Let's not forget the human factor. Presumably, an operation of this scale would require hiring help - potentially lots of it. How do you make sure that one of the workers does not just leave with the hard drive? It would require security on the level employed in gemstones mines (personal search for every employee who leaves the premises etc.) Kind of hard to set up in a bulletproof way - the potential finder could just let the relevant security people in on the profits.
Offer a percentage of the proceeds to the finder's team. Rationally then, they would be satisfied to give the drive to their employers, because their employers are more likely (than anyone else they'd be able to find) to recover the data from a drive that is badly damaged, and to pay them a generous bonus, as agreed.
It also incentivizes the workers to keep an eye on each other to prevent the drive being smuggled out of the site.
> It is said that 27 hours a week is optimal in tech, less than that you could get more done, but more than that you add no extra value, over 40 you produce negative value/bugs.
That's probably true for typical people. There are exceptions like John Carmack and Jon Blow, who can code for 10-12 hours a day and who are running a mini-crusade on Twitter against generalizations like that. In general, I think you're right though - if you're such exception, it should be fairly obvious to you that you're exceptional in this regard and the rule does not apply to you.
Even supernaturally productive people benefit from idleness. Consuming art serves as inspiration for creativity; as productive as he is, Carmack wouldn't have made Doom if he hadn't read Snow Crash in a moment of idleness.
The exception occurs because they are having a strong vision of where they want to end up, and it is pretty far ahead so working hard will be required, yet they are able to feel they are little tiny bit of the way every day.
Still they probably have idle time too that really defines those moments of N days at 10-12 hours.
They probably live a way that Bertrand Russel would approve of.
My former CTO was a work machine, capable of digesting an insane amounts of highly skilled tasks over crazy long hours. Absolutely incredible. A rare kind, very inspiring and also surprisingly balanced in his life.
But he was also a terrible manager, as he was thinking/expecting the rest of the world to be as performant as he was.
One of my greatest friends and associates lives for life itself.
When we first collaborated on a project I had gotten a head start on it and was investing crazy hours.
As if it were the rule, I burnt out after the core implementation was done.
That's when his super powers kicked in.
While I had been toiling and feeling like a solo dev for my "heroic" commitment, he had been intimately learning my code and was fresh to build all the required features on top.
I learned a really valuable lesson about the nature of teamwork. To this day, if someone slightly lifts a finger or sounds the quietest of utterances, they're still doing more than I should ever expect.
> There are exceptions like John Carmack and Jon Blow, who can code for 10-12 hours a day and who are running a mini-crusade on Twitter against generalizations like that.
I strongly doubt that either Carmack or Blow are told by management to work 10-12 hours/day. That they feel like doing it is another matter.
That's an odd take to me. I don't know about Carmack, but what makes you think JBlow want's people to code crazy hours? From what i hear from him he's mostly angry about the waste that goes on in "enterprises" and the focus on complex niche features over getting shit done.
You don't track his Twitter closely enough then :) He was explicitly angry at people who say that it's impossible to be productive in coding for more than 30-40 hours a week. He felt that it's ingraining low expectations in young people, some of which have a potential to work really hard and do and do great things.
It's the same for most of the FAANG giants. The Amazon Prime Video app for Windows is basically unusable (frequently lags, stutters, crashes). Google Drive Windows app frequently crashes (or crashed, I think they replaced it with something else recently). Apple's iTunes was always a confusing mess. Microsoft's Windows 10 is obviously a giant failure in terms of UI if nothing else (because half of the functionality uses old Win7 UI style, the other half uses the new Win10 style - and for many features, some aspects of the feature are found in the old Win7 window, while other aspects in the new Win10 window...). Uber/UberEats - what a mess (my user experience on their website showed everything that is wrong with using "eventual consistency" approach to data).
The one tech giant that is IMO delivering a product that meets minimum quality bar is Netflix. I've never seen a bug in their service. Having said that, what they do is simple compared to what other tech giants do, but then again, even a audio/video streaming service can be completely screwed up (see Windows app for Amazon Prime Video).
In general, software development is very hard and the way these companies do it - with a team of always-new engineers (few people stay on a team for more than 2-3 years and thus few people understand what's going on on a deeper level), with apparently little testing - is not conducive to quality products. [1] Also, the recent trend of microservices means basically companies have given up on delivering a cohesive, tested product - instead every team if deploying their crap to prod and hope they don't introduce bugs that break downstream consumers - and downstream consumers protect against that with failover in circuit breakers etc. It's basically as if the companies admit that they don't know how to do cross-team coordination, quality assurance etc. and every team is fending off for themselves.
[1] IIRC someone from Microsoft openly admitted that the reason for why they decided to make Win10 a Frankenstein with two different UIs stitched together was that nobody understood the Win7 code any more (relevant people changed teams/left company), so any rewrite to use Win10 widgets was out of question.
> I've never seen a bug in their service. Having said that, what they do is simple compared to what other tech giants do
Setting and enforcing boundaries to keep your product apparently simple isn't easy. Frankly, neither is consistently making an apparently simple product keep working; especially when it needs to work on so many devices.
IMHO as a former WhatsApp employee, Facebook has no corporate interest in product simplicity and does not incentivize product keeps working as expected either. People respond to incentives and engineering is incentivized to launch big things, not to keep them working. Personally, I have philosophical issues with the FB way of addressing reliability, but that's a rant for another time.
Netflix does have that occasional bug when you've been scrolling for something to watch for a while and the description updates fall out of sync with the title.
I'm not sure it's conspicuous consumption. Cases of recent pure conspicuous consumption in the tech world, such as the "diamond app" (an iOS app that displays a diamond and costs couple thousand dollars) didn't really catch on that much. I think what's really driving NFTs is:
1. Speculation. People just see it as another asset class that can be blown up and sold to the greater fool.
2. Artists trying to monetize their digital work this way. Up until NFTs arrived, digital art had very little market value (due to ability to make indistinguishable copies of the original at zero cost). Some artists hope that the NFTs will be the vehicle which allows them to cash on their digital work.
> He's most certainly an important historical figure of our time
I wouldn't call him that. He's in second/third leaguer at best. His impact on the world was minor. He deserves biographies for sure (people with much less accomplishments get them as well), but let's not compare him to his contemporaries who were truly important historical figures of that time, like Nelson Mandela or Lech Wałęsa - people who radically changed lives of tens of millions of people.
In general, impact made by individual businesspeople is not that great, because all they do is follow market trends, which makes them fungible -i.e. if Jobs didn't push Apple to make iPhone, some other company would come up with the smartphone later on (the next step in technical/scientific progress is a logical consequence of the previous steps and is usually spotted by multiple companies/people at the same time).
Whereas in politics, the world is not an unidirectional march towards more progress, and, depending on actual leaders, things can get much better or much worse. So, a given leader makes much more of a difference. For example, if Hitler didn't want German race to dominate the world and didn't start WWII, tens millions of people would not have died - that's a huge impact in comparison. The Nazi party and even WWII could still happen without Hitler existing (somebody else might start the party to harvest all the German resentment of that period), but perhaps he'd be less rabid than Hitler, which would result in much less death - hence the actual delta of Hitler is huge. Even deltas of vanilla American presidents are much greater than Jobs'.
For better or worse, I think he embodied the tech culture of our time more than anyone else. My bet is that he will be remembered as a capital figure for putting half of the planet on a smartphone, which is a huge cultural change (not necessarily a good one, but still).
If he's "second/third leaguer at best", who would you put in the first league?
Like I wrote, for example Nelson Mandela lived in the same period and had much more impact.
> My bet is that he will be remembered as a capital figure for putting half of the planet on a smartphone
He may be remembered for that, but that's because people's poor ability to assess real impact. Similarly, far more people know about Elon Musk than about Norman Borlaug - with the latter being much more impactful.
I get it, but I thought it's merited in cases where the gender of the person referred to cannot be determined - usually because the reference points to an abstract class of people of any gender ("a manager") and not to a particular person of known gender ("John Smith"). In OP's case, the gender of their significant other is known, so why use "they" instead of "he" or "she"?
Everyone's assuming modern notions of 'identification', what happened to good old anonymity? Perhaps 'ReactiveJelly' just doesn't want to reveal (or rather probabilistically point at) their own gender, or that of their 'SO'. It's not like they said 'wife' or 'husband' and then 'them'.
- Hire someone above salary bands allowed by HR for full time employees (the salary bands are quite optimistic/unrealistic and are way too low for senior talent). That's probably most common cause in Europe.
