I respect Paul and everything that he writes, even if I don’t agree with it. It takes some serious stones to publish your thoughts on the internet - whether people agree or not.
In any case. This seems like a continuation of the never ending quest for people to sacrifice themselves for the betterment of a corporate profit they will never see.
I’m not interested in eliminating the ceiling - I want to raise the floor. Having a “side hustle” shouldn’t be a requirement to get by.
I am frustrated that the USA’s money advice largely comes from billionaires. They’re not like us. That’s OK. There’s a lot of room between millions and billions
> I am frustrated that the USA’s money advice largely comes from billionaires.
One of my big issues with the 'follow your passion' advice is it almost always comes from people who are already rich. And, those people are often trying to leverage worker passion to staff their companies.
As a young person, don't follow your passion. Instead, figure out the fastest way to economic security and once there, then figure out a passion.
There's an interview with Bo Burnham where he puts it clearly...
> Don't listen to people who just got very lucky. Taylor Swift telling you to "follow your dreams" is like a lottery winner saying "liquidise your assets, buy Powerball tickets. It works!"
And that's the thing. Skill and talent are important, but there's a certain amount of success that's only achievable through luck, or through starting from _so far ahead_ that it's just genuinely out of reach for us mere mortals.
Is the experience of those people irrelevant? No, but it's also not actually applicable to most other people.
Surely there's some luck involved, but wouldn't the Taylor Swift analogy be more like "develop a product that leverages your talents and is likely to have mass appeal, work your ass off perfecting your ability to deliver that product, take the extreme negative externalities of success in your business without complaining, and once you get traction double down on the working your ass off part?" Oh and also "have sufficient business acumen to stare down Apple and win?"
Do you say that because you think the work required to achieve economic security is too much? I ask because it's hard to imagine an alternative that would enable more people to follow their passions without securing the essentials first.
There's a saying from Eastern Europe: first learn a trade, then follow your dreams. If the dreams don't work out, you'll still be able to earn a living.
Andrzej Sapkowski (polish fantasy author, of "The Witcher" fame), when asked about his advice for young people who want to be professional writers like him said: "get into an honest and, if at all possible, profitable profession". We're not dreamers here in EE like people in US, we're not reach enough to afford it :)
She is not rich and has to hustle like crazy to sell her artwork while also working tables at a casino and raising a daughter. I doubt that she would advise anyone to just follow their passion without first establishing some kind of financial base.
> And, those people are often trying to leverage worker passion to staff their companies.
Is there usually a good reason for an average employee to pour their passion into work? Seems like it's better to do a better job than your peers/coworkers but not shoot for the moon, unless you're getting a significant amount of that profit.
Most passions I see are usually poured into something separate from your earning potential, i.e. working a service job while writing music, auditioning for a movie or play, etc.
Unless they can afford to go all in, via startup funding or savings while working on their own project.
I have noticed a divergence between product quality and incentive. The more distant the incentives are the less product quality matters. I have observed this at every place of employment, personal project, and entertainment software I have ever touched. It comes down to this:
1) What is the purpose of the product/platform/work? Typically when speaking of software generally there is only one correct answer: automation. If the stakeholder cannot answer this question in 2 words or less nothing else matters, because this the foundation from everything else derives.
2) How does the stakeholder define product quality? Do they measure any of that? If there are not written goals AND measures its probably all bullshit.
3) How directly are incentives tied to the defined product quality goals? If I have to count the hops using two hands there are no product quality goals.
4) What is the target audience of the product quality goals? In theory the primary audience should that which is the primary driver of revenue, but in reality it is typically that which is of greatest comfort to people analyzing requirements. This is where things get toxic. This is what makes me want to abandon software as a profession.
5) Incentives are not necessarily compensation.
With this list in mind the typical goal of a corporate software developer is to complete some tasks, get paid, and retain employment. Product quality is completely irrelevant up to and including some tolerance for terminal failure.
On the other hand, you cannot survive as a corporate software dev without this ability because 80% of the failure will be completely unrelated to anything you do.
I keep thinking about these two massive projects we were working on with literally 50 people only to find out after completion that nobody had asked the client if they actually wanted anything like it. All that work down the drain...
> This seems like a continuation of the never ending quest for people to sacrifice themselves for the betterment of a corporate profit they will never see.
Reading the essay I didn't see a reference to "the betterment of a corporate profit". Doing good work doesn't mean starting a startup, if this is what you meant.
I agree. I read most of this as an internally facing focus. I feel like now days we are so cynical. You can't take pride in your work, or want to do a good job because you'll just be "doing it for corporate profit". To me, it's more internally focused, learning and building for your own benefit, because you want to know more or do it a bit better. I think the big thing is that you're not competing against anyone else; rather, you're just trying to do and be a bit better than who you were.
> the longest regular conversations I’ve had in the last week have been with an AI-powered rubber duck
I think, and am basing this off of nothing objective, but it feels like the vast majority of content today is written by people who spend, frankly, too much time online. I think the fact I’m writing a comment about this says that I, too, spend too much time online.
The bubble that the tech world and this website in particular differs so much so from reality that I don’t know what to make of the articles that front page here.
All the twitter doomsaying, trump will never be president, all entirely wrong. I don’t know what to make of it - maybe I should log off for a while
Just go out, do some sports and enjoy life :) I stopped spending too much time in front of the computer and started doing more outdoor activities. Best decision ever.
“Go touch grass” is used derisively, but it’s something I tell myself more and more. We overvalue the online world and all its drama. Go outside, meet people, make your own organic, locally grown drama.
These days I schedule my work around the weather. Few things bring me as much happiness as a day in the sun. I know it has been a good day when I have not touched my laptop once.
I recently made a small webapp to make me "touch grass". The idea behind it is that you enter some activities (or keep the random defaults), and when you are bored or doom scrolling, it call tell you what to do.
It's a bit silly, and still very bare bones, but I just like the phrase "touch grass", and this is my effort to reclaim it from the depths of derisiveness.
> As with many things in life, "go touch grass" isn't actually about touching grass.
As with many things in life, though "go touch grass" isn't actually about touching grass, touching grass really is a good thing. (Well, except that it makes me itch all over the area of contact. Still worth it.)
For me it is complementary. While I consciously touch grass, I ground what I am doing with reality.
Is the problem I am stuck coding on really that important? Is there a simpler solution, or is something else more important right now?
At least, that's what works for me, sometimes metaphors are to be also taken literal.
I don't like sports, and I live in an endless suburban wasteland where there's nothing to do but go to bars, restaurants or the mall.
I can't afford to go to restaurants all the time, and I don't like bars or the mall.
I'm shy and I don't do well around strangers, and even when I do meet new people 99% of the time we don't have much in common, so it feels like a waste of time.
I'd much rather surf the web... at least there I'm learning stuff, and I can communicate with people who I actually have something in common with.
The curse of the high IQ is that statistically you wont find a lot in common with the average Joe. Too bad just deal with it.
Get married and raise children.
Go to church.
Spend time in your local library.
Volunteer at a local CSA (community supported agriculture).
Take long walks.
Go hiking.
Ride a mountain bike in the woods.
Go to the gym and lift weights.
But dont spend your life online and staring at computer screens.
I don't see a problem with spending time in front of a screen, and would much rather do that than do pretty much anything you mentioned.
Some things, like spending time in nature are nice once in a while, but there's no nature near where I live, and even if there was I'm often not in the mood to go.
Personally I wouldn't survive in a suburban environment without nature being near by.
Going to restaurants, bars or meeting strangers isn't what I meant. It's still the artificial human made world. Spend time outside the city, hiking, boarding, climbing, running or just enjoying nature... That's it. Finding like-minded people will come by itself.
Oh, and beeing active is just awesome. Pushing the body to certain limits is just so important for my mental health. I am a complete different person, if I don't do sports for a certain time.
This reminds me of that reddit post from a couple of years ago, "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People"[1]. I mean, to utter these kinds of predictions out loud really reveals your power level. That said, I think the author is right in the premise, that human-to-human communication will be affected by whatever it is that is coming our way. The predictions they end up at, however, are regressions that go a bit too far.
I worked in conventional ELV systems related engineering before getting into tech. I feel like people outside high-tech life are so much behind in many aspects of life - the progress made by tech on the lives of high-tech people are yet to reach the ordinary person.
There are so many non-tech people out there we look down but in fact they are the probably 98% of humanity and their reality define how we as humanity evolve.
On the other hand I feel like non-tech people are underrated in their understanding of what what tech is doing, they just have a way more relaxed attitude towards it.
Like finding out your 55 year old Aunty has secretly been using LLMs to automate part of her job is real.
“High tech” people are like trekkies, they’re just more into it.
I think it's a result of how the media relegates different sectors of people into different "propaganda" zones. A lot of people like to watch TV. It wouldn't be out of the ordinary for them to spend more time with the TV than with another human being. Others probably don't have the time to watch any TV. The people online on the internet clearly fall into a niche of "wanting", where they're asking for entertainment but none can give them any, so they invent some for their own selves. Now that there's a proper contender for TV in this space, this will become a regular occurrence.
Note: I'm not stating that people online don't watch TV at all -- just that they don't derive the same sort of enjoyment from it that normal people do.
The online world is often much more interesting to me than the offline world... at least around where I live.
It'd be great if I could afford to travel, but I can't... and, anyway, traveling itself has many downsides, and you can burn out on that after a while.
Ain't that the truth. 99% of what people do socially around my area is drink, talk about work, talk about the most recent sporting event, and talk about their kids if they have them.
After the first 5 times you have those conversations, you can predict the entire night's conversation before they begin. I'd love to have offline conversation that was almost anything else.
It’s that way most places I’ve lived. Sports, beer, motorcycles, tv, shopping…
The online world brings one useful thing to the meat world: organization of meetups for folks interested in a bit more… take Jazz, for example… thoroughly possible to organize a jazz jam in a suburban area thanks to the net.
"Trump will never be president" is an excellent support of TFA's thesis: it was said by people who were not so much terminally online as terminally reading, and who were therefore convinced that no one who is demonstrably illiterate (having a command of the oral register but not the written) in his mother tongue could become president*. In 2016, some large percentage of the US electorate was already post-language (or at least post-literacy), as they agreed the lack of literacy(/language) was no impediment.
* despite having been indoctrinated for years that the genius of the States is that "anyone can become president"?
After watching the first head-to-head debate it was apparent that Trump could win - whereas Trump was clearly a deeply flawed human being, Clinton came across as a smiley robot.
Take your pick between 1) He's nakedly selfish and narcissistic and 2) He attempted to subvert the peaceful transfer of power, one of the bedrocks of our democracy.
I have such an issue with this response because it just seems like “you’re holding it wrong” a la the iPhone “scandal” where apple attempted to blame an engineering flaw on its users
I would imagine most people’s use case (mine certainly is) for RxJS boils down to “call a JSON API and receive a response”. That shouldn’t be a hard problem
Imagine if someone complained about the complexity of Git and the answer was to “write your own DVCS”
The entire point of abstractions is that I don’t need to understand what’s going on underneath them
1) You skipped points one and two in my comment: a) Learn the foundations of RxJS. b) Understand how to extend RxJS by creating operators. Which lead to c) read RxJS’s code to understand how it implements operators to better learn to implement your own.
2) RxJS is not Git. It’s a library designed to be extended by users. To use RxJS you need to write code with it. Git is not exclusively a library and doesn’t require you to write you own extensions to use it day to day.
As a casual Git user you wouldn’t get much out of implementing a DVCS but you would benefit from learning to host your own repo instead of relying on GitHub.
If someone was struggling to use Git I’d tell them to learn the foundations, practice them, and then to host their own repos to continue learning.
The same basic track I recommended for RxJS.
A big moment for RxJS users is when they realize that they need an operator or observable that doesn’t exist. It’s really fun to write your own.
I think the most bad rep for RxJS comes from using it when it is not needed.
Parent comment said:
> But the problems they solve are also unintuitive.
Do you consider calling a JSON API unintuitive or complex? If not, then you may be using the wrong tool. If you need nothing else, you are perfectly fine using a promise.
If you need to await extra requests, transform them, and react to other events then you need RxJS. For a simple call, you do not.
> I would imagine most people’s use case (mine certainly is) for RxJS boils down to “call a JSON API and receive a response”. That shouldn’t be a hard problem
Do you consider the following code hard to understand or are you are making requests in a more complex way?
```
this.network.get('<url>').subscribe(response => <do whatever you want here>)
```
Even if we agree to disagree that the above code snippet is hard to understand, you can just convert it to a promise:
No, that call isn’t difficult. What is more difficult are examples given on things like Angular University, where there are pipe, subscribe, catchError, among others, in a single call chain. It’s not obvious to me at all what the order of execution is in this call chain for instance:
If you look at a snippet of code in a language you don’t understand you wouldn’t call it intuitive. Once you learn the language you might see that what what was unintuitive before is intuitive and idiomatic now.
Once you learn how RxJS works examples like the one anbove anre intuitive.
Angular 2’s most egregious crime is that their tutorials try to make it (and RxJS) seem “simple”. They aren’t. They’re powerful.
Very much agree, and even for the more complicated use cases Saga's are much cleaner and I would argue easier to understand. Article below goes through a few of the differences.
I have been having a ridiculous time trying to find out just how to override an appsettings json variable (DBConnection string) with an environment variable. Could not find any good answer. What is the right way?
Configuration is applied in layers. If you’re using the default setup you get the following layers applied in this order:
1. appsettings.json
2. appsettings.{env}.json
3. user secrets (only in Development environment)
4. environment variables
5. command line args
You can full customize the setup if you desire, there are packages to support things like external secret stores. If you Google ‘Asp.Net core configuration” there’s a MS page that goes into great detail on all of this.
Anyway, your env vars must match the name as you’d structure it in a json object, but with the periods replace with double underscores. So ConnectionStrings.MyConnection becomes CONNECTIONSTRINGS__MYCONNECTION, FeatureFlags.Product.EnableNewIdFormat becomes FEATUREFLAGS__PRODUCT__ENABLENEWIDFORMAT, etc.
Awesome overview, stuff like this is often hard for newcomers to find/figure out. I'm sure it's in the docs somewhere but people often miss it.
One nitpick: environment vars don't have to be capitalized. You can do ConnectionStrings__MyConnection so the casing matches what you see in appsettings.json.
And a word of warning: make sure to understand how the configuration overrides work. If you have appsettings.json define an array of auth servers with 5 elements, then in appsettings.Production.json (or env variables) define an array of auth servers with only 1, auth servers 2-5 from the default appsettings.json will still be there! (something similar to this may or may not have caused a scare in the past)
Yep, it really just works with key/value pairs, so config overrides happen to individual keys. The config system itself doesn't really have a concept of nested objects or arrays. The config provider that reads the json file takes the path, like JobSettings[0].JobName, and transforms it into into a key like JobSettings:0:JobName (IIRC).
I tend to avoid using arrays in config because of the unexpected behavior, and the risk of overriding something you didn't mean to. Anywhere you'd use an array you can usually use an object and bind it to a Dictionary<string, Whatever>, then ignore the keys.
Thank you - I had read that portion of the docs but for whatever reason that part of it just didn’t click. For some reason it made me think I could only use some special subset of env vars that were prefixed with ASPNET_CORE or similar
You can have multiple appsettings files and are additive. Eg, you can have appsettings.production.json which only contains an override for the connection string in the base appsettings.json.
I believe GP is asking about using runtime environment variables passed in through the shell or injected when starting a Docker container, i.e. the 12factor.net approach.
I feel I must ask where you live / what competitive salaries look like to you, because as far as I know, a software developer salary of $190,000 USD+ in Barcelona, Spain is eye-poppingly high
I think he's talking about runn where the compensation honestly looks terrible: $43k as a junior and under $80k as a senior. I wonder if the goal of transparency there isn't to avoid wasting time with the majority of people who won't put up with a salary that low.
I am sure it’s low in the Silicon Valley. Here in NZ - we are the highest paid tech juniors I know off. Most offer around 60k NZD.
Need to remove your US bias. However - the whole point of transparent is that everyone knows.
If the salary is low for you, you will never apply. But you know exactly what you’ll be paid, and know it’s the same as everyone else doing the same role/level.
That is the benefit to being transparent - it doesn’t have to be the highest paid, it’s simply fair. equal and transparent.
What are you even talking about? The median yearly take home pay (sorry, don't know the right word for it) in my middle-of-the-pack EU country is around $16k.
Let me say that again, this country is in 35th place out of 193 by GDP per capita and this is how much people make here.
Yeah, my bad. My comment is very US-centric. At the same time, cost of living is likely much higher in the US, so that also makes a difference in the comparison.
Is that double the median income of juniors in similar tech positions or the general median that contains part-time workers and jobs that require no education at all?
In the US at Big tech cos(FANG style), that would be the base salary for someone with 7-10 years experience. And then you add on generous compensation packages(stock grants, 20ish% bonus target, signing bonus).
I would say it is eyepopping for US techies who haven't made it into the "big leagues", but there are probably a million software devs in the US making that.
in norcal or new york, $190k is pretty standard for a senior role, with equity compensation on top. I get $185k with 7 years of professional engineering experience + rsus worth about $150k over 4 years, and really I could get more if I left for a bigger company, which I don't want to work at. Europe has lower salaries in general, but also a lower total cost of living and better gov't services.
It seems to me, in my uninformed layman opinion, that it would do the opposite. Maybe it would force the outliers down but perhaps bring the average up.
These are two common scenarios I see:
- Two employees at the same level on the same team. One is paid $X higher than the other. Employee one asks for raise based on the fact they do the same job as employee two
- New hire is paid $X more than member of team who has been there receiving meager raises yearly. They can point to the new hire and request $Y more due to their experience
That said, this is conjecture and not backed by anything. Are there published works on salary transparency = lower pay for employees?
There is a 3rd scenario that I've occasionally seen: Two employees with the same title on the same team. Employee One is unhappy because they are paid 10% less than Employee Two, despite same experience and title. Employee Two ALSO unhappy because in practice they do 50% more work than Employee One for 10% more pay.
I still don't see the parent's connection of transparency to lower pay, but there is a rich scientific literature on the concept of "Comparison is the thief of joy" -- I hypothesize that turnover rates might positively correlate with transparency because they could promote intra-team competitive feelings.
The exception would be if there were a rigid structure that you know going in, similar to how e.g. government pay scales work. Since you know going in that the only input is seniority, you won't care that exceptional work is not rewarded because that was made clear from the get-go, and if that would have bothered you you wouldn't have accepted the offer in the first place.
The natural counterargument to that is that if the only input to compensation is seniority, then there is reduced incentivization for performing "above and beyond", possibly cultivating a culture of mediocrity.
It also would promote pay equity, however, since e.g. employees' implicit biases and social conditioning would not come into play under subjective evaluations.
While I support pay transparency on principle, I have never seen it work. In practise, no two employees are ever equal. Even those with the same years of experience, the same qualifications, and the same roles. One might be happy to work late. The other might be happy to pick up the phone on weekends. One might prefer working alone. The other might play better with colleagues. One might offer to take on more projects. The other might not, but they have better attention to detail. The differences go on ad infinitum. There is no "objective" way to determine the market value of each of these two employees. The best we can do is let each business make subjective judgments of each employee. We know this is far from perfect, but it could be more fair than paying two very different people the same wages just because they studied the same thing at university and worked in the industry for the same length of time. One of them will be contributing more to the business bottom line - sometimes significantly so - and they probably know it. They'll leave if they're paid the same as their lesser-performing colleague.
You can observe it by counting the contractors in any company that has salary bands, or transparency, or any other similar system. Very few high performing employees are prepared to accept that their remuneration is being constrained to prevent the lower performing employees from getting jealous. They are strongly incentivised to either leave or become contractors, increasing their remuneration even more. Only the average performing and under performing employees readily accept such an arrangement, because they are either unaffected by it, or benefit from it. You don’t need to do a study to figure out that people avoid things that are detrimental to their own interests.
This is only true if people are underpaid in their salary bands -- which certainly can happen.
However, it doesn't have to. We are still small with our experiment, but we pay 95% percentile in our market, plus provide additional benefits well above the norm.
We have no issues hiring and retaining high performing staff because we pay as much or more than they would get elsewhere in the local market.
I'm hopeful that I can turn it into a public facing dashboard that others can see. It covers the entire state I live in, monitoring 32 stores and about 8k products right now. Already seeing some weird stuff in the data, like a product that changes price every 30 minutes, $30->$50->$30 repeat.
It's a niche type of store (dispensary) and essentially a state blessed monopoly since they limited it to 40 store licenses total. But I'm hopeful being able to show people the data will help with some of it... or maybe I get my door kicked in.
The price change you describe sounds like a poorly implemented price test. I don't think Shopify allows dispensaries to operate on their platform, but that is the type of hack you have (had? it's been a few years) to do to run a price test on Shopify.
That's what I assumed as well, but it's still... off somehow.
The same product is carried at the other stores, each has it at a price of $20 exact...then this one bounces between $30 and $50 all day.
I mean, maybe they are getting suckers to buy it at the inflated prices for both, but I'd be shocked if so. They also carry other products from the same line, and they are all priced normally at $20.
right here... hire convicted felons. go to the nearest prison and work with inmates there that are getting out in a year to teach them programming or whatever position you need filled so when they get out they have a job and the confidence to keep that job.
Can you speak more to how you bypass EPMD and send the IPs of the containers to each other? That would be great for a problem we’re seeing where I work
It took some work to piece together but wasn't too complicated in the end. It's internal code that I can't quickly sanitize or I'd just dump it in a gist :/ Someone on the Elixir Forum might have a template or library handy though.
Same. I'm not clustered yet, but I plan on it before EOY and that would be amazing. I think route53 has some internal routing capabilities, but some of the setup looks scary, or am I just being silly?
just beware service discovery via DNS in AWS will return up to 8 addresses. so if you have more than 8 nodes you will get a random subsample for each request. depending on how your clustering works this may or may not be a problem. you can use the web api if you need to handle more than 8 hosts.
In any case. This seems like a continuation of the never ending quest for people to sacrifice themselves for the betterment of a corporate profit they will never see.
I’m not interested in eliminating the ceiling - I want to raise the floor. Having a “side hustle” shouldn’t be a requirement to get by.
I am frustrated that the USA’s money advice largely comes from billionaires. They’re not like us. That’s OK. There’s a lot of room between millions and billions