Having a child predecease you is one of the worst things that can happen to a person in general. This is a common sentiment in humans. The strange thing is that you mentioned you're trying to follow "logic." This is not logic. These are emotions.
I understand this. My question arose from the fact that it seems like he only cares about the child dying before him, not the child's death overall. It was
> the idea of being told my 1 week old baby is going to die
> have I failed my baby so much as a parent that he won’t even grow to adulthood (much less have a wonderful, happy life)
It’s not exactly a rational feeling; it’s not like this baby was going to die through lack of parental effort or care or anything else that the parents have any real control over, so it’s not like they could have done anything differently.
Nonetheless, it can make you feel like an utter failure of a parent. To some people (I admit, not everybody), that is absolutely crushing.
Well, we're talking about someone who was in legal trouble for taking information from academic libraries that he thought should be free for all. He was willing to put himself at a great personal risk for the sake of making information free. So he would probably be critical of OpenAI for not being open enough, and would probably champion the cause for more and better open source models.
Her argument wasn't that you should be able to go from level 8 to 10 in two years.
Her argument was that she should have come in at level 9.
The Bloomberg article clarified it like this:
"She came into the job with 23 years of experience in the financial services and technology field but was hired as a level eight employee while other men who were hired at the same time as her, and allegedly had less experience, were hired at level nine. As a level eight employee, Rowe made about $750,000 a year while some of the level nine employees made over $1 million a year."
No, she complained that she didn't get the VP job. That's L10. That she was passed up for promotion and that someone else didn't deserve it as much as she did.
As some others have mentioned in this thread, the most important problems are often not the most interesting.
For example, Code for America has several "civic tech" projects where volunteer software engineers can make apps to make it easier for recipients of government benefits to navigate the system. These kinds of "civic tech" apps make government more efficient. They have a direct and measurable positive impact on poverty and inequality.
But these projects are not particularly interesting from a technological perspective. They are not rocket science. They are just web apps. A lot of the time, solving important problems is not particularly complicated or difficult. You just have to care. In other words, you have to be able to prioritize your values over your ego. Will you be able to put on your resume that you learned a fancy new technology? Probably not. But will you be able to say that you had a positive impact? Probably yes.
If you are a software engineer looking to make a positive impact, you should search for terms like "civic tech" or "humane tech" to find projects that are driven by humane values, not profits. Or you should reach out to a nonprofit organization and ask if they need help with their website. They could often use help with making it easier to get donations, communicate their message, contact a politician, or do other stuff related to their website.
The other thing to remember is that solving the most important problems is not just thankless, most of the time. It also doesn't pay well, because it often involves serving people and communities who don't have the ability to pay much. But if you are one of those patient people who prioritizes your values over your ego and your finances, I respect you, and even though I don't know your name, you are my favorite kind of person.
I think the world would be a beautiful place if the most important problems were also the most financially lucrative to solve. But we don't live in that world. We can't expect the financial incentives to line up with what's important. If you serve a nonprofit that aims to make the world a better place, you probably can't do it for the money. It has to be because you care.
The tone of this thread is so unrelatable to me. I feel like the total opposite of the sentiment in this thread. I want to work in a place that pushes me to do better and fulfill my potential. I know that's hard, because true learning is almost always uncomfortable and feels like work. But in most jobs throughout my career, my experience is of feeling stifled and asphyxiated. In practice, many times when I've tried to "grow" in my role, the reaction from my colleagues was negative and I got the sense that I didn't belong there, that I was stepping on people's toes, that overworked people felt insulted or threatened rather than relieved by my offer to take on tiny pieces of their responsibilities. Things have gotten better now that I'm in my 30s and better at standing up for myself, but I'm still in an uphill battle just to be included in conversations. As someone who is passionate about technology, I want to answer questions like, "What's the hardest thing I can do?" or "What's the most awesome thing I can make?" or "What's the biggest positive impact that I can have?" And then I feel jealous when I read this thread because I wish I had a tenth as much support as some of these people have. I wish I had a manager who wanted me to grow too much!
Google offered several times to work with Apple to get full compatibility with their messages. Apple refused every time. This is Apple's deliberate choice.
You sound like you work at a larger company. I've worked at large companies and it's amazing how many resources large companies can waste, and how easy it is for people in those companies to hide that waste.
It drives me crazy when I see a lot of waste - whether it's time, money, or just human potential when people want to achieve more but they don't have the right opportunity because others dismiss them as not having potential. I became much happier when I moved to a small company that was run much more efficiently and very little was wasted, and if people are in a position where they don't feel good about what they are doing, there are sufficient opportunities for them to do something different.
I wish there was a way to maintain git version control while still being able to send and receive files from attachments from people who struggle with the idea of reading or reviewing something in any way other than by getting an email attachment.
I used to work at a bank where we had to collaborate on Word documents stored in SharePoint. It was a nightmare. In SharePoint you are supposed to "check out" documents, edit them, and "check in" the document afterward. The problem was that SharePoint was slow, so it was more convenient to work from local copies. And many people couldn't resist the urge to send documents as attachments when requesting feedback from someone else, thus breaking the version control system. And if someone already had "checked out" the document, there was nothing stopping someone from just working from a local copy, making changes, emailing it to me, and saying "Incorporate these changes into the final version."
It was common for someone to work from an outdated version and accidentally overwrite someone else's changes. Even though SharePoint stored every version, it was still a lot of manual work on my part to be a human git, manually combine edits from multiple reviewers, and update revision history tables on the first few pages of every document because nobody else had the time to do that. There were a lot of manual, human errors introduced by me and others. Partly because sometimes people would make minor changes without updating the version of the document, and then you'd have no idea that you were looking at an older version.
I use git for docs version control now, and sometimes I think of ways to make documentation controlled by git while still making it user friendly for non-technical people to contribute to it. What if you could send someone a file as an attachment, they could edit it locally (perhaps in Markdown or similar, with a text editor that has a Markdown preview), then open it in a special text editor let them click a button that would make a pull request for them without them having to understand anything about git? Maybe the special text editor would also notify them as soon as the doc became outdated.
And if even that was too hard, maybe they could save changes, return it to the sender as an email attachment, then the recipient could quicky make a pull request.
I feel this so much. When my team started up we used latex/mercurial for all documents. It worked great for a year except for one person that used dropbox instead of mercurial. Eventually we reached a critical mass where convincing the whole team to not use word was impossible.
Google docs works pretty well, but I wish it had more friction to download documents in office formats. People are quick to start working on local copies as soon as they miss some minor feature in word and you end up with the same problem you described. I think my perfect tool would not even export to word.
I agree sharepoint is awful and it's even worse now that it's baked into teams and people are using it without even realizing it.
You can set up a GitHub repo and let people edit files there through the web interface. It doesn't show a preview unfortunately, but it does have syntax highlighting and makes it easy for a user to make a PR
An inclusive culture is one where you feel like you belong, and you don't feel a pervasive sense of being alienated, a sense that other people don't want you to be there. The sense that your contributions aren't valuable to the team.
If you don't know what this feels like, good. Over time it really wears you down.
I wonder what their criteria is for "inclusive". My current company has a lot of surface level diversity that most people look for, but I feel isolated because I went to the military while the vast majority of other employees went to college. Our life experienes as adults are so different, that it's hard to connect to anyone.
I feel you, there was a book I can’t find at the moment that a coworker recommended to me on the subject of people from poorer/rougher backgrounds in tech/white color jobs and how their learned experience can isolate them in ways they don’t even realize. You could be told you’re argumentative or uncomfortable to talk to because of intense eye contact but growing up you were told that is important to maintain.
On the one hand this saddens me as I realize a level of inclusivity where people don’t feel these little micro-exclusions is essentially impossible. On the other being aware of them in others broadens empathy and aware of them in yourself can help you select better.
I hope you can find this book because I'm one of those people who came from the rougher background and live in SV. I'd be interested to at least read a book summary! I have a peer who also came from a rougher background and she says I'm fucked because I still act like someone from that background on certain behaviors... and people from that background are looked down upon quite heavily here.
I have almost nothing in common in terms of background with the SV tech people. They're almost all rich kids.
Wow, that sounds so good! As a man I would love to join such a culture. At the moment I have no other choice but to simply be good at what I do and thus earn the respect of peers.
Well you do get to start at the baseline of your peers assuming that you are competent and have some right to be there, which is frequently not the case with regard to women and other minorities in tech. It is easier to 'be good' and earn this respect when you have to spend less time justifying your presence. Of course, you are clearly someone who would be oblivious to this.
Every places where I have worked people have been treated respectfully by the company, though certain individuals can be arseholes. The main place I am thinking of was a female boss who treated the mainly females team below her like shit. Plenty of them left and why wouldn't they? (Those wouldn't be classed as "tech jobs" though, it was wet lab biologists).
It goes beyond institutional policy -- it is social in nature.
Don't hire assholes. Guide your subordinates away from doing things that might isolate others. Organize interactions that encourage different groups of people to interact and build rapport with each other. Demonstrate to your employees that it is valuable to be inclusive.
The only people with the power to build an inclusive culture are the people with institutional power.
So you become more inclusive by excluding people? Do you see the inherent contradiction in this?
And who gets to decide who is an asshole?
> Organize interactions that encourage different groups of people to interact and build rapport with each other.
But you have just avoided hiring one very poorly defined group.
> Demonstrate to your employees that it is valuable to be inclusive.
Sound like virtue signalling to me.
Out of interest would my opinions be welcome in your "inclusive" workplace? Would you build rapport with me and respect these opinions? I have a hunch that I wouldn't feel very included.
These things are not as ill-defined as you assert. I think we can all come up with a generally agreed upon description of what it means to be an asshole. Someone who does not treat others with respect, is cruel, demeaning, etc.
> So you become more inclusive by excluding people?
An "inclusive culture" is referring specifically to the culture among the people working at an organization. The population at large includes many people who are insistent on intentionally excluding others. An "inclusive culture" has never meant "hire anyone no matter what they do!".
Don't confuse "inclusive culture" with "a culture that results from including everyone". Those are two different things.
>> Demonstrate to your employees that it is valuable to be inclusive.
> Sound like virtue signalling to me.
One of the primary roles of a leader is to signal expectations, some explicit, and some implicit. Call it what you want, the point is: a leader's subordinates will learn the bounds of acceptable and unacceptable behavior from the norms that you set.
I think if Yale had a true meritocracy for admissions, they would have a majority Asian student body.
And I think if they actually admitted all of the Asian students that fulfilled their acceptance criteria, they would probably want to expand the school so that a more diverse student body could fit into Yale.
Out of curiosity, I wonder how much larger Yale would have to be, in order to retain all th Black, Hispanic, and Native American students that they currently have, while also including the white and Asian students who were discriminated against.
Would Yale be twenty-five percent larger? Twice as large? What's the scale here?
I would love for them to report enrolled Native Americans and what tribes they are from did they attend high school on a reservation. I keep discovering Native Americans who don't actually have any connection to any tribe.
...the white and Asian students who were discriminated against.
I know you're repeating a framing from TFA and from numerous other sources, but the discrimination against Asians primarily benefits whites, because there are so many more of them. There simply aren't enough BIPoC students to make room for the Asians who would be accepted if the discrimination against them stopped, as implied by your "majority Asian student body" comment. (Also, lots of BIPoC students are not "just over the line" and perform as well as or better than Asian and white students.) The eventual result of this lawsuit will be a much lower percentage of white students, while BIPoC percentages might drop slightly.
