I’ve seen that engineering manager / pm split work like magic before. Usually there’s also an amazing tech lead in there making it work. It’s rocket fuel for the product (assuming market fit, big assumption) and the career growth for the team.
It doesn’t happen often because most companies don’t want to grow their people that much. Consider the frequent HN comment about finding it easier to get a promotion/raise by finding a new job.
That outcome usually comes from some carefully crafted policies at the company level. Stack ranking is an example, though it is more popular recently to talk about in terms of bell curves (of 4-7 people, hah). Caps on raises, onerous documentation processes, and explicit and implicit limits on the number of promotions a manager can request at a time are all popular. There’s a lot of creativity going into crafting policies that limit career growth without saying they are limiting career growth.
Managers that care about people eventually figure this game out, realize how career limiting it is to push too hard on it, and either leave management or switch to caring about org/product stuff more. This has been consistent in my unscientific study of a dozen friends.
That said, I agree with you. I’d like to see that experiment done with a lot of intentionality and care.
If you'd like to not be downvoted into oblivion you'd do well to provide an alternate theory. What's your prediction for the upcoming election? Why? What's your methodology? Or is your point that forecasting is futile? I can't tell. There's too much emotion directed at 538/etc. for me to suss out what your point is besides disliking 538/the media/etc, which just isn't particularly helpful for the discussion.
The automatic ballistic defense systems a tank uses would obliterate an aircraft. They are basically shaped charges that explode outwards to deflect a munition. It only works because tanks have thick armor in a dense, heavy, package.
What you’re suggesting is possible technically but nobody does it because the idea of having to turn your entire plane towards a missile threat to neutralize it virtually guarantees your destruction if two missiles are fired at you in rapid succession. This is not a rare occurrence. At all. Yes, from multiple directions. That’s exactly how surface-to-air systems are set up.
It becomes slightly more reasonable if you turret the gun, until you factor in the weight of the necessary ammunition to neutralize multiple threats, the turret itself, and the independent radar used for target acquisition and tracking. A B-52 could pull it off, a fighter couldn’t yet. Not without massively compromising their payload and aerodynamics.
Chaff, flares, stealth and jamming are used because they actually work in practice. Jamming is a big one that people don’t hear about much. Wonder how the B-52 is still in service? Jamming. Wonder how wild weasels do their job? Jamming.
When you see a turret like that on a bomber then you can get excited for self-guided bullets shooting down dozens of multiple incoming missiles. But tbh at the rate we’re going it’ll just be a laser instead.
Basically Amazon is a symptom of global wealth inequality. He’s making the point that no company the size of Amazon, and no person as rich as Bezos, should exist.
The bulk of the article laments the reality that the media, writ large, wants to report on “Tim vs Jeff”, not on “wealth inequality is out of control and we need to at least break up tech darlings, maybe much more.”
Ultimately if you can't be bothered to read a short book on the subject, you can just live with your confusion on the subject. The world can't be boiled down to sophomoric sequences of logic that ignore the complexities of reality and human behavior.
TBH I can see an argument for a college student living at home with low expenses, a job, and/or plenty of loans having more disposable income than 90% of the population. But I’d hesitate to call that the average student experience. The average student income seems to be around $25k/yr as best as I can find on a quick search.
I don’t see how the math works out for your average student to have more disposable income than someone making 300k/yr. How does that work?
Alex hammered his Sandy Hook conspiracy theory to the point of being sued for defamation, and losing (https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=alex+jones+sandy+hook+lawsu...). Families were forced to move multiple times, unable to visit graves. When the families faced hardship, Alex doubled down on his claims. He never took a moment to ask his supporters to back off or seek a calmer resolution.
My intuition is that you’d get more out of therapy than a career change right now. This sounds more like burnout or a lack of interest to me. But framing it as a lack of intelligence says a lot about how you view yourself, which could make a career change much harder than it needs to be.
It is an anti-parasitic and immune-regulation drug. Not really an antiviral. I guess the theory is that it’d regulate an immune over-response. But I don’t think the science is m showing that to be true in this case.
I actually feel this way about attacks on employment in general, so I'll try to give some quick context about the belief.
I grew up in a lower-middle-class household. We declared bankruptcy once when I was young, and I was told to prepare to have "strangers come and take away furniture" (which, thankfully, never materialized). I never went hungry, but we did live paycheck-to-paycheck and frequently relied on the charity of our extended family to make ends meet. In short, money stress was a thing, and it was obvious from a very young age.
So I consider an attack on someone's employment to be a very serious road to go down because:
- Most people don't have savings, and it isn't necessarily their fault.
- Not everyone has a support structure, we were immensely lucky to have wealthy and generous relatives.
- 4 weeks of unemployment is plenty of time for bills to pile up if someone doesn't have savings, I've taken longer than 4 weeks to find a job every time I've looked.
- COBRA is insanely expensive and may be required if, for example, a close relative is very sick. Fighting with an insurance company as an individual is immensely difficult and interrupting someone's care to have that fight can be life-threatening.
- Desperation breeds poor decision making. That individual may take a pay cut or change careers and never recover.
- The various social consequences of being fired can make finding a job extra difficult.
Basically, I've seen my own family one fail-safe away from disaster, so its easy to imagine the bottom. In fact, that money stress from my childhood has haunted me as an adult -- even though I've never needed to worry about it from a factual standpoint.
I don't have any of these concerns if the individual is obviously wealthy, and I wouldn't go so far as to say one should never try to have anyone fired. But I do personally believe the bar to do so is very high.
Note: I'm not interested in convincing anyone of my point of view. Just giving context for why people think like this.
I agree though I think blaming journalists is a red herring. Ultimately most journalists are just trying to make ends meet and are in no better position to change the rules of the game than any other average person (the ad-revenue game). Or, to use a Bezos quote: “Good intentions never work, you need good mechanisms to make anything happen.”
There are outliers, of course, but that’s the nature of large groups of people.
If we as a society want deep, accurate, journalism we have to figure out a way to make it more profitable than clickbait.