If he was fired on paternity leave, the credited play is to say nothing. This is potentially a beautiful lawsuit and the last thing you want to do is lose ground on something you said on the internet.
The dual-ladder system exists to fix something that is broken but ends up breaking it more.
In essence, there's the E9/O1 problem. An elite engineer with 25 years of experience simply knows more than an entry-level manager. Organizations try to solve this by dual-laddering and saying that there are "Director-equivalent" engineers (e.g. Staff or Principal) and so on, to rectify the obvious injustice of a scenario where a fresh MBA is seen to outrank the best engineers because he manages a team and they don't. The problem is that this dual-laddering makes it worse, because it's so much harder to move up the engineering ladder. If you're a Software Manager I at Google, you have to shit five or six different beds not to make Director within ~6 years and VP within ~12. On the other hand, making Principal+ Engineer is quite difficult, especially if you're not in MTV. So it perpetuates a false equivalency in which the managerial and product folk are gods (because of their swift, easy promotions) while most of the engineers are leftovers.
> If you have a team, you need to "justify" their existence. Is not enough to keep the lights on or slowly polish the product, you need grand roadmaps to keep yourself busy the next year or two. Ideally you want to justify that you need extra headcount to keep the product expanding.
This. It generates the Bullshit Jobs that David Graeber talked about. As a middle manager or tech lead (Taskmaster) you hire people (Flunkies) to make yourself seem more important as well as for roles (Box Ticker) that you might not need but that any "important" project will retain. In the end, this generates duplicate effort and needless work that requires fixing (Duct-Tapers). The only one of the five Graeber categories not represented is the Goon, and that's because those get moved to MTV and fast tracked to the executive suite.
Whether or not it's "toxic masculinity", the internal lingo around performance reviews at Google is lulzy.
It's called "perfing" (as in, if you do something bad, you might get "perfed hard" next cycle) and managers frequently threaten to take people "into the Perf Room" although it's just an expression (there isn't actually a dedicated "Perf Room"). Anyone who gets below 3.0 (Meets Expectation) during the calibration process is called a "PB" It used to be "pillow biter" but you can't make that joke anymore so it's just "PB", as in "How many PBs does Exec want us to have this cycle?"
It's offensive and backward, but it's also hilarious that grown men (and women, if they ever get let in to executive circles) are using language that sounds like it was invented by teenagers.
Is this "scroll fatigue" a problem with algorithms, though? I remember the days of boredom with cable TV: 96 channels, "nothing on". Well, it wasn't that there was a lack of quality programming— I mean, modulo Sturgeon's Law and all that— but it more has to do with the paradoxical nature of boredom... when you're bored, it's not because there aren't things to do, but because all the things there are to do (for a varying number of reasons) seem unpalatable... hunger gives you motivation to eat and makes food more appealing than it would otherwise be, but deep boredom goes the other way and makes things seem so boring that it leaves you doing nothing, stewing in diffuse frustration.
If you're in an airport lounge, it's the unpleasantness of the environment (one designed to irritate and low-key humiliate you, so you spend 5x on a more expensive version of the same service) that causes boredom, even if you brought a good book. Same with work environments; people who work in open-plan offices are much more likely to suffer work boredom, not necessarily because the work itself is boring, but because they cannot concentrate.
So, I think the problem isn't that the algorithms suck. (I mean, they might; they probably do, it's just not the causative issue.) The problem is that we live in a society that leaves us simultaneously dopamine-addicted and stimulus-rich while having no actual power... a lot of that mindless boredom-scrolling comes from the brain craving that next dopamine hit (which is achieved more by finding a new movie to watch or book to buy than by actually watching or reading it). Of course, we all know that's a losing game in the end.
I agree. That said, I think the "your grandma" line should be retired.
1. It's problematic. Why are we assuming that an old woman can't also be a badass programmer? Plenty of CS luminaries (a) were women, and (b) had kids (c) who themselves had kids, and therefore are someone's grandmother.
2. Your audience isn't necessarily non-technical. Generally your audience is going to be someone who's qualified to take the course. Which means that a good explainer is going to, as you said, have a high degree of empathy to beginners... but not explain things at such an introductory level as to leave people bored.
3. I don't agree that people who can't explain things well to non-technical people don't know their stuff; they lack an important skill that could make their knowledge far more useful to humanity, but that's a different claim from saying that the knowledge doesn't exist.
It was pretty obvious that some authors didn't really know what they were talking about. They knew enough to write something, but there were always a lot of mistakes.
This is why I'd be very hesitant to self-publish a technical book, even though for fiction I think self-publishing is the right decision 99% of the time. We all make errors, even those of us who do know what we're talking about, when you get to the scale of 100+ kilowords. For a novel, a decent copyeditor can fix up the production values well enough; for a technical work, you would hope the publisher assigned some people to check the work.
Self-publishing has always been an option for authors. Some publishing houses offer you resources to publish your work. You simply pay them and they review and print your book. It seems to be a fair arrangement. However, after five minutes in Google, you will find out that many self-published authors had terrible experiences or were scammed. Finding a decent and professional publishing house requires time. You cannot trust the first one you find in Google.
Those "self-publishing companies" are often next-generation vanity press. Then again, bottom tier traditional publishing— and the dangerous part is, this includes bottom-tier deals from "Big 5" imprints— are basically vanity press as well.
The number of first-time authors who get traditional deals actually worth taking (the kind that come with 6-figure marketing budgets and TV spots delivered in-hand) is probably in the double digits per year— it's not that hard to "get an agent" if you're willing to take abuse, but 98% of literary agents have no real connections but serve as an HR wall, existing solely to filter out the deserving perma-slush, that will probably be replaced with machine learning algorithms soon.
Publishing gives writers a possibly necessary but very unpleasant introduction to the reality of commerce— there are so, so many people out there looking to get as much as they can (money) and give as little as possible. This applies when you pay thousands of dollars to a "self-publishing company" and get work (cover design, editing, et al) that a high schooler could have done... but it also applies when you sign away your rights to a "Big 5" for a piddly advance and no marketing.
I think the game's very different for programming books than it is for, say, fiction. Generally, people don't write books about Python because they think they're going to quit their day jobs. At the same time, people who can write even passable programming books are fairly few in number... whereas people who can write passable novels that could in theory become the next 50 Shades are commonplace (although people who can write good novels are very rare).
It's impossible to say what it requires not to get scammed in publishing— you have to take some risks, and who can say what risks are right to take?— but a good first step is to accept the very real possibility that you do everything right and still don't sell more than a few dozen copies. Sometimes terrible books sell (50 Shades) and sometimes great books go ignored for thirty years.
I think the poor quality of the U.S. housing stock reflects the long-term shabbiness of our mandatory nomadic character. We move for the jobs, we set up shacks by the gold mines, but we never develop roots and, for the most part, we never get to build real wealth.
This. I was going to write out my own list, but you covered everything I wanted to say.
I would counter that most companies can't attract or retain talent because they don't really want it. Most of the work that needs to be done in the world doesn't require the top 5 percent of the pool.
The "other side of the world" wars are mostly fought by the young, because they haven't developed enough skepticism to ask whether what they're being asked to do benefits the country as a whole, or only certain actors and industries. The old and rich start wars, the young and poor fight them.