Completely agree with this. I got to work closely with an IBM fellow one summer and I was impressed by his willingness to ask "dumb questions" in meetings. Sometimes he was just out of the loop but more often he was just questioning some of the assumptions that others in the room had left unquestioned.
These days the policy positions of each party are hashed out on social media by non-experts. For both the democrats and the republicans, instead of any sort of research or experts driving public policy decisions, it's instead the things that resonate with your average person's feelings as they scroll through their feed and get engagement.
The end result is of course populism. Each election cycle gets us closer to the policy positions of the Republicans being "Immigrants are bad" and Democrats being "Billionaires are bad".
We know where populism leads, and we've seen it for decades in south america. In a few decades, we will get to choose between the populist far left and the populist far right. Policy will get crazier and crazier and measurable societal outcomes will stagnate and perhaps go backwards.
This will continue as long as social media is the primary form of entertainment in the US.
Maybe these researchers and experts should show up and present their suggested positions. People are tired of ivory tower proclamations, and most fundamentally, you need to reach people where they're at. That's just the kind of information ecosystem that we're living in, so people need to adapt.
Unfortunately, ignoring the public sphere and pretending that professionals are above such things is why we're now stuck with someone like Robert Kennedy Jr running HHS. This guy grew enough of a following and movement to reach a position of power and influence and he was barely challenged by experts all along the way.
Experts post on social media all the time, but their voices are not given any weight beyond that of people who aren't experts on the topic.
RFK jr running HHS is the wave of the future. Unfortunately, we will continue to have non-experts who generate high engagement content running policy decisions more and more in the future.
> we will continue to have non-experts who generate high engagement content running policy decisions more and more in the future.
I don't see why you'd assume that only non-experts will generate high engagement content.
I don't disagree but such a sweeping assumption surely needs some argumentation and elucidation. Understating the mechanics of this quite unnatural state of affairs is vastly more valuable that the mere observation of its existence.
All I've seen to date are appeals to human nature but that's a highly misleading line of reasoning that creates more confusion about both human nature and the forces driving content creation.
There are only 24h in a day and each one chooses how to invest that time.
Experts invest time in becoming experts in their field. Youtubers invest time in generating high engagement content and attracting more viewers. Can't have both.
The article is saying the exact opposite of this
e.g.
| three days ago, it came out that Maryland Governor Wes Moore, a 2028 candidate, | made sure to have lobbyists for the American Gas Association in the room when
| he interviewed for open seats to the state Public Service Commission
Not really - that would only be true if far right and far left were far apart in anything other than superficial rhetoric. The structure and operation of power are virtually the same for both.
> These days the policy positions of each party are hashed out on social media by non-experts. For both the democrats and the republicans, instead of any sort of research or experts driving public policy decisions, it's instead the things that resonate with your average person's feelings as they scroll through their feed and get engagement.
That would actually be a major improvement over what we have. Right now public policy decisions seem to get hashed out by nutjob activists on social media, not "average people."
Also the "research[ers and] experts" need to own up to their own responsibility for this situation. Right now we live in a populist moment because they got caught up in their own ideology and group-think, which created an opening for someone like Donald Trump. They should have seen the problems he used to build his support, and came up with effective solutions for them.
Those damn plebs just have no idea what's best for them. Imagine an average person being able to comprehend anything or understand something that our appointed "expert" (some person that's never operated in the real world) can.
I agree with you that my words are unpopular. Populism is popular.
Government and economics is complicated, so it's not that crazy to suggest that your average person doesn't understand it very well. The medical analog of economic populism is antivax and free birth content. Super popular online, but leads to bad outcomes.
Those damn plebs just have no idea what's best for them.
Most people are not an expert in a single field, much less multiple fields, and never every field.
So yes, we need experts to play a substantial role in running things.
Perhaps even more importantly: it's not solely about what's best for every individual. You know what would be best for me? If the government gave me a free giant SUV that gets 4mpg fuel economy, and also let me drive as fast as I wanted while also subsidizing 90% of my fuel costs. Also it should drive itself so I can sleep while driving.
Sometimes we need to consider what's best for society and the planet, too.
Totally random people could draft new laws on climate (at least, they were told this). They met with lobbyists, both pro-oil and pro-climate for two weekends, experts on three other weekends, once in a conference-style where very generic stuff is said, two other in focus groups with more specific expertises, depending on the subject the focus group is on.
Experts were real experts though, with multiple publications and PhDs (or in some cases, engineering degrees, especially during the conference week), and tried to only talk on their subject matter.
In around 8 weekend, the 150 random people made ?148? law propositions, helped by lawyers, and most experts agree that they were both good and reasonable. What's interesting is that most of the 150 people said that before really learning about the subject, they would never have made this kind of propositions.
All that to say: experts don't have to run things, and imho, they should not. They should however have an advisory role to the random people drafting new laws.
I agree completely. I think the main difference is that it's important for your average people to become educated on topics by experts. Thats the part that is missing today.
What experts? You mean the overpaid consultants who dragged the democrats into pathetic ineffectiveness and made them lose against an obviously retarded manchild?
> The end result is of course populism. Each election cycle gets us closer to the policy positions of the Republicans being "Immigrants are bad" and Democrats being "Billionaires are bad".
Except immigrants have nothing to do with how bad things are going, while billionaires (and what they represent) are effectively the architects of this situation. "Billionaires are bad" is an oversimplified, but ultimately correct analysis of the issues of our time.
FDR basically saved the country from fascism with his "robber barons are bad" campaign. I deplore the fall into populism just as much as the next guy, but this is what the situation calls for. Social networks only play a minor part in all of this. Material conditions are degrading, and unrest will only grow until they start improving.
This country's governance has been subservient to capital, basically forever, and unchecked private power is now eating it from the inside. This is what must be fixed if this republic is to have any future, and the populist left is the only band of the political spectrum that at least acknowledges the issue.
Ah, but that same populist left is inconvenient to the valuation of my RSUs, so we're going to have to put a cork in it, maybe we can revisit it once I have enough[1] money.
While you're right, I can only think of twice in my career where there was a "code red all services must update now", which were log4shell and spectre/meltdown (which were a bit different anyway). I just don't think this comes up enough in practice to be worth optimizing for.
You have not been in the field very long than I presume? There's multiple per year that require all hands on deck depending on your tech stack. Just look at the recent NPM supply chain attacks.
The npm supply chain attacks were only an issue if you don't use lock files. In fact they were a great example of why you shouldn't blindly upgrade to the latest packages when they are available.
Fair enough, which is why I called out my assumption:).
I'm referring to the all hands on deck nature of responding to security issues not the best practice. For many, the NPM issue was an all hands on deck.
Wait what? I've been wondering why people have been fussing over supply chain vulnerabilities, but I thought they mostly meant "we don't want to get unlucky and upgrade, merge the PR, test, and build the container before the malicious commit is pushed".
Who doesn't use lockfiles? Aren't they the default everywhere now? I really thought npm uses them by default.
We use pretty much the entire nodejs ecosystem, and only the very latest Next.js vulnerability was an all hands on deck vulnerability. That’s taken over the past 7 years.
To add to this conversation from our other thread, you solve a bunch of problems that are nearly just as bad by not using microservices yet you still do. And that is the same reason why people use JavaScript despite the issues it introduces. It’s not like you’re the only person the industry who hasn’t used a technology that irrationally introduces horrible consequences.
I mean I just participated in a Next JS incident that required it this week.
It has been rare over the years but I suspect it's getting less rare as supply chain attacks become more sophisticated (hiding their attack more carefully than at present and waiting longer to spring it).
A library which patches a security vulnerability should do so by bumping a patch version, maintaining backward compatibility. Taking a patch update to a library should mean no changes to your code, just rerun your tests and redeploy.
If libraries bump minor or major versions, they are imposing work on all the consuming services to accept the version, make compatibility changes, test and deploy.
This is pedantic, but no, it doesn't need to be updated everywhere. It should be updated as fast as possible, but there isn't a dependency chain there.
Social media is full of extremist and untrue content of all types. Antivax or free birth content are just two small examples of viral content that is untrue and kills people. It has a very negative effect on adults, and adults at least have brains that are fully-developed.
Exposing kids to the firehose of misinformation on social media just poisons their brains. Political agitation is mostly political misinformation. Even among the causes online that I agree with, most of the content online is deeply biased, one-sided or inaccurate.
I don't think we should allow the government to ban political agitation, but I do think its fine to allow the government to ban children using social media
The most dangerous, untrue, and extremist content I've ever seen has come from governments.
Lies upon lies about WMDs and going to war for our freedoms and how we need to "liberate" Libya and fund and arm rebels and insurgents. Millions of people killed, trillions of dollars wasted and stolen.
Someone who is not completely trusting of politicians or pharmaceutical corporations, or who wants to give birth like 99.999% of humanity has, really are so far down the list of "dangerous misinformation" they don't even register.
Someone really needs to do a meta-analysis of these results because a paper from a few years ago showed that members of congress underperform at stock picking:
Both papers could be true if congresspeople are worse than the public at picking stocks, but congressional leaders are just better than the average congressperson
It would also be interesting to compare overall stock-picking "ability“ across party lines.
Real-estate investing is another corruption vector. One way to bribe a politician is to sell them a house at a million dollar discount. The optics become that the politician is a “savvy real-estate investor".
I didn’t get a chance to read the entire NBER paper, but an important nuance is that it takes an industry-normalized perspective.
It could be possible that someone in Congress has insider information about a specific industry that helps them, but not about a specific stock. For example, if I knew about specific legislation that would impact auto manufacturers I may have a better idea to get in or out of that sector without necessarily knowing if Ford will do better than GM.
To your point about meta-analysis it would also be useful to know if members are worse than normies at picking industries as well.
It's not helping that in the last 10 years a culture of job-hopping has taken over the tech industry. Average tenure at tech companies is often ~2 years and after that people job hop to increase compensation.
It's clear why people do it (more pay) but it sets up bad incentives for the companies. Why would a company invest money in growing the technical skill set of an employee, just to have them leave as soon as they can get a better offer?
When using this phrase in this context, is your sentiment positive or negative? In my experience, each time I have a job offer for more money, I go and talk to my current line manager. I explain the new job offer, and ask if they would like to counteroffer. 100% (<-- imagine 48 point bold font!) of the time, my line manager has been simultaneously emotionally hurt ("oh, he's disloyal for leaving") and unsupportive of matching compensation. In almost all cases, an external recruiter found me online, reached out, and had a great new opportunity that paid well. Who am I to look away? I'm nothing special as a technologist, but please don't fault me for accepting great opportunities with higher pay.
> Why would a company invest money in growing the technical skill set of an employee
What exactly is meant by "invest" here? In my career, my employers haven't done shit for me about training. Yet, 100% of them expect me to be up-to-date all the time on whatever technology they fancy this week. Is tech training really a thing in 2025 with so many great online resources? In my career, I am 100% self-trained, usually through blogs, technical papers, mailing lists, and discussions with peers.
At Taos, there was a monthly training session / tech talk on some subject.
At Network Appliance ('98-'09), there was a moderate push to go to trainings and they paid for the devs on the team I was on to go to the perl conference (when it was just down the road one year everyone - even the tech writers - went).
At a retail company that I worked at ('10-'14), they'd occasionally bring in trainers on some thing that... about half a dozen of the more senior developers (who would then be able to spread the knowledge out ... part of that was a formal "do a presentation on the material from the past two weeks for the rest of your team.")
However, as time went on and as juniors would leave sooner the appetite for a company to spend money on training sessions has dissipated. It could be "Here is $1000 training budget if you ask your manager" becoming $500 now. It could be that there aren't any more conferences that the company is willing to spend $20k to send a team to.
If half of the junior devs are going to jump to the next tier of company and the other half aren't going to become much better... why do that training opportunity at all?
Training absolutely used to be a thing that was much more common... but so too were tenures of half a decade or longer.
Then it sounds like you need to train them and also pay them better. Most people just want to stay at one company and not do the grind, but the lack of raises, poor treatment, and much better pay other places is blaming juniors for your companies problems.
When I'm hiring an engineer, HR will easily let me bump up the offer by $10-20K if the candidate counters. It is nearly impossible to get that same $10-20K bump for an existing engineer that is performing extremely well. Companies themselves set up this perverse incentive structure.
This! Each time I join a new job, about 1-3 months in the door, there is a sit-down with the new line manager to check-in and give some feedback. I always talk about future compensation expectations at the time. I tell them: The market pays approximately 4-5% increase in total comp per year. That means, up 20% every 4 years. That is my expectation. If they current company is not paying that rate, I will look elsewhere for work. In almost all cases, they nod their heads in agreement. Ironically, when I come to them 3-5 years later with a new job offer in hand with a nice pay raise, 100% of them do not support matching the compensation, and view me as an un-loyal "job hopper". You just can't win with middle managers.
This is why I never do internal job transfers. The total comp doesn't change. If I do an external job change, I will get a pay rise. I say it to my peers in private: "Loyalty is for suckers; you get paid less."
Yeah, companies broke the career structure decades ago. There's no seniority rewards nor pensions to look forward to, and meanwhile companies put more budget in hiring than in promoting. They look at the high turnover rates and executives shrug. Money is being made, no changes.
It's no surprise the market adapts to the new terms and conditions. But companies simply don't care enough to focus on retention.
This has been a thing for a long time and I've thought about it quite a bit, but I still have no solutions.
I'm pretty sure it just comes down to bean-counting: "we have a new fulltime permanent asset for $100k" vs "we have a new fulltime permanent asset for $120k" is effectively the same thing, and there's a clear "spend money, acquire person" transaction going on. Meanwhile, "we spent $20k on an asset we already have" is.. a hard sell. What are you buying with that $20k exactly? 20% more hours? 20% more output? No? Then why are we spending the money?
It's certainly possible to dance around it talking about reducing risk ("there's a risk this person leaves, which will cause...") but it's bogged down in hypotheticals and kinda a hard sell. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to just fire staff for a week then re-hire them at a new salary.
You keep a good thing going, you buy oil for the machinery, you keep your part of the bargain and do the maintenance. You pay the correct price for the stuff you are lucky enough to have been getting on the cheap.
I like the directness of the question: "Why should I pay more when it won't burn down right this instand if I don't?" This is a question asked all over, and it is dangerous, keeping anything going requires maintenance and knowledge in how to maintain it. That goes for cars and it goes for people.
This is not business, it is miserly behaviour, it is being cheap.
The miser will find himself in a harsh, transactional, brutal world. Because that is the only way for people to protect themselves against him.
This incentive is entirely backwards. It should be "what are we losing with not spending that 20k?". You lose out on someone used to the company workflow, you waste any training you invested in them, you create a hole that strains your other 3-4 100k engineers, and you add a time strain to your managers to spend time interviewing a new member.
if you really believe you can buy all that back for 120k as if you ran short on milkk, you're missing the forest for the tree.
>Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to just fire staff for a week then re-hire them at a new salary.
if society conditions a workforce to understand the issue, sure. But psychologically. you'd create an even lower morale workplace. Even for a week, people don't want to be dropped like a hot potato, even if you pick it up later as it cools. People want some form of stability, especially in an assumed full time role.
In my view, I have observed many good, underpaid engineers because they choose stability over higher pay. Most people are happy with slow and stead pay rises while working at the same company. Companies know this and pay accordingly. Only your top 1-10% of employees need more careful "TLC" to give higher raises and regular off-cycle feedback: "You're doing great. We are giving you a special raise for your efforts." You can mostly afford to lose the rest.
I guess that's how we got here to begin with. We take a workforce and treat is as expendable instead of as a proper team.
I suppose it will vary per industry but I can't imagine an other kind of engineering being comfortable just letting go of people mid-project because "we can afford to lose them".
One would assume the solution is to simply offer a good package and retain employees with that. I returned to an old company after a few years of floating around because I realized they had the perfect mix of culture and benefits for me, even if the pay isn't massive.
You're falling for the exact same fallacy experienced by failed salesmen. "Why would I bother investing time in this customer when they're just going to take my offer to another dealership for a better deal?"
Answer: you offer a good deal and work with people honestly, because if you don't, you'll never get a customer.
They could do that: hire juniors, lose money while you train them, and give them aggressive raises. Or they could just do what they are doing: skip the juniors and just hire the people who've got experience.
Everyone's kicking the can down the road and we're very soon going to hit points of "no one has experience (or are already working)". Someone needs to do the training. It doesn't seem like school and bootcamps is enough for what companies need these days.
The game theory here says that such a company will be outcompeted and killed by a company which doesn't spend money+time on retention and training but instead invests that money in poaching.
What you say only works if everyone is doing it. But if you're spending resources on juniors and raises, you can easily be outcompeted and outpoached by companies using that saved money to poach your best employees.
give a big enough raise and they won't want to be poached. You won't retain everyone, but your goal probably isn't to compete with Google to begin with. So why worry of the scenario of boosting a good junior from 100k to 150k but losing them to a 250k job?
In some ways you will also need to read the room. I don't like the mentality of "I won't hire this person, they are only here for money", but to some extent you need to gauge how much of them is mission-focused and how much would leave the minute they get a 10k counter-offer. adjust your investments accordingly and focus on making something that makes money off that.
Its the tragedy of the commons. These companies will think they are very smart for doing this, but theyll just foster a culture where there are no competent employees once the current seniors retire
Compete for talent. You can never compete with big tech salaries, and often you can't compete with their benefits either. But you can still compete in creative ways. The most obvious way that no one does is to promote people into lower hours worked; instead of a pay raise you give them every Friday off, for example. There are a lot of types of people out there motivated by a lot of different things than money.
> It's not helping that in the last 10 years a culture of job-hopping has taken over the tech industry. Average tenure at tech companies is often ~2 years and after that people job hop to increase compensation.
I've started viewing developers that have never maintained an existing piece of software for over 3 years with skepticism. Obviously, with allowances for people who have very good reasons to be in that situation (just entered the market, bad luck with employers, etc).
There's a subculture of adulation for developers that "get things done fast" which, more often than not, has meant that they wrote stuff that wasn't well thought out, threw it over the wall, and moved on to their next gig. They always had a knack of moving on before management could connect the dots that all the operational problems were related to the person who originally wrote it and not the very-competent people fixing the thing. Your average manager doesn't seem to have the capability to really understand tech debt and how it impacts ability to deliver over time; and in many cases they'll talk about the "rock star" developer that got away with a glimmer in their eye.
Saw a post of someone on Hacker News the other day talking about how they were creating things faster than n-person teams, and then letting the "normies" (their words not mine) maintain it while moving on to the next thing. Thats exactly the kind of person I'd like to weed out.
Funny, I was at my previous company almost exactly two years. They never even gave me a cost of living increase, much less a "raise." So I was effectively earning less each year. Change needs to happen from both sides if extended tenure is the goal.
You have cause and effect reversed. Companies stopped training workers and giving them significant raises for experience, so we started job hopping.
Some genius MBA determined that people feel more rewarded by recognition and autonomy than pay, which is actually true. But it means that all the recognition and autonomy in the world won't make you stay if you can make 50% more somewhere else.
When I worked at a very small company we were extremely concerned about this, and so we paid people well enough that they didn't want to leave. All I can figure is that the bean counters just don't understand that churn has a cost.
some places like Amazon operate around the churn. Keep everyone anxious and they won't try to collectively bargain nor ask for raises. They won't be around long enough anyways.
Generally I understand the missing factor to be a control thing.
Th power structure that makes up a typical owners-vs-employees company demands that every employee be replacable. Denying raises & paying the cost of churn are vital to maintaining this rule. Ignoring this rule often results in e.g. one longer-tenured engineer becoming irreplacable enough to be able to act insubordinately with impunity.
A bit bleak but that's capitalism for you. Unionization, working at a smaller companies, or at employee-owned cooperatives are all alternatives to this dynamic.
Good to minimize bus factor, bad when you want to innovate and expand your business. So I guess it's ideal for this slowing economy focused on "maintenance".
I don't think it's good or bad per se. Depends o ntje company needs and the individual desite.
But as someone who originally wanted to be a specialist (or at the very leastT-shaped), I see a lot more problem in fostering specialists than generalists under this model. Sometimes you do just need that one guru who breathes C++ to come in and dig deep into your stack. Not always, but the value is irreplaceable.
Yeah, definitely some drawbacks as well. I think you can develop some specialization despite hopping around relatively often, though it’s not the path I’ve chosen (average tenure of 6-7 years per employer).
Sure but there needs to be a balance with momentum. You cant keep losing institutional knowledge like that. I think we are heavily disbalanced towards too much churn
I mean, if someone was on a street corner selling child friendly cigarettes, I wouldn't call that a parenting issue.
I think parenting is one aspect, but surely you see how given it's a platform that advertises itself specifically for children, in the same way as if there was a children channel on the TV telling your kids to smoke crack, maybe someone should step in
Yea, we'd charge the person on the corner selling the cigarettes. We wouldn't sue the city for selling cigarettes just because it happened in the city, even if the person selling them paid their taxes (so the city made money on it).
As a society, we limit children's access to predatory stuff all the time - porn, alcohol, cigarettes, gambling/lottery, guns, even swear words on the public airwaves.
I use bazzite linux for gaming full time and can't say enough good things about it. You don't need to do anything at all to maintain it. Every Windows game I've ever tried just works perfectly out of the box. Sometimes I will see a warning telling me that a certain game is not certified for a good experience by Steam, and it all just works perfect anyway.
When I was running Windows on the same machine I was constantly trying to diagnose why things stopped working, and downloading drivers.
Perhaps my experience with Windows was worse than average, I don't know. But from my perspective there is zero reason not to run Linux full time for gaming.
There is one reason, anticheat, that at least was why i had to abandon bazzite for now. Otherwise i loved how easy it was to set up like a console for my kids to use without my help.
Also daily driving Bazzite on my gaming laptop, everything is supported out of the box (iGPU / dGPU switcher, fan control, LED keyboard, low/high screen refresh), there's barely any maintenance needed and it runs really smooth. The other day I connected my G27 (wheel, pedals and gear shifter) to play BeamNG, it just worked, no drivers, crapware or configuration needed.
I also use the same machine for dev work and everything works amazingly well.
The web is extremely user-hostile. The necessity of ad blockers is just one example of this. Social Media feed algorithms that maximize engagement at the cost of mental health and political unrest are another
I think there is a ton of potential for having an LLM bundled with the browser and working on behalf of the user to make the web a better place. Imagine being able to use natural language to tell the browser to always do things like "don't show me search engine results that are corporate SEO blogspam" or "Don't show me any social media content if its about politics".
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