Agree with you here. Some of the worst engineers I’ve worked with have been at Google, especially the younger newer ones. There’s a combination of impostor syndrome driving people to dogma (thus lack of thinking) as well as annoying arrogance towards anything that not orthodox.
There are of course many great engineers as well (especially the more OG ones) but the ability spread was way larger than any other company I’ve been at. I think it’s something about its cultural image and incentive structure...
The authoritarianism is a red herring IMO. The real issue is economic incentives trumping everything else. For example in Japan if you test positive the hospital gets quarantined losing tons of money. In the US, you can end up payong huge medical bills. The fear is the same.
The lesson from WW2 should have been that people are all the same when pushed to extremes. This includes the people who make up the communist party leadership in China and every moral philosoher in the west as well.
My armchair belief is that China has ended up absorbing at a global scale, all of capitalism’s externalities. It is an integral part of the world that gives us many things we take for granted like cheap iphones and many others. We do NOT have the convenience to look away and scapegoat one aspect without taking into consideration the whole.
This ended up kinda ranty but every time coronavirus is used to bring up something whose purpose is to draw an “us vs them” line between the world and China I want to throw something.
I often think to the fable of Armus in ST:TNG, an advanced civilization achieved transcendence, but they left behind the black tar creature that gained sentience and represented all of their evils.
+1 I am not sure why, but your comment is the best thing I have read this morning.
A couple of my friends kid me about it, but I meditate almost every day for world peace and the reduction of suffering in the world. It can’t hurt and it makes me feel more connected to the world at large. I live in a small town, volunteering at the local food bank is one of my favorite activities, but I tend to think too much about just local life. I have a difficult time getting too excited about national/global politics, etc. Meditation on peace is the most effort I put into the global situation.
“in Japan if you test positive the hospital gets quarantined losing tons of money” is at least inaccurate, Japan has national healthcare that short-term “sales”/cash strapping don’t matter for hospitals. Economy wise there’s nothing for their corporate to lose OR gain.
Look at any government institution in the US - despite not having a profit motive, there are still plenty of incentives to grow the budget - increased influence in the government, funding pet projects,etc.
And not to mention shutting down a hospital likely means lost wages for a lot of people.
In the UK hospitals still have individual budgets, is that not how it works in Japan.
Yes, I'd expect them to be overridden in times of emergency, but nonetheless - do Japanese hospitals really have scope to spend at will without constraints?
Your comment is very reasonable and informative, please don't let the Hacker News anonymous downvote thoughtpolice mafia discourage you from posting comments to this site. They are the ones who should be getting banned.
Have been inside google and have friends who have worked, work there. There’s some truth to the asshole thing. Though I think it’s more like snobbishness. That is, conditional super niceness if you demonstrate you’re googly.
I like this argument. At a less lethal level it works for guns as well. WW2 taught that you can’t drive countries to the point of having nothing to lose. A potentially positive spin is that we advancing to societies that prevent this from happening to individuals. Though the cost...
The first sentence is comparing to the vast array of "less" lethal weapons modern police are equipped with with and how they seem to be more willing to use them in situations where they wouldn't be willing to shoot someone.
All behavior is selfish. Each level is supported by the lower level. Upper class has a smaller support of semi-elites below them they must appease. Many things are zero-sum so most actions at this level take from the majority for the minority. Thus unethical behavior baked into hierarchy.
That's highly debatable. A child would be incapable of survival in its first few years of life if it weren't for the love of its mother. I guess your response to that will be that it's selfish genes to which I don't really have a counter response.
Do humans happen to get more cancer than other animals? There’s this weird idea, I forget the source, that a less efficient cell garbage collection mutation allowed increased brain development, connections, etc... but at the cost of increased cancer, depression, ego, etc...
Regarding the grow and thrive part, some of my Chinese friends mention that they feel China is unjustly cast as the villain as many of the economic issues in HK like the super small living spaces are a result of unchecked and corrupt capitalism. With China rising and HK having lost it’s monopoly as the doorway to China they don’t have anything to really drive the economy anymore. the gist is “Why don’t they go make themselves useful instead of blaming China for everything.”
Not commenting on its validity but thought it was an interesting perspective to share.
I’ve seen this issue at many “engineering” focused companies where many people write their own DSLs. for CSS in particular there are many people who just hate it and come up with many ways to not write it.
CSS however is very much like drawing rather than engineering. Some aspects are just not scalable. You can draw many things in vector by conbining shapes for example but a pen or pencil is still very necessary for many parts of both exploratory creation as well as something polished.
The same goes for HTML and Javascript to an extent. While it’s great to build railroad tracks, you can’t take a train everywhere... any abstraction has to also have the ability to easily break out of it to handle edge cases. Clean and Pure abstractions almost never have the grittiness necessary to reflect a fractally complex problem.
redux is a "lensed" giant source of data and it works great, maybe he is not familiar with the concept. maybe he is thinking more of just a mutable blob of data? its hard to know when these 'thought leaders' are so obscure when they say what is good or bad
There are of course many great engineers as well (especially the more OG ones) but the ability spread was way larger than any other company I’ve been at. I think it’s something about its cultural image and incentive structure...