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The right and wrong way to lie in business, Part 2
In the previous essay, I opened an honest discussion of the ethics and practice of lying in business. I argued that it is better to tell one large-enough lie than a hundred small lies, and that the...
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Meritocracy is the software engineer’s Prince Charming (and why that’s harmful).
One of the more harmful ideas peddled to women by romance novels and the older Disney movies is the concept of “Prince Charming”, the man who finds a young girl, sweeps her off her feet, and takes care...
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Street fighting, HR, and the importance of collective action.
Street fights Street fighting is a topic on which a large number of men hold strong opinions, although very few have been in a true fight. I haven’t, and I hope never to be in one. Playground...
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Some ways to be bad at hiring
There are some assumptions in corporate hiring processes that sound like “tough love conservatism” but are just wrong. One of them is that false positives (bad hires) are worse than false negatives...
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3 mean-spirited HR policies that can kill a tech company.
Most companies are short-sighted, stingy, and stupid. Trillions of dollars are lost every year to the simple fact that people wielding corporate power become vicious, petty, and, in some cases,...
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Inverted placism: a possible future in which Silicon Valley’s a ghetto
I was having brunch with a couple of friends who are lawyers, and we were talking about desirable and undesirable places to live. Seattle (where I may be moving in early 2015) scored high on every...
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What Silicon Valley’s ageism means
Computer programming shouldn’t be ageist. After all, it’s a deep discipline with a lot to learn. Peter Norvig says it takes 10 years, but I’d consider that number a minimum for most people. Ten years...
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If you’ll ever die, don’t apply
Some day, I will die. So will everyone I know, everyone who has read this post, and everyone they know. I’m probably more than a third of the way there. I’m not especially afraid of it. Actually, I’m...
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What’s a mid-career software engineer actually worth? Try $779,000 per year...
Currently, people who either have bad intentions or a lack of knowledge are claiming that software engineer salaries are “ridiculous”. Now, I’ll readily admit that programmers are, relative the general...
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Why corporate conformity doesn’t work
Narcissism and conformism seem, at first glance, to be somewhat opposite of each other. A narcissistic person believes deeply in his own superiority: others are inferior, detestable, and exist to be...
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Technology’s Loser Problem
I’m angry. The full back story isn’t worth getting into, but there was a company where I applied for a job in the spring of 2013: to build a company’s machine learning infrastructure from scratch. It...
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Why there are so few AI jobs
Something began in the 1970s that has been described as “the AI winter”, but to call it that is to miss the point, because the social illness it represents involves much more than artificial...
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Why programmers can’t make any money: dimensionality and the Eternal Haskell Tax
To start this discussion, I’m going to pull down a rather dismal tweet from Chris Allen (@bitemyapp): “i almost get sad at how some orgs use ’you get to use haskell‘ as a way of getting cheap smart...
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Silicon Valley and the Rise of the Disneypreneur
Someone once explained the Las Vegas gambling complex as “Disneyland for adults”, and the metaphor makes a fair amount of sense. The place sells a fantasy– expensive shows, garish hotels (often cheap...
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Why corporate penny-shaving backfires. (Also, how to do a layoff right.)
One of the clearest signs of corporate decline (2010s Corporate America is like 1980s Soviet Russia, in terms of its low morale and lethal overextension) is the number of “innovations” that are just...
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On programmers, deadlines, and “Agile”
One thing programmers are notorious for is their hatred of deadlines. They don’t like making estimates either, and that makes sense, because so many companies use the demand for an estimate as a “keep...
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In defense of defensibility
I won’t say when or where, but at one point in time, a colleague and I were discussing our “red button numbers” for the organization under which we toiled. What’s that? The concept is this: a genie...
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Greed versus sadism
I’ve spent a fair amount of time reading Advocatus Diaboli, and his view on human nature is interesting. He argues that sadism is a prevailing human trait. In an essay on human nature, he states: They...
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Never relocate unpaid
Someone asked me, a few months ago, if he should take a Silicon Valley (actually, San Francisco) job offer where the relocation was a “generous” $4,000. I told him to negotiate for more and, if the...
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How the Other Half Works: an Adventure in the Low Status of Software Engineers
Bill (not his real name, and I’ve fuzzed some details to protect his identity) is a software engineer on the East Coast, who, at the time (between 2011 and 2014) of this story, had recently turned 30...
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