I view dark mode as basically an accessibility tool. Provide the option of light/dark mode to your users so they can choose what works best for them. I prefer dark mode for most things, but what I’ve actually found is that I just don’t like pure white backgrounds with pure black text. It’s just that a lot of light modes are exactly that.
Your comment is the first one after many to talk any sense.
I recently had an encounter with a sight impaired person that had less than 10% left of his eyesight, and his exact words were "dark mode makes my experience easier".
Since meeting him, everything I do when it comes to UI, I try to be more mindful.
I didn’t think I’d be so pro Waymo but anecdotally I had a fantastic experience with one recently.
I was at a music show very late ~1-2am in SF and walked out to grab an uber to the airbnb I was staying at. I kept getting assigned an uber, then I’d wait 10 minutes, then they’d cancel. Rinse and repeat for 30 minutes, mind you I even resorted to calling Lyfts at the same time and nothing bit. Then I say screw it and download Waymo. 1 minute and it’s accepted my ride, and I know it’s not going to cancel because it’s a robot. 3 minutes and it picks me up. The car is clean, quiet, I can play my own music in it via Spotify, and it’s driving honestly more safely than some uber drivers I’ve had in SF. It’s one of the few things where the end result actually lives up to the promise from a tech company.
Used to happen to me constantly trying to go across the bay bridge in either direction when I lived in Oakland. I didn’t even mind the cancelations so much but the worst was when they would try and hide around the block, close enough to say they’ve “arrived” to try to get me marked as a no show and pocket the fee.
Yeah, drivers want to maximize their hourly revenue, and this is frequently at odds with the wants of passengers. For a while, VC subsidies meant Uber and Lyft could pretend they were fundamentally different somehow, but that's all over now that they're public, and the classic misaligned incentives between drivers and passengers are back in play.
The cars are increasingly beat-up too, another thing we incorrectly believed was Uber being fundamentally different from and better than yellow cabs.
> For a while, VC subsidies meant Uber and Lyft could pretend they were fundamentally different somehow
You must have very rosy glasses because calling a tired/rude Taxi operator at 1am and not knowing whether your cab was coming in 5 or 20min was a major drag, so you always had to plan for 20min+ and sit patiently without social media to fill the void.
Having 2 ubers cancel before you get a 3rd commitment, within a short time frame, and only at the airport or a busy concert isn't that bad at all. Modern entitlement IMO
> The cars are increasingly beat-up too
Regular taxis never had an anonymous review system and they often just bought old police cars, used by 2 drivers across 2 day/night shifts . Good chance the night driver drank on the job too
Uber requires them to have a newish car which in my experience is usually a decent hybrid. A big improvement IMO (although I do love old crown Vic's from back in the pre Uber days).
If anything the biggest issue is Uber not strictly enforcing reuse of other authorized drivers accounts, usually by immigrants without official company clearance
I frequently have to wait 20-30 minutes for an Uber or Lyft pickup at my apartment in south Brooklyn. I'm sure it doesn't help that I'm usually going somewhere like Bay Ridge if I'm ordering an Uber and not somewhere popular. If it's after 1am I just open both Lyft and Uber and book both because at least one of them will just park the car and not come and wait out the timer before it assigns a new driver. I wish the situation is them just canceling, but drivers get penalized for that but apparently don't get penalized for parking at a gas station waiting for you to cancel and pay the fee or sit out the 10 minutes.
One time the guy was just 3 blocks away so I walked to where his icon was, found the car, and banged on his window.
During a weekend trip to Orlando trying to get from our hotel to Disney it took 6 drivers until someone finally came to pick us up.
At least the price is given ahead of time and paid through the app. I once had a cab driver charge my card for $300 when I was borderline blackout drunk in Miami Beach trying to get back to mainland Miami. Didn't use the card reader in the cab either, he used something like a Square reader on his phone. Not exactly sure which one, I didn't piece together what he was doing was fishy until the next afternoon when some blurry memories started coming back and I called my bank.
Book Uber Black and 99% of those issues go away. Have taken more Ubers than I'd like to admit, so I'm comfortable calling this a large enough sample size to qualify as anecdata.
Not sure how old you are but I spent half my adult life dealing with a government regulated Taxi medallion system and the other half using Uber in multiple countries and I’d 100% take “post-VC” Uber over old taxis every single time.
FWIW they both still exist so you’re free to choose, which is the nice thing about competition.
Pre booked airport black car taxis have always been a niche within the wider system for a good reason. Uber’s fluid system is not perfect at every scenario.
In many cities this is solved with the "Uber rank" system, where you simply get in the first car in line, give the driver a code, and then it loads up your journey. Fast and avoids any hassles with drivers rejecting your destination.
Wait, shit, that's amazing. How did they do that? I mean, not how did they write the code to match when given the code (obviously the driver should scan the rider's QR code), but how did Uber get laws changed to allow them to do this obvious reimplementation of a taxi stand when it's technically illegal under taxi laws.
I once got stuck at the vista point at the north end of Golden Gate, because it turns out it's nearly impossible to approach from the Marin side even though that's closer. So like ~4 drivers in a row tried, got lost on the way and canceled.
I took one in SF on a rainy, dark night when I was visiting a year ago. I was pretty impressed. That's not an easy city to navigate even on a sunny day and it did fine.
Uber has over time had to relax a lot of the marketplace management practices that reduce the incidence of experiences like this. Can’t penalize drivers for cancelling / ignoring requests because it starts to erode their argument around drivers being independent contractors. So of course the quality of the product degrades to the point where now it’s going to accelerate the move away from human drivers.
This is what radicalized me. “Uber is 4 minutes away” so I call them, and it tells me it’s trying to find drivers for the next 6-8 minutes, then a driver is selected and they are 11 minutes away, then they sit at their location for 4-5 minutes, then they start moving toward me, then they’re 5 minutes away and cancel and uber changes to finding me a ride. Infuriating.
Same here. This is the exact reason why I will use Waymo before Uber now. I wanted to support human drivers but they let me down too often. I pick robots now.
Seeing a lot of people confused on why drivers do this. What I was told after it happened to me is that I was getting an Uber at the busiest time of the week (Friday afternoon) and going a few miles (I lived near an airport at the time). Others were going much further, so drivers wanted those. But they can't deny the ride, that dings their account. So they do that garbage to annoy everybody instead. Meaning, maybe, your ride just wasn't worth it for them. Robots don't have salaries but also Waymo I guess has no systematic issue that causes such a mess in the first place
If you're playing it via Spotify, it's not your music, it's Spotify's. Waymo is cool technology but I am disappointed at how the app requires a Google account plus access to google play services on an Android phone, and how the streaming music feature requires some kind of protocol that only Spotify and some proprietary Google music app support. All of my music is stored on a personal server that I stream to my phone via Jellyfin, and this does not work in a Waymo.
Yeah it was a little odd how I had to connect things, like I definitely would have preferred a simple Bluetooth connection so I could just play truly whatever is on my phone.
The same exact thing happened to me last time I was in San Fran. I wanted uber because it was cheaper. Ended up taking a Waymo for more because no one else would take me.
Not saying this HAS to happen. But I remember when Ubers were clean, quiet, cheap too. I think you are just looking at a product before the enshittification, when they still have to pretend they care about your comfort.
As I understand it, whatever it costs, is strictly less than the market dynamics of providing the ride today.
There is probably some market equilibrium where they could reasonably provide <5 minute pickups for waymo users that would both cover the cost of the automobile and still be less than the price of an uber today.
It will undoubtedly get enshittifed in its own way, probably higher prices, but at least it will be reliable when booked. Ubers seem to be a crap shoot these days if they're actually going to come and get you.
I can't guarantee that Waymo won't be enshittified, but one fundamental difference with Uber is that Waymo doesn't need to compete in the labor market for drivers. When the low end of the labor market got red hot in 2023-24, that's when Uber prices climbed rapidly because drivers had other options; Waymo won't have this problem. It won't be affected by other things like ever-rising health care costs or local regulations guaranteeing driver wage floors either.
"I know it’s not going to cancel because it’s a robot"
I won't be at all surprised when they start calculating their profits in real-time, if they aren't already, and cancelling or delaying trips that are deemed unprofitable in the moment. They are robots after all.
Waymo already does that through its surge pricing mechanism and limited availability of cars at busy times. And if they really don't want to serve you they'd just not let you book.
This would be amazing, though I realize it's not straightforward and not easy to do. I have so many accounts across different companies that this connection piece is basically a requirement for me to use your app on a regular basis. I'm sure that applies to a lot of people, and I'm sure you already know that. I appreciate the focus on building the tool first and then getting that connection stuff working later.
I just want to also commend you on the UI/UX here, it looks and feels really solid.
> Technical Debt: At scale, tech debt becomes exponentially more expensive. Budget 20-30% of engineering time for platform improvements.
Does anyone else struggle to meet this percentage of tech debt getting done in sprints? If I ever get close to those numbers, tech debt always seems first to go when the rubber hits the road and unplanned work enters the fray
I've found tech-debt to be a false dichotomy with product work. They're all decisions made in the context of the moment with accompanying weakness in understanding and time. Convincing business partners of the value in addressing tech-debt - let alone defining it - is rarely worth the herculean effort vs business outcomes. It always comes down to faith: trust us to get it right... this time; whatever "right" or even better is - if that's a more preferable word. It's no more possible for Product to get it right the first time than it is engineering. Embrace the journey and make the best decisions one can - though engineering leadership should be alert for obvious counter-productive calls - and focus on iteration speed, as that's the only quantifiable, accountable process that I've found to becoming more right.
> don't even give you a fair technical chance if you lack a degree, and the devs are considered to be a cost center.
I've never considered how lucky I am to live in the U.S. and to work at a company that absolutely sees the dev team to be a huge asset rather than another cost. The amount of time, money, stress we've saved by not allowing bad code to enter the code base.. I wouldn't have it any other way.
Also, I've had such great success hiring people without degrees. Truly some of our best contributors came from entirely different career paths. Same applies for some designers I work with.
I’m still waiting for the day where 100% of state drivers licenses are supported in wallet and anyone requesting ID are required to accept them. Quite literally the only reason I have a wallet these days is for the drivers license.
> and anyone requesting ID are required to accept them
This is the big one. I've seen a lot of states where digital drivers licenses are issued, but many retailers are like "lol no, we want the card." It needs to be legally enshrined as identical.
Nope. I will continue to have a DL card so I can choose to leave my phone at home.
When we are required to have our IDs on our person at all times I can at least not be tracked everywhere I go.
Be watchful for legislation requiring:
* us to have our ID on our person at all times.
* IDs to be issued in digital format only.
This is the paranoia I don't get. These are not things that are going to happen in the US, precisely because so many people (like yourself) are against it, and it's a democracy and people vote. So putting your drivers license on your iPhone isn't some slippery slope.
I already said why. But to go deeper: the US has, and has always had, a strong libertarian and anti-government streak among a very large proportion of its citizens. And it's not going away. That's why the US doesn't have a national ID, the way so many other countries do. That's why adults are not required to carry ID's with them, the way it is in many other countries.
These political values are a strong part of American culture. The distrust of central government and authority has been around since the founding of the country. They belong to the most durable of American values.
If the US still doesn't have a national ID, or require citizens to carry ID's, and there's literally no political movement towards that, what on earth makes you think this will change?
Being able to put a driver's license on your phone is state-level. It's a form of ID we're OK with. It can't be mandatory because not everyone can drive. There's zero slippery slope here. I just want to carry the card I already have to carry when driving or flying, on my phone instead of physically. There's zero downside here.
I leave my wallet in my car, because the only reason I need it is for my driver license.
My bank, however, has one of those authenticator doohickies that I need to use when I make big transactions online. Pop my debit card in, enter the pin, and then do a little dance with codes back and forth on their internet banking to authenticate the transaction.
So I am in this annoying situation where my wallet is never where I needed it: either I'm making a payment and I need to go to my car to get my card, or I need my license and my wallet is on my desk where I forgot it last time.
Google Pay and digital wallets have literally freed up one of my jean pockets permanently.
In the US if you need a state ID card and a driver's license those are generally combined into a single card. They usually only need its driver's license functionality when they are driving but often need its ID card functionality when they are away from the car and so it generally goes with them.
I mean, they don't have to be. You can often get a state ID card and a driver's license, but that's essentially redundant. More fees, more time, more paperwork. Things that require an ID just require some state or federally issued photo ID, so you can use a DL, a state ID, a passport, etc. When the extreme majority of adults are already needing a DL to get groceries why bother with another ID.
I wasn't able to find any states where this is the case. They all appear to have rules that say you can only be issued a state ID or a state drivers license but not both at the same time. Additionally federal REAL ID rules have the same requirement for REAL ID compliant identification.
I’d almost certainly lose one or more of them if I did that. I use a compact wallet containing no more than I need and it also gives me a place to stick the odd luggage check etc.
Same, although most of the time, at least cops, accept a photo of the actual ID card/driver license where I live (Romania), at least it worked the last time I got pulled over.
I've been stopped by cops maybe once per 10 year. In that case I'm happy to pay $50 fine for failing to present license which they can check on their database anyway.
Agreed. Teachers are seeing the massive benefits from banning phones entirely during school hours. I think once we get data from bans for certain things like social media for kids, we'll all want to get on the wave.
I'm curious, do supermarket cashiers where you live stand or sit? Why/why not?
The job of pick items up from a belt, finding the barcode, moving that across the scanner until there's a beep, and then putting it on the "out" belt, really does not require the employee to be standing for it.
So why then, are they standing? Because merely sitting looks lazy and unprofessional? Sure if it's a 20 year old they have the energy, but if the employee is 64 about to retire? Making them stand for an entire 8 hour shift, I mean, that's how it is, but it doesn't seem cruel to you when the job doesn't require it and isn't affected by giving the 64 year old employee a stool to sit on until she retires?
Basic human decency says your workplace environment should be chill enough to let you take breaks as you, yourself, dictate. If you're underperforming because of it, you're fired. Enforcing a rule as you claim strips the employee of what little respect they have left. To be honest, your suggestion is sickening to me.
Highly skilled jobs can absolutely be 'perform or be fired', because you're paying for a person's ability to do a specialized thing, and there's usually only so much specialized work to be done.
But there are also a lot of 'we need bodies at a low cost' jobs.
And those latter jobs run on work_output : labor_cost, which can always be maximized by making fewer workers do more.
(Consequently, why the real goal for people studying / graduating in the modern economy should be to find a way to get into the former jobs...)
Yes, and this dichotomy has been analyzed by political and economic theorists for centuries and everyone except autocrats and slave owners has agreed that the conditions surrounding the "work_output : labor_cost" jobs you describe are a huge miscarriage of justice and ought to be discarded with the past. Whether that is predicted to occur via bloody revolution or capitalist accelerationism is a matter of your particular economic and philosophical taste. But every ethical human being says we shouldn't treat people like that.
This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told.
Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing.
And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults complaining how the children are being ruined by the new culture or new item... and I mean we have these complaints from thousands of years ago.
So be careful, you don't have to be completely wrong to still be overreaching.
> This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told.
The interesting tidbit in the case of social media and smart phones is that they are at least partially pushed by the parents (I've seen plenty of examples of parents demand that their children have smartphones at school).
> Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing.
> And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults complaining how the children are being ruined by the new culture or new item... and I mean we have these complaints from thousands of years ago.
I think there is a difference though. There is the "off my lawn" crowd of "children today are so bad because..." sure, but I think they are not the ones demanding social media bans. The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture. These are based on actual statistics and have been confirmed many times.
> So be careful, you don't have to be completely wrong to still be overreaching.
Just the fuck you rich, I'm buying a football team for a laugh human beings. Not that Warren would necessarily buy a football team for laugh, but that "kind".
The issue isn't that billionaires aren't human, the problem very much is that billionaires are regular petty spiteful human beings with poor judgement, impulse control, odd beliefs and an the utter lack of checks and balances that can be disregarded when a human has a billion and more.
NotAllBillionaires, sure .. but it only takes a few to screw over millions of other humans on a whim.
Frankly, imho, billionaires shouldn't even exist. No one person can get that much wealth, that much power, that much influence, without losing their humanity, their decency. It's just not possible because the only way to accrue that much wealth is to do horrifically indecent things.
So, do I recognize what you're saying? Certainly. But I won't be shedding a tear of sympathy for them. I lose all sympathy for them when they step on the necks of everyday people to get where they are.
Succeeding at business does not alone make you a billionaire; that's a whole new level above "successful business owner". Most successful business owners are millionaires but not billionaires. As I said, no one becomes a billionaire without doing horrible things because said horrible things are exactly how you amass such a large amount of wealth amongst a single person.
Also, winning the lottery to the extent of becoming a billionaire is neither common (that's the understatement of the millennium) nor a business. It is a gamble, and a gamble millions of people lose every day because they refuse or fail to understand the sheer improbability of "getting the big one" and the sheer degree to which said gambles are stacked against the "player".
> As I said, no one becomes a billionaire without doing horrible things because said horrible things are exactly how you amass such a large amount of wealth amongst a single person.
Not exactly true.
Andrew Forrest became a billionaire via Fortescue Metals and leveraging development of vast iron ore fields for sale to China. Since then he's focused on renewable energy to reduce harmful emissions in resource mining. He has skated some questionable activities in a humane and considered way but he's far from scum of the earth.
Gina Rinehart became a billionaire by virtue of being born to a self made billionaire. Her father got there by mining Blue Asbestos and exporting lung disease across the planet, followed up by also exploiting iron ore fields (although decades prior to Forrest). Lang Hancock (the father of Rinehardt) was a person of questionable values, Gina is a terrible human being with scany regard for others.
The same Andrew Forrest whose company were found to have knowingly destroyed hundreds of local Australian aboriginal sacred sites in its mining operations? Also, he's a billionaire. He may not be "scum of the earth", and maybe he's tried to do better in his latter days, but he still got horrifically rich off of everyday workers' sweat, injuries, and hardships (mining is no joke).
Besides, this philanthropy is largely just token restitution, at best. No one needs to be that wealthy to live more than comfortable. If he really wanted to help the world, he would use enough of his wealth so as to no longer be a billionaire.
People vastly underestimate just how much a billion dollars is compared to a million dollars, or even 500 million dollars. He could literally give away 99% of his wealth and still "only" have 10 million dollars. And as of of 2023 he had 33 times that much.
No one needs to hog that much of the world's resources. It is neither just nor equitable.
Are you comfortable blaming individuals like Forrest for the destruction that global consumption of iron, copper, and renewables brings, or would you rather 'fess up to collective responsiblity?
The largest Copper resource in the US currently is on naive American sacred land, and the latest proposal for providing rare earth elements essntial for modern lifestyles would disrupt a river system that spans a land area similar in size to Texas.
Do you wish to blame Forrest for these things, or the end customers and their demands?
NB: I've things to attend to now, I'll be back in some hours if you've an interest in all this.
It is our collective society's fault, yes, but the billionaires are the ones who exploit it. They are just as bad, if not worse.
Also, apologies, but I edited my above comment, and wasn't able to submit it before you replied.
And no worries. Good luck on your things. Honestly, I'm kinda done with this conversation, as interesting as it has been. It feels like it's run its course.
It's a pity you bailed, no drama - it's an area of long term interest to me and from the look of your comment you've never worked in mining, you've assumed Forrest never has, nor worked the land, and took an ankle deep search for "bad things about Forrest".
The interesting thing about Forrest is he grew up on Aboriginal land side by side with aboriginal people who themselves have deeply divided views about their past and their future - Forrest has gone well out of his way to provide jobs and education for native people and to sit down at length and discuss deeply contentious issues.
In a domain rife with trolley problems he's been considerably better than most, still with unavoidable warts, and hasn't blown up and destroyed anything on the order of that which Rio Tinto and US Gas companies have.
If you lack any on the ground local context and knowledge there's no shartage of bad press about Forrest, he gets no end of it from the likes of Gina Rhinehart, Clive Palmer, and other resource billionaires who despise him for turning much of his wealth to a greater good (an area of debate, of course) and suggesting that others do the same.
I've known both her and Forrest pretty much my entire life, her land is just to north of where Forrest is operating, she is dealing with many issues - some of which are touched upon here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt6Hmp9ndkI
( Mainly about Canada, but comes back to touch upon Jill's 50,000 year strong family art collection )
> It is our collective society's fault, yes, but the billionaires are the ones who exploit it.
I'd be interested in your suggestions for how to do better.
Bear in mind that if individual billionaires were not operating here then the demand for resources would still exist and would be met by corporations (eg: Rio Tinto) who would chew through the landscape just as you claim others do: https://antar.org.au/issues/cultural-heritage/the-destructio...
I mean Masa will make you a billionaire if you just have a shit business idea you’re enthusiastic enough about, no need to be a terrible person.
Compared to the amount of billionaires there are also relatively many lottery jackpots that will get you there if you just stick your winnings in an index fund.
Not to mention that there’s a decent amount of people who become billionaires by just working on relatively boring ”normal” business like real estate development, where some luck, good decisions and leveraging bank loans will get you there without having to be a slumlord or doing anything terrible.
> The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture. These are based on actual statistics and have been confirmed many times.
Do the stats prove that cell phones are the cause of the dire mental health indicators? Or at least that there is a correlation?
"but this time it's different" has also been a universal historical argument
>The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture.
Honestly you could just cut and paste the same arguments about jazz music in the 1920s or rock music in the later 20th century and they'd be indistinguishable. Just replace the mentions of jazz with social media topics and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference whether it was an article today or 100 years ago. "Health professionals" wringing hands about social media and jazz music in hilariously similar terms a century apart to a bunch of old people who are convinced the kids these days are going to shit because of the things they like to pay attention to.
Young people ARE SUPPOSED TO make poor decisions and be stressed out about it.
Middle aged people are supposed to clutch their pearls and wail about how this time it's different and truly awful (but what we did as kids was reasonable)
Making bad decisions is only a net benefit if they can recover from them in time. Then it becomes a lesson and not an anchor. With addictive behaviors like drugs, nicotine included… making the early mistake ends up being a permanent mistake.
> This time might be different. But it's probably not.
And this is an appeal to tradition.
This article[1] from 2024 discusses this the studies on this topic. It seems to me the results are mixed, but conclusions range between social media being neutral to harmful. There is a lot in that article, so it's worth a read.
When appealing to the authority of academic studies, it's very important to be aware of the replication crisis for studies in the field of Psychology specifically, which is one of the worst offenders. Reproducibility has been found to be as low as 36% [1].
That was not an appeal to the authority of academic papers so much as the OP trying to give context for the information that has informed their position.
Your responses have been an appeal to tradition (“every generation thinks that”), and a dismissal of the information because of the reproducibility crisis.
Ie you are arguing that we (humans) struggle with discerning Truth, and therefore we are wrong, and everything is fine.
But taking the negative position is just as epistemologically flawed. Hence the OPs attempt to discuss the best data we can find.
Letting people figure out cigarettes were bad for them took a very long time, and if social media is another form of addiction why not treat it how we treat other addictive products?
We could assume that this time is different and people, well children and minors specifically, will learn to avoid the addiction rather than banning them like alcohol, cigarettes and gambling.
This time might be different. But it's probably not.
There was a - very similar - moral panic in the 1700s about young people 'reading excessively', which was blamed for escapism, unhappiness[1] and even increases in suicide rates (see: Werther Effect). The language used was 'reading addiction' - much like todays 'smartphone addiction' or, more modern, AI-related 'illnesses'.
Today, the panic is that kids read too little, or the wrong stuff.
What is and isn't societally desirable changes. The tactic to ban the currently undesirable behaviour persists. Moral panics tell us more about generational dynamics and power structures than the medium itself..
Increased suicide rates were being discussed, and there were doctors claiming they had empirical evidence (worse eyesight, loss of sense of reality, 'melancholy' (aka: depression) ...).
Of course, that was 200 years ago, so our standards of 'rigorous empiricism' can hardly be compared to what they had. But the patterns still are eerily similar.
Also, note how modern diagnostics not only concern the well-being of the media-consuming/delusional individual, but also their environment. Polemically speaking: You can be perfectly happy being weird, if your environment feels negatively affected by you, you technically still are a psychiatrical case and need 'fixing' according to the DSM.
Hell is other people, only the young can defend themselves and their interests less and are easier being picked on.
Just nitpicking your first sentence: prohibition broadly works, just in the US (at least) it breeds negative externalities that don't seem worth it in balance.
Sure, but we (as societies) have always had to deal with this. Wherever you are in the world there are things that simply aren't allowed under a certain age, whether that's 15, 16, 18, 21 or whatever.
My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car.
It's not that hard to drive a car! Unfortunately, physics motivates us to have unreasonable expectations of our drivers, like "doesn't drive off the road at 100km/h ever", and "avoids all obstacles all of the time". That's the hard part.
>My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car.
I was driving when I was 5 on the farm, it's not that hard and if you have the attitude that things aren't hard that tends to be true. Don't set your kid up for failure.
Driving on the farm is actually a lot different, you usually have no more than one or two other drivers, but there's no rules. You have to know where everybody is, know what they intend to do, and know whether or not they know where you are and if they can see you.
it makes people much better and more patient drivers because you can't just rely on traffic laws you have to know the intention of somebody in a piece of machinery and if they plan to back up or where they're going and what's in their head... and how to communicate with hands or a yell
Many countries have the driving license at 16. In France it’s accompanied by a parent; in USA it’s the full driving license (I’ve learnt at 13 and never had an accident for 30 years). 16 is ok if you withstand peer pressure.
Insurance and actuarial science is some of the most data-drivenwork we have. It is incredibly hard to withstand peer pressure and there is not much wrong in admitting what the data has already proven.
Teachers are not good indicators of measuring 'benefits', as they are both the beneficiaries of a more brain-dead, more bored, more asleep student body, they have rose-tinted ideas about the way things used to be, and they are also grading the success - which all too often comes down to compliance.
That's why if this was a serious attempt to gauge whether smartphones are diametral or beneficial, we'd have a double-blind, standardised anonymously-graded test. If control group with smartphones gets consistently less points by graders who do not know them or their smartphone habits as compared to those who live in digital exile, we can talk. Until then, 'peace and quiet' in the classroom is mistaken for educational success.
Funny how no-one seems to be eager to finance such a study. For me, that's an indication that the outrage is pearl-clutching.
How do you a double blind sutdy on smartphones? It seems to me that the group that would get smartphone would understand they’re the smartphone group, and the one without would know they don’t have one.
I didn't claim the participants wouldn't know whether they own a phone - obviously they would. I said they wouldn’t know they’re in a study whose purpose is to correlate smartphone use with academic performance.
That's perfectly compatible with a double-blind setup:
* the *students* just think they’re taking standardized tests, not that the effects of their smartphone habits are being monitored;
* the *graders* don’t know whose tests belong to whom.
That’s about as "double blind" as social-science research gets. The commenter I replied to latched onto the literal impossibility of hiding the phone itself, not the intentional design of the experiment.
> they are... the beneficiaries of a more brain-dead, more bored, more asleep student body
> 'peace and quiet' in the classroom is mistaken for educational success.
To clarify, do you think that phones or the removal of phones leads to these outcomes? Do you think that teachers like or dislike phones? Or is the point that there are many biases both ways?
> they have rose-tinted ideas about the way things used to be
Some do. Are teachers the only ones?
> if this was a serious attempt to gauge whether smartphones are [detrimental] or beneficial, we'd have a double-blind, standardised anonymously-graded test.... Funny how no-one seems to be eager to finance such a study.
I am not sure how you would set this up in a way that does not fall victim to a dozen confounding variables. There have been comparisons of standardized tests before and after phone bans, of course, but those also fall victim to similar statistical issues.
> Or is the point that there are many biases both ways?
My point is that if you ask wagonmakers what they think about cars, you won't get many positive replies, but enthsiastic ones where city governments decide to go full Amish. New times and new technology necessitate changing the craft, and the methods of yesteryear, though trained into teachers, just don't work anymore. Change is scary.
You also can't have double-blind study on something both the participant and teacher know is present or not.... But that doesn't mean the study is invalid, it just means you have to account for it.
The United States is a democracy, but more specifically, a representative democracy. That means citizens don’t directly vote on most laws or policies—aside from certain state or local measures—but instead elect representatives to make those decisions on our behalf. The idea is that we trust them to act in our best interests.
You can probably see where the problem comes in. Take, for example, a politician who campaigns on Medicare for All or universal healthcare. To win an election, they often need massive campaign funding—much of which comes from wealthy donors, including those in the medical or pharmaceutical industries. And once in office, they’re targeted by powerful lobbying efforts worth billions of dollars from those same industries.
In the end, the issue is that politicians can legally receive millions in donations and support from industries whose interests might directly conflict with the needs of the people they’re supposed to represent.
Ultimately though, it is known by most people irrespective of party affiliation that medical costs are out of control. One recent example of this collective understanding was when the united healthcare exec was killed. Before there was even a suspect, people generally knew why he was assassinated. Most people in the U.S. have either been directly affected by the insanity that is our healthcare system, or one of their loved ones has. Those that haven’t yet, it’s just a matter of time. It’s just so pervasive.
As Lawrence Lessig put it: before the general election and before the primary election, there is a "Lester" election where donors choose who is able to mount a campaign. Candidates are effectively pre-qualified by 0.0005% of Americans. It's probably an even smaller crowd than that as that includes Joe Nobody who gives $20. Those who "bundle" $1 million in donations or write a mega check themselves have exponentially more access.
There are very few countries in the world that are not a representative democracy. Switzerland is a well-known example of a country where citizens directly vote on most legislation, but in most other countries, you have a parliament, congress, etc that represents the people.
As stated near the end of my comment, most Americans are not okay with the system as it is. It’s legalized corruption that perpetuates the system.
For further reading, I recommend learning about the Citizens United vs FEC case that vastly increased the amount of money going to politicians, far over individual donation limits.
It might be worth mentioning that a massive propaganda campaign against universal healthcare has been conducted on the American public for decades by interests that benefit from privatized healthcare.
The problems with the electoral system are just one symptom of a deeper issue: unlimited political donations. The wealthiest individuals in the world can funnel endless money to politicians through Super PACs, and that influence shapes policy more than an individual voter ever could.
Even if we magically fixed the electoral system tomorrow, the results would be superficial. Sure, we might see more Democrats in office—but if they’re still beholden to massive, uncapped donations, how can we expect them to enact real, meaningful change?
This problem with money in politics is not something that only affects one party. It's a systematic issue that needs regulation. Without real regulation on money in politics, everything else is a band-aid on an open and festering wound.
Not Americans OK with it, just that right-wing wants hypercapitalist low-regulated helathcare while left-wing wants basically "free"/communist health care.
Both of which are infinitely better than what we have now, which is bastardized worst elements of both.
But because both sides will never agree we'll get neither, only the current hellscape.
> I currently manage no direct reports and ship a lot of code.
This is a wildly different status than almost all other people with this title.
I’m glad this person still likes coding, and they seem to be great at it, but this role doesn’t match up to the title. This doesn’t really matter until he wants to switch jobs and realizes near zero CTO positions outside of this one company will require few meetings and zero management. He’d have to change title to principal engineer or something but an article titled “Why I code as a Principal Engineer” doesn’t quite grab attention the same way.
It seems possible that most CTOs are in tiny startups, don't have reports and we don't know about them because, having no reports, they don't get a lot of visibility compared to someone at the top of a 10,000 person org chart.
But the article framing is still odd. If the CTO has no reports who is going to do the coding other than the CTO? The reason the CTO is coding is because, being CTO, they want technical things to happen. He can't farm it off to his reports because they don't exist. Case closed. The real question is why doesn't he feel hiring some people to code is a good idea. 1 highly capable report could probably +30%, 40% his productivity.
With no directs, even “principal” would be a stretch in any company of note. If he spends that much time “coding”, that barely qualifies as a “senior” at large tech companies.
Always interesting how much job title and responsibility varies. Part of why it’s almost always best to go ahead and apply and dig into what the responsibilities would be, rather than see the title and assume it’s not what you’re looking for. I’ve been surprised more than a few times about what people think titles mean.
Most of those engineers, outside of ones who have extremely specialized knowledge or skills, are essentially managing others still just without a direct reporting chain.
The commit log for most of these high-level engineers is extremely sparse. They're spending most of their time writing documents or influencing orgs, not writing code.
Yes. I was responding to the sentence "With no directs, even “principal” would be a stretch in any company of note." which talked about direct reports.
Let me clarify. I know there are principals with no directs. I’m more calling out that the “scope” of a principal is a high bar at Big Tech and if he is spending all of his time coding at a startup, I doubt that he is working at the level of a principal at BigTech.
My own anecdote is that the level of work I was doing as an “architect” at a 60 person startup where I was the second technical hire when the new CTO was hired to bring tech leadership in house from a third party consulting company mapped to a mid level L5 consultant at AWS ProServe (to be fair I only had two and a half years of AWS experience at the time I was hired by AWS) and now while I’m a “Staff consultant” at a third party AWS consulting firm with around 1000 people, looking at the leveling guidelines and expectations at my current company, AWS and GCP, it maps to a “senior”
It's definitely not super uncommon where I'm at. CTOs, especially those that founded companies and are more technical doers than managers, that end up having responsibility for architecture and technical matters (tech lead deluxe), but no people (due to lack of people management and leadership skills/or desire for that kind of job - sometimes also product management skills at larger organizations).
Not much is worse than working somewhere that a higher up is squatting a job title that they don't want to do. It just causes a dysfunctional lord of the flies situation where lower people fight for the reigns to get what they want.
CTO is usually the exec responsible for the entire tech org. The CTO reports to the CEO, and the top managers and maybe a few ICs in the tech org report to the CTO.
I was CTO of a <20 person startup. I recruited the entire tech team, collaborated with the CEO to build the product backlog and spec things out, presented to investors, but also had at least 50% time to code. Not all “CTO” roles are the same. At a small company they better be hands on.
I think a founder/early gets away with "CTO" on their resume, esp. if they're the only person in the org with the role (ie: it's a PM-style CTO, and there isn't a VP/PM; or: it's a VP/E-style CTO, and there isn't a VP/E). But outside that circumstance, given the choice, I'd rather have the VP/PM or VP/E role than "CTO".
(As we get deeper into these threads I am further out on a limb.)
Yes, I was one of the first hires. My role was closer to VP/E and "CTO" was mostly vanity, a reward for being early and getting a new company through the first couple years.
Dotted line reporting is very different. In these instances the VP/E is usually directly interfacing with other executives as the CTO's peer. This is even more true when the budget is managed by the VP/E and the CTO is more customer/sales facing.
You're saying "usually" about something that has definitely not been a norm in my career. It seems like there's really only two ways to interpret that arrangement: either the CTO is in fact the EVP/E (fair enough! lots of CTOs are other exec roles with a funny hat), or the CTO has a single top-level manager report, in which case what really happened is that the org hired a pro to run engineering and put the "CTO" out to pasture.
I've been at several companies that have a CTO and a Director of Engineering. The CTO sets the strategy, and the Director of Engineering handles the execution. In theory the Director "reports" to the CTO (I.e. is under in the org chart), but not necessarily. Sometimes the Director reports to the CEO, and/or takes a more collaborative role with the CTO.
This does not apply at my current company, where the CTO has their title as an artifact of how the founding team was structured, but if I was founder/early at a company, progressed to a senior role, and then was told that I should take a role where I "set engineering strategy", I would immediately conclude that I was being managed out. "Strategy", in particular, is the kiss of death.
Both in my own personal direct experience and in 15 years of consulting, primarily for tech startups, the modal CTO I encountered had in reality a product manager role with a special title that was helpful in important pre-sales meetings --- and they did not tend to be the de facto VP/PM.
I think CTO as "other, better-defined kind of exec, but with a funny hat" is a perfectly cromulent model. I think CTO as "PM that customers feel flattered to talk to" is another perfectly cromulent model. To me, "CTO" is almost an honorific, or like a title of nobility.
Exactly. Most CTO's have tens if not hundreds of direct reports that rely on them regularly. Which is why their time must be used to support them leaving absolutely 0 time to do PR code contributions on the side (unless you work weekends).
