Reed Hastings: On rock star developers - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/08/netflix-ceo-reed-hastings-on-high-salaries-the-best-are-easily-10x-better-than-average.html <comment><USER2> Many of the developers I admire most, if they be rock stars at all, are rock stars in the Neil Peart mold: they're unassuming and don't take center stage, but are widely regarded as geniuses and masters of the craft, setting the vision and structure of the project. Good examples include John Carmack (who was perfectly willing to let Romero engage in rockstar theatrics while he hacked out the next Id engine) and Dan Ingalls (Alan Kay gets most of the glory for Smalltalk, but even he would say Ingalls did the lion's share of implementing the thing).

</comment><comment><USER3> I like to call myself a roadie developer, swooping in to clean up the mess after the rockstar developer came in and trashed the stage...

<comment><USER2> I tell people I strive to be a "session musician". I'm there to use my skill in the craft to do a job and contribute to a greater whole.

<comment><USER4> Session musicians are also called "consultants"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Everyone seems to be trashing the idea of 10x developers (and I would tend to agree unless you're literally talking about a 1 in a million mythical dev) but there are definitely 2x or 3x developers I have worked with at companies.

Unfortunately, I can't imagine a team full of just these developers (in my personal experience) as these folks tend to be bossier than the rest and/or have true disdain for non-programming work which I can empathize with, but is essential in team settings.

</comment><comment><USER6> Netflix is famous for paying top salaries, but do they actually pay 10x the average salary? Is the rockstar getting a raw deal at Netflix?

<comment><USER7> If it's the best offer is it a raw deal?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Rockstar developers can duct tape a bunch of bullshit together and make a good demo, and after 6 months when they get poached by another company you'll just have to hire actually competent people. They'll have to untangle the your geniuses opus of bullshit and rebuild it into something that works. It will take time and it will be expensive.

I'm not too bothered by people wanting to hire rockstars though because there will always be a market for people like me to come in and clean up the mess.

<comment><USER9> This is true, but then also, sometimes that's exactly what you need.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's interesting NBC is still covering something like this. I feel like this is generally well-known in the industry, and that any lean company will try to hire a "rockstar" whenever they can, as they don't have the budget to waste on a pretty good engineer (although, I know in recent years myself and many others personally despise that term "rockstar" and think it causes more harm than good).

<comment><USER11> "Rockstar developers come in, do 90 minutes of work, trash the place, then leave the clearing up to everyone else whilst they bugger off to their next gig."

<comment><USER10> That's a good quote, and very similar to some experiences I've had (who said this?). On the other side of the coin... I've also seen people hired as "rockstar developers" become the overworked scapegoat of a team...

<comment><USER11> > (who said this?)

It's what always pops into my mind when people talk about rockstar developers - don't think I got it from somewhere else but you never know these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't know what the term "rock star developers" actually mean, but there are definitely people I would call short term and long term developers.

The progress of a short term developers work, looks extremely fast, but its logarithmic. A lot of bad project managers think he does an insane amount, maybe 10x, maybe 100x levels of work. He writes code so fast and cranks out so many features its no wonder he's a rockstar. After a while though, because everything he builds is built for the moment, its just nothing but mazes full of bugs that frighten even the nerdiest dungeon crawling hacker.

The progress of having a long term developer on a team, on the other hand, starts off slow, but it's exponential. He might need weeks or months to build up a good foundation. He spends time writing small things that show little to no benefit, but are built well and from which other things can be built on top of. Everything he builds can be used by anyone who reads it, so they too can use his work. His work multiplies the work of his own as well as the rest of the team. But the bad project manager sees him and thinks he's too slow to complete tickets. He is a .05x developer at this point because the average developer would have been finished with two features by now.

After weeks, maybe months, however, his progress matches those of the average developer. In time progress is so quick, it makes the short term developer's work, which is starting to plateau, look effectively flat. While the short term developer was spending his time building up walls with his hammer, nails, and duct tape, the long term developer was there making a drill, that was used in making a saw, that was used in making a ladder, that was used in making a crane. Now he's making skyscrapers using the tools he built, something the short term will never even be able to do in a single lifetime.

</comment><comment><USER13> The test can not be conclusive unless all of them worked on same type of projects, programming languages and faced same bugs over the years.

It's quite likely the so called rockstar had a prior experience in the problem at hand. It will be good to see the engineers learn an entirely new language and solve an entirely unrelated problem

The thing to draw out from the study is hire the right fit. There is nothing called rock star engineer. You rockstar engineer is the best fit for your job, tech stack and challenges in your business.

</comment><comment><USER14> This article makes the dumbest assertions I've heard about quality software development in quite a while.

The "study" isn't really a study. Even so, the metrics that it claims to derive aren't there for the picking.

Then throwing in big names like Bill Gates to say "look Bill Gates said it too" is just name dropping.

Also this looks like something someone would write in 3 minutes between meetings and never actually proof read. The quality of the writing is really quite low.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's possible to be a rockstar developer without being a diva. Some devs are just genuinely skilled at the tech and also at being good coworkers.

<comment><USER16> This is how I've heard some people describe the difference between a 10x and 100x dev.

<comment><USER17> Indeed. The comments on this article are surprisingly negative. It seems most developers, even on HN, believe you can only pretend to achieve 10X by cutting corners and leaving your coworkers with the mess.

My experience has been the opposite. The most productive developers I've worked with have also been extremely skilled at communication and documentation, and they tend to produce much more maintainable code than the average.

<comment><USER18> I agree there can be a huge difference in skill between developers, my complaint with the 10x moniker is that it rarely corresponds with those who are actually skilled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > The researchers expected that the best programmer would outperform his > average counterpart by a factor of two or three. But it turned out that the > most skilled programmer far outperformed the worst. He was 20 times faster > at coding, 25 times faster at debugging, and 10 times faster at program > execution than the programmer with the lowest marks.

What? Okay, so how much did he outperform the _average_ one?

</comment><comment><USER20> I had to laugh at their test. Two hours? Many people can sustain a high pace of work for two hours. But how about as time wears on? There's a lot of assumptions going on here.

</comment><comment><USER21> stepping back, im wondering what would motivate the CEO of netflix to write on article like this on CNBC?

Anyone have any ideas? It's essentially a blog post.

<comment><USER22> He's doing a PR tour for his new book ("no rules rules"), which is released today... already had an interview in the guardian today: [https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and- radio/2020/sep/08/a-new-k...](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and- radio/2020/sep/08/a-new-kind-of-safe-drug-netflix-ceo-reed-hastings-on-what- could-replace-the-streaming-giant)</comment></comment>


Bigfoot Discovery Unveiled In Palo Alto - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/15/bigfoot-discovery-unveiled-in-palo-alto/ <comment><USER2> Do they _really_ expect us to believe that they couldn't get AT LEAST a decent photo of the damn thing?

I mean, a cell phone's camera has higher resolution than that 10-dollar-webcam image capture... yet they expect us to believe they've had it for 2 months!

More importantly, what the fsck is this doing on TechCrunch?!

</comment><comment><USER3> LOL, agreed on all your points! 2 Months in a cooler??? TC has a slow news day and the Bigfoot crew decided Palo Alto was a good place to have a press conference? My guess is www.Bigfoot.com is coming back from the web1.0 days!</comment>


Late But Essential Review - <AUTHOR> http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/08/28/The-Big-Short

<comment><USER3>
      Finance should be regulated into utility status all over the civilized
      world, and if the community of hard-core financial engineers really
      wants to go on being a collective pathogen, they'll be forced to
      acknowledge that what they do just isn't civilized behavior, and do it
      somewhere else. We'll be way better off without them among us.

As George Soros describes in the historical section of _The New Paradigm for Financial Markets_ , this was exactly the attitude which evolved from the wreckage of the Great Depression, but starting as early as the 60s the financial world steadily chipped away at the constraints which had been imposed. (Soros himself was one of the pioneers in the dilution of these constraints.)

<comment><USER4> 20-30 years of sanity might be better than none.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The events described in the Big Short are a national disgrace.

Wall Street was engaged in a fraudulent conspiracy in which the buyer, the seller, the guaranty company, and the rating agency would willingly suspend disbelief so the buyer could get a 'AAA' security that miraculously paid a few hundred basis points over AAA corporates and count as AAA toward risk-based capital regulations, everyone got fees, and those 'lucky' subprime borrowers could suddenly access unlimited amounts of credit without adequate income or collateral.

Then when this created a giant bubble (along with other factors like deregulation, lax application of the regulatory powers that existed, a shockingly long period of lax monetary policy, and human greed) and it all blew up with catastrophic consequences, the banks got a giant bailout, went back to business as usual, and (so far) fended off meaningful reform. They said, who could have known, when the book shows many people did in fact clearly analyze the situation and foresee catastrophe.

That being said - there are countries that have highly state-controlled finance sectors. A notable feature is that they don't have vibrant startup and VC sectors. The only reason capital is available in large sums to start up companies like Google and Facebook is because of the possibility of rich IPO exits. Interestingly, some of those countries with regulated and state-owned banks, where the startup scene is nonexistent and the same 50 companies have dominated the economy forever, did not escape reckless behavior and large losses in the banking sector.

This is still America, last I checked, and people should be free to take big risks and come up with innovative financial structures. But consumer regulation must prevent toxic consumer products like the certain subprime products that were misleadingly marketed. Banks, which are systemically important, enjoy special privileges that make them a lot of money, and receive implicit and explicit government guarantees, cannot become giant extremely leveraged hedge funds.

So, you need to make a distinction between a highly regulated utility financial sector; and a speculative sector which can keep taking the risks and innovating in ways that create value, without the rest of us being on the hook to bail them out when things don't work out.

</comment><comment><USER6> _Of all the failures that led to the big meltdown, the most aggravating is the failure of the bond-rating agencies. These people took good money for pasting AAA credit ratings on piles of the most implausible shit imaginable, and what's irritating isn't that they did it, it's that apparently they didn't break any laws and thus there's little prospect of the long prison terms that anything smelling of natural justice would require._

If anyone is looking for a YC application idea, there's one right there. To be more explicit:

Ratings agencies currently are paid by investment companies to rate the risk associated with the products they are bringing to market (ie, the fox is paying the farmer to tell the chickens how safe the hen house is ).

The financial incentives for ratings agencies are aligned with the sellers, not the buyers. That creates a huge risk for the buyers, because they can't (or shouldn't) trust the ratings.

There's an opportunity there to create a company that does ratings but takes money from the buyers, not the sellers.

(Note that entrenched players will go to huge lengths to tell you how hard this is, and how smart all the "financial engineers" are. From my very basic investigations, I'm not at all convinced that it's as hard as they try and make it seem.)

<comment><USER7> You're forgetting that many institutions can only accept/rely on ratings from regulator-approved companies.

For example, the SEC has granted a ratings monopoly to three companies.

The idea is that ratings are too important to be left to some unapproved company. If anyone could issue ratings, folks might be led to make bad investments....

This is one example of how regulation is systemic risk.

<comment><USER6> It might be possible to market directly to consumers in the retail market.

I assume you'd need a licence to give financial advice, but that should be easier to get than the rating agency license (I assume).

 _This is one example of how regulation is systemic risk._ Well it sounds more like bad regulation to me.

<comment><USER7> > > This is one example of how regulation is systemic risk.

> Well it sounds more like bad regulation to me.

Every regulation can be bad. However, unlike individual firm policy, regulation is system-wide, so the risk is necessarily systemic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Unfortunately the recently passed financial regulation, while containing some good provisions, doesn't do enough to put the genie back in the bottle.

<comment><USER9> Was the genie ever in the bottle?

That's not a rhetoric question. I generally wonder whether Finance has been consider to be anything other than self-serving.

<comment><USER6> _I generally wonder whether Finance has been consider to be anything other than self-serving_

No it hasn't. But there have been times (eg, post WW2 to Regan-era) and places where regulation has shaped the market in such a way that financial players interests were more aligned with society as a whole.

<comment><USER7> > But there have been times (eg, post WW2 to Regan-era) and places where > regulation has shaped the market in such a way that financial players > interests were more aligned with society as a whole.

How about some evidence? Be careful of correlation vs causation. Heck - <USER2> careful about correlation. (Consider fees for stock purchase.)

Note that inflation had some effect. The dollar threshold for "accredited investor" was constant for a long time, but $200k/year in income and $1M in "not-residence" investments became more common. As a result, more folks could be angels.

<comment><USER6> _How about some evidence?_

Fair call. I suspect we are talking about different things, though. I'm not talking about investment performance at all - more about how the financial sector supports the healthiness of the rest of the economy.

Anyway, some evidence that regulation can align the interests of the financial sector with the economy as a whole:

For example, Australia has quite strong financial regulation - much, much stronger than in the US and UK. This includes everything from higher ratios of capital-to-loans required by the banks, to stricter laws around mortgages.

When the financial crisis hit in 2008, the Australian banks were able to survive very well, which - combined with a government stimulus program and continual growth in China - meant that Australia was the only developed nation that did not fall into recession in 2009.

More evidence?

* Both sides of politics in Australia are supportive of strong financial regulation

* The CIA World Fact book says _The Australian financial system remained resilient throughout the financial crisis and Australian banks have rebounded_ [https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...](https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/as.html)

* The World Economic Forum says _The United Kingdom, buoyed by the relative strength of its banking and non-banking financial activities, claimed the Index's top spot from the US, which slipped to third position behind Australia largely due to poorer financial stability scores and a weakened banking sector._ [http://www.weforum.org/en/initiatives/gcp/FinancialDevelopme...](http://www.weforum.org/en/initiatives/gcp/FinancialDevelopmentReport/index.htm)

* _Australia has four of the only around a dozen AA-rated banks in the world, due in part to a tight regulatory regime and domestic banks' limited exposure to poor-quality loans that were the downfall of many banks globally.

Australia has a so-called "four pillars" policy that prevents the four largest banks from merging. That has shielded the four, Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd., National Australia Bank, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and Westpac Banking Corp., from takeover and allowed them to build up profitable, dominant market positions without the need to delve into riskier lending practices.

John Brogden, chief executive of pension and managed funds industry lobby the Investment & Financial Services Association, said the results are a "testament to our deep and liquid markets, supported by Australia's superannuation (pension) and managed funds sectors."

Australia has a A$1 trillion-plus retirement savings industry, aided by the introduction of mandatory employer contributions to employee pension funds in the early 1990s._ [http://wiadomosci.onet.pl/2057316,10,global_crisis_nudges_au...](http://wiadomosci.onet.pl/2057316,10,global_crisis_nudges_australia_up_world_financial_sector_ranks,item.html)

<comment><USER7> > For example, Australia has quite strong financial regulation - much, much > stronger than in the US and UK. This includes everything from higher ratios > of capital-to-loans required by the banks, to stricter laws around > mortgages.

You don't understand - the loose standards in the US for mortgages came from govt, not banks.

> Anyway, some evidence that regulation can align the interests of the > financial sector with the economy as a whole:

You're assuming that govt is interested in the economy as a whole. I don't know about Australia, so I'll accept your assertion that the Australian govt is concerned about the economy as a whole, but the US govt isn't.

And no, the Repubs aren't the worst culprits here. They're largely useless to moderately clueless, but they're not actively hostile.

<comment><USER6> _You don't understand - the loose standards in the US for mortgages came from govt, not banks._

Yes, I do understand that.

In Australia (and in many other places) "sub-prime loans" were not made by banks because they are illegal.

There have been occasional attempt by non-bank lenders to bring them in (eg, "low doc loans") but in every case the loopholes that allowed them were closed.

 _You're assuming that govt is interested in the economy as a whole. I don't know about Australia, so I'll accept your assertion that the Australian govt is concerned about the economy as a whole, but the US govt isn't._

That's quite a bold statement! How about some evidence? ;)

<comment><USER7> >> You're assuming that govt is interested in the economy as a whole. I don't know about Australia, so I'll accept your assertion that the Australian govt is concerned about the economy as a whole, but the US govt isn't.

> That's quite a bold statement! How about some evidence? ;)

You quoted one bit "You don't understand - the loose standards in the US for mortgages came from govt, not banks."

Another is regulatory "encouragement" for banks to hold fannie and freddie stock; that put them all at risk.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Setup a PostgreSQL cluster with repmgr and pgbouncer - <AUTHOR> https://blog.raveland.org/post/postgresql_repmgr_pgbouncer_en/ <comment><USER2> Does anyone else find it odd that sqlalchemy has it's own proxy which intefere's with postgresql by default?</comment>


Mark Zuckerberg Blows Off Wall Street -- An Example More CEOs Should Follow - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-blows-off-wall-street-an-example-more-ceos-should-follow-2012-3 It reminds me what PG said in http://www.paulgraham.com/control.html on December 2010. <comment><AUTHOR> It reminds me what PG said in <http://www.paulgraham.com/control.html> on December 2010.</comment>


Could we kill the icon? - <AUTHOR> http://joecritchley.svbtle.com/kill-the-icon <comment><USER3> This is a great example of how 2D UX design is going completely off the rails.

FlatUI is making it impossible to distinguish between buttons, tags, labels and tabs. Skeuomorphism, correctly derided in its cartoonish, Mac Calendar form, has come to mean having _any_ depth in a UI. Sane-looking buttons? Skeuomorphic! Using an inset for an aside? Skeuomorphic! Icons? Skeuomorphic! Mouse pointer? Skeuomorphic!

It reminds me of the way the the Bauhaus guys would yell "Bourgeois!" at one another's designs until all they were left with were unlivable, white cubes:

[http://www.tomwolfe.com/BauhausExcerpt.html](http://www.tomwolfe.com/BauhausExcerpt.html)

<comment><USER4> In my understanding, buttons and tabs are skeuomorphs, no matter if they are rendered flat or pseudo-3D. In a true digital UI (e. g. CLI shell) there are no such things. I am not trying to say that we should get rid of buttons everywhere, my point is that making UI flat is not enough to make it non- skeuomorphic: it may be flat but still based on imitating real-world objects (now doing it badly).

<comment><USER5> What's a "true" digital UI?

If you're going to say buttons and tabs are skeuomorphic, what _isn 't_ skeuomorphic? Interacting with a CLI resembles the back-and-forth query and response of conversational dialogue: it's skeuomorphic too!

Here's a question for you: what, exactly, is _wrong_ with using metaphors for existing, well-known analogues to convey information in a new context? Isn't this how languages, notational conventions, and symbolic connotations naturally evolve among humans? I understand why people are tired of Apple's _excess_ , but what's the problem with skeuomorphism _per se_?

<comment><USER4> Have I said anywhere that using metaphors is wrong? What is wrong is when a UI uses the button metaphor but avoids making buttons look like ones just to seem more "digital".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Meh. The very letters he is using to communicate his ideas are descendants of icons. The capital A is derived from Aleph, the ancient Semitic symbol of an ox. It used to look like the head of an ox, sort of. In fact, "A" still kind of looks like an upside down ox head, with the horns and everything. It does no longer mean an ox, it means letter A. Because the that's the first sound in the word "Aleph". Similarly these icons have evolved to have abstract meanings beyond their original ones.

</comment><comment><USER7> Once a symbol has a meaning, it works, and continues to work as long as people know its meaning. This article is akin to complaining that the letters of the alphabet or the spelling of words don't represent their sound or meaning well. True, but what is there to do about it?

There is no need to cleanse the world of symbols away because the metaphor no longer holds.

And no, young people have absolutely no problem figuring out what the symbols are for - they just don't know why. Oh well.

<comment><USER8> Exactly; having symbols that are stable and which everyone understands is very helpful. Everybody knows that the "floppy disk" icon means "save". What would we replace it with? An image of one of the many common shapes of an SD card? And what if next year a different form of storage becomes common? Do we change all the UIs?

Not to mention that it's nice to have UIs that carry over from one device to another, so that you don't have to switch to a whole new set of symbols when you go from your laptop to your phone.

<comment><USER9> Everybody who has experience with a computer that is. There are many more people on Earth that were not exposed to the current paradigms of UI and they would benefit from sane symbols.

<comment><USER5> Also, they should be spared the burden of having to learn existing natural languages, with all of their multiple strata of evolutionary development. Instead, new spoken languages should be devised from scratch every generation or two, to prevent people from being contaminated by exposure to historical context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Abandoning a perfectly valid, simple graphical language and replacing everything with gestures and three-dimensional interfaces is not a step forward in my opinion. Don't think of it as a "floppy disk" icon, think of it as what it is - a word in another language, one which happens to translate to "save" in English.

You might as well get rid of the letters on keyboards because umpteen thousand years ago they were pictographs for objects or concepts which are no longer relevant to modern young people.

</comment><comment><USER11> What about thinking of icons as visual anchors -- something to quickly "catch" your eye as you're looking for an operation? What if it doesn't matter what picture the icon has, as long as the shape is clearly recognizable?

Important to distinguish two types of users here:

(a) Someone unfamiliar with a UI will need more visual cues, textual hints, and so on. "What does this button/icon do?" Without helpful text, they may be stuck.

(b) But, someone who has used a particular piece of UI hundreds of times will simply zero in on an app by its icon's shape/color/position. In this case, it's much better to have many varying icons rather than pretty but similar- looking circles. And in this case, it doesn't actually matter what the icons portray.

The iOS 7 Safari icon, while unsightly, catches my eye every darn time. Is that its purpose? And, again, in iOS 7, is this why the gradients follow opposite directions?

Would love if anyone could point to more "science" in this, as I'm simply speaking from my observations.

<comment><USER12> I was about to say the same thing with the same background (none)

If I need to open Gmail, I'm not just looking for the word "Gmail" in a list, I'm using a much more complex search algorithm.

I'm looking for:

\- the distinctive red/gray lines

\- a rectangle

\- the word "gmail"

\- words that start with f, or start with h

\- a specific region of my screen, that I remember last housing this icon

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Betteridge's law of headlines continues here, the answer is no. You can't kill the icon. Or at least this article makes no mention of any alternative or possibility of how that might be done.

</comment><comment><USER14> In 30+ years on this planet, I have never lived in anything that resembles the shotgun shack that is the "Home" icon. (To me, the canonical home is either a ranch or a brownstone, which look nothing like that) I think the kids will be OK with a 3.5" disk icon without caring what it represents.

</comment><comment><USER15> The answer is just a flat and obvious, "No".

Firstly, symbols have been around for thousands of years. Our written language is built around them, and our everyday life is surrounded by them. These aren't going anywhere and are a required abstraction for higher thought. These aren't going away.

Second, logos are prettier symbols, but they are pervasive in our world. Every single business has a logo and tries to push that logo and brand at you every chance they get. These aren't going away.

Third, icons are logos and/or symbols. It stands to reason that if the previous two aren't going anywhere, then icons aren't going anywhere.

Until we have telepathy, that is.

</comment><comment><USER16> Could I kill that icon in cornflower blue?

This misses the point in favor of some misguided idealism, I think. It's hard enough to cram a functional, usable interface into the space provided often enough without worrying about throwing a hard-won language of visual metaphors straight into the trash before you start.

<comment><USER17> > into the trash

"skeuomorph!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Typical useless Svtle post. You outline the problem (and it's a real one), get my attention, pique my interest, and then just stop before you add the slightest bit of useful information. Was it too much to come up with even one useful idea about how to solve the problem?

<comment><USER19> I got to the end and thought I skipped over something accidentally. Read the article for a second time to confirm that there is not even a hint as to how to solve the problem...

<comment><USER20> There is no problem. The "problem"/argument mentioned is manufactured out of pure bullishness toward the current stay of things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Everyone on HN can use a computer and has been using computers for years.

Obviously it doesn't matter to you what the icons are - you'll learn them and use them.

Put yourself in the position of someone who doesn't use computers very often, or who hasn't used this particular piece of software before. What works for those people?

I'll agree that the article doesn't make any sense for those people either.

<comment><USER5> > Put yourself in the position of someone who doesn't use computers very often

Actually, let's not. There's no justification for hobbling utility of computers for those who _do_ use them in order to make them putatively more understandable to those who do not.

Of course, your point still stands: the established conventions - <USER2> icons, CLIs, WIMP interfaces, etc. - are the language that's evolved among those who _do_ use computers, and attempting to replace it with something cut from whole cloth makes computing less accessible to _everyone_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Icon consistency is far more important than flat/skewmorphic artistic concerns. For example, my kid has never seen a 3.5" disk, but knows the icon means "Save", probably because it is consistent among the UIs he uses. Even if you find the best icon metaphor for Settings, changing the gear icon to something else will cause pain for lots of people mainly because it is new, more than any other artistic consideration.

</comment><comment><USER23> These are the kinds of thoughts I could only expect from someone who only encounters bad semiotic practice. Rather than "killing the icon," he should be focused on educating people about the main categorizations of signs and enforcing icon designers to make good use of indexical and iconic signs, rather than coming up with unrelated symbols that users have to learn through trial and error or type-based assistance.

</comment><comment><USER24> Regarding the floppy disk icon, the post says:

"That's holding onto the past; and providing a lack of recognition for young people, who will literally have no idea what one is."

I don't see what's the problem with "holding onto the past": everyone knows there was a past, that the world didn't start when they were born. One way or another, we get to know about things that existed (and disappeared) before we were born, and we accept it as something natural.

Going by the line of thought the author suggests, we may as well, for example, ditch files and folders - not just the icons, but the complete organizational concept. I guess we could just use "libraries" and "galleries", but look at where those are going... in some years, using these concepts could as well mean "holding onto the past".

"Imagine a native digital medium"

In my humble opinion, "digital" and "native" don't combine very well. "Digital" is far from being something every human is familiar with, at birth (so that it can be considered "native"). Killing the icon is actually going to have a negative effect on the creation of a "native digital medium", because icons are many times representations of real life, even if poor representations. For the medium to be native, it would need to actually be closer to what we see in real life, than to be even more abstract.

And let's not forget the fact that after knowing their meaning (regardless of them having any meaning in the physical environment around us), icons are an easy and quick way of recognizing certain functionality even on never-before- seen UI screens, which gives a better first time experience of any software.

</comment><comment><USER25> I have a hunch icons and text are recognized by a different part of the brain, and the best way is to use them together, e.g. have an icon plus some text right next to it.

Some people are image oriented, and can go by the icons. Some people are text oriented and can just read the text.

The text helps first timers who might not yet be aware of certain icon conventions. The icons help power users because icons with clear silhouettes can be read very fast.

And yet another group of people read the text and look at the icon every time - even during repeated use. Because there are several parts of the brain that recognize a command, they feel more assured that what they are about to click is the right thing, and therefore feel more comfortable with the GUI.

All of this is nothing new, really. It goes back to the very first GUIs. There is 30 years of experience with this, there are probably lots of studies that this is indeed a good way to go.

So no, we should not kill the icon.

<comment><USER5> > I have a hunch icons and text are recognized by a different part of the > brain

It doesn't "feel" like that to me, as far as my own metaperception goes. At least not at a purely semantic level: I see a word, and I associate it with a concept; I see an icon, and I associate it with a concept. There's rarely any syntactic relationship among icons as there is among words, so icons are equivalent to merely seeing an single word in isolation, labelling something.

</comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord CLIs do a pretty formidable job of killing icons, I'd attest.

<comment><USER26> > CLIs do a pretty formidable job of killing icons, I'd attest.

CLIs (and textual environments generally) _also_ use icons that have long been divorced from the real-world things they originally represented. And in ways which have nothing to do with their original iconic uses, anyhow.

I'm not sure how that's better than just using icons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Sure we can kill the Icon. I am building voice interfaces. Eyes Off interfaces have no need for icons.

</comment><comment><USER28> The replacement of icons with text in iOS7 was wrong-headed and inconsistently executed. Not to mention that it created a bunch of messes for designers to deal with. I hope that we return to a world where icons are fashionable again soon.

</comment><comment><USER29> What in the world are we suppose to replace it _with_, though?

</comment><comment><USER30> Yes, please, make your interfaces as unusable as you possibly can. Get on that trend bandwagon and never let go, let it take you far, far away.

</comment><comment><USER31> Maybe oneday the save icon will go because applications will maintain their state automatically and the whole concept of working on an "open" copy of a file which is different from the "saved" one will disappear. Actually, why hasn't that taken over a long time ago? Some applications and many web apps do it so they don't need any save icon.

<comment><USER13> > Actually, why hasn't that taken over a long time ago?

Ultimately because people prefer the control that it gives them. They can edit a document and just decide they don't want to save their changes and they can do that. Or they can save it under a different name or in a different folder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I guess the post is a rant, because the author doesn't actually say what is supposed to replace the icon.

</comment><comment><USER33> After reading the comments here, it's easy to feel like a visionary genius. I mean, don't you guys see how obvious this is? The UI/workflow of the future is nothing like the crap we use today. I'm quite confused by people's ignorance. Seriously.

</comment><comment><USER34> What is all this "native" digital medium that he mentions three times in this post?

While a lot of metaphors to old ways of doing things (office work, etc.) may be clumsy, the "native" interface to the computer is really far too low-level for everyday use.

<comment><USER10> That part was confusing. I suspect though it more or less refers to the crux of whatever point he's trying to make, so maybe he needs to run it through a couple more drafts and clarify. Sounds like voodoo to me.

He talks about having users provide their own gestural icons... which just seems like it would be a pain to have to come up with a new kind of flourish every time you installed an app, and I supposed speech recognition, which like gestural commands has a place but I don't think necessarily surpasses the utility of "the little orange and blue round thingy makes firefox happen". I mean that's just _perfect._

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The problem is skeuomorphism was and is a lazy way to provide contextual cues. It is merely one tool amongst a set of tools for providing non-explicit information to the user.

<comment><USER13> Lazy is good for users. But all lot of the skeuomorphism that is rallied against is the kind that is merely decoration. There's a lot of babies being thrown out with bathwater lately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Here's the reality. These flat stuff is a fad. Hating skein program is essentially a snobbish sort of fad that that has been thrust upon users whether they like or not.

</comment><comment><USER37> Icons are hieroglyphs, and there's nothing wrong with that

</comment><comment><USER38> Going from theory to practice, getting rid of the wall of icons on the iOS home screen would certainly be nice. But replacing it with what? Siri and spotlight maybe?

</comment><comment><USER39> Probably, but we wouldn't want to.</comment>


Management theory is becoming a compendium of dead ideas - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/business/21711909-what-martin-luther-did-catholic-church-needs-be-done-business-gurus-management <comment><USER4> The problem lies in business schools and degrees like the MBA.

Check out the faculty list at Harvard Business school [link below]. I randomly looked at profiles of 14 of them and _not a single one had real world business experience_. If there are any who do have real world experience, it's often superficial.

To carry on this article's analogy, business schools are the Catholic church of 1500: incestuous, detached, and self-serving.

Harvard Busisness school faculty: [http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/browse.aspx](http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/browse.aspx)

<comment><USER5> Business shcool, as best i can tell, have elevated the operations of a widget factory to a religion. And thus MBAs everywhere attempt to turn every institution they are put to manage, into an assembly line to fit their religion.

Observe the insanity in health care, where patients are not people but raw materials to be put through the medical factory and turned into a finished, aka healed, product at the other end.

<comment><USER4> Yep... and it all started in the 1920s with Taylorism - the idea that management could be a scientific process.

Taylorism is why, for example, some companies still use lines of code written as a measure of productivity.

<comment><USER6> The fact that people do something stupid and attribute it to a scientific discipline which suggests they shouldn't do it does not discredit that discipline.

Similarly, the Ariane 5 disaster doesn't mean that the idea of measuring the physical world with science is wrong.

There's nothing wrong with Taylorism. It works very well in a variety of fields (e.g. Uber and Amazon use Taylorism very effectively to manage their line workers). The fields where Taylorism isn't used (e.g. software development) are far less reliable and effective - Amazon can guarantee that your package will arrive in 2 days, can you guarantee that your software team will ship on time?

<comment><USER7> Apparently Taylors report was unscientific at best [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the- mana...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the-management- myth/304883/)

<comment><USER6> Lots of early physics was also not done very well, lots of fudges, etc. Does that discredit the idea of applying science to particle movements? Does Freud discredit the entire idea of psychiatry?

<comment><USER8> Physicists kept doing science, and it got better. Actual proper science has developed to the point where the computer I'm typing this on has a complex network of billions of logic gates which operates correctly billions of times a second. I can reasonably expect the CPU to continue to work for decades.

When managerial "scientists" can achieve anything even remotely comparable to that level of reliability and reproducibility, it will be time to take it seriously as a science. Until then, it just isn't one.

<comment><USER6> Many fields don't give that same level of reliability and reproducability; climate science, psychology and environmental engineering are all in the same boat. Guess none of them are sciences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The dead ideas:

* _Business is more competitive than ever._ But in reality, we have more monopolies and duopolies than ever. Peter Thiel's "Zero to One" is all about how to achieve monopoly. Businesses in the US hate competing on price. Without strong antitrust enforcement, which the US hasn't had in decades, the number of players decreases until there's no price competition. How many Internet providers can you choose from in the US? How many in the UK or Germany?

* _We live in an age of entrepreneurialism._ But the big companies are making all the money. The Economist writes: "A large number of businesspeople who were drawn in by the cult of entrepreneurship encountered only failure and now eke out marginal existences with little provision for their old age." All YC applicants should read that.

* _Business is getting faster._ They compare the fast rise of the automobile. Electricity and aircraft were also deployed faster than the Internet. Progress in the first 50 years of aviation zoomed like the semiconductor industry. Then in the late 1960s, it was all done - the Concorde, the Boeing 747, the SR-71, and the Saturn V had all flown. Everything since then has been a minor improvement.

* _Globalisation is both inevitable and irreversible._ The Economist comments "In 1880-1914 the world was in many ways just as globalised as it is today; it still fell victim to war and autarky." The causes of World War One are worth studying. Nobody really wanted it, and it happened anyway. Before WWI, Germany's biggest trading partner was France.

<comment><USER10> Some things are moving fast, though; solar comes to mind as an excellent example of an area with exponential price drops. At any given time, some things are improving fast, and most things are improving slowly or not at all.

My feeling is that there are a lot of basic tech improvements just on the horizon, we start figuring out more ways to bring machine learning into hard fundamental problems of industrial design, medical diagnosis, and so on.

Which of course leads to inevitable discussions of displaced highly skilled labor; it's not clear that the areas of fast improvement will lead to a good distribution of positive outcomes, as we've discussed here so many times before...

On the whole, though, I agree with the other three points.

<comment><USER11> "Exponential price drops" are less of a miracle when they are produced by large subsidies as well as dumping from the production side

<comment><USER10> Funny how 'subsidies' is a bad word and 'VC funding' isn't.

The idea, in this case, is exactly the same: Invest enough to achieve the economy of scale, and get the actually-better solution to the point where it's cheaper than the happens-to-be-currently-dominant solution.

(obvs, subsidies can also be used for other purposes, like protectionism or ensuring that a vital-for-national-security industry isn't outsourced. But I believe that for solar it's about investment, more than these other uses.)

<comment><USER12> I like this comparison, actually. But realize that it is expected that most VC fundings fail. Subsidies is a bad word because it is often an attempt at rigging the game. With the assumption that we fully know what the answer should be.

So, if we can move subsidies to be more like experiments where it is expected that a significant percentage fails, I'm all for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd say "advanced management theory" may be dying, but I don't even see basic 101 management theory being acknowledged in many organization. Things like "don't have one person report to two or more people" are violated all the time and result in predictable chaos and problems.

I'm reminded of the story of garbagemen strike that brought New York City to their knees, while the Irish Banking Crisis caused only a blip because people turned to alternative forms of currency. Real managers provide real value solving real problems, and are well liked by their employees. Unfortunately most management nowadays is awful, and needs to be pruned.

<comment><USER14> Any good sources you would recommend for mgmt 101?

<comment><USER15> Dead simple practices you can start implementing tomorrow: [https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Manager-Mark- Horstman/dp/11...](https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Manager-Mark- Horstman/dp/1119244609)

Their podcast, Manager Tools, is also excellent.

<comment><USER16> Seconding the Manager Tools Podcast. There's also Manager Tools Basics, which is a highlight reel of sorts from the main podcast. Their approach can be a bit simplistic at times, but is immensely valuable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Business books are basically romance novels for men. Silly fantasies, terrible writing, large type, cheap paper and one good idea per book" \- Benedict Evans

[https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/140900879879520256](https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/140900879879520256)

</comment><comment><USER18> These four theories don't seem to be the four most popular in management theory...in my opinion a rough list of those would be something like: Porter- style competitive advantage, Toyota-style operations (agile/just-in-time), everything in modern finance and disruptive vs incremental technology (in the strict Christensen sense).

The professionalisation of management surely has problems but it's important to at least characterise the prevailing orthodoxy accurately...and this article does not.

<comment><USER19> You might be interested to read about William Deming: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming)

He was brought in by MacArthur during the post-WW2 occupation of Japan to help get their industry running again. You can see some of the seeds of TQM/The Toyota Production System in his management philosophies.

His management theories are interesting to me because of the emphasis placed on leadership, and the success and failure of systems of production being almost entirely their responsibility (he claimed around 85% of production variance was due to systemic factors i.e. entirely within managerial control).

Some of his 'deadly diseases' seem particularly relevant in this thread. I've seen many MBA/MPA trained managers makes these errors:

 _The "Seven Deadly Diseases" include:_

\- Lack of constancy of purpose

\- Emphasis on short-term profits

\- Evaluation by performance, merit rating, or annual review of performance

\- Mobility of management

\- Running a company on visible figures alone

\- Excessive medical costs

\- Excessive costs of warranty, fueled by lawyers who work for contingency fees

 _" A Lesser Category of Obstacles" includes:_

\- Neglecting long-range planning

\- Relying on technology to solve problems

\- Seeking examples to follow rather than developing solutions

\- Excuses, such as "our problems are different"

\- The mistaken belief that management skills can be taught in classes

\- Reliance on quality control departments rather than management, supervisors, managers of purchasing, and production workers

\- Placing blame on workforces who are only responsible for 15% of mistakes where the system designed by management is responsible for 85% of the unintended consequences

\- Relying on quality inspection rather than improving product quality

<comment><USER18> A good recommendation as I've read him and like him a lot! It's a bit sad that most of the people interested in Japanese management ideas aren't interested in him (though he does have some following).

My recommendation to you (but maybe it's not news to you either): see many of Deming's ideas applied to modern government in John Seddon: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Seddon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Seddon)

<comment><USER19> Oooooh! I haven't heard of this guy, but sounds like something I'd find very interesting. Thanks for the link!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So a select group of industries, including airlines, have seen a lot of consolidation - you're going to use that as an argument that we aren't in an era of hypercompetition. Sorry, not buying it.

And that's even more true because the airline example is actually flawed. Not all consolidation reduces competition. Look at the past few years, where Delta bought Continental and American and US Airways merged. You'd say that the number of "major" carriers dropped by two. Fine... now look at the Alaska Airlines / Virgin America merger... arguably Alaska is now on the cusp of becoming a "major" carrier, which can compete with the likes of American, Delta, United and Southwest.

So it was consolidation, but did it make things more or less oligarchical? The answer isn't as straight-forward as you might think. Likewise, the acquisition of Airtran by Southwest may actually have created my competition by giving Southwest more planes, gates, and routes - including their first few international routes.

None of this is to say that "management theory" is complete, perfect, or even useful. But this article fails to convince me that it's all just "dead ideas" either.

</comment><comment><USER21> The conclusion is exactly correct:

"The backlash against globalisation points to a glaring underlying weakness of management theory: its naivety about politics. Modern management orthodoxies were forged in the era from 1980 to 2008, when liberalism was in the ascendant and middle-of-the-road politicians were willing to sign up to global rules. But today's world is very different. Productivity growth is dismal in the West, companies are fusing at a furious rate, entrepreneurialism is stuttering, populism is on the rise and the old rules of business are being torn up. "

It is worrisome how much people pay for books that teach things that are plainly wrong. They mention Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat" but there are a lot of others they could have listed. For the last 40 years there has been almost constant rhetoric from business writers about the way that business was becoming more and more competitive, and yet the numbers show that exactly the opposite was happening: new business creation has been in decline since the 1970s, and consolidation means that business has become less and less competitive for the last 40 years. Monopolies have become more common. Patent laws and copyrights have been extended to make monopoly easier. It is true that if you are trying to start a new business, the situation has become increasingly bleak since the 1970s, so from the point of view of someone just starting out, things have become harder, and perhaps some people mean that when they say "things are more competitive". But that isn't the competition of one business against another, that's the competition of one worker against another. We should be clear about our terminology.

</comment><comment><USER22> The four dead ideas according to the article: 1) Business is more competitive that ever. 2) We live in an age of entrepreneurialism. 3) Business is getting faster. 4) Globalization is inevitable and irreversible.

<comment><USER23> Also _Managers know better than you, and are generally better people, and more capable than you, because of some secret "management" skills._

I've seen engineers promoted to management, who suddenly drink the kool-aid that they're "better" than the engineers they worked beside a month ago. Now that they're managers, they _know better_.

The sheer infantilization of the rank and file by managers is appalling, and wide-spread. Such as hiring an expert in the field, and then ignoring everything they say.

Good organizations say "Look, I know that's the best way to solve the problem, but the customer doesn't have time or money for that, so we need something else".

Bad organizations say "You're just an engineer, and wouldn't understand the trade-offs inherent in customer interaction".

<comment><USER24> > I've seen engineers promoted to management, who suddenly drink the kool-aid > that they're "better" than the engineers they worked beside a month ago. Now > that they're managers, they know better.

To be fair, while I've absolutely seen what you're talking about, I've also seen a slightly different phenomenon get blamed for that. Part of a manager's job IMO is to remove systemic paralysis. Some times that means making a totally arbitrary decision just so people move forward. Even if it turns out it was the wrong solution to whatever problem, just making the decision and allowing people to explore the problem space from different directions can have some value.

<comment><USER23> I know a number of people in the military, and there's a lot to be said for _asserting command presence_. Where it doesn't matter what the orders are, just that someone is there giving clear orders.

I've rarely seen that in managers. The issue I was talking about above was that managers really can think of themselves as "better" or having "secret knowledge" that enables them to lord it over the peasant engineers.

I have ethical issues with such an attitude. People are people, no matter how small.

<comment><USER25> My company's style is a culture of consensus. No one really "gives orders," because that's too aggressive, and someone might feel hurt. I find it fucking awful. If there's disagreement about something, usually another person is brought into the mix for "input," ad infinitum. This happens until the issue becomes a non-issue or a disagreement over a new issue occurs.

I might disagree with someone if they ordered me to do something I think is wrong, but I actually admire them for making a decision. There's nothing worse than making no progress because no one has the balls or authority to say "there's contention over this issue, but I think X is the best course."

<comment><USER26> Oh yeah. Ye old "disagree w/ them until they don't care". It's terrible. Usually the most stubborn peasant will get his way. A toxic culture is born/consolidated. It drains any excitement that you may have for the job. The whole process turn into a huge circlej*rl.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This article is a strawman. These are more characteristic of pop business books and motivational speakers than it is of anything I've encountered in my actual business degree. I'm learning about concepts like liquidity versus profitability and the difference between cellular and functional manufacturing layouts. This is looking at a couple of popular books on business and claiming it in some way represents serious business research and education.

</comment><comment><USER28> Business schools (and MBA programs) were an interesting experiment: can you abstract away the most important parts of a business away from what that business actually produces? Empirically, the answer appears to be no. It's understandable that such an experiment would take place. But now that we have an answer, we should stop pretending that the value produced by business schools is sufficient to justify their existence.

<comment><USER29> The existance of serial entrepreneurs suggests that empirically, perhaps the answer is yes, it just can't be taught in business schools.

<comment><USER28> That's a really good point. Would suggest the most important quality for success is leadership, and that it can't be taught.

<comment><USER30> It's possible that leadership cannot be taught, but it can be observed and learnt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> As auganov pointed out, a lot of the BA curriculum is inter-disciplinary and the content is largely generic (barring specializations such as finance/ops etc). Nowadays, anybody can access this knowledge for free for little/no cost. Hence, IMO its not really the content or even the lectures that make MBA schools sell (something which I think even they admit openly).

Most people go for the 'network' and the validation that the school gives you. So no matter how outdated their curriculum gets, as long as

a) their current alums promote and guide future ones (shouldn't be any problem)

b) They are able to continuously source smart people

c) Nobody comes up with a better alternative system to identifying future leaders

These schools should have no problem.

</comment><comment>

IMO, (a) will never be a problem for these schools. The supply of smart undergrads/students is also assured given our innate inertia, FOMO and the perceived lack of growth in non-mba fields as we grow older.

Thus, (c) i.e. somebody coming up with a better metric/validation mechanism to source top leaders should be the biggest concern for these schools.

The lack of formalism and accountability in the curriculum (specially in the softer subjects) means that it's unlikely any one finding/study/trend can deal a major blow to these institutions. For every Enron, they can cite a Jack Welch.

tl;dr: Slow gradual change/reflection is unlikely to change these schools much. Disruption is what's needed.

</comment><comment><USER32> A CEO is supposed to be a leader, someone who can inspire. What we instead are management ranks filled with opportunists and short termists who have spend the last 20 years in management with a single idea - outsourcing.

This is a management class who skate along looking for the next opportunity to rinse repeat the same playbook. There is no leadership or imagination here.

There is a crisis of leadership, a crisis of accountability, an elitist club who look out for each other and extreme compensation with parachutes even for failure.

The whole field of management has not delivered a single good idea, its taken individuals who go against the wind to show a glimpse of the possibilites leaving in their wake the tedious industry of management courses and case studies as magic formulas for success that outside of their original context have no chance of replication.

</comment><comment><USER33> I think MBAs are the MCSEs of the business world; you can't get into certain (high paying) jobs without them despite their value being questionable...

</comment><comment><USER34> So is physics. Perhaps this is already the next middle ages without realizing it.

</comment><comment><USER35> Holy cow! Did anyone else see the comments section on the actual article? Dumpster Fire is a term that gets banted about a lot, but that part of the site is surely flaming raw sewage. My god, is that what my uncles see as 'informed' readers? Jesus, the Economist could really use some more heavy handed mods.

</comment><comment><USER36> I wonder why they thought this article was newsworthy. It's news to no one that most business books are empty of thought. The same goes for many MBA programs. So yes, we should ignore management theory, but for the reasons given in this article, we should ignore the Economist.

It's not even clear that the four ideas cited in the magazine are actually prevalent in management theory. The piece itself did almost nothing to substantiate that.

One of the best books on management theory is War and Peace. The central idea in war is simply that good lieutenants are more useful and more rare than the sycophants and adjutants who circle the chiefs of staff.

One of the second best ideas about management is this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership)

The main job of managers is to make the lives and tasks of competent individual contributors go more smoothly.

</comment><comment><USER37> I pose the question as a middle manager who feels those above are doing a worse job than I could, what would I do to show I am senior management material. One of those things feels like it should be 'get an MBA'. But as others have said, maybe this is just _paying the price for entry to the club_. On the other hand, I see plenty of senior managers who have got their positions from 1) being in the job below when the senior left or 2) social connections and have few of the soft skills or technical skills that would make them a decent manager. At least MBA's give the appearance of a meritocracy!

</comment><comment><USER38> I think business school is already disrupted with startup accelerators like YC. It's a matter of time before they realize it. Some accelerator programs even want a tuition. I've pondered this a lot thinking what I would learn to go to business school, but problem is that you can't get funding to start a company, but you can get funding to attend business school. Hence why business schools exist now. But 10-15 years from now this will change.

</comment><comment><USER39> >Management theories are organised around four basic ideas, repeated ad nauseam in every business book you read or business conference you attend, that bear almost no relation to reality.

This a weak premise whose scant evidence is primarily composed of pop business airport books. And the idea that the vast, diverse, and nebulous world of management can be distilled to four ideas is a joke.

<comment><USER40> I thought it was a fair distillation. Any distillation of a field is bound to be incomplete, but what do you think it was missing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> this:

"The theorists' third ruling idea is that business is getting faster. There is some truth in this. Internet firms can acquire hundreds of millions of customers in a few years. But in some ways this is less impressive than earlier roll-outs: well over half of American households had motor cars just two decades after Henry Ford introduced the first moving assembly line in 1913. And in many respects business is slowing down. Firms often waste months or years checking decisions with various departments (audit, legal, compliance, privacy and so on) or dealing with governments' ever-expanding bureaucracies. The internet takes away with one hand what it gives with the other. Now that it is so easy to acquire information and consult with everybody (including suppliers and customers), organisations frequently dither endlessly."

</comment><comment><USER42> As someone who is a respected manager, according to anonymous surveys my managed peers take every year (and they are truly anonymous) as well as what I learned from the manager I came to most respect in my life and still go to to this day even though he isn't any more, I think what makes good management particularly effective is a few things. Before I list them out and explain though, I just want to add one caveat: This isn't applicable for everyone, and certainly not every industry, and everyone's situation is different and it can be hard to relay some idea's perfectly in text so I'm going to do my best.

With all that said, here's a little background as well. I manage a team of folks who are in charge of IT infrastructure and deployment. Mobile devices, servers, VPNs, virtualization setups, as well as database administration and some non-customer facing coding to keep everything going, all the way down to the desktop setups for employees. I work with maybe 30 people underneath me and there can't be more than 100 of us all together. Each of my 30 team members are tasked with different tings in accordance to the rough outline i speak to above.

Now, to the good bits

1) If i learned anything, from being the manager to before that, its a really really simple thing. Don't ever forget where you came from. Ever. I often will think about making a decision - some big, some small - and I remind myself 'What would my reaction be if i wasn't a manager, but underneath me? How would I react to this? Positive? Negative? Why?' I find that my best manager did this all the time, and it really showed because he was one of us before he was a manager (for my company this is typical, we don't get a lot of outside management for our group that hasn't at least had some experience on the basics of what we do). The reason for this is to me obvious, in that you will better understand the actual core of your decisions affects this way. Its easy to forget all this in the day to day, but its a huge one.

Specifically, it has benefited in that some changes that came down from those who manage me, were immediately rejected because I was able to articulate, in a way they could understand, why the new change would be bad. For instance, they wanted to take away our hands-on Lab for testing new technologies (this is a good part of what we do, to keep up on things) and go to a more virtual one. In theory this seems okay, there's a lot of companies that do this (Cisco, itpro.tv, VMware, all have these kinda things) but I made the case that no, have it hands on, with good training attached to the hands on labs, was a more effective on the whole, and it cost less, because we could dedicate a rotation of people to learn something, teach it to the team, and then the team gets to test it, and they rotate into to teaching back, until we feel the technology is well covered to at least a 'intermediate' level for all members on our team. With the virtualization, this was lost, and they had to pay more for the licenses. It ended up being better for us because we could just get labs setup, get documentation/official manuals/training material, learn it, and teach it over the course of x weeks to everyone else, and they could then come in to the lab when there was allotted time, break stuff, fix stuff etc. and round it went.

2) One of the best things I ever learned as well, is that if someone or someone's is designated as a point of contact, they should be treated as such for a project. For instance, if I designated Steve the networking guy as my point of contact for network related projects that I need someone to oversee, I essentially report to him, with some exceptions, instead of him reporting to me about the project. This gives them freedom, and gets them into a position where they can also learn good managing skills or at least, focus on big picture things for awhile. I don't micro manage, I philosophically meet my team half way. If things that we have as objectives are being met, and are exceeding expectations, then i give more leeway. I will always stick up for them if they in turn do good work, and the more good work that is produced, the more freedom I'm willing to allow. This has created a huge win for the company as well, as our team is small, but incredibly productive.

3) Don't try to sanitize feedback. This isn't a 'be a jerk' card, but team members who want to improve honestly like feedback, and give it to them honestly. Good and bad. One thing old managers i know used to do is never talk about the things I did well - to reinforce those things, is the purpose - <USER2> only talk about how we could improve. My best manager, and a skill i keep as well, is whenever I do check in with my team in a 1 on 1 way, we talk about what they're doing that is amazing and great, and then we talk about area's of imrovement, and relate it back to 'so these are your core strengths, how can you apply what makes these your core strengths to these problems?" that really gives people a lot of motivation in my experience

4) If you make a commitment to someone, meet it, obviously huge unexpected things aside that you can't plan for, this generally is huge. Not forgetting say, asking upper management for x thing on their behalf (our company works this way a lot, though we're trying to change that). or even just follow up when you say you will. If you do miss it, explain why, honestly, and then go from there

5) Training is important. invest in your team, your team invests in you, and that makes for a great company to work for, have as a client, and essentially helps you grow. It took our company some time to realize this, but now they're full on.

6) Rotate their roles, but don't push overly hard for people to do what they don't like unless there really is a specific reason. and I'm not talking about ' I don't like putting notes together detailing these implementations'. There are musts in every job, and enforce those across the board. I'm talking more 'okay, so, you been doing the networking for like a year, year and half, are you okay, burned out, want to try something new?' this lets people pick up new skills, maintain those skills, and apply their previous work experience on your team in different ways. We're team 'swiss army' internally for this reason :) and my headcount is smaller than the next guys, but we're always rated one of the top teams. I think this has a lot to do with it. (out of 4 teams, granted)

7) you can be of great value as a manager if you learn to filter what is actually nessacary and what isn't from upper management before talking to your team about their goals/expectations. See my example on the virtual labs. My team didn't know that was even a consideration until another manager in the same meeting mentioned it to their team. by that time, it was dead, and my team was grateful they didn't have to waste time thinking about it.

8) If someone is bad hire, and your team isn't working because of this, don't be afraid to do something about it. you're a manager, sometimes doing hard things like firing someone or moving them into a different position they're more skilled for is something you need to recongize early. this goes along with my next point....

9) if your team members come to you saying somehting about how they are being treated by others, take it at face value, look into it, and have their back. Always. Always. Always. Never dismiss this. I had an incident where someone was being discriminated against based on their sex by an older team mate who i think just had it in their head from a different time what the role of that person was and wasn't, and I had recently assigned them as a project lead. I didn't tell them to deal with it, I looked into it, asked a trusted colleague to talk to some folks about it (not revealing the nature, just said 'Hey man, could you do me a favor? coud you ask around and get a feel for what people are getting a vibe about person x? I want some imparitialness to this' Idk if that violates policy in HR or not, but for me it worked well, i squashed it quickly and made it VERY clear what isn't tolerated on my team in a short amount of time, but it also came down to the person who was saying things that were considred sexist didn't realize what they had going on was just a reflection of insecurities. Sometimes you're being the psychologist therapist and working them through those feelings so they can understand what happened. I didn't end up having to separate them or fire anyone in this case, because that person came to an understanding and the person in charge separately was okay working from a clean slate as long as it didn't continue, once they understand what triggered what. Now they both work together extremely well and are both happy.

Anyways, that's my experience. I'm no lawyer, no MBA, and your mileage may vary, esp. on that last bit, but these are some representations and guidelines i follow often.

</comment><comment><USER43> If management theory have no value then why MBA grads from top schools are so high in demand? This is not a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely curious as I've wondered about this for a long time.

<comment><USER44> I've always thought there are two sorts of management - keep things going style and make new stuff mode. MBA's are directed at keeping things going - fitting into middle management, warring with other MBA factions, fighting over internal politics etc. You need an MBA for this because you know the language, it's a very unique language and to get respect from the current incumbents you need to know the language. It has nothing to do with making new things (in general), these are stories they like to tell themselves, but I think in general it's not correct.

The other sort of business is making new things, here business school knowledge comes in handy but it's not a big part of the answer - you can learn this stuff on the fly. More so I think knowing too much MBA stuff can be detrimental cause it interferes with your gut feelings. If having an MBA was useful then every startup would have an MBA, like every middle manager has an MBA, qed.

So MBA's in short MBA's are in high demand because they teach you the rules of the game that all the other MBA's know. Does it have much to do with business itself? Well some of it imho

edit: you could say an MBA contains the rules of engagement. but having an MBA doesn't make you a great general, and street fighters never bother to learn the rules.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> TOP-DOWN:

Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), Narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), Psychopathy (the lack of remorse and empathy), Sadism (pleasure in the suffering of others);

</comment><comment><USER46> The best business advice I've ever read was put out by the Scientologists. Not that they do a good job of following their own advice; but its good. They know how to be effective.

<comment><USER47> Such as....??

<comment><USER48> it's full of bullshit and they did some bad things but there are some good points:

\- generally high moral standard and ethics are valued a lot - it pays back long term in business

\- focus on drug detox, exercise, being fit in general - you can argue it's not business advice but on the other hand it's very practical if you think about it

\- focus on understanding things, misinformation is very bad thing (like a sin)

\- state of flow - this is quite interesting in context of programmers - <USER3> all know it's there and it would be nice to be able to train yourself to go into this state when you want.

IMHO you can't say it's good or bad, it feels more like opinionated, almost randomly, cherry picked things from religions, psychology etc. glued together with a book by sci-fi writer - some things will be correct, most not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> [http://abstrusegoose.com/380](http://abstrusegoose.com/380)

</comment><comment><USER49> I would have liked to see a discussion of "maximizing shareholder value".

</comment><comment><USER50> All ideas are dead. Only true facts are alive.

<comment><USER51> Are you being sarcastic or silly?

Seems troll-ish to me...

<comment><USER50> People hear what they want to hear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> The irony of this article in claiming that management theory is outdated is that it selects ideas that were ascendent 10 years ago pre-financial crash.

The author should consider reading a book published after 2005.

Not that I'm a huge fan of the genre, to be honest. Way too often I basically see management books arguing that domain skill in the subject managed is immaterial and I could not disagree more with that.

Also, I'm curious what metrics he's assessing for "productivity growth is dismal in the west." It's precisely because of productivity growth that we can envision an economy where centralization and globalization are not inevitable forces.</comment>


Meet This 14-Year-Old Self Taught Hacker - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/22/meet-this-14-year-old-self-taught-hacker/ <comment><USER2> Fair play to the kid and I wish him success.

But... they make him out to be some kind of genius. Hes not, hes a kid who is skilled at programming (just like some kids are skilled at football or whatever). Hell, I learned to program from uni books when I was his age, because I didn't have internet at the time - this doesn't make me a genius. I'd even go so far as to say I'm lagging behind a lot of people here on HN. Still, this guy has a lot of opportunities ahead of him and its awesome that hes doing well.

<comment><USER3> I'm in agreement with your point. The media doesn't take this kind of interest in kids that excel in plumbing. Or painting walls. Or woodworking.

Probably because so much of the public has this perception that "computers" require exceptional genius.

<comment><USER4> On the other hand I would suspect much more media attention _is_ given to kids that excel in throwing or catching a ball.

While TC isn't exactly mainstream media it's nice to get some coverage.

I always thought it was slightly odd but nice that The Late Show with David Letterman occasionally featured "kid scientists" in the line-up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> That was me with my brand new Apple //c, but no Internet, no one locally with similar interests, and not much encouragement from family. I'm not complaining- I really enjoyed the solitude and few distractions.

When access to this world-wide network came along, it saw the potential for this kind of thing where like-minded people could connect from half a world away. (not to mention the research capabilities we have now.)

Oh, to be young today with access to the Internet and a thriving hacker community.</comment>


Libjpeg-turbo - <AUTHOR> http://www.libjpeg-turbo.org/ <comment><USER2> I benchmarked libjpeg-turbo on iOS and Mac and it was significantly faster than the built-in stuff (typically around 2-3x), which includes the hardware decoder on iPhone.

<comment><USER3> I did a few benchmarks on the Raspberry Pi a year ago and got similar results. CPU decoding is a lot faster using libjpeg-turbo compared to using the hardware jpeg decoder: [https://info-beamer.com/blog/omx-jpeg-decoding- performance-v...](https://info-beamer.com/blog/omx-jpeg-decoding-performance- vs-libjpeg-turbo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Any context why this is suddenly trending? libjpeg-turbo is awesome, but hardly new.

<comment><USER5> Sometimes I wish there was a package/library of the week. So many great discussions to be had!

<comment><USER6> This is something that the old freshmeat.net site would do. It was a great place to see releases of software all in one place. I'm sad that it's gone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >a JPEG image codec that uses SIMD instructions (MMX, SSE2, NEON, AltiVec)

Wow, it's been a long time since I heard anything about AltiVec.

<comment><USER8> The one real downside of Apple moving to Intel is that it's quite difficult to get cheap-ish PowerPC hardware.

At least we have ubiquitous ARM now, if you want to test your code on non-x86 platforms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Honest questions: is this a complete re-implementation of libjpeg? (It was mentioned that this was originally based off libjpeg/SIMD, a libjpeg v6b fork.) If not, why can't this be backported to upstream libjpeg?

<comment><USER10> Upstream libjpeg after v6 has appeared a little... weird lately: [https://github.com/LuaDist/libjpeg/blob/master/README#L353](https://github.com/LuaDist/libjpeg/blob/master/README#L353)

<comment><USER11> Odd. This insanity is also present in the original source on [http://www.ijg.org/](http://www.ijg.org/) .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you need to save/encode images you really want mozjpeg instead.

<comment><USER13> ... but if you want something that is fast, you probably want libjpeg-turbo

> When compared to baseline (the only mode that is fully accelerated in > libjpeg-turbo), the combination of progressive JPEG, jpgcrush, and trellis > quantization improved the compression ratio by 15-27% (average 20%) in our > testing but increased encoding time by approximately 34-59x. More than half > of the compression ratio improvement came from the use of progressive JPEG, > which is supported in libjpeg-turbo as well. Decoding time was increased by > anywhere from 17% to 3x, with most of this again being due to the use of > progressive JPEG.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The libjpeg.so in Debian (from the current stable release onwards) and Ubuntu is libjpeg-turbo.

<comment><USER15> Ditto FreeBSD, Fedora, and (probably) CentOS).

<comment><USER16> FreeBSD only made it default throughout the ports tree somewhat recently.

<comment><USER15> A little over a year ago, yes: [https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports?view=revision&revision=r397...](https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports?view=revision&revision=r397084)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is there a way to express SIMD in C? I'd expect that it's a solved problem.</comment>


Berners-Lee: WWW is spy net - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/10/bernerslee_warns_of_spying <comment><USER2> I don't have a problem with Google, Facebook and Twitter dominating the web as such because I don't have any accounts with them: They are commercial entities filling a need. Capitalism at work I suppose.

We all have a choice not to use them and I think this is the point he's missing (or the article is omitting). The opening paragraph should be "Inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has warned that the internet has become the "world's largest surveillance network for those that use Twitter, Facebook and Google".

I have had lengthy conversations with my family and friends about Facebook and Google and what they do with your information and the majority shrug and say either "I'm not bothered" or "They would get bored looking at my stuff". I don't bring it up with anyone anymore.

I feel that something monumentally bad will happen in the future related to the information these companies have amassed, something epically bad and the public will (perhaps) say "Enough is enough" but it will be too late... just my $0.02

<comment><USER3> Do you really have a choice to not use them? If so:

\- You must not use android and have Google know your location for traffic purposes (and other ad-related data-mining)

\- You must ensure all your friends never post pictures of you on FB, preventing them from building a profile about you by association

\- You must block every single ad that originates from the Google ad network (and which is eager to learn your browsing habits)

\- You must never fly on an airline belonging to Star Alliance, as Google bought ITA Software (formerly known as Sabre) to get a hold of all the airline reservations done for those airlines

\- You must never send an email to someone with a Gmail address

This is a case where choosing to not use Google is a bit more complicated than choosing to not drink Coke.

<comment><USER4> > \- You must never send an email to someone with a Gmail address

You can be sending to gmail without knowing. Many business use gmail enterprise. I've been told that their EULA states no mining on private data, but that's very hard to believe.

<comment><USER5> Even my personal email goes to a GApps account, grandfathered from when it was free for individuals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The NYT article from a few days ago has much more context: [http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/technology/the-webs- cre...](http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/technology/the-webs-creator- looks-to-reinvent-it.html)

Original discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11859395](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11859395)

</comment><comment><USER7> Berners-Lee said:

> "The web is already decentralized... We don't have a technology problem; we > have a social problem."

I am not sure I follow. Surely censorship and mass surveillance are facilitated by the hierarchical topology of the internet and the reliance on central authorities like IANA for key resources. This does not look like a social problem to me. Maybe a political problem, yes.

<comment><USER8> My interpretation is as follows. Despite the distributed nature of the Internet, the society at large seems to promote centralized services on top of it. One gov't, one legal system, one language, one search engine etc. Something in the nature of people motivates this type of organization.

<comment><USER9> See: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality by Clay Shirky (February 8, 2003) [http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_w...](http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_weblog.html)

"In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution."

For a much bigger look at similar effects, see Critical Mass by Philip Ball [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Critical-Mass-Thing-Leads- Another/d...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Critical-Mass-Thing-Leads- Another/dp/0099457865)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> am I naive to think we all would get spied on a lot less if we cleared our browser cookies every couple of hours or at least daily?

<comment><USER11> Clearing Cookies is definitely a good start. Cookies take essentially no effort on the trackers' part, so they are deployed a lot.

I personally usually just recommend installing the EFF's Privacy Badger [0], which eats Cookies and blocks tracking scripts all in one, while almost never breaking webpages, so while it's not perfect protection, it's a good compromise for most people.

[0] [https://www.eff.org/privacybadger](https://www.eff.org/privacybadger)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> [http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=technopoly](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=technopoly)

Facebook CIA project: The Onion News Network [https://youtu.be/cqggW08BWO0](https://youtu.be/cqggW08BWO0)

</comment><comment><USER13> Oh, thanks Tim.

[http://boingboing.net/2013/10/04/firefox-bug-pledge-never- to...](http://boingboing.net/2013/10/04/firefox-bug-pledge-never-to.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> this seems ilke a re-hash of Schneier's piece from 2013...

[http://us.cnn.com/2013/03/16/opinion/schneier-internet- surve...](http://us.cnn.com/2013/03/16/opinion/schneier-internet- surveillance/)

</comment><comment><USER15> This from the guy that helped push DRM for the Web.

<comment><USER16> No, this from the guy who helped found the web. In my book, that gives him the right to say whatever he wants. DRM or not.

<comment><USER13> Well, he can say whatever he likes but just because he started the web doesn't mean he gets to change it to a less open version of his original vision.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Joyvite – Referral Program for Your SaaS - <AUTHOR> https://joyvite.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone, I'm co-founder / CEO of Joyvite. Joyvite is basically referral program as a service.

I'm happy to have any feedback you may have! Thank you!

<comment><USER2> Hey Ganis. I reckon there must be a typo in your header "Customers" as opposed to "Costomers"

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi tixocloud, thanks for the correction. I have fixed it!</comment></comment></comment>


Still Struggling with Social Networking  - <AUTHOR> http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/still-struggling-with-social-networking <comment><USER2> This guy sounds like a nerd, as Paul Graham describes nerds: oblivious to the social strategies that normal people use to become popular.

Nearly everything posted on Myspace is meaningless fluff. You'll notice that most conversations at bars are meaningless fluff. It's just a way to plug in socially. Most important is displaying how many friends you have, both at singles bars and on Myspace. The more friends you have, the more popular you are, and therefore the more people want to be friends with you.

A T-shirt that came out a few years ago: "Tom is my only friend." This is a way of saying "loser" in the mindset of the socially savvy.

</comment><comment><USER3> "years after these sites have become the leading destinations on the Web, I still don't get it. I don't have that visceral, gut understanding of the attraction and benefits of these services"

Same thing here; I just don't get it. But my theory is this: I have friends I see regularly and we keep in touch, talk about the big things in life and (for a few of these guys) they're basically like brothers to me. I have maybe a dozen other people I like to keep in touch with, and a dozen others who I get on with but rarely see.

I think some people like to think they have hundreds of friends, but it's a different definition of "friend" -- more like my category of "people I get on with but rarely see". Emailing, phoning or (heaven forfend) going out places with those people probably won't happen too often, but keeping a page on a social networking site allows you to keep in touch without too much effort or appearing a bit creepy by emailing or phoning too often. I still don't "get it" on a visceral level but I can see why some people want to do that.

Summary: if you have loose connections to many people, use Facebook or MySpace. If you have more intense relationships with a few people, don't.

</comment><comment><USER4> Facebook is useful if you have enough friends to connect with. If you're struggling with it (and you want to "get it") then you need to meat some new people, probably younger people, who have real social lives in the real world. These are the people who add value to facebook by posting pictures, sharing their lives, and planning their next friday night out with friends. It's just another medium for communication. I'm sure there were people who didn't "get" the telephone because they thought "everyone I know is within a couple minute walk from me. why would I need a telephone to call them?" And I'm not saying Facebook is as revolutionary as the telephone but it does enable you to communicate with a greater number of people in a more efficient means. But if you don't see the point, then you probably don't have many people to communicate with.</comment>


Real-life bombs don't display time left - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Do-real-life-bombs-have-big-LED-displays-indicating-how-much-time-is-left-until-they-detonate/answer/Kah-Seng-Tay

<comment><USER2> Ask a stupid question, get an inane answer.

<comment><USER3> To each their own, of course. I enjoy reading something from someone who knows what they're talking about, and although I could have guessed most of that myself, I found his answer thorough and interesting. <shrug></comment></comment>


Startup Quote: Michael Lopp, Blogger, Rands In Repose - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/2374460846

<comment><AUTHOR> You have no idea if your idea matters until you share it.

\- Michael Lopp (@rands)

<http://startupquote.com/post/2374460846></comment>


Ask HN - Would a start up take me seriously? - <AUTHOR>

Greetings,
I am currently a College Student, and I really like the startup culture and I am trying to make myself very hire-able right out of college, based on the following, would a start up consider bringing me on board when I graduate?
Experience:
1) I've designed and implemented a program for DNA analysis that my state uses in their labs. (I made the source code available) 2) I've done bioinformatics, concentrating on parallel computing, mostly NVIDIA's CUDA. 3) I was the head back end programmer for a startup (can't disclose the name), I joined as the only programmer and helped come up with many of the concepts they now employ. I started out with a focus in rapid prototyping and eventually moved on to building a scalable backend. 4) Internship for a big name company (think Microsoft, Apple , Intel big)
Education:
1) Currently pursuing a degree in Computer Engineering 2) Also pursuing a minor in Mathematics 3) I have a 4.0 GPA, all around
Computer Skills: (languages I know and a few I plan on learning)
Java, C/C++ (I prefer C), Python, PHP, MySQL, Haskell, Clojure, Scala, OCaml, Javascript, VHDL, C#
I love software development, I have read(or am reading) all the big books on the topic, ie code complete, pragmatic programming, man-month, design patterns, etc..
Even though my focus would be software development, I have a very firm understanding of the hardware, and enjoy some assembly every once in a while.
I am currently 21 and have 3 semesters left before I graduate, I ask you HN, would a start up take me seriously coming out of college? I mean like a real member of their team! <comment><USER2> Ok, what we see in the valley are two types of recent graduates. We see "curriculum only" graduates who can barely use an IDE and can't code their way out of a paper bag (usually without real internships). These graduates _require_ 2-3 years of experience before you can trust them with any level of complexity and are not really hire-able unless the startup is very desperate. It's very easy to filter out these candidates but they also (saldy) make up the bulk of the applicants.

Then, there are the geek's geeks (you). We love candidates like you. You put in long hours for usually much less pay than a senior engineer and don't know enough to realize that free pizza isn't really a benefit. You will not have any trouble securing offers after you graduate.

Now, there are some things you can do to make yourself even more hire-able than you already are.

First off, years of real world experience matters more or less depending on the technologies you use. If you are very good in a hot skillset you can name your price and choose your company regardless of experience, degrees, body odor, etc... Right now, the hottest language in your background, by quite a bit, is Javascript. Good UI people, and specifically good JS guys, are extremely hard to find right now. If you add in some solid backend skills (you already have Java, which is good, but Rails or Django might be even better) you are starting to look like the perfect candidate for any startup.</comment>