Having been one of those #1 employees in the past, I didn't feel short changed. It was an arrangement that was beneficial for both myself and the employer. I don't know how many of us there are. But there are people who will take being on call 24/7 in exchange for full autonomy and not having to justify coming and leaving at random hours or taking leave without notice when the opportunity is there.
I had the employer pay for some of my vacations during downtime, I progressed along my career path much faster than normal employees, I was paid more than normal employees. It was a good gig.
At least in a startup environment, the bus factor risk isn't even on the same order of magnitude as much more tangible stuff like the client walking away. Doubling your labor costs to mitigate a risk that doesn't make the top 3 is just bad business. Sometimes it's not even an option.
You make a deal with your #1s that they will get the fun projects, the paid vacations when the current crisis is over, the completely flexible hours and full autonomy. Anything they want within reason, as long as shit gets done.
It's not for everyone, but I can see where GP is coming from.
You two are talking about completely different things.
There's no 'on call' for the kind of projects that parent is talking about. There's a small handful of guys who get shit done and maybe a second ring development team around them.
For some people, the truly exciting work is the work where none of this stuff has been proceduralized. It's not feasible to train or do knowledge transfer between two shifts for these projects.
In most of the world it is decided. The decision is click-wrap 'contracts' are unenforceable. Starting with the fact that they don't meet the definition of a contract.
My bad, it was meant to be 2080 but I can't edit the post anymore.
Either way, japan's population is not only ageing but declining at an exponential rate due to low childbirth - which has been directly attributed to the piss poor work life balance. The Japan as we know it today will not exist in a few decades. It will either be a far less populous country, or full of immigrants.
So I don't think we can take their 'not us vs them' attitude in the workplace as any kind of precursor for a successful or happy society.
> I knew a person who wanted to quit, their boss said "no, you can't quit", and they stayed on for several more months
[...]
> I feel like the it's "me vs them" attitude I see so much on HN leads to worse outcomes
I think your anecdote there proves otherwise. That person was asked to act against their own interest and did it out of feebleness. They didn't gain anything in return, it was not a equitable exchange where e.g the boss paid out an additional bonus for the employee continuing to stay against their wish.
In a capitalist society, it is always workers vs employers. Do not mistake Japan's social cohesion for some kind of workplace utopia. It is one of the worst countries on earth in terms of work life balance - which is currently destroying their entire society as childbirth rates plummet. This is not hyperbole. By 2030 years ~85% of the population will be elderly people.
If you want an average outcome, follow the average path.
Having kids or getting married or staying in the same place all their life does not make people any happier. God knows I've seen plenty of people who were bitter about any combination of those choices.
If you want to actually live your life as a conscious being, stop looking at what other people are doing and decide what you want. It's scary and it's not for everyone.
I'll take your word for it. From the pictures I've seen the vertical distance between the screen and the windshield looked big enough to block most of your view of the road when looking at the screen. Unlike a Toyota where the display is vertically positioned the same as any other dashboard.
There's an entire generation of traffic safety cameras that detect people looking down away from the road and it looks to me like they'd be tripped by a model 3 driver just reading their speed...
> As a long-ago ex-Googler I find it amusing to watch employees name-drop where they work, always with some underlying subtext implying authority [...] Parent comment doesn't simply imply this but explicitly uses it as the basis for calling OP out. It's amusing because the namedrop is always accompanied by some claim they felt they couldn't support solely through a sound argument.
> So basically the code base and politics of any large (successful) company.
How does that invalidate anything of what he said or vindicate Tesla exactly? Do you believe that because some large companies are shitty places to work that everyone should just accept it as the status quo and shut the fuck up about it? Why are you expecting a single employee to try to 'change things' and why do you think that him speaking up about the issues is not an attempt to do just that?
> "the interior is a disaster, there's no instrument cluster which takes your eyes off the road"
This is the most WTF aspect of the model 3 to me and seems to confirm that there isn't going to be some last-minute mitigation. I know it was done because autopilot was expected to be mature by the time model 3 rolls out, but I don't see how it can even be street-legal when you need to look away from the road to determine your speed.
I benchmarked this recently. It comes in at 4-10x slower than cpython for random typical use cases on my machine, which is not too shabby at all. The author also states that numpy is slower than it should be due to lack of support for BLAS at this time.
The real impressive feat to me isn't hosting jupyter in the browser. It's access to a reasonably fast implementation of numpy in the browser which smokes native JS code for homogeneous array operations. I would love to see a minimalistic WASM implementation of numpy that can seamlessly interop with normal JS. Such a library would open up all sorts of possibilities that aren't currently feasible due to perf reasons.
Fake news only carries weight because people have been indoctrinated into blindly accepting appeals from authority and failing to engage in the most basic kinds of critical thinking.
It's a very reasonable assumption. When self driving cars give up, they give you a second or less to assess the situation around you and avert disaster. This is now well understood to be less safe than just 100% manual driving since your attention is then on the road at all times instead of inevitably wandering when the car is doing just fine 99% of the time. Don't forget that Wayomo killed off their SAE-2 test program after finding drivers were falling asleep at the wheel of these 99.0% autonomous cars.
And to build a self driving system that can give you a reasonable time to actually assess the situation and respond to it? That's the same system that's 99.9999% reliable.
This is the crux of why self driving cars will simply not work in the foreseeable future unless sequestered to their own tightly controlled road networks.
Self driving cars are not going to happen in established cities for a very, very long time.
The only thing that could make it happen is a giant like Google/Alphabet investing enough cash to lobby governments to repurpose existing transportation infra to only belong to self-driving cars. But that's also the doorway to a dystopian future where megacorps run entire countries.
We live in a capitalist society where the literal goal of an enterprise is to exploit the labour of workers and pay them less than what they create in terms of value.
There are young graduates who haven't worked that out yet and there are veterans who know the game well. At no point is trust involved in this equation. Employment is a mutually beneficial arrangement where the worker's self interest to maximize their wealth is always orthogonal to the employer's self interest of maximizing their wealth.
Just be a grownup and negotiate a fair cut. I fucking hate employers acting like we have some kind of trust, or worse, friendship. We're in a business arrangement. The only mutual trust is that I will do what I can to make as much money off you as possible, and you will do what you can to make as much money off me as possible. So long as that arrangement benefits us both, we have a working relationship. There's a reason why you will find a paragraph along the lines of 'don't be friends with your employees' in every book for founders.
People who say stuff like you're saying fall into one of two categories: the naive who haven't yet figured out how the world actually works, and the disingenuous preying on the naive who haven't figured out how the world works. I won't work with either.
I had the employer pay for some of my vacations during downtime, I progressed along my career path much faster than normal employees, I was paid more than normal employees. It was a good gig.