Hey, we dedided to take an approach where we build on top of libraries like BlockNotejs, Yjs, HocusPocus but build our own wrapper around it in Django and Next.js. This allows to iterate really fast and to catter our own need (we are large organizations we don't have the same as startups or SMEs).
Contributing and sponsoring allows us to make improvement that help the whole collaborative software category.
Yes. Companies that are not able to produce as much value per engineer will likely be driven out of business. This will not happen overnight, as there are likely more in-experienced engineers available (at least for a short amount of time). The too inexperienced team will in some cases lead to the company not being able to compete with their product and slowly dying.
Their valuation in June 2019 was around $400M, which makes this a 20x increase in less than 2.5 years. Quite impressive and a great example on the effects of COVID to digital business.
In Finland 18% of all energy is produced with Nuclear, which almost the double of the global average (~10%). We don't have earthquakes or other very strong weather phenomena (apart from freezing temperatures up to -40C/-40F), which makes Nuclear a very feasible option.
Not to forget stable geology suitable for long term storage of our own waste. Solar isn't great for most of the year. Wind is some parts, but long periods of downtime. Hydro can't really be extended. Geothermal would require very deep wells. Outside biomass nuclear is only sane option.
That is blowing the risks out of proportion. Normal houses won't be earthquake proof, and people will actually be living in them and get squished if there is a bad earthquake. There will be death and destruction.
Whether or not the nuclear plant survives intact is a bit of a minor issue. It just has to fail without being orders of magnitude worse than the earthquake.
Citing Fukushima - Fukushima was bad. Bud the mounds of corpses caused by the natural disaster that also caused Fukushima are a far more important thing to spend resources preventing than Fukushima itself was.
> without being orders of magnitude worse than the earthquake
You're overlooking the exaggerated panic-and-horror reaction of the public to literally any kind of nuclear incident. If you design merely for statistically acceptable results it's basically guaranteeing political blowback at some point.
The Dominant Media has an exaggerated role in this when they whip up paranoia for ratings (really no different than Facebook prioritizing angry posts in your feed — eyeballs get ads).
IMHO being hit by a natural disaster is by far better than the same + also radiation (not even mentioning lack of electricity). I wouldn't mind a nuclear power plant to cost twice its normal cost if that could make the latter completely impossible.
But if you had to pick one to prevent, preventing the disaster is more important. So before earthquake-proofing the nuclear plant you should worry about earthquake proofing your home.
There is an objective ordering to what should be earthquake-proofed. Nuclear plants are not actually at the top of the list to worry about - places where people are likely to live and work are. Draw up a list of things that hurt people around the time of the Fukushima disaster. Fukushima barely makes the list. Fukushima might not even be on the list, the toll in human suffering of Fukushima is very small compared to the natural disaster that hit Japan that day.
We can also overbuild the nuclear plant because nuclear is so crazily efficient why not. There is only one plant to secure. But it isn't a blocker if it doesn't happen, and it is an irrational concern.
> But if you had to pick one to prevent, preventing the disaster is more important. So before earthquake-proofing the nuclear plant you should worry about earthquake proofing your home.
If I could, I would earthquake-proof and flood-proof everything even where the probability of these dissertation is near-zero. But this obviously isn't going to happen (in fact it baffles me how people insist on living non-proof way even in areas where disastrous floods actually happen every now and then).
Nevertheless I feel like I would prefer my home destroyed and even myself crippled over the neighboring nuclear power plant blowing up.
> Nevertheless I feel like I would prefer my home destroyed and even myself crippled over the neighboring nuclear power plant blowing up.
How much have you thought about it? Again, Fukushima, one of the worst nuclear disasters of all time. As far as I know nobody crippled.
I'd go for the plant meltdown myself, I like life, liberty and having use of my legs. It is reasonably likely that nobody would get hurt in a meltdown, the damage is largely economic.
I just fear the radiation which might come out. I believe loosing a home and a leg is better than getting irradiated. It would probably ruin my nighttime sleep for the rest of my life if my body would start glowing in the dark, you know :-]
I am a proponent of nuclear power generation nevertheless.
> I just fear the radiation which might come out. I believe loosing a home and a leg is better than getting irradiated.
Why? Even purely on that scenario you'r cutting off your leg to avoid a typically undetectable statistical risk.
We've got 50 years of records on the risk of plant meltdowns, a surprise earthquake hitting homes that aren't prepared is much, much worse than a nuclear plant meltdown. An earthquake will kill people. There will be deaths. Destruction. Suffering on a scale that is much worse than a nuclear meltdown.
You should earthquake proof your house if you think that is a possible risk.
consequences of having a considerable area contaminated and uninhabitable for basically forever are not to be understated. humanity does not have the tools to predict black swans which lead to such results.
you're seeing what happened and extrapolate the future based on this. what didn't happen is equally important. Chernobyl was the worst accident, but it was by far not the worst possible outcome. e.g. if the core burned through concrete and contaminated ground water, it'd be way, way worse.
> Surprisingly, the cost includes “lost” contributions from community members who had accounts already, but whose activity appears to have been catalyzed by the (often low quality) contributions from those without accounts.
The best way to get high-quality feedback is to say something stupid and have the expert correct you.
I can point to a handful of low-effort journos whose whole schtick is asking dumb questions on Twitter so that the would-be know-it-alls can post "well, actually" to them in the replies.
By virtue of the engagement numbers they clearly love it, and come back for more slop every day.
#1 Requires some knowledge to do, which can be hard. I do agree that #2 is very true and indeed what I mean by bein stupid is ”exposing your own stupidity/lack of knowledge” rather than playing stupid.
Author here. There definitely are people, who perform better than others, even when the environment is not built to favor them and hinder others from performing well.
If we believe that the talent within a field follows the power law, as suggested by this study (http://www.hermanaguinis.com/PPsych2012.pdf) it means that only 20% people in the field are high-perfomers, and something like less than 5% exceptionally high performers. When you look it from the perspective of scaling an organization it means that getting these people to your company will be very hard. 80% of companies are hiring within the "average or below average" section. The truly high-performing people, who are passionate about their craft are very likely to move to companies that are at the at the top of XYZ, where XYZ is the topic within software engineering that they're especially passionate about, pay well, etc.
There was originally a section the article that tried to highlight "statistics", but I eventually left it out, because I did not find a good place for it:
"Statistically speaking, it is much easier to create a "10x engineer" by creating an organization, where most people perform poorly than actually hire and retain someone, who really is 10x better at software engineering than an average person."
In hindsight, I think there are a few things that could have been emphasized more, so the thrust of the blog post would have been clearer:
- The title could have been better frased around the topic.
- The context is companies that are growing fast and need to scale.
- You likely have a company full of close-to-average people.
”The truly high-performing people, who are passionate about their craft are very likely to move to companies that are at the at the top of XYZ, where XYZ is the topic within software engineering that they're especially passionate about, pay well, etc.”
Is there a source for this claim?
How likely are they to move exactly, and what motivates the non-movers to stay?
This is based on my limited personal experience observing the careers of people I know, whom I could consider somehow exceptionally good at their craft. I co-led the CTO team of software consultancy with 350+ devs. In that role it was pretty clear that it was really hard to compete on salary and how interesting projects experts could be offered.
Motivations differ based on what the person values. The top motivations I've experienced are:
- Money
- Following intrinsic motivation and being able to grow professionally
- Friendships and the feeling of belonging
- Stability and not taking any risks
The people in the last two categories tend to change jobs more slowly in my experience, but most still do it at some point.
I'm not aware of any reliable studies on the subject from the field of software engineering. If someone knows one, I would be more than interested in reading one.
I would probably consider consultancies very differently from product companies.
Since the company charges a per-person rate on hours worked, all it needs is to charge more than you pay them (plus utilization). So it's a very viable business model for the company to hire the cheapest (so either least skilled or least experienced) developers, as long as you have enough projects where you can charge for them. Maximizing engineering skill is not profitable, maximizing the diff in pay * the number of hours worked is what is most profitable.
I would argue that consultancies are probably the worst type of company for attracting talent. If we consider the idea that an engineer becomes skilled enough that they now have to power to choose which projects best interest them, then choosing the company is analogous to choosing that next project. If they join a consultancy, they specifically lose that power. Since, you're not signing up for a single company and single project, you're signing up for every single client in that company's portfolio.
Personally speaking, if I was to run a consultancy and cared about the quality of the developers, the only choice is to hire exclusively new grads out of college. That's when there is the greatest diff between the pay they can command and the potential skill level they have, since that skill level is unknown. You can then exploit that gap for a number of years, until they realize how good they are and can command a high enough salary from a different company (most likely a product company) that has the margins to be able to pay ridiculous salaries and not blink an eye.
In my experience the difference between good consultancies and average product companies is not very big. On average I've seen consultancies being able to attract more technically curious and product-minded engineers. The exception are the product companies that are somehow special in the market (e.g. can offer a significantly better pay, or do something very interesting in terms of scale or technologies).
The dynamic you describe tends to get stronger, when consultancies grow. The voices & competence of the technical people becomes less important when it comes to the business and efficiencies in utilization and the company brand start to matter more. The consultancy I worked at was not an incumbent, but an underdog competing with the big players, so the actual execution mattered more, when trying to win bigger customers. Even in consultancies, there are operational effiencies you get from having competent people. Mainly from having less middle management & account managers.
However, there things are useful for the consultancy's business only to a limited extend. You only need to be slightly better than the average consultancy and you're OK. So there is a point, when you either need to be great at sales or thought-leadering, or a consultancy can no longer increase your salary or provide your with work you find interesting.
Interesting on that first point, that's not what i would have expected. So what are you seeing from these product-minded engineers that leads them to choose a consultancy over a product company?
For "underdog" consultancies, i've always felt that they win by
1) sending their A team where an incumbent would be sending in their C team. That would make sense, as the incumbent's A team is on a more important client, whereas this small client "is" the underdog's important client.
2) carving out niches and specialties. So you serve less clients and projects, but also build up a reputation. You kind of become an incumbent of sorts, just for that niche.
Both 1 & 2 are valid strategies for underdog consultancies. Consultancies that are very good at #2 may also have better ability to keep people, who are exceptionally good at some specific tech or domain, because they usually have higher rates and peers that are good at the same thing.
As for product-minded engineers, there is often more freedom at a smaller a consultancy than in (many) product companies. You can switch projects every 3-18 months, select a new technology you want to learn, have big ownership on the helping the customer building the product, etc. To some people this is ofc a downside and a lot depends on the kind of client/project you're working in. Much of this also is lost, when the consultancy starts taking on bigger projects with bigger clients that already have much of these things set in stone.
