Governments have overestimated the economic returns of higher education - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2018/03/economist-explains-0 <comment><USER3> I suspect that at least some of this is due to confusing cause with effect: people see that most highly successful people have a collage degree, and wrongly conclude that anyone with a collage degree will be highly successful.

A few of the other problems with this increased drive to send people to collage is that now a collage degree is required -- as the article points out -- as a signal of employability even for jobs where a high school education would suffice; a drive away from trade school, even when a job in the trades pays well and is quite secure; and of course the debt load that comes with collage, even for a degree is in a field with little chance of providing a good return on the cost of the degree.

<comment><USER4> More generally, it's a problem with confusing a thing with the symbol of that thing. You can't make people richer by printing money and just handing it out, tho' that doesn't stop governments trying it (quantitative easing being the latest example). No mere coincidence that the same governments think they can educate people by printing and handing out degree certificates.

<comment><USER5> The whole point of the SA article is that you _can_ make people richer by printing money and handing it out.

It's absolutely clear about this. Printing money and handing it out is the best possible strategy if you want a vibrant, inventive culture.

Conversely rationing access is self-defeating. You get a few individuals with giga-wealth and a lot of friction everywhere else, which throws sand in the wheels of future wealth creation.

<comment><USER6> No, you can't. There's no free lunch. Printing money makes the person with the new banknotes richer, but everyone else holding banknotes poorer. I.e. it's zero-sum.

> if you want a vibrant, inventive culture

Nonsense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This was mentioned in another comment but nothing about "education" is about actual education. It's primarily about credentialisim and not being locked out of a career with a high ceiling.

Though I disagree with many of his political opinions Peter Thiel I think is right on the mark when it comes to education. Additionally credentials serve to lock people out of careers where they can thrive except for the rubber stamp of a piece of paper.

In the words of Syndrome "if everyone is super, no one is". If every one has a BS/BA , masters, PHD then in a real sense no one really does.

(Added after reading critical comments: "Nothing" is to strong of a word. With that said I still think most of education is about signaling/credentialism etc.)

<comment><USER8> > This was mentioned in another comment but nothing about "education" is about > actual education. It's primarily about credentialisim and not being locked > out of a career with a high ceiling.

Really? Learning how the history of your country has no value? Learning how to write properly, how to construct persuasive arguments is of no use? Learning how to break an argument down into smaller parts and analyze it for soundness has no practical application?

Because those are just a small list of the many skills I learned in college.

Not to mention higher level math, an understanding of biology, physics, and chemistry, and a deeper appreciation for arts and music.

In a world flooded with propaganda and "sponsored messages", knowing how to keep a clear head and peel away the layers of misdirection is an incredibly important ability, one that a good education will teach.

In a world where scientific debate in matters of public policy is of utmost importance, being able to understand the science being debated is a necessary skill for the voting populace.

College is incredibly useful, I fail to understand why detractors insist that it has no value. I will readily agree that corruption is rife and the cost is increasing way to rapidly, while quality may very well be on the decline as universities attempt to push more and more students through, but an educated populace is by no means a bad thing.

<comment><USER9> > College is incredibly useful, I fail to understand why detractors insist > that it has no value.

This black and white approach is silly. Of course it has value. The question is whether the value that it provides is sufficient to offset the cost of the tuition, housing, food, books, AND opportunity cost of not working. You're easily looking at 150k at a _public_ institution for an intelligent kid _per year_.

Are you saying you can't figure out how to acquire all those skills you mentioned for less than 600k and 4 years spent? And are those skills necessary for everyone?

<comment><USER10> Adding to this, much of what is useful about college is what you _do_ with your time there. 80%+ of undergrads don't understand that they should be _doing_ things with their time as an undergrad: working in a lab; running and managing an active club; volunteering for the campus radio station.

Thinking of higher education as something that is administered to students, I think, is a major reason it does so little for so many. Students have spent their k-12 years having education 'done' to them. I would argue that you only really get a successful experience at higher education if you treat it as something you are 'doing' to/for/on yourself. In that sense its very similar to any other kind of bootstrapped education, but very much so, the higher education environment is much easier to do so in.

<comment><USER11> > Students have spent their k-12 years having education 'done' to them.

I think you have neatly expressed the root of the problem right there.

Education is best approached by the student, not compelled by the teacher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> While I agree the the economic impact of government-assisted education is often overstated (or at least misunderstood) and that a degree and an education is not a 1:1 mapping in either direction, education for education's sake is a perfectly worthwhile goal, IMO. That often seems to get forgotten in these discussions.

<comment><USER13> Yeah. Just recognize it as "consumption" rather than "investment" in economic terms. People usually conflate the two with regard to home-ownership as well.

<comment><USER14> Even if education were entirely a matter of signalling (which obviously isn't true) then it would still be a perfectly good personal investment in that it would get you a better job than you would have otherwise. It would just be social subsidies of it that would be consumption rather than investment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As a machinist mechanic by trade, higher education needs some serious reform. The idea that youre going to spend four years of your life generating an insurmountable debt only to arrive without a job is bleak. Some of these degrees arent just useless, theyre outright goddamn predatory.

The saddest moment in my career was realizing my boss makes a fraction of what I make after he pays his student loans. He still had to pay those loans when the recession hit and he was out of a job for 3 years. That kind of pressure with a wife and kids drives a man to crawl into a bottle.

</comment><comment><USER16> Higher education in the US has been seen as a way to improve one's lot in life - to climb the class ladder. That's still true.

But there was a window in the 1970s-1990s in the US where it was MUCH easier to use college and hard work to advance. Tuition was lower and it was easier for poor and middle class kids to get in. Today, tuition has skyrocketed and the middle class is completely filled with kids who hire college consultants and train for standardized tests. Kids outside that elite sphere are at a big disadvantage. That wasn't true in the 70s and 80s, but eventually the upper and upper-middle class figured out how to take advantage of college opportunities and crowded out the working and middle classes.

<comment><USER17> That's not strictly true. Colleges are getting more applications than every before and are many of the best ones have tuition assistance programs for those who can't afford tuition. However, its true that the awareness of these kinds of opportunities is spotty among the poorer sections of American society.

<comment><USER18> it doesn't matter if there's tuition assistance. Growing up poor you're at a profound structural disadvantage to even get into those schools.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> ...For the same reason we are over/underestimating all sorts of things: Correlations don't mean causation. Even when they do, subsidizing the cause can break the causal link. Taking english classes and learning english might be causally related, but paying people to take english classes may not have a predictable result.

The current disadvantage=discrimination debate has the same problem. So do many of the Scandi-inspired policy suggestions, assuming that policy X caused result Y, and will again.... If we apply this logic in other places we'd conclude that homosexuality increases salary. Evidence for these things is probabilistic, and we suck at statistics, especially when we're being political.

Anyway, I found this interesting (by ommission):

 _Part of the reason why university graduates earn more is because they are brighter and harder-working to begin with_

Not that they were wealthier to begin with? Not for class reasons?

and...

 _humanities graduates, ...tend to earn more if they come from more prestigious institutions suggests that one reason ... get ahead of peers in the job market._

Get ahead how? Knowing people who are ahead? Being associated with people who are ahead? Talking like people who are ahead? They already conceded that it isn't the education....

Humanities (and educations generally), was the domain of the educated classes. Lower class people sent their kids there for class mobility reasons. It was a way for the more talented middle class kids to join the upper-middle classes, _by joining them physically_. Kids from those classes, went to college to strengthen the class association. In the UK, they were generally explicit about this. The economist knows this. Why beat around the bush.

Higher class seeming people (yes, this still exists) do better in job markets. ..also in marriage markets, probably get loans easier...

</comment><comment><USER20> I think I'm seeing some confusion on this thread about the term "specialist". Basically, if you're anything other than a subsistence farmer, aren't you some kind of specialist? Teachers, doctors, grocers, car salesman, lawyers, bankers, mechanics, all these professions are limited in scope not just to one economic area but to a small portion of that economic area. It's not college that makes you a specialist. It's modern economies that demand you specialize. Even if that specialty isn't considered "professional".

<comment><USER21> You just listed a bunch of upper middle class occupations. Try food service, retail, general construction, factory, or warehouse labor, driving, etc. These are positions that, when they're hiring at all, will hire any able-bodied person known to be reliable and follow directions. In your city there is probably somewhere day laborers hang out and contractors come by in their pickups to hire anonymous strangers for a day's work in cash under the table with no collecting or reviewing of resumes. That's what we mean by not specialized.

The trades (electrical, plumbing, automotive, etc) are good examples of specialized but not college-educated positions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Education is in many ways a valuable preparation for future work, there are many important goals which can only be achieved (or can be achieved better) with lots of education.

But... it is also a social signal, and therefore a positional good. To the extent there is social status in being among the top third of the education scale, there can never be more than third of all people in that category.

The above seems ridiculously obvious... but is underappreciated in the analysis of many phenomena.

(Another example: if you define poverty as the 15th percentile of some measure, by definition the poverty level will always be 15%. To figure out if there's real progress being made, on poverty or education or anything else, a scale must be found that is not positional, that is somehow an absolute measure.)

</comment><comment><USER23> 1) the government wants more college grads (admirable)

2) the government makes it really easy to secure loans to go to college (short-sighted)

3) the market is oversaturated with demand AND buying power (because of the easy loans)

4) prices rise (duh)

5) now everyone is in crushing debt and a degree is far less valuable

Very simplified; but why is anyone surprised?

<comment><USER24> Those surprised tend to measure success by intent rather than consequences.

<comment><USER23> well said. Or if free college is their end, then these are the means. Complete collapse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Because most people do? Because it's a sacred cow that you cannot criticize? Because most of the elites have elite university credentials (almost by definition)?

e.g., see Peter Thiel's criticisms [https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/10/peter- thiel-were-in-a-bubb...](https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/10/peter-thiel-were- in-a-bubble-and-its-not-the-internet-its-higher-education/)

<comment><USER26> > it's a sacred cow that you cannot criticize

That is hardly the case; it's trendier to criticize than to defend.

> Thiel

Thiel has many crazy ideas, some of which lack the sophistication of an undergraduate paper. Money doesn't make you smart, but perhaps college would have helped him. (EDIT: Apparently he did go to college and graduate school; my point was mostly snark, but some education in many issues saves people from thinking they are too clever.) It's no surprise that someone who openly wants to disempower the public and eliminate democracy would be against the public becoming educated and empowered.

<comment><USER25> It's trendy to criticize the monetary cost of higher education, but it's perceived as a near-necessity, with counter-examples being considered noteworthy ("Bill Gates and Steve Jobs dropped out of college!")

<comment><USER27> Both of those people needed a college education, just not a diploma.

Steve Jobs credited Apple's phenomenal success to what he learned at liberal arts college.

[http://www.reed.edu/steve-jobs](http://www.reed.edu/steve-jobs)

Bill Gates attended an elite high school and some elite college -- he was at least as formally educated as the average college grad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> In a surprising demonstration of not burying the lede, it's given away by the subheading: " _Earning a degree is about signalling, and not just learning_."

<comment><USER29> > "Earning a degree is about signalling, and not just learning"

This is nothing new.

It was this way since the beginning of higher education in religious institutions. Higher education was a social signal that gave clerics power over many aspects of society in their roles as religious leaders and advisers to rulers.

In Europe it was common for non first-born sons of aristocrats to go into the clergy via the academic route. They didn't do this to give up power, but to associate themselves and their families with powerful religious/academic cultural institutions.

Even during the post WW2 broadening of higher education access, it served as a bridge to upper social classes.

You can't get rid of the class signalling aspect unless you can get rid of class as a cultural phenomenon, which is unlikely.

Being broadly educated will always be a signal of class, no matter how it is achieved, simply because it implies that you had the resources to study things that are not of immediate vocational value.

But many aspects of higher education that don't have vocational value have a lot of value in creating an informed, adaptable citizenry.

You can, however, reduce the degree to which higher class association via higher education is needed in order to learn skills needed to achieve a decent livelihood.

One way to achieve this is to reverse the trend of large cuts to public higher education funding, which is the largest factor in the increased costs of those institutions [1] (not fancy buildings).

[1] [https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent- the-m...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-main- reason-tuition-is-skyrocketing/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Personally I think this article glosses over all of the important details and is fairly useless.

This sort of casual assumption is infuriating:

"Part of the reason why university graduates earn more is because they are brighter and harder-working to begin with."

Whether or not college is _only_ a sorting mechanism is unsupported by the article. If we restate the intention of higher education as "make everyone brighter and harder-working", then this whole article falls apart.

</comment><comment><USER26> There's an assumption in the title (obviously) that appeals to a popular argument on HN, but the article itself is not conclusive:

 _university graduates still make around 70% more than non-graduates suggests that demand for skilled workers still far exceeds supply. / Yet governments may actually be overestimating the economic benefits of higher education._

The article says the economic returns could be overestimated do to the social benefits of college. I certainly agree about the social benefits, and I think we need college open to all:

First, it's really about wealth and class; these economic arguments are a BS distraction to a significant degree (though not entirely). I know of schools in rich districts where 95% go to college, and in poor districts only miles away where it's maybe 5%. What does that have to do with economic and social benefits? Why should those social and economic benefits go to kids in rich districts? The expansion of college means expanding it to the poor district; I don't hear wealthy parents saying that their own kids shouldn't go, or that their district should send fewer to college; the argument against college is really an argument to not expand the same opportunities to the working class and poor. For social/political reasons (racism, maintaining political power) and self-interest (not paying taxes), there are even some who don't want the poor kids to get the opportunity; it's an nascent aristocracy protecting itself, which is incompatible with democracy (which is why people like Thiel are against democracy and education) - though certainly that doesn't apply to all critics and criticisms, we also shouldn't pretend it's not an issue.

Second, in the land(s) of opportunity, why are we suddenly rationing it through central planning? Let people advance themselves and go to college if they want to; give them the chance to advance themselves by making college available to them, the best one they can get into. Who are you or I to tell them they shouldn't go because we don't think it's economically worthwhile?

</comment><comment><USER31> > Estimates of the economic returns to higher education tend to assume that > all students will graduate. In practice, around 30% of students in Europe > and 40% of students in America will drop out before earning their degrees.

This leads to a dangerous debt situation. I saw this up close in New Mexico. The state gave everyone a "bridge" scholarship which covered the first semester of college. Students who had no business going to college would go anyway and get a loan to cover the second semester. They would fail out and be stuck with a nasty loan for no good reason.

</comment><comment><USER32> My story. I've even done a PhD myself. I'd barely recommend doing a degree anymore to most people. The pace of change is huge and universities are barely keeping up. The most needed is practical skills, which you can take on the go and use online learning courses.

</comment><comment><USER33> The relationship between Education and Prosperity is funny one. Argentina and Egypt are good examples of societies that got educated but did not see economic returns. (source: nntaleb).

A prosperous country gets more educated but an educated country may not always prosper.

<comment><USER34> ARgentina's public education is disastrous at all levels.

While we have a public university that is free, mostly middle class goes there. Upper class goes private, and lower class does not graduate highschool. Our high-school graduation rate is 50%. And our public college graduation rate is about 50% as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Higher education - okay, but _quality_ education can't be overestimated.

I live in Poland and education actually seems to be getting worse over time, while catholic church is consistently gaining ground. In primary + secondary schools, there's more religion than physics, biology or chemistry. Mathematics is the only science lesson still more common than religion. Technically there should be "ethics" lessons as an alternative, but very few schools actually employ such teachers, citing various excuses.

Recently, there's a push by education minister to let priests become educators (form masters), taking orders from bishop rather than principal. Final exams from catholic religion are not far away.

If you put tax money into religion rather than scientific grants, and you complain your country has very low innovation rating, really, what do you expect? Maybe you could export a new religion?

<comment><USER36> During communism in Poland there was 1 hour of religion classes per week. Classes were run in Catholic Church buildings. Now there are 2 hours of religion classes in school buildings. Pupils who do not want to go to religion classes can have a free time.

Do you really think that changing for example 1 hour of religion lesson per week to 1 hour of chemistry would change a lot?

I doubt whether the ethics lesson in your case would result in less religion intolerance. Someone who is that much ashamed of his own country should simply emigrate, as President Komorowski advised.

PS. Polish Catholic Church also overestimated the impact of religion classes for practicing Catholics. Now less people attend Sunday masses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Little to do with economic returns.

Unrevokable student debt is one of the biggest government assets.

<comment><USER38> Only for a sufficiently restricted definition of asset. You're thinking of the article that was referring to financial securities. Student debt may be leading in that category, but the government doesn't own much in the way of financial securities compared to land and military assets.

<comment><USER37> " Over the last decade or so, there's been an absolute explosion in student loans, growing from $260 billion in 2004 to $1.31 trillion last year.

So, the total value of student loans in America today is LARGER than the total value of subprime loans at the peak of the financial bubble.

And just like the subprime mortgages, many student loans are in default.

According to the Fed's most recent Household Debt and Credit Report, the student loan default rate is 11.2%, almost the same as the peak mortgage default rate in 2010.

This is particularly interesting because student loans essentially have no collateral.

Lenders make loans to students… but it's not like the students have to pony up their iPhones as security.

That's what made the subprime debacle so dangerous.

Millions of homes were underwater, so when borrowers didn't pay, lenders didn't have sufficient collateral to cover their loan exposure.

With student loans, there is no collateral. Lenders have no security to recoup their loans.

So when students don't pay, someone is going to take a hit.

That 'someone' will likely be you.

That's because hundreds of billions of dollars of these student loans are either owned or guaranteed by the United States government.

So as borrowers stop making payments, it's the taxpayer who will suffer yet another massive loss.

Let's be honest, though, there's something seriously screwed up with this system.

Young people are pushed into this system by a society that places an irrationally high value on university degrees.

Kids are told for their entire lives that if they study hard to get into a good school, there will be a great career waiting for them.

For many young people this turned out to be a total lie.

In fact, Federal Reserve data once again show that, for at least 25% of college graduates, salaries are no higher than for people with just a high school diploma.

Racking up so much debt hardly seems worth it.

It seems bizarre to begin with that an 18-year old will know what s/he wants to do in life, to the point that they should take on $50,000 in debt for a piece of paper that might not even make them marketable.

What did any of us really know at age 18? And how many of us could have accurately predicted our life's path?

Very few.

And yet there's an absurd amount of pressure to force young people into this system that heaps debt upon them. "

— Simon Black

<comment><USER39> Just so you know, I believe HN generally frowns upon user-imposed line breaks when not strictly necessary because it hurts readability for mobile users. Not a huge deal, but you might want to keep it in mind since you seem to put a lot of thought into your comments.

I'm curious: unlike with the mortgage bubble, student loan debt is non- dischargable-- even bankruptcy won't wipe it clean. And if you default on it, they'll eventually start taking a percentage from your paychecks before they're even deposited in your bank account. Doesn't this mean that the government is eventually going to get its due from pretty much every student, unless the student literally spends their entire life making no money/only under-the-table income? Personally I'd be more concerned about the students who will never escape their constantly-increasing debt than I am about the US government, which will probably come out ahead no matter what here since a good portion of students pay back their loans + high interest. Aren't we guaranteeing loan profits for the US government on the backs of the future retirement accounts and savings accounts of the middle class?

Then again, enough of the US already lives in poverty that I'm not convinced that this is any worse than the situation we've had for the past 50 years. Depressing, yes. But different, maybe not.

<comment><USER40> > unlike with the mortgage bubble, student loan debt is non-dischargable-- > even bankruptcy won't wipe it clean.

Student loan debt is not non-dischargeable, though it's harder to discharge in bankruptcy than general unsecured debt (and much harder to get out of than mortgage debt, which can often be escaped without bankruptcy.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Well, economic returns have to originate from somewhere. Either your additional education allows you to take something away from someone else our it allows you to increase productivity and reap its benefits. Also if you spend five additional years at university out of say fifty working years, then you already have to increase productivity by ten percent only to match your economic output without spending this additional five years studying. And in highly competitive markets, that are already optimized to death, ten percent is a lot and even then you just broke even.

</comment><comment><USER42> Education is a sacred cow for cultural reasons and probably a gigantic waste of resources on the whole.

I think it would help to step back (rather like an anthropologist) and ask fundamental questions regarding the social, cultural, and economic functions of education in a given society or economy (or globally) and go from there.

Regarding practical, real world questions on the value of a college education, I can only say this: as much as I dislike German-style educational tracking, the so-called 'dual system' in Germany does produce interesting results, and provided the right conditions, something like it could be put into practice elsewhere. At the very least it provides workers with the necessary technical skills to do their jobs while shielding them somewhat from competition from outsiders (this protectionist function should in theory help buoy up wages and add job security, though collective agreements and general employment law contribute to both) without without sending them to college. One can and should of course debate the merits of general education and its putative political, social, and cultural benefits, but if we are talking about the bare-bones technical skills and practical experience needed to do a job, a parallel apprenticeship and vocational training system as exists in Germany is a viable alternative to university.

I could say a lot more, but I will leave it at that for now.

</comment><comment><USER43> I wouldn't say the issue is that governments have overestimated the economic returns of higher education, I would say the issue is that companies have collectively underestimated the value of apprenticeships.

If the strongest possible economy is the one where the highest proportion of citizens are making the most of their individual talents, apprenticeships seem like a better fit than university for many professions, as they let the apprentices learn a trade directly, which either results in them finding a job they're good at or in finding out early that it isn't the path for them. Studying at a university has other benefits outside the job market, and I would still want anyone who wanted to go to have the opportunity to do so (by making it more affordable), but if the only reason that some people (not all) are going to university is to land a decently paid job, then let's just cut out the middle man and let people learn whilst they work.

This has benefits for companies too, as they get a larger pool of potential employees to work with, which ultimately keeps wages lower in the long run, and I'd also suggest that apprentice schemes help build loyalty, which should result in reduced disruption to business operations (compared to companies that struggle to retain their staff).

</comment><comment><USER44> In my view, it has become extremely popular to believe that higher education is a waste of money and time -- famous people like Peter Thiel are promoting the idea, and there are of course supporting "studies" like there are for all popular ideas.

But there is a caveat that I see: If it is true that not all people benefit from college, likewise, not all people benefit from not going to college. I'm thinking of myself here. I would have been a terrible bricklayer. For one thing, I'm not a physically strong person, though laying bricks might have rectified that situation. I also don't know if I would have been able to live with the nature of the job for 45 years, including its physical effects.

I might have been a terrible computer programmer. I learned programming in high school, at a time when it didn't require a college degree. But would I really have enjoyed being a programmer for 45 years? And so forth.

<comment><USER45> The most important aspect of education is learning how to think. Whatever the vocation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I don't see anything in the article to indicate that governments (multiple) have overestimated anything.

Which governments? What were their estimates exactly?

This article just throws some factoids together to form paragraphs - <USER2> making any coherent points in the process.

The article concludes with this: _Governments are right to fret about training future workers_

Who is fretting? What does that even mean?

This sloppy journalism merely plays the good old tune of 'government isn't doing the right thing' (a form of 'someone else is at fault'). It'd do more good to look in the mirror and ask if you're doing a good job and start from there. Don't worry about governments, start with yourself. In the case of journalism, start with doing some research, coming up with a stance, having arguments from multiple sides and then presenting them in a compelling manner.

</comment><comment><USER47> I graduated in 1992 and my state school (UIUC) cost around 4K year + 10K housing, easily worth it. Today it is 30,000. Still probably a pretty good deal. Over 25 years, the cost probably rose by about the same as inflation.

For schools that cost 100K+/year, parents would be better off taking the 400K and investing in the S&P 500 over those 4 years. Because of compounding, their child would never need to save a penny to have an outstanding retirement. If the money doubles around every 8 years (9% ish) and they retire in about 48 years, they get 6 doubles, so their 400K is worth approximately 25 million (in non inflation adjusted dollars)

<comment><USER48> 100K/year schools aren't for education. They are for class signalling. Someone who graduates from the school is either a member of a certain class or part of a select group that the school deemed worthy of associating with that class.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> And I may have overestimated the returns of learning how to paint like Bob Ross. No but seriously, reducing the value of labor to nothing is the cause here. Who could have predicted that being so jaded about workers that dedicate their lives to corporations would cause this to happen? So a typical citizen that works out all the time, is perpetually happy, frugal with finances, and only cares about work is a little too common nowadays (eerily so). This actually makes labor itself have no value if people will do it for free. None of these advantages work for people anymore because no one can stand out among anyone else.

</comment><comment><USER50> I'm going to try and exemplify the "why" in a much shorter ammt of space using some arbitrary numbers -

SCENARIO 1:

\- Year: 1965

\- # of jobs requiring college degree: 75

\- annual college graduates: 60

SCENARIO 2:

\- Year: 2018

\- # of jobs requiring college degree: 150

\- annual college graduates: 1,000

Aside from how horrifically wrong this^ is, the ratio problem remains.

</comment><comment><USER51> We are in a capitalist system that optimizes around financial gain. Our educational system has traditionally not had the same goals. Its not hugely surprising that it is not the best vehicle for creating perfect financial goal achieving cogs. Apprenticeships, Bootcamps, online training, etc. are way better for a vocation oriented education. You lose the well rounded, empathic, and critical thinking gains that a traditional college education rewards, but we don't seem to really care about those qualities anymore anyway.

<comment><USER52> Instead of calling it education, the term brain washing is more appropriate. :))

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Requisite link to Professor Bryan Caplan's case against high spending on education in the current system:

"The key issue ... isn't whether college pays, but why. The simple, popular answer is that schools teach students useful job skills. But this dodges puzzling questions."

More here:

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-c...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats- college-good-for/546590/)

</comment><comment><USER54> > _But in around half of occupations with better-educated workers average > wages have still fallen in real terms._

Did I miss something? "Half" is not a substantial argument without more detail. What about the other half? Stagnant? Rising a little? Rising dramatically? Which types of jobs fall into each bucket?

Not against the signalling argument per se, I'm just missing information.

</comment><comment><USER55> There was an interesting debate on this at LSE: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmGL67coWwc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmGL67coWwc)

There is clearly a problem but I'm not sure what the answer is.

</comment><comment><USER56> "Part of the reason why university graduates earn more is because they are brighter and harder-working to begin with."

Is that it, though? Or do they just get to reap the rolling snowball of opportunity from successful parents?

<comment><USER57> It doesn't say that's "it". It says that's "part".

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Would you rather have a degree from Harvard with no education, or a harvard education with no degree?

If you prefer the degree to the education than you likely value the signaling more than the human capital argument for education

<comment><USER59> > If you prefer the degree to the education

This could be seen quite blatantly in the first years of MOOC courses.

People became really angry at the end because there was no real certification being given.

It got really ugly.

<comment><USER60> I'm trying to find a source to support your argument but I'm not having any luck.

Coursera's original course offerings gave free certificates upon completion. My understanding is that MOOCs started charging for certifications in an effort to pay the bills. The jury is still out on whether these certifications are taken seriously or not.

<comment><USER59> They did give certificates, but a vocal minority was not happy that they were not Stanford/MIT,... issued certificates.

It boils down to your last sentence:

> The jury is still out on whether these certifications are taken seriously or > not.

Many people were taking those courses under the expectation that the certification would be highly prestigious and felt defrauded when that wasn't the case. The fact that they paid nothing only made matters worse because people feel more entitled when they pay nothing for a service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> One way to approach this could be to allow community colleges to give 3y or 4y degrees for certain majors. It could significantly reduce tuition costs.

</comment><comment><USER62> Higher education is not overestimated if it gives you better opportunities for the future. Perhaps some kind of higher education provides little economic value. I think that from a personal point of view, what you get from higher education depends a lot of what you put into the table, if you are a hard working intelligent guy and you have the ability to focus in what you are really good at, investing in higher education will give you a good ROI.

</comment><comment><USER63> And significantly underestimated the returns of accumulated and concentrated capital.

</comment><comment><USER64> College should be more about career training.

</comment><comment><USER65> Paywalled...

<comment><USER66> [https://outline.com/kJVEkY](https://outline.com/kJVEkY)

<comment><USER65> Thank you sir. Also, where did you find it?

I'm getting downvoted, but I tried the first 20 results from the 'web link', I can't read the article on any of them. Why not just post a readable link?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> TL;DR: Correlation does not imply causation.

<comment><USER68> Please don't do this here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> "since 1970 the share of workers with degrees has increased in virtually every occupation. But in around half of occupations with better-educated workers average wages have still fallen in real terms. " -I love it when "the economist" forgets how "supply and demand" work.

Real talk: it's easier to govern a nation of debt serfs who have to take out loans to take a glorified IQ test.

</comment><comment><USER70> Obvious reasons: locking young people in universities in their highest testosterone years reduces crime and drug addiction. Especially among people who don't get to have much returns from that education.

<comment><USER71> Universities are a hotbed for binge drinking and drug use. So I'm not sure I buy into that.

<comment><USER39> I don't think college campuses have a reputation for violent crime, though. I think the point is that maybe the students are ruining their own lives through drug abuse, but they aren't robbing/killing/maiming others.

Considering how safe I'd feel on a college campus at 2am on a Friday night compared to a rundown section of town, I'm tempted to believe that college does keep kids away from the worst of violent crime. I can't find any studies on the subject, unfortunately.</comment></comment></comment>


Audio Commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky for the Fellowship of the Ring - <AUTHOR> https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/unused-audio-commentary-by-howard-zinn-and-noam-chomsky-recorded-summer-2002-for-the-fellowship-of-the-ring-platinum-series-extended-edition-dvd-part-one <comment><USER2> "CHOMSKY: I think the Hobbits are criminals, essentially."</comment>


Awesome Cold Showers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hwayne/awesome-cold-showers <comment><USER2> Good start! Would love to see more...</comment>


Peter Thiel says the age of Apple is over - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-says-age-of-apple-is-over-2017-1 <comment><USER2> Well that's one way to get a headline although I don't think it's as grim. Sure there were some missteps by not bidding for Here Maps for example or letting Waze get bought by Google -- (what's the point of 200B if you're not going to use it...) but to say that Apple can't still continue to command the profits like they have is a bit much in the phone space as they have a huge cult following, a lot of customers locked into the ecosystem (see: costs to jump to android being too expensive in terms of time etc), and for the most part, a vertically integrated stack that just works. I think the phone has hit peak phone, now it's just a matter of time until we see who comes out with the next truly must-have item.</comment>


Chrome and Safari extension to rehabilitate disruptive footnotes. - <AUTHOR> http://openideas.ideon.co/2011/rehabilitate-disruptive-footnotes <comment><AUTHOR> I mentioned Footnotify before on HN but I'm resubmitting it now as the Google Chrome version of Footnotify was just released.</comment>


Y Combinator's Search for the Next Big Startup [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-09-23/y-combinator-s-search-for-the-next-big-startup <comment><USER2> @sama: you did not answer the interviewer's question on what the biggest challenge was in the past 18 months. Could you please answer it here? I'm really curious.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thank you for letting the conversation not devolve into bubble vs. no bubble or "hot spaces"

</comment><comment><USER4> For some reason the video keeps on failing to play for me, here's the youtube link for people with similar problems: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIad4KkQkuY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIad4KkQkuY)</comment>


Twenty years, 1998 – 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/03/20/twenty-years-1998-2018/ <comment><USER2> Oh c'mon, give me your best early curl stories!

/ (curl author)

<comment><USER3> I used `curl -H` to send anonymous love-letters to all the sysadmins of the world who just happened to be log-diving. Apache and Nginx have very liberal header sizes, so you could fit entire poems into them.

Also, do you know why c-ares isn't standard on libcurl packages?

<comment><USER2> c-ares is not standard because making a drop-in replacement for the regular stock name resolver function is really hard and c-ares is not 100% there. A c-ares powered libcurl fails to resolve some host names in some setups that otherwise work with the stock resolver (and thus in other apps/libraries). That's why the threaded stock resolver is the most popular resolver backend of curl/libcurl these days...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I once used curl to download curl binaries

<comment><USER5> In my current project I'm using curl to download a tarball with curl source code for building curl.

<comment><USER6> Same, incl using the Metalink[0] feature which I really, really like and don't understand why it's not more popular.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalink](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalink)</comment></comment></comment>


Why Pi Day Doesn't Work in the UK but Does in the US - <AUTHOR> http://m.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/31888465 <comment><USER2> Because Americans use the stupidest way of writing dates: middle endian. It doesn't sort correctly (unlike YMD), it's inconsistent in the unit magnitude order (unlike DMY and YMD) and it's different than virtually anyone else in the world.

<comment><USER3> We'll entertain your fervent opinion of the best way to represent a date as soon as you put people on the moon.</comment></comment>


Stress, Neurochemistry and why Programming is Hard (slides from OSCON 2008 talk) - <AUTHOR> http://the-programmers-stone.com/2008/07/24/oscon-2008-slides/

<comment><USER2> You can also find a lot of his material on his blog, which I submitted to HN a few days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253540>

</comment><comment><USER3> I attended this OSCON session, and while it got off to a slow start, by the middle/end I felt I'd been treated to some major new insights about a performance-impairing drug-like addiction to stress that may be very common.

So, I hope he puts his slides up in an easier-to-view format than a ZIP download, and if you start viewing them, don't bail out early until at least 2-3 slides after the one with the 'cognitive flexibility test'.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope someone recorded it, and it shows up later. There's a lot in the slides but, they're just slides.</comment></comment>


The Amazon Builders' Library - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/ <comment><USER2> Wow. I haven't gone through most of the content but shuffle sharding not only is a great idea but their write up is quite clear: [https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/workload- isolation-u...](https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/workload-isolation- using-shuffle-sharding/)

Impressive stuff!

<comment><USER3> Yes, that's a great one. But now I have a brain teaser stuck in my head: Imagine you have a multi-tenant system like they describe, but for each customer A, B, C they have users A1, A2, A3, B1 etc.

You need ordered delivery of messages, but only at user level (if all messages needed to be ordered you could not do this sharding type setup). Is there a way to apply shuffle sharding while maintaining user-level ordering guarantees?

<comment><USER4> Yes! we do recursive, nested, shuffle sharding in these cases. Our Open Source infima library doesn't quite include direct support for this, but you can get a sense of how we put it all together:

[https://github.com/awslabs/route53-infima](https://github.com/awslabs/route53-infima)

<comment><USER3> Cool, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Colm and Marc frequently post great threads about distributed system design on Twitter. Definitely worth a follow: [https://twitter.com/mndoci/status/1202641319643869184](https://twitter.com/mndoci/status/1202641319643869184)

And on a personal note, I'm astounded and so lucky that I get to work with these amazing engineers!

</comment><comment><USER6> I've worked in AWS for five years. I get paid, but the kind of knowledge in these pieces are by far the most valuable thing I've gotten from working there. I've been in it. I've used these principals. I've seen what happens to drive these recommendations first-hand. I've worked to design and build systems that follow and support these guidelines and principals.

</comment><comment><USER7> Amazingly little to no use of images in the articles. Turning the 'an image is worth a thousand words' on its head. Seems to work well though. Examples: [https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/avoiding- insurmounta...](https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/avoiding- insurmountable-queue-backlogs), [https://aws.amazon.com/builders- library/caching-challenges-a...](https://aws.amazon.com/builders- library/caching-challenges-and-strategies/)

<comment><USER8> Good point. We should use more images. I'll think about where we can add some for clarity! Now that we've done a bunch of talks at reinvent in these topics, we should have some that we can incorporate easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Disclaimer: ex-AWS

Wowzer. Amazon, and in particular AWS, sits on a treasure trove of hard-earned lessons abt designing, building, operating, maintaining systems at scale. I'm glad they have began to share _some_ of that know-how with the external world.

I wrote abt longing for AWS to do this some 6 months back [0] as I dearly missed access to those docs and videos that helped me understand so much abt the underpinnings of some of the most staunchest challenges dealt with by behemoth-esque services like S3, EC2, Redshift, DynamoDB, Kinesis, LB, Lambda, Edge, Security to name but a few.

I must point out though, re:invent does have a _ARC_ track [1] which gives glimpses into AWS' design principles.

There's so much they could still share (for instance, abt how they track and run their operations, how they deal with service outages, how they do change management, how they continuously monitor and improve the weaker and slower parts of the systems, how they gear up for launches, how they deal with issues facing larger customers, how they go abt their design process, how they refine their internal tools and processes, the internal tech talks, the review meetings esp the one run by Charlie Bell...), and I'm glad they've committed to be doing just that.

It'd be fun comparing literature coming out of Amazon to what's published by Google et al.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251589](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251589)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhr1KZpdzukfzSjpgH4E5...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhr1KZpdzukfzSjpgH4E5PiDwBM2o4UHD)

<comment><USER10> why do you keep typing 'abt' instead of 'about'? what are you planning to do with all the time saved?

<comment><USER9> Isn't _abt_ [0] a generally accepted abbrv for _about_ [1]?

[0] [https://www.dictionary.com/browse/abt-?s=t](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/abt-?s=t)

[1] [https://www.abbreviations.com/ABT](https://www.abbreviations.com/ABT)

<comment><USER11> It's understandable, but very rare in most text. It's the sort of thing you'd expect in a telegram, not a modern forum comment.

<comment><USER12> Especially when they take the time to write "management", instead of "mgmt".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone know why Amazon engineers always seem to write so well? Any time I read technical content from Amazon, I am struck by how clear and concise it is.

<comment><USER14> Amazon has a very strong written culture (search for 1 pagers and 6 pagers). To be effective at higher levels in any role you need to be good at it.

<comment><USER15> Any tips on how to get better at this?

<comment><USER16> Write more _and_ find ways to get feedback on your writing. It's important to get outside input to help you see the things that don't work and experienced readers/editors/friends/coworkers can often provide suggestions on how you can fix it.

<comment><USER17> This. and: It really helps if you work in a culture that values critical feedback on thinking and writing. Too many readers will pass on an opportunity to offer critical feedback, either because they don't want to offend or because they didn't read it carefully and critically enough. Having someone read a doc and tell you it's good feels good, but in general doesn't help you improve (and is actively harmful if the document is mediocre).

One way to encourage this helpful criticism is for authors to accept feedback gracefully and have a policy to ask questions _only_ for clarification of the feedback (to understand the feedback better) and never to engage in the debate response of explaining why what they wrote is good enough.

(The minute you debate them on the first of seven points they have, they're going to deprive you of much of the value of their feedback on the next six because you're seeming defensive at worst or exhausting at the least.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Reading this snippet in the article about leader election in distributed systems: "Each item of data still belongs to a single leader, but the whole system contains many leaders.". It could not be a clearer statement of Conway's law[0]. Orgs ship their org chart. The technical architecture at AWS absolutely reflects the org chart and business organisation of Amazon generally.

[0] [https://www.techopedia.com/definition/31927/conways- law](https://www.techopedia.com/definition/31927/conways-law)

</comment><comment><USER19> Lot of amazon content in the past week or two. What's going on? did they have a keynote or something?

<comment><USER20> AWS re:Invent ([https://reinvent.awsevents.com](https://reinvent.awsevents.com))

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's great to see some of the stuff that I used while at Amazon becoming more publicly available. Good documents, these.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is that something new? Or they just compiled all their tutorials in one place?

<comment><USER23> This just got released. It's a living source authored by senior engineers at Amazon and covers some of the best practices that we use at Amazon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm really glad this is public now, really good experience-driven (often straight from major post-mortems) recommendations here.

</comment><comment><USER24> Some real gems there.

</comment><comment><USER25> yeah this is great stuff!

</comment><comment><USER26> Lists don't make such great HN posts, because the discussion inevitably becomes about the lowest common denominator of the items on the list. The interesting material is in the specific items on the list, but these never escape the gravitational pull of the generic topics (in this case Amazon and AWS). It's usually better to pick the most interesting thing on the list and submit that instead.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20denominator%20list&sort=byDate&type=comment)

<comment><USER27> Normally I would agree with you, but the existence of the library was the most significant announcement of today's re:invent keynote. So the existence of the list, and the fact that the list will keep growing, is the news here.

One option might be to change the URL on this submission to the blog post about the list instead:

[https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/check-out-the-amazon- builde...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/check-out-the-amazon-builders- library-this-is-how-we-do-it/)

<comment><USER26> That's a fair point. Thanks for the correction!</comment></comment></comment>


Poetry Atlas: Poems About Places - <AUTHOR> http://www.poetryatlas.com/ <comment><USER2> Only one poem about Silicon Valley. HN needs to fix this!

If necessary, write a poem about your current work/surroundings and post below.</comment>


Ask HN: Collaborative UI/UX Designing Site. Do you see any demand for it? - <AUTHOR>

I don't know if anything similar exist but I think I would like to use it if any such web application exist.
In short it should be a mini web based inkscape/illustrator to quickly design prototypes, UI/UX designs. It should have following features -
1. We can use the HTML5 Canvas for this.
2. We can provide a toolbar of graphics objects such as rectangle, circle etc.
3. Library of UI Controls such as label, input, button, menu etc.
4. Save/Download designs in png/vector formats,
5. Designers can invite others to collaborate on a design project.
6. Designs can be public/private and may have commercial/opensource license.
7. Search/Browse public designs.
8. Rate and Review Designs.
9. Sell/Buy Designs.
10. Portfolio/Profile of Individual Developers/Design Houses.
What do you think. Is there demand for such web application? <comment><USER2> A realtime collaborative wire-framer with e-commerce functionality?

Personally, I don't think the marketplace or 'rating' designs, or posting them publicly at all is a good idea. Wireframes would probally be seen as too basic of a commodity, and with of the large amount of design work to go from a wireframe to a full design mockup there would be no reason to actually buy any wireframe-stage mockup. A buyer could take the wireframe and fully build it up legally without needing to buy anything after they see a preview thumbnail. The buyers would almost certainly want to make minor changes themselves in the proccess, too.

I like the idea of a collaborative wireframing tool though, I would certainly have a use for this myself. I know of realtime collaborative 'whiteboards', and single-user online wireframing tools, but nothing that combines the two.</comment>


France had Covid-19 on November 16, hospital says after analysis of chest scans - <AUTHOR> https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3083599/france-had-covid-19-november-hospital-says-after-analysis-chest <comment><USER2> They reviewed chest scans from November 1st, and came up with a first case on November 16th.

It begs a question - was the methodology good? Perhaps their method of review was flawed? False positives would explain the low consistent number of cases they found since November.

I think for this kinds of studies they should also do a blind analysis of a pre-covid month or two. Perhaps it would turn out Covid would be found in this data as well.

<comment><USER3> A case from Dec 27 in Paris was confirmed after samples were re-tested when we knew about the virus...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does this call into question whether the virus arose in China? The last bit of news I saw from there said they had their first case on November 17.</comment>


Product Hunt Was Our Launch Day Rocket Fuel - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Torbahax/product-hunt-was-our-launch-day-rocket-fuel-d5143e00b6e0

<comment><USER2> With an 18% conversion rate from a 'random new products' (non-targeted) website, this tool sounds like it would be fine with traffic from anywhere. Schedule this Facebook ad management tool for an aqui-hire before this fall!

<comment><AUTHOR> :) We believe we are solving a massive unmet need in the market right now and I think Product Hunt did a great job of proving that hypothesis. Appreciate your kind words!</comment></comment>


U.S. Carried Out Cyberattacks on Iran - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/us/politics/us-iran-cyber-attacks.html <comment><USER2> If you have the ability to hack things like a missile control system, it seems almost wasteful to do it when there isn't an immediate concern. It's just a less friendly pen test: now Iran knows which systems they need to do a better job securing (or a subset of those systems)

</comment><comment><USER3> Why is it OK when we do it but when "they" do it it's an act of war?

<comment><USER4> Everything we do is okay. At least according to our state department and most of our news outlets. We can't do anything wrong. It's the enemies that are terrible. The US stands for freedom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _according to people briefed on the operation._

The article smells of Soviet propaganda machine by claiming to conduct a successful offensive yet providing no way of verifying even the very fact it happened.

</comment><comment><USER6> It could just be me, but I always found US cyber hacks to be much more menacing. Iranian, North-Korean, Chinese and Russian hacks give off the aesthetic of pseudo-gangsters or general bullies.

Russia: "we hacked their social network and created provocative memes"

China: "we used our military cyber intelligence team to steel Google's source code"

North-Korea: "we hacked Sony because they created a film that made fun of us"

While the US hacks always get under your skin.

US: "We delivered a worm that slowly shut down your nuclear reactor over the span of several days and you didn't even notice"

US: "we literally hacked into your missile system"

</comment><comment><USER7> > _An additional breach, according to one person briefed on the operations, > targeted other computer systems that control Iranian missile launches.

Determining the effectiveness of a cyberattack on the missile launch system is particularly difficult. Its effectiveness could be judged only if Iran tried to fire a missile and the launch failed._

Okay, that doesn't make any sense. If an Iranian IT guy reads the NY times, wouldn't he just go reinstall Windows on the missile launch computers?

<comment><USER8> These systems aren't just windows systems, you're talking guidance systems / platforms often times controlled by SCADA platforms. While windows is a component, the real _effective_ hacking as with stuxnet was modifying low level code to create values that appear in line, but in fact were false creating an improper outcome. If the US hacked iran, it wasn't a hackers style animation, it was something low level designed to impact things beyond _windows_. I wouldn't put it past them to even use media to imply they had simply to break down their trust in their systems. It's effective in a post Stuxnet world, where they know first hand it's possible.

It's also very hard for anyone to yell about retaliation when it did not cause deaths (that we know about) and it serves as a deterrent. These stories are going to only continue to be more and more common.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It seems like a counter productive strategy to advertise this kind of attack. Though it may benefit humanity by influencing politics domestically, letting the war hawks feel like something was done to quell the beating of the war drum.

</comment><comment><USER10> I can only imagine how Iranians feel right now. Their government signed a deal; they abided by the deal; and now the most powerful country in the world is crushing their economy and threatening war for no reason evident to them. They're probably begging their politicians to develop nukes ASAP. And making plans to flee the country. I mean, imagine what it's like, packing your bags, deciding what to take and what to leave. Imagine how that makes you feel about the United States.

War with Iran is - I realize I'm probably preaching to the choir here- the worst idea in a long, sad history of bad ideas.

</comment><comment><USER11> And Iran carried out cyberattacks on us. Just continuing the status quo

</comment><comment><USER12> And this is news why? The NYT has become a treasonous rag. If anything thinks major state sponsored cyber attacks are not being carried out between world powers they're either ignorant or having been paying attention. To call out the US like this is a sham. How about the NYT times writes about the cyber attacks carried out by China, Russia, Iran, NK, and more?

<comment><USER13> Would you please not use HN for political battle?

Also, you've posted a bunch of unsubstantive comments here. Please don't do that; we're trying for something better than internet default on HN.

If you'd review [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and take the spirit of this site to heart from now on, we'd appreciate it.</comment></comment>


China Announces That It Is Going To Stop Stockpiling U.S. Dollars - <AUTHOR> http://www.trueactivist.com/china-announces-that-it-is-going-to-stop-stockpiling-u-s-dollars/ <comment><USER2> So what _does_ this mean for the ordinary American Joe Schmoe? What kind of effects can one expect if/when China starts pricing oil contracts in yuan instead of dollars and lets the yuan float?

<comment><USER3> I don't think they're about to let the yuan float totally, soon. I'd be surprised. If they did, suddenly their output would become less attractive to Western markets. We know they want to have their economy rely more on (internal) consumerism than on the export market, that that's a long transition.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why are there no tech startups in Australia? - <AUTHOR>

I grew up in Aus - then went to the US for college and haven't really been back since (5ish years) until now - for a short holiday. I've been trying to sniff out a startup scene in Sydney and Melbourne and cannot find one. In fact there's a general dearth of creative ambition: why would you want to do anything other than be a Doctor, Lawyer or Banker is the attitude of the most ambitious people I've encountered... <comment><USER2> Yeah, it would be great if there were tech companies like Atlassian, Campaign Monitor, RetailMeNot, 99 designs (launched in Australia...relocated to California) being started in Australia. I could go on...</comment>


How We Found Great Talents for Our Remote Company Without Spending a Fortune - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nightwatch.io/finding-remote-employees <comment><USER2> Let's see... i have a FB account for keeping in touch with some non technical friends who don't know better. I am in no groups and post nothing. Filtered out?

Now about your form:

Why would I like to work at ... whatever your company was called? You offer remote (big plus) and perhaps you pay well enough. (opens the main web page) Other reasons, no - you seem to be spammers so the only reason I'd work there is money.

Coolest things you've ever done work wise? Legit ISH but you're filtering out competent people that did their job well at a boring job. Does writing a (admittedly pretty simple) kernel driver without having access to the hardware and having it work with (i think) just one modification count?

Coolest things you've done privately? None of your bussiness.

What are your prospects, dreams or expectations, career wise? No one in their right mind will answer honestly here, they will insert some canned interview lie.

The remote question is legit, but it filters out everyone who has worked in an office and got sick of it. Only people who have worked remotely can answer something meaningful here. Expect another interview lie here.

Btw my answer is "the most challenging thing is to pry out all the information you need out of people, and you need to be proactive about that".

</comment><comment><USER3> Carefull of too much "extensive application form", it may bite you. Takes time to fill those forms and then get an automated "no thanks", can be discouraging.

Point is to reduce friction but not too much. (code this big function before applying).

I would add a salary-range too. As insanely cool the work may be, your kids/landord don't care that you're saving/changing the world.

Example: Coolest things can be in the resume, what would you like is usually the job-description/role etc, can you work remote (I already have x years remote in my resume) in same/different timezones .

Many forms double the things that already are listed in the resume (all questions taken from the form are listed in my resume).

<comment><USER4> Most companies don't care how discouraging they are to the people they don't hire.

<comment><USER5> And this is exactly why the comment above yours has value. Beat the drums and spread the message.

I mean, I suppose it's entirely possible that "most companies" are quite pleased with their hiring process and the people they have hired, and truly believe there is no one better that they could have hired. But there's a pretty good chance they could have hired someone better... not objectively, universally better, but better suited to their actual day-to-day needs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > If a person's answers are clearly inflated and their claims of > accomplishment seem exaggerated, take it as a red flag.

I'm not convinced you can tell that as well as you think you can.

> it's 99% certain that your next hire has a Facebook

If you are hiring a social media manager or SEO person (like in this article), definitely. I feel like hiring devs are often a different challenge altogether.

<comment><USER7> You'd be surprised how many people in digital marketing don't have a Facebook account. I thought I'd be shamed for never having one, but the more I talk about it, the more people I find out don't have one either

Note: I have an empty/fake account so I can access client accounts.

<comment><USER8> I'm a marketing consultant and I don't have FB. The line about "99%" of candidates having FB makes me think the author is out of touch.

<comment><USER9> Does it not mean exactly the opposite that you are becoming a dinosaur?

<comment><USER8> My teenage nieces/nephews don't have FB either, so the likely answer is "no."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You want exceptional talent, you know that they need to be "pampered" to take the job, and yet you make them fill out a form before they even talk to you? That doesn't sound like a great tactic.

In my experience the single best free tactic for vetting candidates is having them be referred by your employees. Of course you'll still have to look at them yourself like at any other candidate, but at least they have a direct reference you can talk to. If your employee is any good, chances are the people they want to work with/have previously worked with and enjoyed it are as well.

<comment><USER11> yeah. i personally struggle sometimes to answer the question "Why do you want to work for XYZ company?"

and that's because so much of why i want to work at a company boils down to the specific tasks and working conditions and the specific people i will interact with in that specific job. the overall company seems like a small factor a lot of times.

also it's hard to know much about some new, private, very small startup anyway. how much info can i really obtain about something that small and that private?

<comment><USER12> "I like to work in interesting domains on interesting problems. From the outside, it looks like this describes your company so I'd like the opportunity to talk to you and learn more about your company."

<comment><USER11> nice. yeah. i like that sentiment, that perspective. i would feel good about answering in that that way. thanks.

(for some reason, i always imagine companies want an answer like "Well, I've been dreaming about fixing bugs in billing systems for discount airline backend software since I was in the sixth grade. And since your company is the third largest discount airline backend software company in this part of Ohio, I just had to apply.")

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This form risks loosing the best candidates, for being too extensive (as @ddorian43 has noted) and requiring the candidates to dedicate a solid amount of time to formulate their answers in writing; and the best candidates don't have too much time on their hands. And it is not just the time to write the answers; the questions are quite open-ended and require the candidate to consider their inner motivation. Some candidates might even be compelled to lie when answering questions such as "What are your prospects, dreams and expectations?" because they might fear a negative reaction to the truth, which is often along the lines of "I want to be fairly compensated for my contribution".

It would be much better if they offered multiple pre-defined options, with an additional option to write in another answer; e.g. for the first question it could be something like:

        Why would you like to work at Nightwatch? (select all that apply)

            [ ] I like the product
            [ ] My skillset is a right match to the position
            [ ] I hope to learn new skills
            [ ] I am the watcher on the walls
            [ ] Other (please specify): _________________________________________

<comment><USER5> I think a useful question to ask candidates to help preserve my sanity would be:

Which word means "moving towards the state of no longer having?"

      [ ] peacing out
      [ ] lossing
      [ ] losing
      [ ] loosing

I'd probably accept #1 and #3.

<comment><USER14> What is the absolute worst?

[ ] the greengrocer's apostrophe

[ ] people willing to debate standard comma versus Oxford comma

[ ] typos not caught by spell check, because they are also valid words

[ ] a homophone or near-homophone incorrectly replacing a word that would otherwise be valid

[ ] an obvious dearth of proofreading or copy editing

<comment><USER15> CV and any kind of interview are, IMHO, subjective. You'll hire not the best for the job but the one that complies with your biases.

Empirically, I would say that the most optimized hiring strategy is: trial most, keep the better ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is just another "this is how we setup the hoops people need to jump through to get hired at our company!" article. I don't particularly think making it more difficult to fill out an application is the kind of filter you're looking for. I don't see how you are going to find "great talent" (another term that's been rendered meaningless) without looking at a Github page, sample projects, or viewing sample code. No mention even of Hacker News Who's Hiring thread!

</comment><comment><USER17> "Facebook groups are super useful because it's 99% certain that your next hire has a Facebook."

Funny, that's precisely how I filter candidates too. First question: "Did you bring your Facebook?"

<comment><USER18> > Facebook groups are super useful because [...]

I guess our visions aren't aligned then. Anyone into the sport of making money would agree that SEO is a good thing but the way you sell it to me I'd want to kill myself before I work for you guys.

Nightwatch, you produce market speak aimed towards the completely wrong tree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> _The secret of jobs is joining and targeting the right Facebook and LinkedIn groups._

Nothing about that sentence makes any sense.

Also "talents"?

</comment><comment><USER20> When I was first promoted to leading a team and tasked with hiring people, I was really scared because of the prevalence of articles and anecdotes claiming scary things like "80% of people in software can't code" or "one bad hire will destroy your team."

After a few years of doing it, I think those fears are silly and it's all a lot of overblown scare tactics to pressure us into cargo-cult adoption of what Google has done, usually through consulting firms that advise on the recruiting process or through new businesses like HackerRank, etc., that try to commoditize this fictional hiring fear.

What has worked for me is trusting recommendations from my existing team, employees in a company, or my extended network. I've also selectively reached out to specific users of GitHub, Stack Overflow, Kaggle, and other community sites. I will also travel to university recruiting fairs, professional conference recruiting fairs, and sometimes local meetups or technology groups.

I avoid opening up a job ad to the whole internet and accepting an undifferentiated stream of resumes. I avoid it _not_ because it means I have to weed out "bad coders" or some nonsense — in many cases, _most_ applicants are fully skilled enough for the job, and it's just a big lie in our industry when people whine about inability to pass FizzBuzz. It keeps the incentives aligned towards hiring hyper-competitive 22-year-olds who just spent 10 months on leetcode and end up working for a lot less money, while nobody thinks about the impact on culture, long-term design or other expertise, diversity, etc. They just want the 22-year-old leetcode jockeys to arrange them as a doll collection in open-plan seating for VCs and investors to walk by.

Instead I an internet stream of resumes because it's not cost effective to put myself in a position where I or especially engineers on my team have to scour huge piles of resumes.

I can't stress this enough. You should not open yourself up to a firehose of resumes. And adding extra filters, like coldly making candidates complete a code test before they even speak to a human about the nature of the job is just a symptom of the contortions you have to do if you open yourself up to a firehose.

Focus on improving the useful signal of the _source_ of resumes. Keep diversifying and improving this, and take on small batches of higher signal resumes.

If I could summarize what has worked efficiently for me:

\- keep job ads short and technically focused on the intended job duties

\- don't open yourself to a firehose of resumes

\- use technically probing conversation, recursively digging into really technical details of the candidates past experiences or studies

\- code tests, if used at all, should be used lightly, involve no hazing-style algorithm trivia, and candidates should have options regarding their comfort and preferences (e.g. doing it on-site vs take-home, using their editor & programming environment of choice, generous time limit, and absolutelt nothing resembling HackerRank/coderpad/whiteboard hazing nonsense).

\- Keep initial interviews short and informative.

\- Use the max over a candidate's performance in early rounds, and min in later rounds, explained below:

\- In early rounds, always have more than one interviewer to get multiple impressions, and use the _best_ candidate impression to decide to continue them to the next round.

\- in late rounds, have many interviewers and use something closer to the candidate's _worst_ session to decide on an offer, but perhaps with some careful discussion to mitigate the chance it was unrepresentative.

\- And of course _always_ give the candidate a chance to ask questions and see the facilities. I would expect a candidate to absolutely turn me down if they aren't allowed to ask questions, and why shouldn't they? Especially if my company comes across like we care more about cramming in one more trivia question than about the candidate's curiosity and preferences, frankly then _we don't deserve to hire a good candidate._

There really is such a woeful lack of _Peopleware_ -style common sense in modern tech hiring; a lack of basic humanity or empathy to such a degree that it actually hurts _business_.

<comment><USER14> So which garden hoses of resumes should I put my resume into--rather than the fire hose--if I want to be hired by a good company that follows your recommendations?

If you don't drink from the fire hose, you're accepting the intrinsic biases of the lower-flux feeds that you do use, and missing the candidates that won't necessarily know to stand exactly where you are willing to search for them.

But then, if you do disclose your sources, and everyone starts using them, those eventually increase in volume and decrease in quality as well.

The problem is still finding a method to match high-quality employee candidates with high-quality employers, without getting swamped by any low- quality parasites inserting themselves into the signal and masquerading as high-quality for individual benefit.

Why not have some of the candidates vet each other? Give everyone a random set of N partially anonymized resumes, and ask them to pick the one out of the N that they would most enjoy working with at your company.

<comment><USER20> This is very true, and if you find that for your use case, you really need that bigger fire hose, then by all means go for it. But you have to agree you're shifting different costs around.

If you go with the fire hose, you have to pay the weed-through-tons-of-resumes costs, often including build outs of application systems, standardized portals and application/interview pipelines, third-party recruiter overhead, etc.

I would argue that even if the fire hose is allowing you more access to the tail of some candidate distribution, it is not worth that cost, and in all likelihood the best candidates would be reachable through other means anyway.

In reality, many of the companies that use these big recruiting platforms designed to wrangle an internet fire hose of resumes fall into two camps (yes, an oversimplification, but often useful):

\- big corps who want a large pool of resumes solely to put downward pressure on salary -- these are the same companies that will ask you to do a 20 minute song and dance interview with someone from HR right at the start, which is nothing but pretense to ask about your salary requirements, and immediately reject you if you either won't say or say something too high. This kind of place right away communicates that engineering managers don't have the power to hire good people, only people who were cheap enough to pass the initial HR filter.

\- Places that cargo-cult copy the hiring process of other, uncommonly successful places.

When you focus on cultivating a smaller network of places to request resumes, you do pay a cost. You do immediately prevent yourself from good candidates who wouldn't just happen to be in your targeted applicant communities. But this is life. Trade-offs. Do you _know_ that this cost is worse than all the costs associated with the huge big-box applicant pipelines? I mean, people using those pipelines are still often heard griping about how hard it is to find candidates and how long it takes. My experience has been that the benefits of narrow, specialty / community focused requests for applicants work out to be a lot better overall, even if I have to endure some unpleasant costs to do it that way. No method is perfect, so you have to look at the trade- offs. And as always, your mileage may vary.

> "The problem is still finding a method to match high-quality employee > candidates with high-quality employers, without getting swamped by any low- > quality parasites inserting themselves into the signal and masquerading as > high-quality for individual benefit."

I actually really disagree with this, and I think it just perpetuates the myths about tech hiring. In reality, _very few_ applicants are "masquerading" (and, by the way, _all applicants_ are in it for individual benefit). People seriously overestimate how many applicants are "fakers" \-- especially because they will ask some asinine hazing trivia, like some useless question about esoteric data structure internals, and then when someone can't answer it perfectly in 20 minutes, they'll be declared a "faker" and the interviewer will jump on Hacker News and write some comment embellishing the situation, as if the candidate ran away in terms when asked to solve FizzBuzz, despite having 10 Ivy League degrees on their resume. It's nuts.

Few people are fakers. It's safe to assume applicants are sincere, and then technically probe them. If they can't speak with you in good technical detail about their experience or studies, it doesn't meant they are a faker, but it might mean they aren't the match for your role. Be nice to them, give them useful feedback, and move on.

But I can't even imagine how awful it must be to harbor such a cynical attitude that you need to be significantly worries about people "masquerading" during interviews. It really, truly just isn't true, not even when you _do_ use a fire hose stream of resumes.

<comment><USER14> If you disagree that fakers are a problem, then all you need to do is turn on the fire hose until your resume bucket is full, then turn it off. There will be a suitable candidate for you in there. You don't need to filter by any specific criterion, and you can rely on the random confluence of people that are looking for work just as you happen to be taking resumes.

If you don't believe the fire hose is full of unsuitable candidates, and you can't evaluate more than 100 resumes, then don't take 10000 resumes and try to filter it down to 100 with outside resources. Just take 100 resumes to start with, and go from there.

The assumption that the fire hose is filled with low-quality resumes is _intrinsic_ in your suggestion to get resumes from other sources. Everyone has pumped their resume into the big reservoir at one time or another. Not everyone has supplied--or even known about--all the various garden hoses.

If the fire hose _isn 't_ full of junk, why would anyone intentionally _not use it_?

Even if you can only evaluate 10 resumes at a time, spin the valve on the fire hose until 10 squirt out, and evaluate them. It's okay to have your search fail, because you can always spin the valve again to get 10 more. Even if your search succeeds, you can still get another 10 resumes from the fire hose. That's the whole point of having it. If people stop tapping that reservoir, the candidates go somewhere else. They stop putting resumes on Monster and go to Indeed. They stop using job sites and go to LinkedIn. They get tired of the recruiter spam on LinkedIn and go to Facebook groups. You're relying on the candidates you want to be surfing the same wave of signal-to-noise that you are, and to be fighting the same arms race of eminently-suitable-for-the-job versus oh-yeah-prove-it.

By the way, you may have misunderstood my use of masquerade. When you ask the job-seeker community for a specialist in X, then a generalist, or a specialist in Y may adjust themselves to appear to have more skill with X than they actually have. It isn't that they _can 't_ do X, but they aren't what you specifically asked for. The specifics in the job advertisement are themselves a type of filter that some people will work to defeat in order to get past the arbitrary filtering layer to the human evaluation layer.

<comment><USER20> > If you disagree that fakers are a problem, then all you need to do is turn > on the fire hose until your resume bucket is full, then turn it off.

This is wrong because you are presuming your conclusion (that fakers are the problem) already. Fakers _aren 't_ a problem, and it is _the other_ reasons for avoiding the fire hose that matter.

But generally, I would agree. If it were possible to set up big box resume submission solutions and turn them off after a little while, it would be fine. There would be many qualified candidates. It might depend on exactly what specialized skills you need if hiring for a specialized role, but generally, yeah, you collect 1000 resumes and most of them correspond to people who can do the job, or who would need modest extra training or mentoring to do it at a high level.

You collect 1000 resumes and you definitely _aren 't_ gonna get 999 "fakers", and this fact isn't really the point.

The real problem is that you can't turn off the resume fire hose when your bucket fills up, because the existence of the fire hose is a political problem. You have to deal with HR having their nose in it, meetings and policy and bureaucracy about how to choose workday or greenhouse or some slick new start-up, whether to pay retainers for recruitment firms (who also might have perverse incentives).

Most often I, as the hiring manager, have no control over resume collection if it is done through generic application portals, online careers sites, or job aggregator sites. What happens is I get a _weekly_ batch of some unreasonably large number of resumes, have to filter them myself or with my team, and then send back the approved ones to someone in HR. HR then does pre-screeners and comes back and says, "you can't hire any of those people because they all want competitive salaries" and we go again over and over, until 6 months have rolled by, my team is ready to vomit at the sight of another resume, and HR _finally_ breaks down and lets us increase the budget, and we go back to some candidate we wanted to hire from the original batch of resumes, but they got a job in the meantime, and we repeat.

Your comment seems to presume that internet scale fire hose of resumes somehow doesn't get managed by a bureaucratic HR system, but that's _never_ the case (anymore, not even in early start-ups).

You avoid the fire hose because it requires affixing a bureaucratic collection mechanism to the front that mediates how you are able to review resumes, and limits you from choosing the candidates you want.

You're right that _if you could turn on the fire hose for some time amount of time_ then you'd move through qualified candidates very fast. _But you can 't_ by the very nature of the apparatuses you are forced to use if you use an internet-wide fire hose _at all_.

> By the way, you may have misunderstood my use of masquerade. When you ask > the job-seeker community for a specialist in X, then a generalist, or a > specialist in Y may adjust themselves to appear to have more skill with X > ...

I actually think this is more of a symptom of bureaucracy as well. Companies don't usually create job ads for specialist in X, and when they do, they usually are not coherent, and the hiring filters are also not coherent. So the company creates a job ad for specialists in X, but everything about the interview and hiring process makes it impossible for specialists in X to actually get hired (from coding trivia to salary limits to impossible wishlist job ads claiming to want 10 years of experience in a technology that has only existed for 5 years, etc.)

The problem is more that the company is saying, "We define 'specialist in X' as: costs less than $150k, has 13 years of experience with data science, and is an expert with React" because they don't know what they are talking about. The job ad maybe looks like it's a data science position, so someone who would _actually_ be qualified for the job maybe has 5 years of experience in data science and no experience in React because that part is totally a mistake for whoever created the ad.

Then some pointy headed recruiter gets the application and thinks, geez this guy only has 5 years experience as a data scientist but we wanted 13, and he doesn't even have experience in React, but it says right here in the job ad they you need it! This guy is masquerading!

Anyway, it seems like we probably won't see eye to eye on it, and that's cool. I don't mind if lots of people keep cranking on big solicitations for thousands of resumes, because I can keep flying under the radar and using different techniques to find candidates.

<comment><USER14> So the fire hose is not the problem, but the fact that other people are often blocking or restricting the manner in which you access it.

You use garden hoses because you can sneak them past the fire hose monitors and connect them to a tap in your team's office. Once you have tasted the water and selected an appropriate candidate, then you can smuggle them past the gatekeepers and get them hired.

But that still leaves me with the question: if I want to get hired by you, how do I know which garden hose to use?

I have seen sane, descriptive job ads that instruct interested applicants to ignore the standard application instructions and e-mail their resume to a particular address, with a specific keyword in the subject line. That indicates a simple filtering program, perhaps with an auto-reply function, that goes to someone _not_ an HR gatekeeper. Some people out there are connecting their own garden hoses to the main reservoir, such that they control the flow rate and the filters.

If the reason you don't use the fire hose is because your own company makes it unusable, that doesn't necessarily mean that other companies--especially small ones, with maybe one part-time HR employee--will also make it unusable.

<comment><USER20> > So the fire hose is not the problem, but the fact that other people are > often blocking or restricting the manner in which you access it.

I guess it's a matter of words and it might dissolve our question, because the way I see it, "fire hose" == "people are often blocking or restricting the manner in which you access it". At least, that's what I'm trying to mean by opening yourself up to the problem of managing a fire hose of incoming resumes. The platonic ideal of a large stream of resumes that I can easily slice and dice of my own accord, in practice, doesn't exist and would be so rare as to not factor into the discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "We want the best talent at the best possible price"

What "price" range were you aiming for?

</comment><comment><USER13> And also about the "Why do you want to work for this company?" question: don't presume that I do. What I do want is learn more about you (feel free to ask me what caused that, though), and if I find you interested I might even want to work for you. But you need to sell the company first.

Companies too often assume that a) applicants know everything about them, and b) are keen to work there from the beginning. But hiring is a two-way street, and the candidates -- especially the best ones, and especially in IT -- can often afford to shop around before deciding which offer to accept.

</comment><comment><USER22> You failed selling your company to me. Your tecnique seems just another philosopher's Stone that incompetent recruiters think were capable to find out and capable to engage magically IT specialists paying less as possible. Maybe it was possible only because, engaging remote workers, you can hire people in country with low cost of living.

</comment><comment><USER23> Good English is, clearly, not one of your company's core values..

</comment><comment><USER23> There is so much talk in the tech world about equality in the work force, yet, all too often, you hear lines like "separating the wheat from the chaff" regarding job applicants. Is there maybe a more respectful way to speak about people who are less talented than others?

<comment><USER4> I think most of the talk is about increasing the number of women and non-Asian nonwhites. I've heard very little talk about being more respectful of people's humanity (whether applicants, employees, or the general public).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I fully expected to see jobs for 'Media Marketing Ninja' or 'Social Media Hacker', but the jobs listings are normal. Was not surprised to see it's an SEO company. Making the internet a better place one backlink at a time!

</comment><comment><USER25> Can't help feeling the TLDR here is "luck". Heavy survivor bias, no metrics on things that either weren't working or feedback from candidates/hires of what worked.

</comment><comment><USER26> Actual title is "fortune," not "cent"

</comment><comment><USER27> Someone fix the title plz. "Talent" is both singular and plural when referring to employees.

<comment><USER28> It's fine. You can interpret "talent" as a mass noun, in which case you wouldn't pluralise it ("There's a lot of talent here.")

Alternatively, you could use it in another sense ("He is a great talent," and "Our employees are all great talents.") Interpreting the title in this sense is slightly awkward but certainly grammatical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> artificially generate views for your blog to get more people aware of your company?

</comment><comment><USER30> Sounds like another obnoxious silicon-valley wannabe company. The kind of place that is "changing the world" one internet search at a time.

"Define your company values and mission" 90% of these are tautological marketing catch lines, anybody with a brain will be able to smell the bullsh*t on this one.

Also keep in mind that their tagline is that they "create enterprise-level search visibility tools for internet samurais of the future". Samurais - enough said.

<comment><USER31> First, I want to say I largely agree with you.

Second, I want to say that the 10% of a company's values/missions that aren't tautological marketing catch phrases are actually -incredibly- important, and can directly contribute to a company's success. The fact 90% deviate is more to do with companies not realizing how important it is to not just be marketing fluff, than any intrinsic value or lack thereof of having such a statement.

Fundamentally, a company has many decisions where they have to choose A or B, not both. Oftentimes these decisions are made at a level the CEO or similar has no insight into. To be able to ensure people make the right decisions and are all pulling in the same direction, a culture has to be adopted. Mission statements, value statements, etc, are the only tool the CEO really has to shape that culture, beyond simply hiring into the roles directly underneath him (which is hard to do without insight into what is going on beneath -them-). The Culture Code has a great segment in it about how Johnson & Johnson's credo (specifically, "We believe our first responsibility is to the doctors, nurses and patients, to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services") led to its handling of the cyanide in the tylenol incident, which saved the product line (when every analyst was like "that's done, no one will trust Tylenol again"), as well as introduced the now ubiqitous tamper proof packaging.

<comment><USER30> I'm unaware of the Johnson & Johnson example you mention, but to me a company with a "good" culture code (are they ever bad? or even different?), is like Kim Jong Un saying that North Korea is free and fair.

I'm not saying that culture doesn't exist but it exists in the decisions that are made by the people who run the companies themselves, they set the tone and precedent for how the company works and the employees take note and follow.

<comment><USER31> Yes, there are bad cultures. More commonly, there are companies without a culture. Oh, different departments may have a de facto culture, but the company as a whole doesn't have one. That's a problem. Because where a company grows and delivers value is in the alignment of very disparate concentrations and expertises. You can build the best damn software system in a given domain, but if your marketing team isn't on the same page, it will fail. And if your marketing team is awesome, but the product completely misaligns with what they're selling it as, you will see some initial success, but very quickly be disrupted or flat out fail (though if your business people are good they can possibly swarm to buy any competitors before they become a threat).

The decisions are important, yes. But the person at the top isn't making every decision. They may have the best intentions, but if somewhere down the chain of command someone is prioritizing the wrong thing, focusing on the wrong thing, but still doing their job okay, they won't be told to do differently or let go. Defining a focus allows their immediate superior to recognize they're not doing their job. It even allows their subordinate to tell the manager "Hey, our mission/values statement says X; are you sure we should be doing this?" and possibly fix it without escalating it (though if escalation is necessary, it also provides a reason to escalate it, and a reason for the superior to pay attention).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> TL;DR - Post job ads in Facebook groups.</comment>


Ask HN: Does HN search work for you? - <AUTHOR>

Looks like I can't find anything newer than 4 days old. <comment><USER2> Agree, all the most recent posts seems to be 4 days old.</comment>