read the AHA guidelines I linked to. CPR is indicated for apnea or agonal respiration. Pulse or not.
You are absolutely supposed to do CPR for someone with a pulse if they aren't breathing, because as you probably recall if you're not breathing your pulse is going to disappear shortly anyway.
> VT with a pulse is not defibrillated
Right. You said (emphasis mine):
> Defibrillators are used in cases of ventricular fibrillation and ventricular tachycardia. These are lethal heart rhythms where the heart is either quivering uselessly, or beating too fast to allow the heart to fill with blood between beats. In both of those cases, the patient will have no pulse.
Which is untrue, as you noted: VT isn't always treated by defibrillation. And, as I noted, VT doesn't always present with no pulse. The distinction is important, because someone reading that paragraph may be confused and think "VT is always treated with defibrillation". Which is absolutely untrue.
Television and film are particularly bad about this. For obvious reasons. It's more exciting to shock someone with paddles than it is to pump them with 1mg of epinephrine.
> nor should you do CPR on someone with a weak pulse
Absolutely untrue. CPR is recommended by the AHA for anyone who isn't breathing, regardless of whether they have a pulse [0].
By "she may have had a weak pulse", I mean that she may have had a weak pulse that wasn't felt. That's not asystole technically, but it results in the same treatment.
Emergency situations are, understandably, high-adrenaline scenarios and mistakes get made. Even professionals aren't great at detecting carotid pulses properly all the time [1].
> In both of those cases, the patient will have no pulse
Absolutely untrue as well. Only VF is pulseless. VT can present both ways [2].
It's almost certainly multi-faceted, but I don't think it's just "conservatives discovering the internet," or at least anymore than it was 4 years ago.
Two things that I think contribute heavily to the phenomenon you're seeing:
1) We've had 8 years of a democratic president. People were similarly fed up with conservatism at the end of GWB's presidency. If things haven't been going well for you for the past 8 years (and for most Americans, they haven't been going great), it's easy and common to blame the president for those troubles. And by extension, the president's party and theoretical political ideologies.
It's much easier to have strong feelings after such a long time with one political party in charge (theoretically).
2) I'd wager a large sum that most of those comments come from white males who earn at or less than the median income, who previously may not have felt that strong of a political ideology or at least not enough to comment on an internet forum.
Much of the current liberal discourse in America is focused around historically oppressed groups, e.g. black Americans, or people who don't fit into classic gender identities. This comes at the expense of ignoring (or in some extreme instances, trivializing) the struggles of the working class or middle class who may not necessarily fall into one of those historically oppressed groups.
I think it's easy to imagine that if you're a white, poor male you might not feel like American liberalism in its current state really cares about you or your problems. Not that I think Republicans really care about their problems either, but at least they pay them lip service.
Really interesting that so many people went straight for the "welfare queen" of this current economic specter (s/"welfare queen"/"art therapist") while ignoring this.
I mean the article all but says this ("critics.. say the income-based repayment program... instead bestows big benefits on those who... earn high incomes").
I think you're doing a great job. Moderating threads and submissions that are basically guaranteed to be shitshows (like this one) is an incredibly thankless job.
Thanks for keeping it together, and thanks for keeping this from going off the rails.
Really interesting given that white supremacists also tend to be anti-semitic, and most of the same tropes about Asians also apply to the Jewish community: Focus on education, low rates of crime, etc.
Maybe that's just a factor of how modern white supremacy came to be, though (i.e. Nazis).
> I'll stick up for coding bootcamps as a general concept
Sure, and similarly there isn't anything inherently wrong with for-profit universities: You can certainly find people who excelled in an environment like DeVry and don't regret their decision to attend.
Over time one can expect that the "cream will rise to the top" and good bootcamps will have a certain reputation associated with them. Similar to for-profit universities. Still, I hope it goes without saying that many of the same concerns about for-profit universities also apply to coding bootcamps.
> I do think that the credential is important.
Why? What does the credential prove in this case?
> sure enough, three months later she got a job at $110k coding the consumer website for a bank.
That's great! I'm happy for her. Still, I hope that sentence gives you (and her) some pause for concern.
If three months is enough time to train someone for a $110k job, I would suggest that job is unlikely to remain paying $110k in the foreseeable future. It's hard to think of other professions that pay so well for so little investment. The supply can (and will) increase precipitously to match the demand, and salaries will drop precipitously.
For a recent example, see the recent glut of law students and freshly-minted lawyers making a pittance. There are quite a few parallels between that scenario and the current one facing software developers, except that law school is even more of an investment than coding bootcamps.
> at least be in a place where you might see another $50k/year over the next 5-10 years
That's my point though: I don't think that's likely. Maybe over 5, but it seems unlikely that 10 years from now she'll be making $160k. I'm suggesting that those kinds of salaries will be reserved for people working in specialized fields, not people doing basic web development.
For a more realistic future salary, I'd say look at developer salaries in places like Canada, or much of western Europe (where $60k/year a year is probably much more realistic than $110k).
> Google isn't going to hire a bootcamp grad, but they also almost certainly won't hire an autodidact
Google absolutely hires autodidacts. I know a few of them. Clichés about "non-Stanford students need not apply" aside, Google just hires smart people. Smart people don't always have degrees or certificates.
> I did not receive much support either from the HN crowd
I think there's a reason for that, and you touched on some of them. There's undoubtedly an ageism to the tech industry, and being an older junior developer is likely to be a huge uphill climb.
There's also skepticism around the coding bootcamp industry for the same reason that there's skepticism around University of Phoenix: The certification isn't really useful or impressive, and the kind of person who benefits highly from a program like that would likely learn just as much through self-study at a severely reduced cost (or free).
Compounding that, there's a glut right now of alternative software development education. It's hard to imagine a future where being a software developer isn't significantly less prestigious in the future, except for software development in highly specialized areas (e.g. machine learning).
Not that prestige is so important, but the reasons for the loss of that prestige will likely cause salaries to plummet significantly. It's entirely possible (and some would say likely) that most web development will become analogous to traditional trade professions like plumbers in the future, with:
* Significantly less initial investment: There's no standard or certification for being a web developer)
* Significantly larger pool of competition: Your web developer doesn't need to physically be located near you, unlike your plumber.
If you're fine with all of these things, then that's great! Be a software developer. Just be aware that it's likely to experience significant changes in the coming decades, not many of which are likely to be beneficial. You might very well do better for yourself and your family to actually just become a plumber instead.
> Taxation is definitely an effective tool for social control. Do you have an alternative? Or do you suggest that government should not be involved in social control?
I hope you can appreciate why some people would say the answer to that second question is "as little as possible."
When the government is offering carrots and sticks, there will inevitably be some group of people systemically discriminated against (either by not receiving the carrots proportionally or disproportionately receiving the stick). Tyranny of the majority and what not. The gears of government grind very slowly, and changing government policies often results in multiple generations of people experiencing discrimination before things are changed.
For a recent example, one argument (among others, of course) for same-sex marriage equality is that it's discriminatory for same-sex partners not to receive the carrots of legal and tax benefits that come with being married.
Is there an alternative? Maybe. Maybe not. I could spitball one, but it would likely be an inadequate solution. Still, I think it's prudent to be careful. Social control is a double-edged sword.
My guess is that Gopman posted something incredibly insensitive in a moment of frustration and probably really regrets voicing his opinion, even if he still believes it. It's hard to have sympathy for him given that.
Still, this argument that we should use someone's past actions against them indefinitely is oddly reminiscent of our penal system. Are criminals inherently incapable of rehabilitation, even with an idealized correctional system? Should we hold their past actions against them indefinitely? If not, what's an appropriate amount of time? What if they seem truly remorseful of their actions?
I don't know that I have a good answer for those questions, but it's interesting to see some of the same people arguing for a more humane penal system simultaneously holding these long grudges against people for their (admittedly incredibly insensitive) actions.
> It seems like consolidation was a lesson we learned a few decades ago and are in danger of forgetting.
Despite groans to the contrary, I don't think consolidation is the reason services like Netflix/etc. are so popular and why cable service is starting to become considered gauche.
I posit that it's entirely about:
1) The on-demand content that services like Netflix/etc. provide
2) To a lesser extent, the discoverability of content
I don't want to watch Game of Thrones on Sunday evening. I want to watch it now. I want to re-watch Ocean's Eleven tonight, not Thursday during the day. Netflix (in theory) helps me with that. Cable service doesn't.
I want to watch an action movie, and one that I can actually watch right now. Netflix helps me with that. Cable service doesn't, unless I just put on whatever the "action movie" channel is showing.
Hell, cable service providers try to offer some of this already - it's just that their selection sucks. It's either incredibly old movies, or movies that no one wanted to see the first time around. Or it's just the latest episode of a popular television show, or the first season and we're on season 12 now.
Again, despite what people might say I don't think they really want a la carte programming: They want a Spotify subscription for television and film.