yes... only the worthy and entitled deserve it clearly!
The plebs should work 60 hours to support the lifestyle of the wealthy elites.
In all seriousness though it's clear his book is aimed at people that have a chance of creating enough wealth to escape wage slavery. For many people in the world this is simply not an option - I think that is the point the author is trying to make?
which part of `liberte egalite fraternite` does worker exploitation come from?
Amazon is free to do business in France, and they are free not to (as they threatened)
They are not free to exploit people. That is equality and fraternity at it's best.
Always surprised when neocons come out the woodwork with their hetero economic view about some God-given-right to exploit the poor and desperate because they are rich.
it makes no profit yet Bezos is the richest man in the world by some margin?
How can you buy into that narrative.
The no profit book keeping is just a way to avoid paying tax.
As a shareholder I would rather see them pay fairer wages, be taxed appropriately and have a slower rate of growth.
If the cost of scaling at the speed they scale comes from unethical business practices then the answer is to scale slower, not exploit the worlds poorest and most vulnerable so that Jeff, myself and a load of other privileged capitalists can get even wealthier.
I’m not buying into anything but investors are. Amazon isn’t profitable. It’s not to avoid paying tax, it’s to reinvest. And because investors don’t care about profits in amazon it makes bezos the richest man. This doesn’t have anything to do with my initial comment though. Amazon is cheap because it pushes costs down in every area. Including workers. And consumers like that.
From my POV the most productive growth amazon can make as a company would be engaging in better ESG practices There are forms of capital outside of material assets and intellectual property.
Amazon is losing human capital (tbray as a high profile example, but I am sure he's the tip of an invisible and silent iceberg)
Amazon is losing brand capital which will hit the bottom line (ethical consumption is an ever increasing trend)
Amazon will continue to irk Governments with its lack of respect for sovereignty laws (tax in particular, but also labour and monopoly).
It's getting harder and harder to participate in the modern world for me. So far I've deleted my accounts on Uber (because of the harassment reports) Airbnb (because they don't give a fuck about scams), and last, Twitter (because they were enabling Nazis, and continuing to use Twitter is basically endorsing Twitter in my eyes). But the majority of the world seems to just shrug and are fine with the terrible behaviours.
The slaves must free themselves - I always think of the start of the mining unions - the strikes went on for a long time, and they were very nasty, it was a huge fight. People have been tricked out of these rights that were hard won, capital won't easily go back to decent conditions for workers without a fight.
Early 20th century unionisation only happened in the US after pitched battles and gun fights, and when that didn't stop it it was bought off where possible.
A lot of that history seems to have been suppressed to the point that hardly anyone knows about it. It's certainly not something you'll see being mentioned on any mainstream media channel.
yes its disappointing, younger people don't realise how much blood, sweat and tears went into obtaining the working conditions they have now, and as you say, it's not taught much any more.
I remember going to a huge meeting and strike in the 80's, things were a lot more civilised then. I was a young apprentice, there was an older guy who was 'blackballed' - he had turned on a switch against the slowdown rules (a partial strike) - no other worker would talk to him. There were strike funds for people who couldn't afford it, it was a very exciting thing for a young kid, I don't know if it happens any more. People dying on the job so the owners can make more money is nothing new.
I feel like this is promoting wantrepeneur lifestyle and taking low paid long hour start up jobs to get on the ladder.
Whilst innovation is important, and earning your stripes too, I get sick of this unspoken attitude that anyone who doesn't work for a "cool" startup must be unambitious and lack talent.
Big tech are dominating most of the interesting problems. Startups likely can not compete with google - if they choose to let you exist it is because they have decided the problem isn't profitable enough.
If that argument is correct, then startups are toast and it's big conglomerates from now on. I think that's going too far. Not everyone wants to work for a big company; not everyone wants to work for an ad company; and so on. What I'd like to know is whether startups can narrow the gap enough to be worth it for early engineers, once these non-compensation factors are included.
Disclaimer: worked only in startups as early-stage engineer.
I feel like early stage startups are getting closed to be toast, at least in bay area, from different angels conglomerates are better at non-compensation factors as well. And in current environment, when startups stay private longer, any engineer has a better chances to go to mid or late stage startup, wait till IPO and repeat. It is better from money, career, networking.
If put aside equity, as a decision factor, I think, early engineers can go to a startup because it's a faster growing environment with more freedom. Faster for career, business skills, networking, engineering skills... But founders are focused on growing a startup (or stock price) at all cost, short term, from round to round. And people personal goals are usually longer term and founders don't have time/will for that.
More thoughts on non-compensation factors that startups could get right if they want:
1. Advance in career faster.
Some go to startups because they feel they can progress faster in career ladder. In reality early engineers do not have enough experience for management/lead positions, and there is not enough experience to gain in early days (not enough people, tasks). Founders usually end up bringing ex-big corp/cool startup management, because "they worked at scale".
For management career development working at big corps are usually better, since there is a clear path you can take to grow, and you can estimate how much it will take you to do it.
Founders could be upfront about they goals and as part of offer could promise people a chance at management, some management coaching. Organizations like YC could offer early engineers management/leads coaching programs to their portfolio companies.
2. Grow as engineers
Startups usually don't have enough scale and tech is not perfect. More like a different peaces "glued" together in a hurry, and always constant change.
Anyone working at startups as early engineer and trying to go to big-corp for money will hear "yeah cool, but we are looking for tech experience at our scale of usage"
Startups can compete in this area (if they don't have scale) by allowing people to develop as public figures, encouraging blogging, talking at conferences.
3. Unlimited vacations. Flexible time.
Early engineers are always on, and harder to take long vacation, or completely disconnect. Compare to big corps, there are some where you can take several months sabbatical.
4. Full business transparency
Founders can be fully transparent in terms of business, funding in front of employees. This can go long way in developing loyalty and trust. Compare it to big corps, where there are layers of management.
5. Remote-first
More startups allow people to travel and work from whatever hours, location they want - more employees/engineers they will attract.
Founders could be upfront about it: we pay 80% of market comp, but we don't care where you work from, as long as you available from some reasonable time online.
6. Networking
I feel like startups suck at this. It's expensive to send people to conferences, startup team is small. Working at FAANg you have better networking opportunities.
YC/VCs could have a networking events not only for founders, but for engineers as well. From YC perspective it's better if engineer leaves for another YC company and stay in ecosystem, than to leave to FAANg.
7. Family friendly
I feel like big corps are more family friendly: insurance, time off, activities. Startups figuring out how to make it or compensate for luck of it — could help.
Then why didn’t google found/outcompete the laundry list of unicorns that have emerged over the last decade plus? Google could outspend them all by 10x. Google is very, very good at what it does, but like all big organizations Google has blind spots you could hide a tour bus in.
Personally I am making top money on Scala gigs, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. The people I meet on these gigs share my opinion. Most people wouldn't take a Java job even if it paid more, same for Go or Node ( both of which I have used in production in the last month, and wouldn't take over Scala, with the exception of serverless)
Teams in Media, Government and Finance are leveraging Scala to do things that take Google and Netflix twice as many devs because they use less expressive languages.
Yes, Go is great because you can scale a team from 1 to 10 to 100 with little effort. With Scala you get the same stuff done with 20 people.
The people that hate Scala are either Java devs that didn't get it because they wanted to write inheritance based OOP code and would still be bad devs in any other lang, or are hiring managers that struggled to get the right people.
This is actually an advantage when you have the right hiring process as you end up with better developers - they don't need to know Scala, but need to be open minded to new ideas and motivated to learn.
With all that said, the church of FP and the hascalator community is a problem for Scala. Overly dogmatic & academic functional programming styles don't have a place in production systems.
Leverage the type system, immutability and the Future/Option monads and you eliminate huge swathes of bugs. If you are looking to write "Java on steroids" or would rather be writing Haskell then you are probably contributing to Scala's perceived problems.
If you are a startup or small business then Scala isn't a good fit - you're probably better off starting with JS or Python and moving to Scala when you have more users and need to deliver something solid. FAANG don't need to use Scala because they can throw money & devs at problems and therefore favour languages that fit that modus operandi.
For all the companies in between, Scala is great fit because when you get the right people you can outmanoeuvre any competition.
One of the earlier comments described Scala as a love child between Java and Ruby that turned out great. Despite not having used Ruby in anger I agree with the sentiment as I believe the best way to write Scala is as a statically typed Ruby for the jvm. It's supposed to be simple and elegant, and the best Scala devs realise this. To re-iterate my earlier statement, if you are trying to write something "oop" or "pure fp" then you are getting it wrong.
We're a Ruby/Python/JS/Scala shop and once people are up to speed the productivity of Scala blows the other three out of the water. It's insanely hard to beat the productivity-performance ratio of Scala.
FWIW, I'm in a FAANG and finding Scala devs is even a problem within my own org and team. We've resorted to teaching largely Java devs Scala on the job with mixed results. A former senior manager who made the decision supposedly viewed going all in on Scala as a mistake in large part due to the huge time loss in ramping people up & problems hiring.
I like what I've used of the language at work, although I tend to write a lot of JavaScript on a day to day basis, but to say the right hiring process makes Scala an advantage is not quite right in my own experience.
I'm not trying to guess where you work, or saying this applies to your company or team, but as usual, FAANG is not a very helpful acronym here.
From what I know there are very successful teams that use mostly Scala, at least at Apple and Netflix.
Now Amazon... I've had some AWS recruiter approach me specifically because I was looking for a new Scala job, who assured me they had a few products 100% in Scala. He then directed me to a team that didn't give a damn and was looking for a generalist. Not the first time I experienced the broken recruiting process at Amazon.
Hiring Java devs is the problem. It's a lowest common denominator language.
Try looking for Ruby or JS devs. It's a lot easier to teach someone from a dynamic background how to leverage a type system than it is to teach an imperative developer to write side effect free code. State is a crutch.
They just happen to be people who has done Java - we hire the best devs we can, regardless of language experience (my own team has interviewed/hired people who have done primarily Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Clojure, and/or Java). A couple turned out pretty well, but several turned out to be much more junior than we expected. I should add that I have no love for Java myself, I rather not be writing Java at all if I can help it.
If there is one thing this profession has taught me about hiring, it is that it is very difficult to predict who the top performers will be. Blanket assumptions will often prove to be not true when searching for the cream of the crop.
I really don't see how people have trouble finding Scala jobs. All the respectable newish companies around me use Scala on the backend (old and large companies are unfortunately still stuck with Java and similar abominations). If someone wanted to hire me for a NodeJS, Python, Ruby or Java backend I would laugh at them.
>With all that said, the church of FP and the hascalator community is a problem for Scala. Overly dogmatic & academic functional programming styles don't have a place in production systems.
Isn't Scala minus the problems you mentioned just Kotlin?
Personally, being able to solve problems with the abstractions you can achieve within the language over adding very specific language features to solve them appeals to me more.
1) Agree
2) Partially agree - I haven't gone to the length of writing anything down but I have been modelling it in my head for weeks. As you say later in your post a lot of it is intangible hence the difficulty in deciding.
House/Apartment - I currently stay in Yorkshire so housing is cheap. As a contractor my Ltd Co can pay my rent as a valid business expense. Switching to permanent employment would mean that I have to pay this out of my personal income, so in that sense the costs would go up and not insignificantly so.
The job security is a strange one - I contract for a large consultancy with work for a large Government department. The work won't dry up anytime soon and when it does, my specific skill set would allow me to find more work (either abroad or in London). People I work alongside are being offered year long renewals - practically unheard of as far as I am aware.
The "startup" is a Government funded organisation so although a permanent position, there is always the chance the funding will dry up.
The hours should in theory be a similar 37-40 hours per week. Whilst sometimes in my current position I will work a 12 hour day to help with deployments or live issues, it is rare. The client is very flexible with regards to office hours. I imagine the new role would be similar, however there is a risk that it ends up being worse with longer and less flexible hours. The job posting specifically lists working from home as a perk so I suspect it's fairly progressive.
Friends is a big one - Yes I have made friends with people on the current job and I will miss them sorely, however I also have friends in Manchester which is within commuting distance of the next job. I would be looking to cultivate old friendships at the expense of newer ones. The Christmas journey home would be an hour less on the motorway so not a huge factor although would mean frequent visits are easier.
The million pound question is the retirement part. Whilst I don't think I will be ready to completely stop working in ~10 years, having the option to sounds very appealing. I would like to be free to spend time with my (imaginary) family and have the creative energy to work on other projects without worrying about financial viability.
Ultimately the tradeoff probably comes down to on the one hand having a job I can be proud of (I am working on a cure for X) that will also be incredibly stimulating intellectually, versus the surety of the job I have for now, with the contractor income that allows me to become financially independent a lot sooner.
The plebs should work 60 hours to support the lifestyle of the wealthy elites.
In all seriousness though it's clear his book is aimed at people that have a chance of creating enough wealth to escape wage slavery. For many people in the world this is simply not an option - I think that is the point the author is trying to make?