My boss doesn't want to keep growing the company - <AUTHOR> So I recently had a meeting with my boss to discuss my performance and a self-evaluation form I filled out a while back. In the self evaluation form I said that a personal goal of mine is to contribute to growing the company several times larger than it currently is (we just doubled in size over 5 years, so it's doable). I listed some of the ways I would do this. I was not shy in saying that my reasoning for growing the company was to open new doors for me (think Department Head).
He read this section of my self-eval out loud, and then said "I don't want to break your heart, but doubling, tripling, quadrupling the company isn't a goal for us. We would lose a lot of the benefits we currently enjoy as a small business." I was shocked, disheartened, and now I feel like I'm working a dead-end job. Basically, his mortgage and 4 wheelers are paid off so we must be big enough.
I've designed and built so much for this company thinking the growth would continue, but this is all it's ever going to be. Has anyone got any pointers on how to navigate this situation? I don't even know why I'm posting, just really disenfranchised right now and second guessing my career choices. <comment><USER2> Your boss sounds like he has excellent points. I'm not sure I understand yours?

You mentioned nothing (here) about "why" the company needs to grow other than you seem to think you will benefit financially from it. Is that the right move for the company? It sounds like you are just trying to move toward unsustainable growth for a short-term payout. Your boss appears to be looking long term and doesn't think that's the right move.

Did you propose any real ways to make the company more money, such as a new product you could design and be an integral part to get a higher salary / bonus from that? It sounds like you just went in there and said "if we market to X more people and triple the size of our company we could make even more money!" Even though you are completely disregarding the difficulties associated with growing a company so fast... all the overhead, fixed costs, and then one bad quarter/year all the sudden you have to drop 50% of your staff etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Did you propose any real ways to make the company more money,

I did. Specifically by going to confs and trade shows and networking with potential customers and/or suppliers. We don't currently do ANY of that. We have a couple cash-cow customers that we milk for most of our revenue. We do not have our eggs in very many baskets.

> Even though you are completely disregarding the difficulties associated with > growing a company so fast...

I was brought in during a doubling where the company moved from one state to another. Growing this company and increasing it's capacity was specifically why I was hired. That focus has shifted and I'm concerned about the weaning focus on growth from management.

Like I said, a few people here got very rich very quickly and I think it's taken their eyes off of the prize.

<comment><USER2> >Like I said, a few people here got very rich very quickly and I think it's taken their eyes off of the prize.

What is the prize in your view? To grow as much as you possibly can and make as much money as you can?

Sounds like the "prize" for your boss is a stable company.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's fine. More power to him. I have to stay moving foward though. He may be happy with where he is and he should be. He earned it.

But I'm steadily arriving at the conclusion that if there's never going to be enough of this company so that I've got paid off 4-wheelers and hotrods in my driveway too; then it just isn't a good fit for me.

<comment><USER3> You work for a _life style business_ not a growth company. If you want a startup, go find one.

<comment><AUTHOR> From my interview... "...This company has been around for 50 years, but we're family owned and we're growing a lot right now. We're starting over in a new state so we're like a 50 year old startup! We've got that startup mentality..."

<comment><USER3> In my experience, any company that claims they are a "X year old startup", where X >= 10, is full of bull.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Your boss has something is stable and makes money. Why jeopardize that for growth? Growth brings a lot of problems: more people, more overhead, communication issues, process issues... Too many startups go for revenue growth and never make any profit. You see it all the time in the SaaS space.

</comment><comment><USER4> I mean, if he's the owner and that's his position, I only see a couple of obvious possibilities:

1\. Convince your boss that growing the company is a reasonable goal. Whether or not this is even possible is an open question, and then there's the question of how to accomplish that. This would probably be a complicated process, and there's no guarantee that your current boss would ever agree.

2\. Buy the company from him. If you really believe in the potential of the company, maybe you could buy it. If you don't have the money to do so handy, you might be able to find investors to go in on the venture with you. This would probably be a complicated process, and there's no guarantee that your current boss would ever agree.

3\. Quit, and go do something else. Either start a company of your own, or take a job somewhere else. This is probably the path of least resistance in some regards, but it's obviously fraught with its own dangers.

</comment><comment><USER5> Something I learned pretty quickly in building software is that no one is irreplaceable. I've seen lead developers that do literally everything walk out and never come back, and despite teething issues and an occasional lost contract, the company almost always survives.

I echo the other comments, but one thing you mentioned made me curious. You say it's an older company, but that they moved state? If that's the case, then is it possible to either move state again or to open up in another state as a satellite office? Maybe one option available for you is relocation, and to put your money where your mouth is.

Try asking your boss if he'd be open to opening another location, and giving you a goal of growing it over the space of six months to a year. If you succeed, then you continue there - if you fail, you accept redundancy.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nobody, least of all your boss, will complain if you grow the companies revenue without significantly expanding on your cost base.

I would suggest thinking of this as a challenge, see if you are up to it. Grow it in a way where your boss is not taking on additional risk from scaling up prematurely. You mention the reliance on a few key customers, on this front you can also de-risk.

Also he does sound like he has his head screwed on. Ask him for more detailed feedback. I would imagine he has looked at your plans for growth and don't see them as a good idea because of X, Y, Z. Figure out what these are and take the criticisms on board.

</comment><comment><USER7> I was in a situation similar to yours in 2012. I had worked for a small business programming and social media marketing firm. It was only the owner and myself working in the business – as well as subcontractors.

It was spoken about between the owner and I for years how we would grow the business and I would eventually become a partner.

We started at 32,000 a year, moved up to 70,000 a year, and moved up to $120,000 a year. When it was time to decide to take a contract worth several hundred thousand dollars… The owner decided not to because she didn't want to grow the business that large.

I felt as though I wasted three years of my life working for a company that had no intention of actually really furthering my career -and my livelihood.

The following month I quit and left for another business. It sucked. The whole entire process. Leaving and explaining why.

My advice is to move on and try not to focus too much on it. You did as best as you could.

</comment><comment><USER8> > Basically, his mortgage and 4 wheelers are paid off so we must be big > enough.

FYI, that sounds petulant.

Still...

Reframed as "I earnestly feel like we can be a benefit to more users and still keep the same benefits of our current size." (or something like that) while followed up with a plan to do that which demonstrates understanding of the issues involved... that's a whole different story and would likely get your boss's attention.

Though, after reading the rest of the comments I doubt even that would fly. A 50 y/o company? IMHO a single doubling was a once-in-a-generation thing. "startup mentality" does NOT a startup make.

Get the heck out of there.

For real though, growth for growths sake is the goal of cancer. Please consider "providing value to more customers" as an alternate strategy motto.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why should a company grow perpetually? This idea that every company's goal should be to take over the world is ridiculous. Let's trade, you work for my company and I'll work for yours. Your boss sounds like he's got a good head on his shoulders.

</comment><comment><USER10> Quadrupling a Wire EDM / CNC precision manufacturing business would require massive capital outlay. It sounds like a good way to achieve bankruptcy.

Your boss is right.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you see untapped potential in the company, why not just quit and start a competing company? If the company you work for is mildly successful, it sounds like there's room for more competition and for you to grab a larger share of the market if thats your goal / ambition.

<comment><AUTHOR> They are successful because they have invested a lot into automation and efficiency. We're the cleanest, greenest, _leanest_ and newest shop I've ever seen. And we do so much with so little in terms of workforce. We have a very good thing going for us. It would take probably $100m to build what they've built.

Sales, however, is not very... effective. They don't go out and look for work. We rarely get dog and pony shows. We aren't putting our name out there. We are at the mercy of our small selection of deep-pocketed customers.

We are well positioned to take a lot of larger competitors by storm in the region. Up until recently I thought that's what we were doing, but I guess I was mistaken.

However I think I'm going to have an honest and up-front conversation about where the company _is_ headed. It seems to be the most logical way forward. Really understand what the reasons are for our current direction and see if it's something I can live with. I'm comfortable if it's not going to work and I have to start looking, but it's just kind of a sad feeling. I was totally ready to fly this flag to the top.

<comment><USER11> It sounds like you work for a rather large company if it would take $100m to be as competitive as this company, yet at that valuation, it doesn't make sense that they're trying not to grow bigger then what they are, because they'd be easily wiped out if any of their large customers went to a competitor. Also, where do you exactly fit in this picture? Since you believe they can gather more business by focusing on Sales, is that where you are positioned in the company / part of your job responsibilities or is it just your gut feeling that they can be so much more? Either way, best of luck in your conversations with your boss.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

I'm IT but I assist Planning and Production Control. Our "sales team" is my boss and one other guy who's not really effective. They get paid commissions on their accounts. They do nothing to go out and get new accounts. There's a lot of low hanging fruit because nobody knows our name, yet if you do a side by side between us and most competitors we have the same capabilities with half the overhead. That's where the automation they've invested in really helps out. But when our regular customers aren't enough to fill the machines up with work I feel we have a duty to go out and fill them up with new work. My boss disagrees. I want to bring in my own contracts and grow the company that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would love to have an employee like you in my business BUT the fact is that it is not your call to determine the company's vision. The owner decides the vision and goals for a company. So perhaps you need to respect that since they don't want the extra hassle of growth and I can assure you that the more you try to grow, the more hassles you take on (I am in the middle of it right now). So yea, unfortunately your boss's visions are not aligned with yours and you cannot expect them to change that. I would say embrace it and move on accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER13> Is your goal to become a department head? Don't join a startup... three things need to go right. They grow so they need department heads, they don't need you to develop anymore and see you as the best person for the role.

Start a side business because you can slowdown at work.

Chances are a startup never grows to need a dept head. The goal is usually to stay under 20 and keep everything flat until someone buys them.

You have startups who get series financing and they grow quickly over two years and hopefully ipo. But those are not 50 year old businesses.

</comment><comment><USER14> >Basically, his mortgage and 4 wheelers are paid off so we must be big enough.

Isn't that the point?

I'm not starting side projects with a hope of growing them beyond what gives me a comfortable lifestyle.

</comment><comment><USER15> Go start your own business and grow it as large as you want. You can even be bigger than Department Head.

</comment><comment><USER16> fired him ..</comment>


Daniel Kahneman: 'What would I eliminate if I had a magic wand? Overconfidence' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/18/daniel-kahneman-books-interview <comment><USER2> Typical partial-rationality. Humans are not robots. Having an accurate picture of your own flaws and the risks involved in most endeavors will _not_ help you to perform better than having a slight overconfidence. We tends to overemphasize risks if we are made persistently aware of them. In every dynamic performance based activity, this tendency needs to be counterbalanced by a degree of irrational confidence. It's a feature, not a bug.

There are times when it is also harmful, but things like actually being able to talk to that girl, ask for that raise, close that sale, take down that oppressor...these things benefit tremendously from irrational confidence.

Removing all overconfidence would be the end of the human race.

<comment><USER3> Three paragraphs to demolish an acclaimed Nobel prize winner! Congratulations! You should be put forward for yours.

<comment><USER4> Not to be that guy, but -- you are appealing to authority, which is not a valid argument... Personally, if I had a magic wand, would probably use it on myself to cure that damn impostor syndrome and the paralyzing fear of failure. But that's just me.

<comment><USER5> Well technically, while appeal to authority may not be valid for a perfectly informed rational agent, it is something that is valid for humans for the very same reasons 'torreens advocates overconfidence is useful - namely, we don't have neither enough time nor computing power to evaluate to evaluate all available data. Authority is a useful heuristic.

<comment><USER6> An appeal to authority is never a valid argument, as it is a logical fallacy (i.e. by definition invalid).

Sure, authority can be a useful heuristic for non-authorities, but is useless in argumentative reasoning, e.g. "X, who is an authority says Y, and so [therefore] Y is true".

<comment><USER3> > An appeal to authority is never a valid argument, as it is a logical fallacy > (i.e. by definition invalid).

Jenny McCarthy and Dave Grohl's opinions on the effectiveness of vaccination are clearly as valid as my doctor's. Weighting my doctor's views above those is clearly a fallacy because debating rules.

<comment><USER6> I appreciate your sarcastic attempt to make a point via reductio ad absurdum, but as you can see the only thing I'm saying is that arguments that makes the assumption that whatever an authority figure says regarding a matter must be true (argument from authority) are never valid.

I'm not saying that expert opinions don't have merit, I'm saying that expert opinions aren't logically true _because they are uttered by experts_.

I suggest you look a little more into these "debating rules" (logical fallacies), as they are basically old-timey resoning rules; i.e. popular and intuitive arguments that don't make sense.

P.S. As I recall, the Foo Fighters were mixed up in HIV-denialism, not anti- vaccination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >"(overconfidence)is built so deeply into the structure of the mind that you couldn't change it without changing many other things".

Based on his book and other books similar I think he is referring to people using incomplete data to prove a fact and have absolute confidence in it despite a cognitive bias being at play. Just think about all the political issues we are so aure about or the anecdotal evidence we trusted about a new feature or the results of a split test.

There is a case study with horse handicappers in "the psychology of intelligence analysis" that shows the accuracy of handicapper predictions were the same whether they had 5 data points or 40...but when they had 40 their confidence in their predictions skyrocketed.

He is warning us to second guess those facts (not self esteem related) that we feel so confident in...

</comment><comment><USER8> > The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so > certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

\-- Bertrand Russell

<comment><USER9> This is a nice saying, but there are other classes of fools and fanatics who are also full of doubt. How do you know if you're any one of those?

SELECT * FROM Everyone WHERE doubt=true && (foolishness=true || fanaticism=true)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great, now where will we find 24 year olds to run Silicon Valley startups?

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting article. On overconfidence. A number of years ago, I took a graduate managerial science course. I recall an exercise: 10 questions (i.e, the moon's diameter) were asked with an numerical answer. One has to provide a range (high, low) that guarantees one is 90% correct without being overly wide in one's estimate. I think the goal was to get 6 questions correct. The class abysmally failed: answers way too narrow. The class really over-estimated their knowledge. There was more questions like this, all to demonstrate various fallacies in decision making.

That said, I recall reading a chapter in the "Black Swan" on balancing overconfidence and underconfidence.

Reading some of the comments reminded me of a quote from Bill Parcells: "Confidence is born out of demonstrated ability."

</comment><comment><USER12> That's odd. Owning a magic want would give me a lot of confidence. It's magic!!!

<comment><USER13> Overconfidence is confidence above your ability to actually deliver. You pretty much can't get overconfident in a magic wand, it's magic.

<comment><USER14> You can get overconfident in your ability to use it - gotta save those charges for when they really count man.

<comment><USER15> Yeah but you can always repeatedly (z)ap it when it's out of charges to wrest one last charge.

<comment><USER12> Now you tell me. DAMMIT!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Human's emotions are connected in constellations.

Overconfidence has its evolutionary story. For example, with a little overconfidence, you can take risk to start up. You have to be a bit delusional to aim high. And it doesn't sound bad to me.

<comment><USER17> It is about mating mostly.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> TL; DR: Nobody can really know, and it's all just held together by hope, in spite of evidence to the contrary.

That's a nice change from the "we tell you how to succeed" methodologies for the impatient.

Heidegger was wrong. Not even a god can save us.

<comment><USER19> You know, the world keeps turning and civilization keeps running on a daily basis. All of that is pretty solid evidence that we're a lot less cognitively crippled than we think we are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Overconfidence can only be defined in hindsight, therefore avoiding overconfidence cannot be a guide for decision making.

</comment><comment><USER21> It's always in others. Never in us.

<comment><USER22> As the smartest man on Earth, I concur the problem is with you all. Goddamn blind people, when will you see my genius already, I need money for a Lamborghini. Don't make me work for it. And I see your doubt, and I raise the card 'Self-reliance' by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self- Reliance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Reliance)

[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Essays:_First_Series/Self- Rel...](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Essays:_First_Series/Self-Reliance)

For certain, it is beautiful. Reason, it's overrated, it makes people all mean.

"Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say `I think,' `I am,' but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence."

Sounds like me

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> That means 2/3 of HN.

</comment><comment><USER23> I would replace the term "Nobel Price in Economics", with "Nobel Memorial price of Economics" or "Fake Nobel Price" for short in any publication.

<comment><USER24> Obama got a Nobel Price despite Guatanamo and Drone Murders, so i think the price's value isn't that high anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Nobel prize in Economics" = "Swedish Bank Prize in Economics".

It's ridiculous when some financiers get together to legitimize their field, co-opt the brand of another prestigious award, and everything just accepts it.

<comment><USER26> I think Daniel Kahneman is the wrong guy to start with this argument.</comment></comment>


Facebook was Caught Secretly Deleting Mark Zuckerberg's Sent Messages - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-to-let-users-unsend-messages-after-mark-zuckerberg-caught-2018-4 <comment><USER2> Yesterday:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16770818](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16770818)

</comment><comment><USER3> I mean come on, let's not be coy here: Mark Zuckerberg literally can access and manipulate any Facebook data he wants. That's kind of his entire MO.

<comment><USER4> If you said this about Jeff Bezos and data on AWS, you'd be wrong. That's a bit apples-to-oranges, but what I mean is being an executive in a company does not entail access to customer data retained by the company.

I don't expect Facebook to be a good data steward, but they certainly could be. Not to AWS's extent (Facebook can't turn a profit without reading your unencrypted content, currently), but to a minimal extent at least...

Then again, whose trust are they trying to earn?

<comment><USER3> Sure, but AWS makes money from being paid to host data securely. Facebook and other social networks make money by selling your data, so it inherently comes with an amount of transparency to function as a marketable product.

<comment><USER4> I agree completely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Did FB really think it was going to remain a secret? "Unsending" messages that have already been read by the recipient is difficult to hide, and especially when you're the CEO of FB one of those past recipients is going to pick up on it pretty quickly.

Either FB knew and does not care, or their PR folks are completely incompetent (or in the dark), or hubris at the highest levels.

<comment><USER6> Third option: Zuckerberg said, "just fucking do it," and they just fucking did it. Total control is very much a double edged sword, especially when the person in control seems to have only a tenuous grasp of human nature.

<comment> well-here-we Or lawyers made the decision as part of their "document retention" policy, and no one spent much time thinking about the repercussions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What exactly is the problem here? Why _shouldn 't_ the CEO of a company have special capabilities? He owns it after all.

You'll be outraged to learn restaurant owners often make things for themselves that's not on the menu.

<comment><USER8> So your bank manager can dip into your account?

<comment><USER9> Your bank could put a line at the top of your statement that reads:

SPECIAL HAPPY NEW YEAR MESSAGE FROM FACEBANK $0.00

and then come February they realise they look pretty stupid so they take it out of the statement (web page). No one would care too much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> OK, I would have done it too. This is a 0.01 on a 1-10 scale. Messages over the years, at 2am or 1pm can be taken out of context and so on and here you have one of the richest people on earth. Of course he could've said "my assistants wrote it" but un-sending does not do much bad to the receiver.

<comment><USER11> Can't they just claim it's an upcoming feature they are testing internally before release, that will be rolled out soon?

<comment><USER12> irony: [http://nordic.businessinsider.com/facebook-delete-sent- messa...](http://nordic.businessinsider.com/facebook-delete-sent-messages- enable-harassment-2018-4/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I really want there to be a simple benign explanation for this. Like, maybe this is a new privacy-first feature, and Zuck was simply dogfooding it internally, just like with every feature before it gets rolled out.

</comment><comment><USER14> "That wasn't Zuck abusing his power! That was, er, a new feature we were going to implement!"

Uh huh. Sure, Facebook. And you call them "steamed hams" despite the fact that they are obviously grilled.

</comment><comment><USER15> Is it possible this violates Facebook's consent decree? If they need opt in consent to _share_ information, and need to _actually_ delete information when requested, it would logically follow that _deleting_ information without a user's consent is not kosher.

</comment><comment><USER16> Repost. Also, more dead horse beating?

<comment><USER17> Right now someone, somewhere, is complaining that "the media" has ignored this very event.</comment></comment>


The economics of building a factory in Brooklyn to be near the cool kids - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/10/13/the-economics-of-building-a-factory-in-brooklyn-to-be-near-the-cool-kids/

<comment><USER2> _The final decision turned on a simple calculation: MakerBot wanted its production line close to its engineers, and its engineers wanted to live in Brooklyn. Working out bugs in a factory halfway around the world would be cumbersome, MakerBot executives decided._

I can definitely see that from a risk-management perspective, especially for a small startup, and one that doesn't have its production process nailed down solid yet. A ton of Kickstartered physical-product projects end up sinking by trying to manufacture in China. Admittedly some just don't have the first clue of what they're doing, but some also get done in by the large latencies, and the remoteness/opaqueness of the manufacturing side to the engineering team (which then leads to difficulty in debugging or iterating).</comment>


This Game of Thrones climate model is what's been missing from your life - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/12/there-is-now-a-climate-model-of-the-world-of-game-of-thrones/ <comment><USER2> Actual Abstract:

[http://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2017/december/climate-game- of-...](http://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2017/december/climate-game-of- thrones-.html)

Actual (Mock) Article:

[https://www.paleo.bristol.ac.uk/~ggdjl/westeros/game_thrones...](https://www.paleo.bristol.ac.uk/~ggdjl/westeros/game_thrones_1.0.pdf)

This is pretty fun. I hope they explain the weird seasons in the series. I'm sure in the fantasy world it will have to relate to the magic and the children and all that. And I'm sure it will be totally different in the books, if RR Martin ever gets around to actually finishing them.</comment>


Goiânia Accident - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident <comment><USER2> Also see the International Atomic Agency's report on the accident (linked from the wikipedia article):

[https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub815_web.pd...](https://www- pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub815_web.pdf)

It's a heart wrenching story. The guys who caused the accident were scavenging for scrap- pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel to bring their families money. On that day, they brought death to their families- death in the form of an enchantingly blue-glowing powder that their kids played with and put on their skin like glitter. These people didn't know anything about radioactivity. They couldn't have imagined what they brought into their homes. They never had a chance.

</comment><comment><USER3> The movie "Césio 137 - o pesadelo de goiânia" is a well done dramatization of the tragedy.</comment>


This Could Be HUGE Celebrates MofM - 1,690.30% growth - <AUTHOR> http://blog.thiscouldbehuge.com/post/64362345/why-all-the-celebration ThisCouldBeHUGE.com celebrates month over month growth of 1,690.30% <comment><AUTHOR> Not to shabby of a stat, they deserved a mention.</comment>


PHP: Cracks in the foundation - <AUTHOR> http://phpadvent.org/2011/cracks-in-the-foundation-by-gwynne-raskind

<comment><USER2> I was at conference recently talking to a group of "developers" and one finally asked, so what kind of language requirements do you have of the people you hire. I answered that I don't really have any requirements of the specific language. They all looked at each other and nodded, oh, so you must not be too advanced as you are not looking for people with experience in new advanced languages. I was a little surprised because I was thinking the EXACT opposite. I work with _developers_. I don't really give a shit what syntax they prefer of are used to. If you can create your own framework error handling, message queues, custom db libs, etc then that is useful. A real dev can pick up a new language and syntax in a week, so just because you can write hello world in 10 languages or use some rails ORM to output some stuff does not make you a developer.

It's all starting to take me back to my youth watching Robotech and remembering the Zentradi, an advanced race with awesome technology and tools that were developed for them generations ago, but none of the understood how any of it worked or how to fix it, they could only use it. If it broke, they just start over with a new copy instead of debugging it. I hope that the our new generation wont end up like that.

I recently interviewed a recent CS grad that had no idea of the correlation of array of characters and pointers to those characters. You know that it's all just addresses to memory, right?

Anyway, of course there are those who truly dissect and get all the languages and their benefits but are few and between.

Give me a dev that "gets it" in one language any day, instead of someone who thinks remembering the function call or some syntax in 10 languages is of value.

If I hire someone here is how I rank them... 1\. 5 years experience in C 2\. 5 years experience in PHP 3\. 5 years experience in Rails 4\. 5 years experience in Rails, Python, erlang, java, php, c, other languages dujour.

Ok, there are people that are just picking up PHP and don't know squat, but at least they know they are beginners and are teachable.

<comment><USER3> > A real dev can pick up a new language and syntax in a week

No, that's complete bull. A real dev can pick up syntax in a week (or a day), but integrating concepts and techniques he's never seen so far and building up new instincts which correctly fit the new language, that does not happen in a week unless the guy is in the "genius" category.

What you really have after a week is a guy who writes $previous_language code in a new syntax. In the way "Real Programmers" can write Fortran in any language.

<comment><USER4> It does depend which other languages they've previously been exposed to. I'd argue that once you've seen Haskell, common lisp, APL and Forth, there aren't many new concepts that any language is going to throw at you that you can't relate back to something you've seen before. It doesn't take a genius to get that much exposure, just curiosity, patience and time.

<comment><USER5> So far in my limited experience the rule still holds: If you drop a Haskell programmer into Blub they may well try to write Haskell-flavored Blub for a while. I've seen it happen.

I think you're misapprehending the problem. It's not that Haskell programmers can't _understand the structure_ of Blub. Gods, no. It's that it takes time and tolerance to be able to immerse oneself in the Blub _culture_. Blub has its way of doing things, much of which is more accidental than logical, and alas, much of what passes for colloquial Blub is probably stuff that Haskell was specifically designed to avoid like the plague. There's an initial tendency to either run around waving one's arms like Jeremiah, trying to convert the Blub programmers to the side of Light, or to take to drink in despair at the sheer Rabelaisian sloppiness of the Blub universe. To work through this takes time, and possibly therapy.

It's like anthropology. It's one thing to be a linguist and work your way through library books about the syntactic structure of a family of languages from New Guinea, but it's another thing to be airdropped into New Guinea itself, insinuate yourself into a local village, pray you don't die of any tropical diseases, learn which compliments in your native language are actually mortal insults in your new host culture, try to laugh along with the natives when they convince you to lean against a tree filled with stinging ants, and simulate exquisite happiness when your host offers up a delicious sample of the local insects. It's a cultural problem. Not everyone is up for that experience. One may have to work through a certain amount of shock.

<comment><USER6> I agree it's largely culture, but I think there are some technical issues that go with the culture as well (which are sometimes the reason for some cultural elements). Even someone who solidly understands OOP, for example, may not know all the many _specific_ gotchas and possible pain points of C++ if they haven't written a lot of it, and some of the cultural conventions common in C++-land were developed because of awareness of those gotchas, and in an attempt to minimize them. C++ is probably a limit case because it's so large and has so many interacting features that there's a lot of accidental complexity, so just knowing the PLs concepts only takes you so far, but I think many languages have some similar things.

Heck, even ye olde C has a whole litany of detailed spec edge cases you need to know about if you want to understand the finer points and avoid some nasty pitfalls (and an even bigger list if you go to C+POSIX).

<comment><USER5> Oh, I agree, and we're actually talking about the same thing. We're just defining the word _culture_ with different scopes. My scope was, approximately, "anything about C++ that you really need to know to write idiomatic C++ code and interact productively with your C++ coworkers and community, but which you didn't learn from that _Introduction to C++ for Lisp Nerds_ book that you skimmed last weekend."

Clearly not a hard-and-fast definition. The more "proper" scope of the word _culture_ is, of course, ultimately a giant philosophical issue which I intend to blithely handwave away. ;)

(I suppose one could try to argue that _all_ of C++ is a cultural artifact, and C and assembly for that matter, but sooner or later you'll reach the Turing machine, which if you chip away at it you'll soon discover is just the tip of an iceberg which consists of _all of mathematics_ , and then folks like _Plato_ will turn up on the battlefield looking for a fight and holy cow, look at the time, gotta run.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > PHP, being a language intended for beginners,

I've never heard this before. PHP is certainly very easily picked up by beginners, and in my own opinion makes it easy for said beginners to spend years and years not moving very far beyond beginner-level architectural patterns (just look at the source of Wordpress for an example), but do the creators of PHP really consider it to be "a language for beginners" ?

I have an entirely selfish agenda here. The next time some know-nothing manager promises his client "we have the top programmers with years of experience who will write the highest quality code you can get", then demands that we do everything in PHP because that's all he knows, we can say, "really? You're going to charge the client all that money, then give the client an app written in a "beginner" programming language ?"

<comment><USER8> Personally I think there are better languages for beginners than PHP. I think Javascript, Perl, Python, and more are fundamentally better in this regard. There are some fundamental, lexical problems with PHP in this regard. I think by a "language intended for beginners" I think it is meant as "a language intended to allow HTML/SGML authors to cross over into programming."

PHP is in essence a fairly narrow tool, much like a chasing hammer (which really isn't that good for driving nails but is extremely important in some kinds of metal work). It is a preprocessor for SGML files (and this is why all programming logic is typically put in SGML PI tags). I call it a "templating system turned on its head" because whatever you do with PHP, every file is lexically part of the template even those which have no other SGML tags other than the PI tag which is indicating programming logic.

But what this means is it works very well in its own specific domain (namely preprocessing HTML, XML, and other SGML files), but degrades quite a bit as one gets out of this area. This limits code reuse basically to web apps (yes, I know you can write GTK apps in PHP, but really? why on earth would you want to?) and thus locks one into essentially one set of technologies. So there are drawbacks as well as advantages.

<comment><USER5> PHP is _indeed_ a "templating system turned on its head" (according to second- hand reports from a talk by Rasmus Lerdorf, PHP was originally designed as a bare-bones templating system for C programmers, but then more and more stuff migrated into the templating system...). And it is, indeed (or was, anyway) tied strongly to a single domain, and a limited set of architectural patterns.

But every design choice cuts both ways. These features are not merely drawbacks. These are PHP's _strengths_ , the things that make it so delicious for "HTML authors who need to cross over into programming".

You can learn PHP with Google. My understanding is that most people do. [1] Just Google all your problems and up will pop some code that you can mimic. This works because, to first order, _all PHP code is solving the same problem in the same way_. You will probably not accidentally Google up some PHP-based physics simulation. You will probably not Google up some PHP code used by sysadmins to parse the output of pipes on the command line. You will certainly not Google up any PHP-based graphics algorithms or device drivers or client- side DOM manipulations or Android system functions. No, when you Google "how to do X in PHP" you'll get some code that you can paste into a template with a .php extension and then execute on your cheap shared host. Until fairly recently there wasn't even any danger of encountering object-oriented PHP.

You can argue that programmers trained in this way are useless for anything but cobbling together Web pages, and you're right, but 90% of them don't care. Web pages are a killer app. People build whole businesses out of cheesy web pages.

My suspicion is that many PHP tinkerers don't want more "architectural flexibility"; that translates into "decisions that we have to make but don't know how to make", "knobs that we have to set carefully but which we don't even know how to turn", and "oodles of online documentation for use cases that we don't have, which chaffs up the search results for the use cases that we do have."

The irony, of course, is that PHP's maintainers have been hard at work bolting features from other languages onto PHP, which as a side effect threatens to destroy the narrow domain-specificity that was its most unique feature. [2] Objects, namespaces, closures have all been welded onto the superstructure. One wonders what happens next. Maybe the folks who embrace all these things will drag the entire PHP community closer to Java, Python, Ruby, or some oddball superposition of these things. But I think it more likely that the community will continue to balkanize, with the bulk of users rejecting all these transplants but certain segments embracing one or another of them.

\---

[1] I learned PHP via reading and hacking on Drupal modules, which is a much better plan, but also definitely not the beginner-friendly choice. Drupal has a steep learning curve.

[2] Though don't blame the maintainers too much: These features are in fact in demand, from the people who took up PHP without realizing that it was a narrow domain-specific language and pushed it right up to the limits of the available hacks.

<comment><USER8> Completely agreed. Hence the chasing hammer metaphor. You wouldn't use a chasing hammer to drive nails, but you wouldn't use a carpenter's hammer for chasing either. These are strengths, but they ensure that PHP is a relatively specialized tool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This list seems a bit tired.

There are a couple of things in here that are actual issues, but they seem small in scope, and easy to work around.

As for the is_a changes, I think it's probably for the better, as they say, you have to break some eggs to make an omlette. Also, the article first complains about not having Unit Tests to catch this, and then later complains about it being ignored on release. Ultimately unit tests are great for refactoring, but when code is actually being changed, some sort of process needs to be followed for that (dictatorship, consensus building, anarchy?)

I program in PHP, and we don't depend on too many outside libraries. And for cases where we do, we will simply fix these issues.

It used to be that upgrading PHP was much 'easier' to do, meaning you'd just go out and do it, and would hardly breaking anything (at least in my experience). However lately it seems that the risk is higher. However I welcome this, because it means the language is progressing and we're getting a lot of additional things. For all the projects I've worked on, we make sure the code works with that version of PHP. Unit/integration/regression/selenium/using it on development for awhile/whatever are all valid things to do, if you have issues you fix them and move on.

5.3 was great, excited for 5.4 with traits as well. It's a great time to be writing PHP.

<comment><USER9> The array/sorting things are sometimes just things developers will have to deal with until someone makes new methods and deprecates the old ones.

I used to think that the code base needed to be perfect, no extra cruft, only code that's necessary, switch parameter order just to make things match. However in doing so it adds a tremendous amount of pain and risk. My OCD does't want to handle it, and it's always good to strive to get to that point, but ultimately nothing is perfect, so might as well deal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> PHP has already proven itself time and time again. There are lots of high- traffic websites running PHP successfully. Yes, it's easy to make a simple script and get it running fast, but you can also engineer complex OO applications.

One of the reasons I've stayed away from things like rails is because it puts too many layers on top of things like the database.

I've known a few developers that use Django or Rails and have no idea how things work underneath. This is a disadvantage. Especially if you need to do something like optimize a database query and to do so, you have to actually change the framework that maps SQL to an object.

<comment><USER11> The problem with your statement is the equivalent developer is extremely common in the PHP world. There's tons of people who hack on WordPress or Drupal and 'have no idea how things work underneath'. It's probably the majority of people with "PHP" on their resume.

<comment><USER12> I call bullshit on your Drupal FUD. You can't code effectively for Drupal without a robust grasp on basic PHP, SQL and the Drupal suite of hooks. You better have some serious OO chops too or integration with stuff like Views is going to eat your face.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, but mainly because Drupal is a pile. CCK & custom forms seems about four times more complicated than just doing it in raw PHP. So that is not necessarily taking anything away from the intelligence of the developers, only pointing out they are coding against the abstraction, not the plumbing.

Still I'd bet the majority of 'Drupal developers' are just folks who know what the right modules are & some customization tricks.

<comment><USER12> "Still I'd bet the majority of 'Drupal developers' are just folks who know what the right modules are & some customization tricks."

My anecdotal evidence based on five years of working with the CMS indicates you'd lose that bet, but whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Learning PHP is how I got into web programming, and for that I'll be eternally grateful. Since starting to explore languages like Ruby and Python however, I've been reluctant to use PHP in situations where others are an option, so I'm really glad to hear things are picking up in PHP's development—it can only mean good things for the development community.

</comment><comment><USER14> But it can be fixed. Rather than specify a grammer in BISON and generating C code, write your parser as a recursive descent parser. Then add some annotations and auto-generate grammar files from the C code.

This is the same principle as generating document using DOXYGEN, the closer the annotation is to the code, the more chance there is of the annotation being correct.

Also, its something you can incrementally.

</comment><comment><USER15> I havent developed in php in years, but here is my tale on it from my current point of view.

Of this whole article the one thing that jumped out at me was "broken and ignored tests". Being an open source developer myself, I greatly value the tests in every open source project. Nevermind the fact that this is PHP which warrants the use of tests even further because of the various points the author makes.

I hope that going forward the maintainers of the PHP core ensure that every bug fix has a passing unit test along with it. That would at least keep the dam holding back the flood intact.

<comment><USER16> Adding tests for bug fixes doesnt necessarily help when your code is in that state. I think you are better off looking for coverage on tests, and trying to write specs eg formalize the parser as mentioned. Probably a lot of tests now are from previous bugs, but the code has drifted and they have not been maintained.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is it time for software developers/engineers to unionize? - <AUTHOR> I've seen an increasing number of HN posts on the subject of how software developers/engineers are almost universally underpaid relative to the value they bring. The collusion between Apple, Google and others to keep salaries down and block poaching suggests that this is a systemic problem. There are sites out there like Glassdoor that offer some transparency -- but for the most part this industry is very opaque. The average software developer/engineer is left with only anecdotal information to gauge their value in zsalary negotiations.<p>So my question for HN is this: Would software developers/engineers benefit from a union? From a collective bargaining standpoint, would a union give software developers/engineers a leg to stand on? What would the backlash be from the tech industry if developers/engineers unionized in large numbers?. <comment><USER2> Hell no.

Unions serve a big need when employers exploit employees in a detrimental way. They did great things to expectations about safety on the job, number of work hours, ageism.

In tech, we get paid better than most of the population, perks are expected and provided, and equity sharing makes some people rich. Yes, you could maybe get paid more if there was a union restricting labor supply, which is how they work, but it would really suck to have union seniority rules or have union say in who works where. It limits freedom for both employers and employees once the important items like job safety have been addressed. Union negotiations go both ways; the employer agrees to something, the union makes you agree to something by proxy in return. You may not like what the union forces you to do.

<comment><USER3> > Unions serve a big need when employers exploit employees in a detrimental > way

Like for example when the biggest companies, Google Facebook Apple and all others in California agreed to not give wage increases to employees who would be looking to switch employers?

Was it in the ten thousands per year difference in average salary?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd hate to be stuck in a Union where what I'm paid is based on my seniority or on some test they come up with to measure my ability. I like being able to negotiate my salary. Unions may initially bring us higher wages but the combination of union dues, corruption, and bureaucratization of our field by unions will ruin it. Soon you wont be able to develop unless you're part of a union and have done your mandatory 3 years apprenticeship if we go that path.

I don't want to be the next automotive industry.

<comment><USER5> As food for thought, could the coding schools be creating exactly that? (While from another perspective, they create an avenue of home-grown employment for displaced workers in an economy where entire sectors have disappeared.)

Also consider consulting shops that adhere rigidly to specific development tools and practices, including hiring only compliant developers for customers, post-engagement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My wife is a registered nurse, so she's a union employee. While it is nice to have someone negotiate on your behalf and represent you when you have a dispute, it certainly doesn't help with salary negotiations. You can't switch hospitals to get a higher salary because it is a formula based on education plus years experience. As an engineer, I have tripled my salary over the last 5 years by switching companies and being a good negotiator. A union would have just gotten in the way. Developers need to learn their true value and negotiate accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER7> My understanding of unions has been that they work through the restriction of the supply of their labor. I haven't thought about it for very long, but it seems to me that the union's success is contingent on its being able to prevent other companies from hiring developers unless they hire only union- certified employees. I am doubtful this can happen.

I think that a semi-successful union would hamper the success of smaller companies by demanding that they hire only certified, highly-paid engineers. These engineers can only work a certain number of hours, use certain languages, etc. (Assuming such conditions can be enforced in the first place, with so many available employers in the market).

These conditions seem to me difficult for many organizations to accommodate. Thus, my thinking is that a semi-successful union would trigger software boot camps like App Academy to attempt to "break" the union by increasing available supply. The union would then fail. Collusion between Apple, Google, and other companies to hold down salaries only succeeds if there is no "spoiler". Facebook turned out to be a spoiler, and they benefitted greatly from it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yes - despite the bleating about unions from people who I can only assume have never had to fight exploitation and unfair practices, unions are one of the only ways that you as an employee can adequately defend yourself from bad employers AND bad employees.

Yes, software developers are generally paid well and if you can earn the respect of your peers, you're usually treated pretty well too. However, the industry is rife with horror stories about sexism, over-working, burnout, family disruption, harassment and abuse - not to mention the ridiculous burdens placed on developers who are also expected to be on call 24/7, manage the company's IT infrastructure, and generally do whatever the hell their superior demands at a moment's notice.

For a privileged segment of the industry, there is no problem - but that is by no means representative of the whole. Software mills churn out shitty software and treat their employees with the same respect they give to quality and professionalism.

Being part of a union gives you the numbers required to do meaningful damage to a company which doesn't treat you right. As always, a balance must be struck between the strength of the employer and the strength of the union(s), but for many in this industry, it's currently a losing battle. More and more demands every year, but fuck you if you want to be treated better.

Don't delude yourselves into thinking that being part of a union is only about money. If you ever have to work ridiculous hours, not see your kids or your partner, suffer from lack of sleep, do things outside of your job spec, and generally just feel like you're being taken advantage of, then the reason for this is that YOU ARE INTERCHANGEABLE. You're not a special little snowflake just because you're pretty darn up to date with the latest technical shizzle- wizzle you read about on HN. You may be technically very proficient, but then so are a lot of your peers, and there's no shortage of developers out there.

This may be a highly skilled industry, but it's also one with a very low barrier to entry and a shit-load of people producing OK work at a fraction of the cost of your salary. You're not immune to abuse just because you're good at what you do.

<comment><USER9> You'll find it easier to persuade people in life if you can resist making the first thing to come out of your mouth an insult comparing them to bleating sheep.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps it was a little too strong, apologies. I've just had this conversation far too many times and much of the opposition to unionisation is of the ridiculously simplistic 'why don't you just leave and find a different job?' kind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Unions seem to offer the most benefits to industries where workers' skills are commodity -- a factory worker can fairly quickly be replaced by someone else who can assemble equipment. A bus driver can be replaced by someone who else with the proper license.

Using this constant threat of replacement -- "there's someone waiting to take your job and happy to do it for less if you complain" \-- management can hold back wages and take advantage of employees. Hence, the union fights for things like standardized salaries and tenure and so on.

Good developers/engineers aren't easily replaceable. As much as outsourcers and body shops want managers to believe you can just tell any developer what to do build and you will always get the same result, we all know that one bad developer can ruin a project and a great developer is often worth way more than 10 mediocre ones.

So as long as developers are being valued individually for the skills they bring to an organization, it's better for them to negotiate individually rather than bargain collectively.

<comment><USER11> Right, there is currently no upside for individual developers to unionize because there is massive demand and low barriers to entry.

What unionizing would do is create a quality floor for development, which would be good for businesses but less immediately beneficial for individual developers.

Until barriers rise or the market is completely flooded with good developers, thus causing wages to plummet, unionization won't happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There already is one [1], it just has no power because no one joins it. People forget the requirement of unions where it's member/non-member ratio is at an equilibrium where employers are compelled to negotiate with the union.

Every time I have ever seen this issue come up, the loudest voices in the community are vehemently against it.

The argument goes that software engineers are too creative and valuable to simply be replaced like so many union workers. See thread here: [http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/9481/are- ther...](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/9481/are-there-any- unions-for-software-developers)

I think the real answer is that the ethos/personality/philosophy of a large swath of software engineers does not jive with collective organization. Also the market is such that developers are on the top of the pile and thus do not need to organize.

[1] [http://www.iww.org/unions/dept500/iu560](http://www.iww.org/unions/dept500/iu560)

<comment><USER12> Wouldn't athletes unions or actors unions be a counter-example to the too creative/valuable argument?

<comment><USER13> If software was mostly contract work then yes. Unions for athletes and actors provide an underlying stability (health care, retirement benefits etc...) since the average career length and stability in these professions is low.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So, I'm all for unionizing, but let's be particularly careful about _why_ we might want to do such a thing.

Is it because of job security? _No_. There's nothing worse in the world then being "secure" at a job working on a codebase you hate--every day, seeing the madness and pointless mud piling up and piling up. In many cases, the company and culture is worse off if you can't readjust teams to retain the people who fit and let go the people who want (or need) gone.

Is it because of wages? _Somewhat_. As programmers, we shoulder a disproportionate part of the responsibility for delivering value to customers and if we do it properly we end up with a product that scales with little intervention. Accordingly, we should reap a better share of the long-term profits. At the same time, even if you aren't in vastly over-inflated talent markets as on the coasts, we generally aren't paid too badly--unless you are in a town were the profession isn't respected, in which case you are getting shafted repeatedly.

Is it because of work conditions? _Yes_. We work a very sedentary job. Many shops expect/require bullshit-long hours and at weird times, and few promote life/balance with anything more than a wink and a nod. There is a large amount of stress involved with our work, especially as deadlines draw near or as code rot becomes apparent. Cognitive dissonance is great, because we aren't allowed to lie to ourselves about reality: we can't, because computers don't deal in lies. Bad code is bad, sales features promised don't exist unless there's code backing them up.

Is it because of professionalism? _Yes_. I can pick a "programmer" out of a set of 100, even from a good school or respected company, and still fin glaring omissions in what they know and how they practice. There's no quality control in what people describing themselves as software engineers or programmers know, and so hiring becomes annoying. This in turn makes the market screwy.

~

A full-blown union would be of questionable utility--I sure as fuck don't want to give any of my paycheck to yet another bureaucracy claiming to represent me well. That said, there may be a good argument for a professional body similar to the ASME or IEEE.

</comment><comment><USER15> Unions may not be practical because of globalization and virtual workforce. What would be interesting though is agents.

Kind of like recruiters, but overall a more serious and professional bunch, for instance, you need to become certified/accredited in some way to be a "programmer agent".

They get paid, not like recruiters today. They negotiate on your behalf, they are _your_ advocate in negotiations with the employer, and they get a standard 10% of your yearly salary.

You don't talk money _at all_ , they negotiate your deal. Also they could act as your career adviser. Their interest would be a long-term relationship, and in your advancement, which may work better than in say sports or entertainment where the career lifespan is shorter.

</comment><comment><USER12> Here are some thoughts on what unions might be useful to fix:

Agesism in tech

Non payment for employees or contractors

Protect programmers refusing tasks on ethical grounds

Establish ethical standards

What other problems have we not been able to solve so far?

<comment><USER16> No vacation time, no overtime pay, unreasonable working hours, and so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > I've seen an increasing number of HN posts on the subject of how software > developers/engineers are almost universally underpaid relative to the value > they bring.

Examples?

</comment><comment><USER18> Working for the Public Health Sector, I am yet to see any advantages to being unionized (beyond a few additional health benefits), so far I've pretty much only seen drawbacks. My salary is far lower than most people on here (mind you, I was aware of this going in), getting an actual pay-rise is near- impossible, but by far the worst is how everybody is put in the same basket, and I can't emphasize this enough.

The work conditions (and associated politics) reach ridiculous levels, particularly since the union (which I was forced to join...) seems to only be concerned with the clinical side of things, of which I take absolutely no direct part in. So for instance, I won't be allowed to work remotely, because "it may affect patient care"... > I'm a programmer.

So as far as developers/engineers are concerned, I would say no to unions.

PS: I'm aware the public sector is a bit of a different beast (I worked in the private sector for a long time before that), but I think the point remains.

</comment><comment><USER19> Man, this just smacks of entitlement. Software engineers are one of the highest paid professions in the world - FAR more than the average job, and the job is consistently ranked among the best jobs in the world in nearly every list made. Not only do we typically get higher base pay, we often get much nicer perks like catered lunches, remote (telecommute) working, shares of companies to share in the upside etc.

If you are feeling underpaid, there are probably many other companies you could work at who are actively hiring that will probably pay you more. The collusion cases you cited are rare, and have only been discovered at the largest tech firms like Apple and Google - who by the way most certainly have more software engineers on the north side of six figures than not.

If you are a software developer, now is not the time to unionize. Now is the time to enjoy this while it lasts, as make as much money as possible. It won't last forever.

</comment><comment><USER20> The problem is: We programmers choose to stick to the companies run by money crazy people who don't care about us. It's a choice we make. We want to feel safe, love to see payment coming to our bank accounts every week. Problem is in us, not in the people who run the business - most of them have no respect for developers. We all need to be brave, make better choices, refuse to be slaves, search for better options - isn't it what we Engineers are supposed to do? If we start leaving companies who don't treat programmers well, eventually they'll realize the fact. It's already happening..... more developers are doing start-ups, more people are doing freelancing..... Finally, NO UNIONS please..... we enjoy solving problems, we enjoy programming, Money comes second.....

</comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if a union could prevent white-board interviews. Perhaps a working professional organization could pre-qualify programmers.

I don't think CPA's or lawyers have to do whiteboard interviews.

</comment><comment><USER21> No it is not. The IT sector is one of the highest paid in the world, and there are so much possibilities to choose from, that no agreement between Google, Apple, Microsoft or any other can keep the salaries low, which they are not.

When going the union way your give some of your freedom. You don't have freedom to negotiate everything yourself on your own terms based on your own needs, knowledge and value. No one knows better than you what your needs are.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think it would be easier for developers to just form small companies. All the advantages of a union with none of the disadvantages.

</comment><comment><USER23> I feel that programmers are compensated pretty well for what they do, especially in the US. I certainly don't feel underpaid personally, and it's hard for me to imagine unions improving my wages when they're already quite good. I also think unions would cause my workplace to become 'stiffer' and less pleasant to work for.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's a good discussion to have, and while I think there is need for added transparency, I think the 'Union' solution is old-fashioned, maybe even inapplicable. As you already mention, Glassdoor is part of that step

</comment><comment><USER25> Underpaid? Here's an important economics lesson you should have learned yesterday: The price is what someone is willing to pay.

You are paid exactly what you were able to negotiate.

</comment><comment><USER26> The IEEE and ACM already exist. While they don't do collective bargaining type things, the IEEE certainly looks after member interests via their lobbying efforts.

</comment><comment><USER9> In a world where any programmer is free to quit and start their own company, and many successfully do, what's the benefit of unionizing?

<comment><USER8> The fact that they aren't, for one thing. This is a delusional worldview - most people in employment, regardless of their industry, do not have the time or necessary capital to fund their own business venture.

<comment><USER9> You don't need everyone to do this; just enough to ensure that if a worker feels exploited, they always have someplace else to go.

<comment><USER8> The nature of exploitation is that the exploited often do not recognise that they are being exploited. Being exploited introduces so many other problems into your life that it becomes incredibly difficult to identify the root cause and do something about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Are there any modern examples of unions that actually work well and avoid the problems of airlines/autoworker type unions?

<comment><USER27> Professional sports.

<comment><USER28> Professional sportspeople usually have _agents_ to look after their salary negotiations, transfer prospects and endorsements though...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Having lived most of my life in a state that is hostile towards unionization, I don't think this would make life much easier for me. Nonetheless, it's a good question.

(I don't have the answer.)

</comment><comment><USER30> It will NEVER happen.</comment>


Twitter thread reveals incredible collection of computing museum in Bozeman MT - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/ThatAndromeda/status/1027988913904742400 <comment><USER2> In response, the museum just created [https://twitter.com/Compustory](https://twitter.com/Compustory), and it looks like they'll be Tweeting something (presumably very interesting) weekly every Monday.

Source: [https://twitter.com/Compustory/status/1028416631943262208](https://twitter.com/Compustory/status/1028416631943262208)

This is awesomeness all around

</comment><comment><USER2> Related: exactly the same kind of thing as what happened in this thread, except in Spain, in 2016, and about typewriters: [https://twitter.com/mwichary/status/791709895083102209](https://twitter.com/mwichary/status/791709895083102209)

<comment><AUTHOR> This should probably be a Hacker News submission in its own right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> That photo about the 486... I'm guessing the plan exists on the internet somewhere, right?

If not, I wonder if whatever the photo was of shows the whole plan.

</comment><comment><USER3> Had no idea about this amazing place. Thank you.</comment>


Show HN: Who is Hiring on a map - <AUTHOR> https://sabakumoff.github.io/hn-sort-out/10.16.html <comment><AUTHOR> Basically I wrote the code that parses HN's Who Is Hiring page, selects all the job positions, passes them through the Google Natural Language API in order to recognize the location entities(see [https://cloud.google.com/natural- language/docs/basics](https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/docs/basics)), then builds the static html that shows the locations and the attached jobs in a Google Map. Note that AI's entities recognition does not always work well, some places does not make much sense..

<comment><USER2> Outside the major tech centers in the US, none of the locations I clicked were accurate. Billings MT, exemplifies the issue.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! I agree that the recognition of location entities is not accurate in some cases. For example if a text like "Blockai | San Francisco, CA | CV/ML and Front-end Engineers - [https://blockai.com"(from](https://blockai.com"\(from) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12631335](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12631335)) is passed to Google Natural Language API: then it returns the following "locations": San Francisco, CA, ML, CV. [https://github.com/sAbakumoff/hn- sort-out/blob/master/LangAn...](https://github.com/sAbakumoff/hn-sort- out/blob/master/LangAnalytics.PNG) However, ML stands for "Machine Learning" and CV is "Computer Vision". Perhaps the algorithm concludes that CV/ML is the location because it's close to other locations(San Francisco, CA). I will try to work it out for the next "Who's hiring" event :)

<comment><USER2> Also look at Alabama and Georgia (the US state, not the country), because these break in other ways.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you elaborate about Georgia? I can see one job "Rails Machine | Savannah, GA | Remote (U.S. Only Please) | Site Reliability Engineer" that seems to be correct.

As for Alabama's jobs I can see that is an investor's name "Bessemer" was recognized as Bessemer town in Alabama, "Cap Hill" area of Seattle became the place in Alabama as well and "Fifth Avenue" of NY and London also fell into Alabama..That's a total mess of course..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The markers on a map are clickable by the way</comment>


A collection of useful .gitignore templates - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/github/gitignore <comment><USER2> These templates are also used by gitignore.io

I made a simple alias for generating a .gitignore using their service:

ignore = "!gi() { curl -L -s [https://www.gitignore.io/api/$@](https://www.gitignore.io/api/$@) > .gitignore;}; gi"

Example usage:

git ignore 'node,osx'

Note that the alias is potentially destructive! So some may prefer to do the output redirection themselves, especially if there is an existing .gitignore to which you wish to append.</comment>


Notes on fusion in Haskell - <AUTHOR> http://teh.id.au/posts/2017/06/30/notes-on-fusion/index.html <comment><USER2> Description of fusion in Haskell, [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38905369/what-is- fusion-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38905369/what-is-fusion-in- haskell)</comment>


RIP: BlackBerry kills its Classic phone - e-sushi http://money.cnn.com/2016/07/05/technology/blackberry-classic-phone-qwerty/index.html?iid=surge-story-summary <comment><AUTHOR> Source at Blackberry: [http://blogs.blackberry.com/2016/07/change-is-only- natural-a...](http://blogs.blackberry.com/2016/07/change-is-only-natural-a- classic-model-makes-way/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Will BlackBerry stop producing smartphones with a hardware keyboard? Or it is only the Classic model which is being killed?</comment>


Ask HN: Best Place to Sell a Social Network? - <AUTHOR>

After Yo! made its splashdown a few months ago, I spent a few weeks and built a push notification social network based on Emojis[1].  The project is fully running and I've been using it for the past 2 months, but I don't want to own it (Releases, Updates, etc..).
The system architecture is simple. - iOS front end with CocoaPods deps management - Parse Backend for managing users and sending push notifications - Sketch design assets
People are still contacting me to sign up for the Beta which has about 20 users. The project is written in Swift, but I'm working on something else which I don't want to take time away from by having this project on my plate as well.  If anyone knows where I can sell this, any information would be greatly appreciated.
[1] - http://joeblau.com/emo/ <comment><USER2> Since you have 20 users, you should be able to sell your social network for 10 cents, maybe as much as 50 cents.

But seriously, you're not selling a social network. You're selling an app. People buy users, not the underlying software of social networks. If you don't want to work on this anymore, just scrap it.</comment>


Bill Gates: Coronavirus Shutdown Could Last 6-10 Weeks - <AUTHOR> Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates claimed that the current coronavirus shutdown could last between 6 to 10 weeks, depending on how well testing goes.The billionaire spoke to a Reddit audience on Wednesday, saying a short term shut down possible."This will vary a lot by country," Gates wrote."China is seeing very few cases now because their testing and 'shut down' was very effective." "If a country does a good job with testing and 'shut down' then within 6-10 weeks they should see very few cases and be able to open back up," he added.Gates said that the economic impact of the "shut down" will be "large," but the economy can "eventually ... open back up" if done properly.Have your say - ⇓ Hit the comments below ⇓ © press The Microsoft founder also said that the U.S. would eventually go into lockdown, but added it should have been done sooner. The Microsoft founder also said that the U.S. would eventually go into lockdown, but added it should have been done sooner."We are going into lockdown, but as usual in retrospect, we should have done it sooner," Gates wrote. <comment><USER2> Bill Gates washing his hands of Microsoft (and COVID-19): [https://media.gatesnotes.com/-/media/Images/Articles/Health/...](https://media.gatesnotes.com/-/media/Images/Articles/Health/A-coronavirus- AMA/AMA2020-handwashing-loop.ashx)</comment>


Ask HN: Would you like a 2nd collapse button at the end of each comment? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Yes, please.

<comment><AUTHOR> See? We all want it! :p</comment></comment>