> very real national problems that this might address.
This is a dubious claim to begin with. If you believe that 'trade deficits are bad,' can you explain why? Post Covid, the US economy has emerged in significantly better shape than nearly every other country in the world, so I'm failing to see how these deficits are meaningful.
> Globalization has played a big role in creating the massive income inequality in our country
What is your source for this belief, especially when comparing globalization with other factors that cause inequality? From my understanding, the biggest recent contributors to a higher cost of living in the US are housing, health, and education. Health and education purely services-oriented, and housing is one-third a labor cost.
> our society as such is biased heavily toward importing goods rather than exporting goods
I think that's great. America exports services. We innovate to create new technology, are a leader in designing the things and systems that people want (think of our tech industry), and we delegate the work of manufacturing to others. That seems fine to me, and a function of having (relatively) open, free trade.
Related: The Foundering podcast did a great series on the origins of TikTok and how it evolved from a Silicon Valley startup into the juggernaut it is today.
You can still have less successful businesses failing (trees dying) without entering a recession (forest fire). Nice analogy but I don't think it proves that recessions are necessary.
I've used various forms of these audio tools in the past (MAX, PD) and this is a very impressive piece of work. First, I haven't seen one implemented with web technologies before, and after running through many example projects there were zero errors or issues for me. Everything seems clear and straightforward.
Nicely done, congrats on publishing this, and thanks for making it open source!
As an engineering manager, I would absolutely love to hear this from a report. It provides immediate clarity to me on how to provide great projects and work options for you.
However, there are a few points in your post that may be conflating topics.
First, 'maintaining the current codebase' and providing work that is valuable to the team/org are not the same thing. Some engineers will endlessly poke around the internals of a code base, refactoring, tuning, renaming for clarity, but never provide anything of real value. This is a pitfall.
Second, I would separate 'career growth' from promotion. Companies orient promotion ladders around particular dimensions that you may or may not care about, but that doesn't mean you can't be growing. Consider if there are ways you want to grow that are outside of what your company is asking for as a promotable step. I don't mind if engineers don't want to be promoted but I'm concerned if they have no desire to grow.
Finally, your post makes it sound like you believe an engineer's lack of ambition led to their being laid off, however this may conflate ambition for output. Are you sure a lack of ambition was the reason or were they not producing anything of value (as in point 1 above)?
For bonus courage points, consider having a candid discussion with your manager about each of these topics. I would wager that you will be much better aligned afterwards.
You don't need to be competitive to be successful or happy. My first question is: what do you want?
If you enjoy life in the most boring way, then it sounds like something in your life is already fulfilling. Boring and exciting are entirely in the eye of the beholder.
Especially early in your career it can be daunting to see the success and skill of other people in the field but recognize that their success took a long time to build up, and probably some amount of thrashing around too.
So again, what do you want? Do you enjoy continually learning new things and getting satisfaction from exploring new ideas? Do you enjoy the act of building something new from scratch? Do you enjoy optimizing parts of what you build at a small level until the details are just right? See if you can clarify for yourself what you really care about and focus on doing more of that.
For now, I would also counsel against avoiding being 'a boring copy-cat'. It already sounds like you have an interest in going broad - embrace that.
I don't think the data is proving this out at all. Streaming will probably be a winner-take-most market and Netflix is on track to remain the leader.
We'll see what total 2021 subscriber growth was on Thursday, but estimates for Q4 are still around a net addition of 8 million subscribers. Compare this with Disney Plus growth in the same period of 2 million subscribers and I think the results are quite favorable.
If you pay attention to the details, such as in earnings calls, executives have reported that average subscriber watch time has only been increasing over the past few quarters. (Also see refs such as: https://backlinko.com/netflix-users#time-spent-with-netflix)
Keeping in mind that Covid has slowed production of content, in 2021 Netflix still managed to create the two most watched movies _ever_ on the platform (Red Notice, Don't Look Up). There are follow-up seasons launching for at least three of their strongest series, including Witcher (released tail end of 2021), Bridgerton, and Stranger Things. Plus the regular spikes of culturally relevant content such as Squid Games, Cheer, etc. which now happen fairly often.
> is destroying the business model that made them so appealing in the first place
I'm not sure how you are inferring that the business model has been destroyed here. It's certainly evolving over time but the promise has always been 'pay us a monthly subscription and we'll give you lots of things to watch'. I don't see how that has changed meaningfully or negatively.
Netflix has had naysayers at every stage of its growth. The landscape is always changing but I believe the critical idea is that Netflix leads in streaming and this has only strengthened over time. Total subscribers, revenue per user, and watch hours per account are all drifting up, and I fail to see how that represents a downward slope.
Of course market cap is not the same as the equity value of a company. However market cap numbers are useful in comparing public companies to one another, and for broad categorizations of the scale of a business.
I think another way to characterize 'riskiness' is the volatility of a portfolio, IOW how much does it swing up and down over time. So everything else being equal, two funds with the same ROI may still have different levels of volatility, with the fund having the lower volatility being more desirable.
I'm super tired of people conflating civil rights + first amendment protections with the idea that speech anywhere, by anyone, on any platform, deserves to be protected.
The goal of the first amendment is to protect the citizens of America from laws created by congress / government in limiting speech. That is nowhere near what we are talking about when we're talking about _any_ speech conducted on a private platform.
In fact, it's interesting to me that the argument has recently been spun around such that some politicians are claiming that social platforms are violating their first amendment rights by blocking or banning. This has nothing to do with the intent or language of the first amendment.
In my mind, you can be the most fervent civil rights advocate and still believe that Twitter/Facebook/etc can ban anyone they want for any reason. Even more so if you believe in free enterprise and the rights of a business to act in the way that they best see fit.
I understand that platform bans have more implications and repercussions than I'm outlining here in simple terms but still the conflation is frustrating to me.