I agree with all above, and I'll go on a slight tangent.
I dislike the "genius" and "gifted" labels because in the long run they're excuses why you're not one. "It's ok that he got a better salary - he's a genius!". With a "nature" argument, you don't have to think about the "nurture" argument - your actual skill. Then you can give up without being ashamed.
99% of the people you'll actually meet are averages with interests and luck to manifest their skills in the right way. And on the other hand, I've attended local Mensa chapter meetings to see first-hand that "geniuses" can in 99% of cases be just ordinary people with some special interests on which they may or may not capitalize.
So - always value contextual knowledge, skill and effort, and encourage yourself and other people to develop. Because otherwise you just like to play the lottery and complain how the numbers are too random to your liking.
The labels 'genius' and 'gifted' look convincing until you read about 'accidental genius' - genius acquired after a serious illness or injury.
'genius' is just a particular configuration out of millions or billions in which a brain can form. Brain's real estate is malleable like a city's. So, no reason why one cannot configure it to one's liking. Now, the procedure to do so might not be as easy.
I also think that there is not much difference between an alcoholic (any addiction for that matter) and a workaholic genius. The reason is that both do not know what drives them.
I note that there are many sensational media stories about accidental genius, and zero accidental geniuses who leveraged their genius to become absurdly rich/famous/powerful. I am therefore very skeptical about whether accidental genius really exists. All this is tangential to your point of course.
I wouldn't say it's _completely_ separate, in the sense that within a certain field + industry combination, the salaries will be fairly stable, and from there it's a combination of skill, worth to company, being able to market yourself, be visible, and being in a position (financially and otherwise) to be able to bargain effectively for your salary. Along with your networks, looks, etc. With an added heap of some randomness.
All of these add a lot of noise, but there's still an underlying signal there. It's kind of like BMI; at an individual level, it may be highly misleading due to the variance, but at a population level, it's fairly insightful.
If we're discussing the capitalist society, the salary does represent in a very literal form your worth to the company, and by consequence probably your skill level too. I'll admit that it's more complicated than that.
What you should not associate with your salary is your own sense of worth or success, because there you're on mentally unstable grounds.
But in my original response I just gave a random example, and you're right that we should not expand the discussion in that direction.
The definition of "worth" in that context is also contingent on factors that have nothing to do with the quality or social value of the skill that salary supposedly represents.
Can you create an exaggerated perception of your skill in others? To what degree does your skill have latent demand vs effective demand? To what degree has your skill been monopsonized? To what degree does your skill apply to solving problems that are currently externalized?
Some simple examples: An amazing social worker could change the lives of dozens if not hundreds of people, however, since those people are broke & homeless, her target demographic is unable to compensate her for what she does (latent demand), and her salary is very meagre and state subsidized. An expert in environmental restoration could save a strip mining conglomerate millions of dollars while improving the health of hundreds of thousands of people in communities downriver, however because that conglomerate chooses to externalize those costs onto those communities, that environmental expert also ends up recieving a meagre state subsidized salary.
Your salary is simply the amount of money you have convinced a company to pay you. You could waste 3 years making 100k a year only to deliver a failed project that resulted in 0 revenue.
No, they're right but I can see how you interpreted it. They said salary is "your worth to the company" -- meaning, the amount of money they're willing to part with to have you, or to keep you from working elsewhere (your "worth" to them).
I think you took it to mean actual calculated dollar-value driven-by-the-eng worth. Even thinking about that, your example is wrong because it ignores expected value (EV) of a project which takes into account risk. For example, if your theoretical project has a 10% chance of generating $5mm/yr and a 90% of completely failing, the EV of the project is $500k/yr - so it's totally worth it to pay an eng $100k/yr to work on it, even if it fails.
No they mean that bullshitters, asslickers, and manipulative but charismatic and confident politics players often get more recognition and salary than the objectively skillful and technically competent, value delivering people.
Sure you can redefine "worth" to include scheming and taking undue credit and deflecting blame, but it's a stretch.
To keep things in track in the spirit of the originating comment, do those people not fit exactly what the commenter was talking about? That they may be average/below average at many things, but they have spent a great deal of time to become well above average at, say, understanding how to manipulate people (which I stress may not be a conscious decision to be a bad person), rather than having, say, expert knowledge of automobile mechanics? I mean it's a shitty thing, but it's not really about "worth" per se, it's about skill, and that skill doesn't have to be ethically positive/neutral
That becomes a tautology. It's well possible that a toxic manipulative person enters a company, destroys a lot of value production and efficiency by pitting people against one another, taking credit for apparent wins and pushes losses to others and into the future and still makes it quite high in promotions. Perhaps at some point they get booted, but they can do a lot of damage, perhaps make skilled people leave rather than enter an uncertain fight when they have high job market value, leaving the more desperate to stay who don't dare to stir things up. Meanwhile others don't feel responsible for helping a cold megacorp so they just want to get out of this with the best CV and social standing and a good reference.
You must interpret "worth" in a tautological manner if you consider the toxic persons behavior valuable. It's an organizational pathology. Just because it happens doesn't mean it's good or teaches us we need to re-evaluate what we consider value.
Cancer can displace useful cells and kill the organism. It doesn't mean that "well in the end it was for the better anyway since cancer cells are more worthy since they ended up winning". That's twisted logic. Also note that megacorp won't die so easily and the effect of one such person may not show up visibly until after they've voluntarily left for a better job to another place to repeat the cycle.
1. that someone with what would be considered a morally/ethically negative skill would inevitably damage an organisation, or that an organisation would not want someone with that particular skill.
2. that the cancer analogy is at all useful. A company or org is not a body (it is a legal entity with a specific purpose), and a person with what I've called morally negative skills is not a cancer cell (they are a thinking person with actual goals that may align and actual skills that may be required).
I can pull out innumerable examples from politics or business here. Take the current US incumbent. Or, as I'm from the UK, the current prime minister, or his home secretary. Of course, to an observer who feels they are a cancer (I do!) they are what you describe. And they will always force other people out who would seem to have [call them] positive skills that would make them better suited [from my viewpoint], sure. But none of that means they aren't skilled, or that they do not have (fairly obvious, as I think about it) "worth"
In my experience there is a correlation between income and inability to deliver on projects. Seems some people spend all their time convincing management of there value rather than delivering on their jobs.
No, salary reflects leverage- how hard you are to replace. Not the amount of value you generate. There are lots of ways for a company to figure out ways to make you easier to replace, thereby decreasing your leverage, and the difference between the amount of value you generate, and the amount they have to pay you, is their profit.
It represents your cost to the company: something they try to keep down and which gets countered by their need to have you, the scarcity of your position and most importantly your willingness to walk away.
If people got paid their actual worth to the company there probably wouldn't be much profit to go around at the end.
In capitalism your salary is by definition less than your value to the company. Additionally, there is a tendency for wages to be reduced to the social minimum.
> In capitalism your salary is by definition less than your value to the company.
No, it's not.
Under ideal market conditions, the price of any good (including labor) is exactly equal to its value to the marginal purchaser (and, also, to the marginal seller.)
Human on Human interactions, which are required for the majority of employment, employ game theory to ensure that your pay is below your value. When talking about labor groups/unions you can approach an ideal scenario. Even those will have variation that are manipulated by human to human interaction.
There are no "ideal market conditions". The real conditions are such that, statistically, you will be underpaid in comparison to your value within a company. Sometimes you get lucky and drop into an upside down position, which is overpaid, but that's the best wage slaves can hope for.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice – in practice there is” (Yogi Berra)
I do not use the "ideal market conditions" theory to describe what happens in practice, because it has little utility (except in predicting some very constrained trends).
The genius and gifted 'myth' is also bad for the genius and the gifted themselves. I know a guy, he is clearly gifted, but due to not adding hard work stalled in his PhD.
I've seen way too many people handicap themselves this way. In my experience, someone with completely average gifts in a given area will likely never win a world competition, but putting in repeated and consistent effort can probably be better at that thing than anyone they will encounter in day-to-day life. But it's so much easier to just shrug and say oh well.
Most of the exceptionally gifted people I've run into in life have either also been very hard working or have run into a wall when they get to a level where their giftedness is no longer enough for them to get through every situation without also putting in hard work.
>run into a wall when they get to a level where their giftedness is no longer enough for them to get through every situation without also putting in hard work
I have hit this wall and have sometimes wished I was less intelligent but more diligent. I would be healthier and wealthier for sure.
To any intelligent but lazy young man reading this, don’t delay improving your diligence. Seek counseling and coaching if you can. Don’t let your good grades, impressed teachers and peers, and fancy college acceptances convince you otherwise.
But avoid ADHD drugs. They will wreck your body, make you numb, and sap your enthusiasm for life.
ADHD drugs have actually done the complete opposite for me, although I was basically the poster boy for ADHD-PI before I was diagnosed. Without counseling and coaching in tandem with the medication I can see how easy it could be for the drugs to do more harm than good.
It hits people at different points. Could be college, could be grad school, could be work in general, could be a promotion. But it will ultimately catch up to you.
I ask any high schooler that is heading to college if they actually study and how difficult school is for them. Most of the "smart" one tell me their classes are really easy. I tell them to expect to actually have to study and for those easy A's or B's just for showing up to become C's and D's in college.
My buddies kid actually took the advice to heart and has been getting A's and B's in college still which is good to see. I wish someone would have given me that advice and saved me an extra semester.
I have to ask - what's the revenue model? I didn't see a payed account option (which is nice), but I do wonder how you're going to sustain this without deciding after 5 years that maybe selling a carefully selected subset of information would not be privacy invasive (just projecting my worst fears here)?
This is in the air but there are a couple things we are keeping in mind. Ads are still on the table, just not hyper targeted ones. The only targeting being to people who follow certain subjects on slyde (cars, weather, etc). Outside of that, not much more. This will limit the amount of advertising revenue for sure, but this leads to the second point. We want to also allow creators of premium content to create premium channels on slyde, which would be a way for content creators to fund themselves, similar to how YouTube does it. Ultimately we have to accept the fact that we just aren't going to be able to monetize users to the same extent as facebook or google does, and that's okay with us.
Using ads will destroy the privacy and trust for sure. The ad networks will track anything and it all starts again.
I think users will need to pay a very small fee. That gives them control to be a legal owner of their account and data's. That is actually the argumentation of most other platforms to use and sell user data's, because they have no legal rights on their data's. By paying they have.
If you would offer an additional email address in a paid model, that would also secure the path from the platform to the user. Like 1$/month for Slyde. 2$/month Slyde with email address.
Second can be a an option to receive funds or donations. Third users and platform keep fake accounts under control when users need to pay something.
Also you should allow users optional to ID themselves by a third party service. That is very important for some public persons and many others. Later you can offer services between these users which bring you some extra income.
Has anyone at Stackexchange written open about their revenue model? Seems similar.
You do also need to keep in mind that you need to make sure the ads themselves aren't serving tracking garbage or outright malware, even if you do not offer precise behavioral targeting or even store behavioral data.
You can maybe also sell fun premium features like Discord does with Nitro.
Our idea at the moment is to act like reddit ads do. Advertisers essentially make a post without anything more than a title, description, image / video and a url, with the image / video hosted and scrubbed by us. This will most definitely take careful design but your point is valid. Right now it's a delicate balance of not getting ahead of ourselves but also not setting ourselves up for failure due to poor planning.
Premium things is something Snapchat tried out for a bit with bitmoji, though to be honest I haven't looked deeply into any available data on how that worked out for them.
A YouTube premium but without the data collection type model is something we've talked about. Hopefully the users will guide us in the right direction with this. We have to worry about fighting the stigma that there is even a paid option for it, and would that stifle growth? Not answers we have but something we've questioned.
Perhaps Spotify offers a good example. Free tier is funded via ads. Premium tier, no ads + other benefits.
I expect you'd find that there is a significant segment of users who would be willing to pay for the service in order to not be targeted with their specific characteristics and use patterns. Brands can build trust, perhaps make that an objective to support subscription sales.
There couldn't be more truth to this. Ads are such a slippery slope. If for arguments sake Slyde grew to be something, it would be due in no small part to the "take it or leave it" approach to ads, if they ever become a thing. Any deviation from this would essentially be biting the hand that feeds you. I can't say we have all or many of the answers to combat this problem but I can say we are weary of it and is the primary reason we want to develop other monetization strategies that are a win-win for us and the users.
That's a wonderful way of supporting people while also taking care of brand, styling recommendations etc. Kudos to Arduino!
Maybe RPi just hired some <profanity-word> lawyers that need to justify their salaries by doing same-old, before somebody in the top level wakes up and goes "maybe that's not the best way of doing things"?
Thanks for the Kudos (Arduino co-founder here). Most likely they used an external service, which uses an algorithm to decide if a TM is used in the correct way or not. So the so called <profanity-word> lawyer was misguided by the work of a software engineer... anyway.. Let's not imply that all decisions are malicous and all lawyers are evil. The reality is that people make mistakes all day every day, imagine algorithms..:)
So, I hired a thug to beat you up, but the instructions I gave them were based on an algorithm, so everything's cool! See, I'm not a crappy violent offender, it was just people I hired and an algorithm.
> Let's not imply that all decisions are malicous and all lawyers are evil.
I'm really not. But I can imagine that if you're a professional versed in blindly protecting IP - this is what you would do. The decision to do it in that specific way (suing infringement left and right) needs to come from the top and typically is not a decision that a lawyer would make alone. So, 3 scenarios:
1) this is an unsupervised default action of a lawyer that's just applying the law without guidance from management, because that's what they expect that they should be doing.
2) management approves of this and they're short-sighted thinking that the logo IP is more important than the community
3) management decided that they'll make a business move that requires stronger branding and purposefully want to kill the community to monopolize the support.
In case 1 and 2, we can hope that this will be corrected. I really don't like case 3, but again - I was never a very good business-person.
EDIT: Wow, so it was No.2. Glad to see the feedback loop working. But as pointed out by others on this thread - it's not that RPi should not protect themselves and their trademark - it's that they can do it in a better way than sending take-down orders.
The point of the article was not about the quality of the product (cakes) but about a model of small-time abuse in which she has first-time experience. She is allowed to state the situation and give an opinion.
Secondly - comparing BBC journalists to people selling personal lifestyle as a product is insulting. Journalists are in obligation do declare "opinion pieces" if they're writing them, while influencers are basically only doing opinion pieces, and have a business model of convincing manufacturers that their opinions is worth paying for. Their positive opinion is probably worth just a bit more money (yes, that's also an unsubstantiated insult, I just like to blend in with the crowd here).
"comparing BBC journalists to people selling personal lifestyle as a product is insulting."
Be that as it may, the BBC has become exactly that. It used to be the place to get news - now it's a magazine selling stuff instead - and you can spot those particular 'articles' a mile off.
A sad but true reflection of what the BBC has become. :(
I still use BBC as one of the better European sources of information, after filtering mentally that it's (of course) tailored to UK audience. I'm not British, so maybe I wasn't paying as close attention as I should to see the decline in quality.
On a tangent, maybe worth it's own thread - can you propose a good European news site, in English? There's plenty of aggregators and crap-generators out there, but quality reporting is getting harder to find, and I'm grateful for any recommendation.
The Guardian. They're good quality, have great investigative journalism, and seem to care about things that actually matter ( e.g. environment and climate change, Panama Papers, Snowden, etc.)
This is another site that needs the "invite code" for new users to register?
I know the arguments of controlling the influx of new people and having a trust-chain so that comments are decent etc... but it just feels so elitist.
I just find hypocrisy in the contrast of:
- hey, we're a cool new site, we'd like your attention
- but you can't be part of the party, you're not one of the cool kids
>This is another site that needs the "invite code" for new users to register? I know the arguments of controlling the influx of new people and having a trust-chain so that comments are decent etc... but it just feels so elitist.
Well, we're guilty of that, too. It's not about elitism, we let thirty of our colleague's students use our ML platform[0] for their final year projects, and send invites to people who go to our Slack workspace. There are some things to fix before we can onboard everyone, that's all.
I don't say they're doing it for the same reasons, but it's not necessarily elitism. It can be limited resources, etc.
>but you can't be part of the party, you're not one of the cool kids
You're one of the cool kids. Where do I send the invite link?
Like I said - I understand that there's probably a good reason why you're limiting user numbers, but it's a bad mechanism for doing so.
Good luck, I'll take a pass on the invite, and wait for the site to become open, if that happens. As you're not limiting viewing of articles, I'm not losing much, and the biggest downside is that you'll miss-out on the early adopters and hype-surfers, but mostly it's just bad PR.
I think you may have missed the part that explains we're not the original link. I'm not OP.
I was explaining why we're doing it on https://iko.ai to manage compute resources, as it is a machine learning platform. Early users help make the product acceptable for a wider audience. Building product in a void and launching is not the way to go in my opinion.
The fact you take a pass means you don't need it that badly. Generally speaking, early users do need the product badly and are willing to accept certain imperfections, and have extremely helpful feedback to improve the product so it eventually becomes appealing to a wider audience.
The pattern also helps limiti g the number of disappointed people. When it is a low stakes 'job to be done', you can open for everyone. When it's a bit more demanding, you need to get a few things right. Again, I'm not OP and the product I'm talking about is something else.
Thanks for clarifying, you're right - I missed the fact that you're not talking about the same product. Thank you for the offer, but you're right - it would be lost on me.
> early users do need the product badly and are willing to accept certain imperfections
Agree on the second, but the first parts is a wild exaggeration. You get to discover that for yourself.
We spent seven years delivering ML products to enterprise, and are building something based on what we discovered. However, this is not a photo sharing application where the use case is very narrow and one developer is enough to pin-point the need and execute on it. This is a meta-product that enables people to build products.
There is some complexity in that the ML landscape is varied and it is precisely why many are trying to do that. We can discover part of this and we did, but we want to uncover more by having users try it out.
A concrete example: during the first months of the pandemic, our colleague had thirty students with machine learning final year projects. These were in a hot COVID spot. We had total lockdown, and these students did not have the possibility to go to university to access computers. They also did not have means to buy a costly workstation just for the project. We onboarded them on the platform as "early users" so they could train machine learning models, deploy them, and build applications that used them, and as a result, were able to graduate on time.
Now, I don't know what you think of that approach, but preventing 30 students from losing an academic year is not a bad thing. Did the platform suck in some ways? Absolutely. They graduated on time, though. 30 * one academic year = 30 years saved because that product, even in its primitive form, existed.
We can either develop in a void and wait until the product is complete and perfect to show to the world and allow everyone to use it, but I don't think anybody who actually shipped useful products in their life ever does that.
Whenever someone asks how they could focus more when building their product, even a personal project, I tell them to get the right kind of users. Early users help uncover the unknown, and help focus on some of the knowns.
For example, you have a long backlog. Without users, prioritizing can be done but is tricky. With users: after the 20th user complains about a bug/UX, you know what your next issue/ticket is going to be. The result is faster development on what matters, and the consequence is instead of shipping the product to the wider audience in a year, it'll be in 6 months.
Having early users helps tear down things we might have ignored and accelerates bringing this value to more users.
You seem to have the impression that I don't see the value of early users, which is not true. They are crucial.
Could those 30 students have gotten GCP access and carried out their assignments? Probably. I wouldn't portray myself as a savior while trying to sell a product. I'd
say that those 30 students were doing you a favor. (In the same way Autodesk, Microsoft etc are giving away student licenses to get you into their eco-system. It's really not a new thing)
But, to my original quote that you seem to have disliked - you are a small company (I saw 10-ish people?) that's entering a highly populated and competitive market with the assumption that your early adopters "need your product badly". I can only assume you have one helluva product. I'd say in 2-5 years you'll have the answer (not that it has to be bad news).
>You seem to have the impression that I don't see the value of early users, which is not true. They are crucial.
I'm not assuming you don't see the value of early users. I'm giving examples of them being crucial.
>Could those 30 students have gotten GCP access and carried out their assignments? Probably.
Assumptions of this [for the students]:
- They have a payment method and can set up a billing account [they don't]
- They know how to set up VMs [they don't]
- They know how to set up notebooks [could do it difficultly]
- They know how to install dependencies [they had trouble with that]
- They can afford storage and compute including GPUs [nope]
- They can version their code and track their params/metrics/models [nope]
- They can deploy their models to use them in web applications [nope]
- They can get their models to their machines [slow connection, + dependencies]
- Thirty students can easily show their progress to their supervisor [nope]
- A group of students can collaborate easily on different machines [nope]
And the last assumption is that they care about all these things. They don't. The job to be done is to study something, train models, and write a dissertation on different approaches, not to entangle themselves in dependency hell and containers. That is overhead.
>I wouldn't portray myself as a savior while trying to sell a product.
I'm not portraying myself as a savior. I'm stating that the product saved a lot of time.
>I'd say that those 30 students were doing you a favor.
I believe I have given examples of this being true by saying that having users focuses development by uncovering unknowns, and focusing on what matters.
I so believe this that the whole series of replies goes in that direction.
>But, to my original quote that you seem to have disliked
What do you mean by disliked, and what lead you to believe that?
>you are a small company (I saw 10-ish people?) that's entering a highly populated and competitive market with the assumption that your early adopters "need your product badly"
We are our own early adopters, and we do need our product badly. We would have used something else had we found one that solves problems we encounter in the real world.
>I can only assume you have one helluva product.
Not really. We're working on that, though. We want it to be useful for us, first.
I dislike the "genius" and "gifted" labels because in the long run they're excuses why you're not one. "It's ok that he got a better salary - he's a genius!". With a "nature" argument, you don't have to think about the "nurture" argument - your actual skill. Then you can give up without being ashamed.
99% of the people you'll actually meet are averages with interests and luck to manifest their skills in the right way. And on the other hand, I've attended local Mensa chapter meetings to see first-hand that "geniuses" can in 99% of cases be just ordinary people with some special interests on which they may or may not capitalize.
So - always value contextual knowledge, skill and effort, and encourage yourself and other people to develop. Because otherwise you just like to play the lottery and complain how the numbers are too random to your liking.