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Censorship continues on Hacker News
Here’s a post, from user lgieron, that was killed yesterday on Hacker News. It will be invisible unless you log in. The full text is below: One thing to keep in mind – coding for a living and coding as...
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On how programmers involuntarily become managers
Something that I’ve noticed in the software industry is that many people will, at one point, state that they have no interest in becoming managers, only to reach out for the positions a few years...
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Silicon Valley can be beaten.
I have struggled, for years, to figure out whether Silicon Valley can be beaten. That is, can that toxic society be outperformed, shown up, and replaced by something with that has better moral values...
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The four stages of a company, the resource-extraction culture, and Silicon...
I’ve observed that companies exhibit certain patterns as they evolve into large corporations, and I’d characterize the most common sequence as having four phases: the colony stage, the legend stage,...
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RPG character classes as they apply to the corporate workplace
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that certain patterns of the role-playing genre of game (think Dungeons & Dragons, or a 1990s Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy console RPG) applies to...
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“Female work” vs. technology.
I had an experience, a few days ago, that I just need to speak about. I was speaking to a recruiter whose reputation as a “fixer” is legendary. I need someone like that, because VC-funded tech is, it...
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The “I.T.” stigma as the source of VC-funded technology’s rotten culture.
People outside of “Silicon Valley”, meaning VC-funded technology startups, have an often hilarious and rosy view of it. To hear them tell it, a tech job means free massages whenever you want, access to...
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Why I’m not quitting technology
Every now and then, I encounter a blog post about “Leaving Tech”. Sometimes, it’s a whiny, self-indulgent rant by someone who didn’t expect startups to be so hard. Other times, the person has solid...
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Harem queens in the corporate world
I recently came across a New York Times article about shitty behaviors that our society often associates with the female gender. It’s about the stupid, catty, bitchy behavior that makes for an...
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Rapid headcount growth kills a company’s culture, but not in the way people...
Even though Silicon Valley fetishizes rapid growth and “unicorns”, it’s well-understood that rapid headcount growth is bad for company culture. The firm gets big, “politics” start happening, and the...
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Y Combinator and Paul Graham are bad for the world (Part 1)
“Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank and he can rob the world.” In early November, 1988, one of the first major computer viruses, “the Morris Worm“, hit the Internet. While the...
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Y Combinator and Paul Graham are bad for the world, Part 2: Fixing founder...
Part 1 is here It’s easy to recognize that the current state of Silicon Valley is unacceptable. Innovation has nearly ceased, and what we now have is a resource-extraction culture with no sense of...
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It’s not “Early” Exit Disease, just Exit Disease, that’s killing innovation...
This is in direct rebuttal to a TechCrunch article by Adrian Fortino that asserts that “Early Exit Disease”, meaning a willingness to sell one’s company at a low price due to risk-aversion and a lack...
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The C Word
This is yet another essay (as if there weren’t enough) on corporate “culture”, but I choose not only to focus on the thing, but also the word. Both it (culture, that is) and how people discuss it are...
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A Minus B, and the inevitable grey goo.
When I was five years old, I experienced a first lesson in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I had been given eight jars of brightly colored clay. Fancying myself an artist, I mixed colors together to...
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Insights into why a contravariant type can’t be a Haskell Functor
In learning Haskell’s core types, type classes, and concepts, one often finds counterexamples useful in learning what these abstract concepts “really are”. Perhaps one of the most well-understood type...
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Corporate ageism is collective depression
This article crossed my transom recently. It’s about the difficulties that older (here, over 50) women face in finding work. Older men don’t have it easy, either, and in the startup world, it’s common...
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Malfragmentation
Paul Graham has been saying a lot of dumb things, of late, and since he’s rich, those things get taken more seriously than they deserve. I’ve decided that his recent essay on “Refragmentation” is worth...
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Things that failed: the individual mandate for health insurance
The Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) quite possibly did more good than harm, and it was enacted with good intentions, but it hasn’t caused health insurance premiums to decline. Instead, they’re going...
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Of programmers and scrubs
I’m currently working through the book, Playing to Win, by David Sirlin. It’s excellent. I’ll probably buy a copy, and I’d recommend this book even to people who aren’t especially interested in...
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