Lyft and Uber have wasted so much time and money. This is the problem with VC money focused on growth. There's no pressure to build anything sustainable, no pressure to build competitive advantages. Arbitrary point to point level 5 self driving is decades away. And even if it came tomorrow, what competitive advantage do these apps have? They are a single Google Maps update from being wiped out. They should've spent past few years using network effects in the same way as Facebook to protect themselves. They should've built loyalty programs like frequent miles. But they completely wasted their opportunity.
I often wonder what is the natural market price of these services? Basically, without massive VC money distorting everything, how much would a Lyft or Uber ride really cost? I have a feeling it would be much higher than now. Despite all the hype, true level 5 self driving is decades away. When the VC money stops, what are these companies going to do?
I think the only viable option for them is Lyft Line/Uber Pool. It benefits from network effects (more using the service, better it gets) which also prevents newcomers. It could become a monopoly like Facebook. They should be pushing this harder than unrealistic dreams of level 5 self driving.
One thought might be to have a subsidized ride share system where employers/transit authority pays people to ride share. Impression that based on transit authorities reaction to causal car pooling is they wouldn't support it. AKA they don't want people carpooling they want them to ride busses.
Second thought of mine based on buses in San Francisco is the buses are too large and too few. More smaller buses would increase ridership and reduce trip times.
My thought might be interesting if car poolers could tap into the commuter benefit cards. AKA pick up someone on the way to work and they can transfer 25-50 cents a mile into your account.
I wish some billionaire would start a chain of carbon neutral gas stations. I wouldn't mind paying more for gas if I knew it was carbon neutral. There are several ways the gas could be carbon neutral, either through production (solar/wind into fuel creation) or offsets (plant trees or carbon sequestration). Instead of slowly trying to change our transportation infrastructure to EV, which will take decades, this could have immediate impact now.
Your comment sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. I was confused about how burning 1L of fuel, which weighs ~1kg, could possibly produce ~2.3kg of CO2.
The answer, which took me far too long to realize, is that the oxygen pulled from the air makes up the bulk of the mass of the CO2. Oxygen has an atomic mass of ~16 to Carbon's ~12, which means that 1kg of pure carbon can be combined with oxygen to produce ~3.7kg of CO2.
So yes, your calculations sound about right. Contrary to my first impression they do not violate the law of conservation of mass.
This is a lot lower than I expected. I wish governments would just add this as a tax directly. But seems almost impossible in the current political climate.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but i don't think that's how carbon credits work? Paying 10% more for gas doesn't magically reduce the CO2 emitted. I would expect that at some point, someone has to actually not emit CO2 for this to work.
I think even a startup could do this. Could work with existing stations to promote themselves as being completely eco-friendly. They would add a small cost to each gallon of fuel (as andrewwhartion mentioned it should only be ~3-4%) and that cost would go to offsetting the emissions. The startup could charge another 1% or a lump fee and put the work into making banners / promotional material to advertise their eco-friendliness, and also handle the PR. In an eco-conscious city just the local PR could bump business enough to make it worth it.
A lot of gas stations here ask "Do you want a car wash for $x.xx" directly on the gas pump after you slide your card. If gas stations just added "Do you want carbon neutral for $x.xx" I think many would push yes in the right markets and a reasonable $x.xx value.
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the idea. I personally buy from companies like https://us.whogivesacrap.org/ and seek out and pay a premium for sustainably produced food. In a city such as SF or Seattle where many people are wealthy and eco-concious I could see this working. I'm unsure if it would scale though.
I think organics food shows this isn't true. These gas stations would first target the affluent liberal markets. The marketing could be, don't feel bad about buying that luxury BMW gas guzzler, come to Neutral gas station. The station should feel high end, like the Apple store of gas stations.
This is how organic food started with Whole Foods. And the same strategy could work here.
Organic food is successful because a significant number of people believe it is healthier to eat than non-organic foods. The environmental impact is mostly not the reason. (Whether it is true that organic foods are healthier may be debatable, though for some foods the evidence is pretty good that it is.)
It won't work to use that angle for gas. Pure environmental plays are harder to find. There are people who pay more for renewable generated electricity, so that's a good parallel. I don't know what percentage, however, or if it'd be enough to support a chain of expensive gas stations.
This was true years ago, but I think times are different now. Theres a feeling of near panic among many as the effects of climate change become more obvious and the new Trump environmental policies. I think theres strong desire to do something and this could tap into that.
Also by being high end, theres opportunity to be very different. These stations shouldn't even look like traditional stations. They could provide services that appeal to affluent markets and provide good profit margin. This will be necessary at first because raising gas price alone won't be enough to cover costs.
I suspect that the population of every country is too price sensitive for this to make a dent. Take for example ethically produced clothing, food, etc. While they are big industries they can barely hold a candle to their less-ethical counterparts.
From what I see, relying on good intentions doesn't quite seem get us to where we need to go.
The cool startup thing here is gas delivery a.k.a. "the Uber of gas stations". It seems like they could add this as a service, since they need something as a reason to exist.
(this is a submarine comment, I don't want Yoshi to go out of business or I'll have to inflate my own tires again)
Even if it would succeed and a significant people would be willing to pay more, without regulation you cannot know that it is really carbon neutral instead of the billionaire owner pocketing the difference. And once you get around to regulations, a carbon tax is a much more sensible proposal.
The "smartwatch" from Apple and Android is not a good idea. Fitbit and Pebble are closer to the right direction. Apple/Android keep trying to make watch-sized smartphones. But they will never compete with actual smartphones, they will just always be annoying inferior smartphones on your wrist.
The key factor is to consider which senses are optimal UI for each device. Smartphones dominate the visual and audio senses. Smartwatch simply can't compete there. So smartwatch should have a very simple very low power display like the Fitbit and Pebble and maybe a simple speaker/mic.
So what sense is the smartwatch good for? It's touch. There is a lot of potential of using vibrations/touch as a UI. For example, I think the Apple watch vibrates for turns when you do a Maps route. That's a good start. They need to focus more on things like this. There's a lot you can communicate with vibration, kind of like morse code (such as two quick vibrates, a long vibrate, etc.)
And now Apple has a very advanced touch sensor (the new one in iphone 7). Get rid of that silly big screen on Apple watch. Put the touch sensor there. Why not just allow thumbprint scan, wave my watch at a Apple Pay terminal, and buy things? Way less effort than taking out my phone.
These kind of pure touch and vibration UI is a huge open field. And I think Apple somewhat understands this. But they need to make the big step of dropping that screen. Because that's not where the smartwatch is strong. And it would also allow long battery life which is more important for smartwatch. People are used to daily charge for phones. But much less tolerant of that for watches.
> Get rid of that silly big screen on Apple watch. Put the touch sensor there. Why not just allow thumbprint scan, wave my watch at a Apple Pay terminal, and buy things? Way less effort than taking out my phone.
Just in case you missed it, this is already supported, and it's somewhat better than you're suggesting. Once the watch is unlocked, it does not need additional authentication to pay until it leaves your wrist (at which point it relocks). Double click the side button to put it into pay mode.
The software field really needs to stop associating "top engineer" with Google interview process. The Google interview process has nothing to do with "top engineer". The only thing it measures is how much time you spent studying DS and algorithm books. It's just like the SATs for college, study and you do well, but has nothing to do with actual college work. There is only one correlation and it's as a measure of work ethic. If you study hard for SAT, you will probably study hard in college. Same thing for the Google interview.
It's actually not a bad system for fresh graduates. If they studied hard in college, all that DS and algorithm knowledge should still be fresh. And it's away to see who studied in college and who didn't. But it's only useful here because there's nothing else to look at for fresh graduates, they have no experience.
However, it's a very bad process for senior engineers. Google should have a different process for seniors, but they probably don't care enough to change.
The plan in the article is complementary, not against public transit. It has the potential to fix the "first and last mile" problem for trains. If successful, it would greatly increase use of rail public transit.
I looked at ebikes a few months ago and it's still too expensive. Even the kits for converting a regular bike was almost the price of an ebike. Is it this expensive in the rest of thr world? If not, why is it so expensive here, why isn't someone just importing it and selling it for much cheaper?
Where is here for you? In The Netherlands, an e-bike costs you about 1300 EUR. Not cheap for a bike but not overly expensive either, there are more expensive non-e-bikes that are regularly bought.
I don't understand why Toyota is not the leader in plugin hybrids. They had such a big lead in hybrid tech and the next natural step was plugin hybrid. Imagine a RAV4 or Highlander plugin hybrid with 50 mile range. The demand would be incredible. The marketing would be so easy, "Drive your SUV to get groceries with zero gas! Save money, help the environment, and drive a big car! win-win-win for everyone!" A SUV like this would fit so well with the suburban lifestyle in the US. Instead they are wasting time and money on the hydrogen fuel-cell nonsense. How can their management have enough vision to create the Prius and hybrid tech and yet so ignorant of this next obvious step?
And this is why software today is in such a sad state. Managers think it would be great to have an army of young engineers who don't question and just do what they're told. But any leader surrounded by sycophants will eventually fail. Management often doesn't realize that they really need the senior engineer who has the experience and confidence to say "NO". Because that engineer is the one who will prevent the project from collapsing under the weight of scope creep and tech debt.
> Because that engineer is the one who will prevent the project from collapsing under the weight of scope creep and tech debt.
That's the shitty thing: there's enough work that doesn't cross the threshold that requires you to pay for technical debt. Otherwise, a lot more managers would be getting burned by it. There's no electric shock when they hit the wrong button. Even if it isn't a "big boom" moment where you can't deliver some huge new feature because of bad architecture and lose a lot of potential money, the little payments are written off to the younger generation to actually rebuild the thing because they have energy/time to burn.
There's not really a single threshold though. I think the shittier thing is that software is just an incredible market for lemons. Even us programmers ourselves don't really know how good we are, and there is no way to accurately compare all the problems we faced with the problems we avoided. So forget about non-technical management, they could be paying twice as much for someone who takes 10x as long to deliver a feature and never have the first hope of getting a clue. Or they could hire someone who is demonstrably fast but paints the whole system into a corner where the next critical business feature requires a complete rewrite.
Experience is no silver bullet, but it generally goes a lot further than non-technical tea-leaf-reading or junior dev shotgun programming.
its possible to be experienced and not say no you know? the opposite is also true... the trick really is not saying yes or no, but understanding what your boss really wants, and offering a realistic way forward to achieve that.
Recently I got an email about a job that seemed interesting. It's a well known company that used to be a startup but is now a mature company. I went to the job description page: 8+ years experience, tech stack I'm familiar with, mostly backend work, seems ok so far.
Then I get to the last line. Open office, has video games, happy hours, other typical things designed to attract those in their 20s. It's all a hidden message screaming, if you're old, don't apply. And they want someone with 8+ years experience! It's ridiculous.
You're probably seeing a hidden message where there isn't one. The culture/benefits sections of most job descriptions are generic and that generic portion of the hiring message is tailored to the majority of hires the company is likely to attract via job postings. For most tech companies that is going to be candidates directly or recently our of university, and the majority of that majority does perceive/expect many of these types of office perks as hallmarks of a successful tech company. The message isn't intended to exclude you or me. The message is intended to hook the easily hookable.
I am sorry, but what is wrong with having video games in the office?
At both my previous companies I played games time to time, with co-workers. 15 mins of playing Fifa with a co-worker end s up both relaxing, and productive as you both bond and hash out things, and often much better than boring meeting.
I am 35 btw. Also, our CEO regularly played as well.
I have been at an office/environment (Amazon), with cubicles, or offices, people coming in, going home at 5:30pm, no social time, nothing interesting. I thought that was awful, and I would never work in a place that doesn't understand that creativity requires some play time as well.
This is all anecdotal evidence of course, but my exposure to this sort of office culture has been much more negative than what you described. Every place I've ever worked, I've played video games or done other fun stuff with my coworkers, sometimes as a part of every day. Nothing wrong with that, I wouldn't have had it any other way. This is the norm, but I don't think this is what people are talking about in this thread.
The negative variant of "come work here, we have video games in the office!" happens when there is an expectation from management (or even just the rest of the team) that everyone is going to participate in Mandatory Team Playtime whether they enjoy it or not. And the 1-2 hours of Mandatory Team Playtime always means that you have to stay at work for an additional 1-2 hours just to get your job done. Or maybe Mandatory Team Playtime is a consolation prize for making you work through the weekend.
I usually find there being too much to do to spend time playing video games or whatever at the job, unless there is a company after-hours event.
I'm not exactly on the younger side either, being 32 and having only been working professionally for almost 4 years. It's not that I don't love games either - if the game industry paid comparatively, I would certainly consider going into that industry, and have plenty of very successful friends in it.
That said, I don't view the presence of these things as discrimination - if you don't want to participate, don't. Nobody is forcing you, and if they want to falsify performance reviews/withhold promotions when you're clearly outperforming your peers/etc., then I'd get down and dirty letting them know that their behavior is crap, and then job search because I don't want to work for a company like that.
The problem isn't the games, it's the office space. Having video games, foosball, table tennis, etc near your work space is distracting as hell. If they are optional and silent (from my perspective) it's not a problem but me experience has been the opposite.
I had management buy everyone nerf guns once as part of a "hitting our targets" marketing campaign. It seemed like every time you got deep into concentration a nerf dart would ricochet into your screen. Needless to say, we missed our targets.
I've had the nerf war going on around me as well. Everyone else in the office shooting at each other, me in the middle fiddling in my terminals. I learned that if you just don't respond, you don't become a target and you can get on with whatever you were doing (YMMV).
It's not the video games themselves. It's the culture. It's a way to keep young employees in the office longer. It's not uncommon for these places to have people roll in around 10am and stay until 10pm. That's not a place I want to work at, and I'm not even 30 yet. But you can bet your life savings on a company firing anyone for not playing this game. That's why I won't work for a place with videogames.
I've worked at a bunch of places with video games in SV. Most of the time it's barely touched.
Meals is what really determines how long people stayed. Sometimes 3 people would play video games. Sometimes a team creates a lunch time card game routine. Some teams really love foosball or whatever.
If a place didn't serve 6pm dinner, people tend to leave before dinner time since they got hungry. If they served dinner, then they consistently stayed until dinner time. If dinner was too late like 8pm, then they might as well of had no dinner for most employees.
10am-10pm places develop often because it's a small startup, and because normal commute hours are horrible. I don't know many people although who actually works anything near those 12 hour days.
That's complete bullshit, I work for one of those company that happens to have video games around. Not everyone play, but after work, we sometimes get around and play for a couple of hours and we just have so much fun that we end up going home late. What's wrong with that?
But realize that companies do not give you these 'perks' like free food, games, laundry, etc. as a bonus. It is to keep you at work for more and more hours.
Honestly, I don't think it is a bad thing if you do enjoy this sort of thing and are young without kids, wife, etc.
The problem is that it creates the 'bro' culture that turns off anyone who isn't in the same demographic. When most of the team is staying late, bonding with COD, those that don't - the 40 year old who needs to pick up his kid, or the 25 year old woman who doesn't play XBox - tend to be excluded as time goes on.
To be completely honest, I've always thought the complaints of sexism in tech were completely bullshit.
But when I look at things as a mid 30's guy who is already seeing hints of ageism and really have no desire to stay 'till 10pm playing video games, I have to wonder if maybe I was somewhat wrong, and maybe the typical SV software environment is somewhat toxic for anyone not a 25 year old guy - females included.
Free food is the real perk that changes hours. Everything else isn't used that much or is very very company/team dependent and you have to evaluate them on a company basis.
10 companies might give laundry, video games, board/table games, free gyms and all 3 meals. How the company or team uses those things is very company dependent. Laundry service is not used that much most of the time, since you usually have to pay. It's usually just a purple tie pickup/dropoff closet.
I think the "staying late, bonding with COD" company is like the minority 'nightmare' thing that gets all the media attention, while most of them are pretty normal, does something at lunch sometimes and eats all the free meals.
> But realize that companies do not give you these 'perks' like free food, games, laundry, etc. as a bonus. It is to keep you at work for more and more hours.
It's give and take, nothing is for free, and this deal is a pretty good one imo :)
> The problem is that it creates the 'bro' culture that turns off anyone who isn't in the same demographic. When most of the team is staying late, bonding with COD, those that don't - the 40 year old who needs to pick up his kid, or the 25 year old woman who doesn't play XBox - tend to be excluded as time goes on.
So we shouldn't bond and have fun because of these people :D?
No I think you should do what you want; it certainly isn't the job of young male engineers to make sure everyone else is included in their environment. God knows that other groups were never especially inclusive to many of 'us' growing up.
Absolutely nothing wrong with it. But people with families, kids that need help with homework, etc won't be able to do that often if ever. Being young very often also means having fewer commitments.
Or you have different interests. Perhaps you don't expect to be friends with coworkers - so long as folks get along well at the office, that's enough. Perhaps you would rather have the compartmentalism. Perhaps you'd rather play at home while not wearing pants. Perhaps you'd rather spend time with a loved one, your children, and the couple of friends that you've had for years.
Perhaps you are an introvert and really need the downtime. Perhaps you are an artist and enjoy that instead. Maybe you play an instrument and get an hour of practice most days. Maybe you like theater or a good dinner in lue of a few hours of video games.
Not playing games after work isn't an indicator of someone's life sucking. It just means they have different interests or priorities in life that don't match up to spending a few hours at work playing games.
Well I'd say it depends what kind of game you guys have. If it's COD like in some of the comments I can understand. But in my office we mostly play goofy party game, I sometimes invite my gf over to play with us and she manages to have fun while not being a gamer as well. Here's a list I made:
No idea. In fact, having some complicated games to learn and compete at is likely a good thing if you have a team of gamers and give your brain a mental break from work while still having something interesting to chew on. Think high level play in fighting games/MOBAs, number crunching in MMOs, FPS map strategies, car simulation builds, sports strategies and teams, etc.
Even if you don't want to think about that stuff, you can then turn to doing silly things and giving yourself a break.
I would have a similarly visceral reaction to that line, but I wouldn't interpret it as a "keep out" sign for older developers. Rather, it's a gigantic red flag for wiser developers of any age. They're looking for people they can trick into working 60-80 hour weeks, every week. Those are probably going to be mostly recent grads in their 20s, but they're actually selecting for naïveté and the lack of a personal life rather than youth.
Let's see, most recent environment like that had me at late 40s (at the time), two guys mid 40s, the boss late 40s, and some young uns.
We all had nerf guns, regular silliness, and fairly regular beer+gaming sessions with the app company down the hall. They had a couple of full size multi game arcade machines, and a console. :)
I'll be old when they nail the lid shut :p I'd rather talk about games, motorbikes and beer than golf any day thanks. Unless you mean willingness to give up weekends for dubious reasons and pull stupid hours regularly - then on that score I've been old since my 20s.
That said I have experienced age discrimination - tech is rife with it, but never if I got past HR or recruiting types. I don't know why tech makes it more likely - it's not like every or even most companies are looking for the naive to work 10am-10pm daily.
You know who made the most use of the kegerator and the board game night at my last business? The sixty-year-old dude with a wife and two kids. He spent one-and-a-half nights a week at the office drinking, playing games, and socializing and was otherwise headed home by five. He made good use of that networking time, though, and partially because the tooling was there; he'd not have had a chance to interact with the office full of twentysomethings if he'd not had work provided socialization tools and had to go out out to interact.
It didn't exactly work - he eventually was fired in a really bad bit of house-training for cronies... But he was very popular. The tooling you're reading as a young people's perk is actually a pretty good neutral ground: if work didn't have a kegerator, I'd probably not go out, I'd be at home, not working and not thinking about work.
When I worked at a place with the average age was mid 30s and being mid 20s made me one of the youngest, we all played a lot of lunch time foosball and ping pong, left the video games untouched and were still an 'old' person friendly place.
Depends on what you mean by experience. I'm skeptical, to say the least. No doubt there are 29 year olds who have been "coding" for 20 years and being paid for it for 13 of them. That's different from having experience.
