Why It's So Difficult to Climb Amazon's Corporate Ladder - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-15/careers-at-amazon-why-its-so-hard-to-climb-jeff-bezoss-corporate-ladder <comment><USER2> You should almost always avoid working for low-margin businesses. Sure, if they are new and growing, there's an exception, but if their whole growth plan is premised around being low-margin, it's not going to be a great place to work and advance your career. Expenses such as compensation are always on management's radar.

<comment><USER3> It's pretty well known around Seattle that Amazon pays their employees very well, and has a tendency of giving ridiculous signing bonuses.

<comment><USER4> I actually didn't get a job at Amazon because my pretty normal base salary requirements were higher than most of the execs in the company.

The deer in headlights wide-eyed look on my recruiter's face (after I had finished all the interviews) when I told him what I currently made in a smaller metro and what I was looking for is something that will be seared into my memory forever.

I can't remember if the word "salary cap" was used or not, but it was definitely implied.

I offered to accept a lower base with alternative compensation options (even vacation days), but it was already too rich for their blood.

I think they gave it some serious thought, but I got a call a week later that they simply couldn't do it.

<comment><USER5> I'd describe AWS pay as "competitive". Most all gigs provide you a decent signing bonus and stock grants. This lowers your base salary as all these items together are taken into your total compensation, which I believe is pretty much the norm up in Seattle for AWS/Google/Microsoft.

Your signing bonus is pro-rated and you pay it back if you quit before one year, and your moving expenses are also paid back over two years if you quit before then. Your stock grants vest heavily in the back-end over four years. Every year you get a review and new grants are included in your total compensation package as your "salary". It's a sort of lock-in system that helps keep you invested in the company as you keep earning stock etc, but that was my perspective. Nothing exorbitant, and that fits with the Amazon ethos of "frugal".

<comment><USER4> Yeah, that jives with what I was told. I think the stock grants mature over 4 years? I think the schedule was kind of interesting as well but I don't remember what it was, it wasn't 25/25/25/25 either.

To be honest, I think it was a miss-match in positional terminology. I was going for a PM role, which in my current career path is basically the CEO of a specific project or program for part of a company. (These programs can be very big, the largest program I ever worked on as part of the PM staff was north of $130m/yr. but for a wide variety of reasons I prefer the smaller $5-20m work, much more fun to run). Typical compensation is a base salary + specific performance bonuses + contract win bonuses (+ large option grants as bonuses in the kinds of companies that do that sort of thing).

I got the sense that at Amazon PM roles are much lower down the totem pole positionally and act more like coordinators in the organization and don't have as much agency as I was assuming. I was honestly just looking for a change of pace and probably would have accepted whatever they offered even if it was quite a bit lower than what I considered my market rate, but I fouled it up early on and didn't recover well.

<comment><USER6> If they're like PM roles in the rest of the Internet industry, then yes, they are basically CEOs of a specific project or program for part of a company. The problem is that in most large software companies, projects are generally quite small. So a PM might be in charge of an engineering team of 4-6 engineers that are working on one tiny widget on the page. The product as a whole is usually the responsibility of a VP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ex-amazonian here. Another problem is if your manager _doesn 't want_ you to get promoted. For whatever reason, sometimes people don't click, and I've seen the careers of some extremely talented developers be hampered by a bad or non- relationship with their manager. It didn't matter that their entire team, and other teams viewed these people very highly, and sought out their advice and consultation on a number of matters - they still couldn't get promoted unless their manager signs off on it.

<comment><USER8> I worked for a fairly large company that previously required your team manager to approve of you moving to another team. You could spin wheels all you wanted, but if they didn't like you for whatever reason they could immediately stop any lateral movement. This wound up pushing a lot of employees out, they'd eventually quit because they were miserable. Couldn't get shifts they wanted, bootcamps, training, unfairly poor reviews, etc.

It was one of those "who.. thought of this?" ideas. I believe they recently removed it.

<comment><USER9> Variations on this are pretty common, although what I've seen more is that you're obligated to inform your manager before seeking a position on another team- your manager has no power to prevent it from happening.

I don't know why a manager would want to prevent this from happening though. If I were a manager, and one of my employees said they wanted to switch teams, the last thing I'd want to do is force them to stay on my team knowing that they didn't want to be there, even if I was feeling vindictive towards that employee.

I've heard that the policy requiring informing the manager was motivated by a desire to allow employees to switch teams if they wanted to, but at the same time to dissuade managers from actively poaching employees from other teams in the same company. Also, it gives the manager a chance to possibly make things right with the disgruntled employee, instead of just losing that employee with no warning.

It's not a perfect system at all, but I can at least understand the rationale. It totally doesn't make sense that a manager would be able to prevent it from happening though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Ambitious employees tend to spend months having lunch and coffee with their boss's peers to ensure a positive outcome once the topic of their proposed promotion is raised in an OLR."

Sounds like all those Microsoft stories that came out a few months ago.

<comment><USER11> its a trend others and I have seen elsewhere. Far too much a popularity contest, trying to ensure during your daily and weekly routine you don't piss off someone who might be sitting on the review panel.

It has taken getting good work done and placed it second to making sure to not tread on any toes, even if that means things that should be done don't get done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Article rings true from my perspective as a "level 5" manager in Amazon's fulfillment operation.

Remember that Amazon core value to "have backbone" and "don't be afraid to disagree"? This is where that would bite you in the ass. That Senior Operations Manager you disagreed with that one time in a staff meeting in front of the GM? Yeah, they just sunk your promotion during the OLR because your direct manager didn't want to put their spine out there to get snapped.

Not sure how different it was in Seattle, but in order to get that promotion, you had to tread lightly and make sure everyone thought of you as the perfect little angel.

<comment><USER13> Tread lightly :) hehe

But yes, nothing worse than passive-aggressive management.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Maybe the problem is promotion altogether? Work your ass off for 1 year and then, you may or may not win the promotion lottery. I guess a more flexible style of salary increase could be created?

Work on a project for 3 months. If it attain its goal, everyone on the team receives 0.20% increase. This way you want to make sure your team will succeed.

I'm just thinking outloud here. It could be a rubbish idea.

<comment><USER13> Much more simple than that. Just take a cut from the profits your project generates or supervises. If the project doesn't generate or supervise anything just get a cut from the overall budget which is allocated based on how valuable the project is to the company.

<comment><USER15> Favors near term profits far more than long term growth, which you could argue is not good for the longevity of the company. Plus, there would be competition over the seemingly most profitable projects. And there are projects that don't generate any profit, but has benefits that are very difficult to quantify.

<comment><USER13> But if that's true then it applies to shareholders and execs as well. Should we change their compensation plans? Yes there will be competition over the profitable projects and that's how it should be. Projects without profit don't exist. If the project doesn't have profit then the company wouldn't allocate budget. If they allocate budget then the project is profitable. It is up to the project leaders to have the fight and justify budgets if it's not that obvious.

<comment><USER16> > Projects without profit don't exist.

Depends on your industry. In finance there are many, many projects which have to be done for legal compliance. There is no 'profit' for the company; the goal is to be permitted to remain in business.

Funds have to be allocated to do the project, but it brings in no new revenue. It might actually incur new costs, such as ongoing storage for audit logs.

<comment><USER13> Well, any prevented loss can also be interpreted as profit. So depending on what kind of money is at stake you can reasonably claim a cut. You provide insurance and your cut is the price of the insurance policy. It's a well established business.

<comment><USER15> Not arguing at all that things have inherent value, but the challenge is having an objective way of putting a dollar value to those activities.

For example, does a backup generator add any value if the electricity never goes out? Do you only assign it 'profit' if electricity goes out? How do you calculate the value of the downtime if electricity does go out? Does it encourage people who've worked on setting up a backup generator to 'wish' for outages?

It's a challenge. Even if you do have answers to all of these questions, there will always be levels of subjectivity resulting in politics, and the effort involved will be itself an administrative workload of which the 'profit' would be difficult to assess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think the most interesting part of the article is when it mentions that anecdotes about an employee's performance most-often dominate these OLRs. It seems that a company with as concrete of a business goal as Amazon's would have the ability to use a more objective means of measuring employee performance.

<comment><USER18> The nice thing about knowing everything going on in your company is being able to judge it easily when it exceeds expectations. The shitty thing about standardized metrics is gaming those metrics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So it's stack ranking by a different name.

</comment><comment><USER20> Non-Amazonian here but I can tell you this so-called OLR process is same as how most companies with more than 100 employees deal with the promotions process.

In most companies your line manager does not solely decide your performance rating and promote you based on that, but rather the manager should be telling you how your are performing, how to improve and grow, and once you have proven you can manage added responsibilities then your manager suggests and advocates for your promotion. The promotion candidates are then considered across all teams during an annual or semi-annual review process.

This practice ensures that a lenient manager isn't promoting their junior interns to VP roles, every team has the same performance standards, and managers of other teams can endorse or disapprove of someone being promoted based on whether they work well with other teams rather than just performing well within their own team.

<comment><USER21> And that someone who doesn't like you can black ball your promotion efforts anonymously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think that there's a lot of subtlety that gets lost talking about the corporate structure in Amazon. The levels were more or less correct, so far as it goes, but it's not the full story. For instance, a senior developer could be level 6, while his manager might be level 5. That doesn't mean that the dev gets to override what his manager says; they're different promotion paths.

This is key. If you want to work as a dev at Amazon, you'll go from level 4 to level 7 as a dev. I don't know if devs are ever integrated into the corpocracy, vice presidents and so on. I suspect that they generally aren't; at least, I've never heard of it happening.

A manager's levels are different. I'm not and have never been a manager at amazon, but the responsibilities at each level are different from the dev side.

<comment><USER23> At Amazon the individual contributor path goes up to level 10 (VP level).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Any organization is going to have a very limited number of top slots, and so the larger it is the harder it will be to climb into one of those positions.

I guess I don't see why this is news.

</comment><comment><USER25> In many organizations a promotion will depend on your supervisor's ability to sell it to his superiors. The system at Amazon just makes it more noticeable.

I'm highly opposed to establishing quotas, either for promotion, demotion, hiring, or termination. In all cases, quotas establish a destructive environment.

</comment><comment><USER26> Whenever I read one of these articles, I wonder which medium to large size companies actually _are_ good places to work. This is from a "startup type person perspective" \-- i.e. largely defined by work or career, even if you don't want the financial risk of a startup. Lots of places are fine if it's just a job.

Apple seems like it could be awesome if you're on the right time, and horrible otherwise, which is about the best I've seen of anywhere.

By definition, any job where you're not revenue generating and in the main (and especially main and growing) line of business also sucks. I guess there are limited exceptions when it is clear a new product could become the main line of business, and you're early in it.

Amazon, Microsoft, Intel seem painful at best, and Google seems like it had a rough few years with a mass culling of less important products.

On the other hand, even the most pathological organizations (government!) can be ok as a consultant, if you're on an important enough assignment and have buy-in at the right levels. If nothing else, it's an amazing opportunity for comparative anthropology.

</comment><comment><USER27> Sounds to me like no matter what system is used, the problem is that there's a limited number of promotions/raises to give out.

If your employees really are adding value to the company, then why should the promotions/raises be limited?

<comment><USER28> Because promotions are generally to a new role, and have been perverted at some places to simply be a new title. Want to get promoted from a Developer to a Developer-2? Those are unlimited.

Want to get promoted from a developer-15 to Amazon's CTO? Those are limited.

<comment><USER29> The Developer to Developer-2 (in Amazon parlance, SDE-I to SDE-II) is VERY limited at Amazon as well. OLR doesn't just hold back managers, it holds back everyone, and it badly hurts their competitiveness in the labor market. After 18 months as an SDE-I there, I received a 4% raise, which was huge, for Amazon (though cost of living in my area went up substantially more during that time). But there was never a chance I was going to be promoted at that time, even though I had been very close to being hired as a II, and if I'd been interviewing then instead of being reviewed, I would have had the II title and compensation. So I left a couple months later (mostly for other reasons, but I won't pretend this wasn't a factor), and got that at my new job. Their loss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Skip 9 but you have 11? Obligatory "this ladder goes to 11." Really, what's the point of removing a wrung on the ladder if you're only going to put it back at a different/higher place. You could have steps 2, 3, 5, 7, 11 and then say you've removed 5 different wrungs but have you really?

</comment><comment><USER31> Worked at a firm that used the same method for raises and promotions. It builds animosity and decreases synergy between teams. When there is a limited pool of reward money and you know the split hinges on the perception of your department there will be a lot of blame games and outright sabotage.

</comment><comment><USER32> Software is the modern sweatshop job. It's mostly dead end. Oh, and non- technical managers.

</comment><comment><USER33> How can it be harder to climb Amazon's corporate ladder unless they have less management or do more outside hiring at a senior level than other companies? _Somebody_ has to get promoted to fill the positions, right?

<comment><USER29> They do have a lot of outside hiring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Reading stories like these make me sick to my stomach and stay away from big corps.

</comment><comment><USER35> Why don't companies just ask employees what they would like to be doing, and pay them to do that? It's stupid to promote someone into a job they don't want, or keep them doing a job they don't want.

</comment><comment><USER36> This type of review system also exist in my job and I think this is crazy, as they expect you to please every other manager in the team, which further leads to favoritism and bootlicking.

</comment><comment><USER37> There's a strange gap between levels 4 and 5. 4 is for new graduates, and 5 is for product managers? What about experienced engineers?

<comment><USER38> That's not really accurate. 4 are usually college hires, at 5, other job families can split off. Engineers, Managers, TPMs, Product managers, etc. they're all in parallel. So you have Level 4,5,6,7 and higher engineers as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I wonder if Jeff is a Discworld fan.

<comment><USER40> Do you mean the dead mans shoes/wizard levels thing?

<comment><USER39> Pretty much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Maybe it should be difficult? There's usually nothing more useless than someone who wants to beome a Manager. What even surprises me more is the amount of people out there who really don't care about the money; they want authority. They want a Title in life. They need a title in life?

I have noticed the one factor that can produce a good Manager. That one factor is birth order, and it's the first born. If you're an only child, sorry you are one of the worst. But the first born has been conditioned into not abusing power, and just getting the job done.

<comment><USER42> I'm sure there's a lot of younger brothers out there that caught savage beatings from one of your "non-abusing" types.

Just another type of leadership I suppose, do as your told.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I used to get angry when I read about supposedly progressive tech companies (Amazon, Microsoft, et al) having psychotic, brutal review processes, stack ranking, internal mobility issues, closed allocation.

Now, I'm more inclined to laugh at their rookie mistakes. These MBA/McKinsey hotshots have been (very expensively, I might add) setting up the same exact defective corporate culture (in a variety of different industries) for 25 years, and I (like quite a few on HN) could single-handedly do a better job just because I, unlike the McK morons who think stank-ranking's a good idea, understand talent and what it takes to succeed.

Any company that relies on closed allocation and rank-and-yank is fucked in the long run.

<comment><USER44> Here is a fun thing to read:

[http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/09/how-i- failed.html](http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/09/how-i-failed.html)

And on Google:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/sex-and-politics-at-google- it...](http://www.businessinsider.com/sex-and-politics-at-google-its-a-game- of-thrones-in-mountain-view-2013-9)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This article is poorly sourced and fails to establish any evidence for it's main point, that it's "difficult to climb Amazon's corporate ladder," which is probably true considering it's a Fortune 100.

Instead, the article paints a picture that Amazon as a place ruled by fiefdoms and popularity contests, but again without any actual evidence, no you have to buy the book for that.

I have a feeling that if I read the book, that I would find that there is nothing here salacious, but that's not how you sell a book.

<comment><USER45> > _This article is poorly sourced..._

On the contrary, it's first party interviews:

 _" In dozens of interviews ranging over two years for my book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, employees often sounded... But in my interviews with rank and file employees... No one I talked to..."_

Just because Wikipedia has a "no original research" policy doesn't make first party research "poorly sourced".

<comment><USER18> Not sure how Wikipedia is relevant here..

Saying "I have sources" and actually quoting those sources are two different things. I'm sure you can appreciate this difference.

<comment><USER45> Sounds like if one wants the quotes, buy the book. This article seems to be a synopsis of the research, so one wouldn't expect all actual quotes.

// Wikipedia is relevant because their "Verifiability" page is the top result for the phrase "poorly sourced" and Wikipedia tends to be the only context I hear the phrase. Outside of Wikipedia, "poorly sourced" doesn't mean how extensively phrases are in quote marks. it means where the information came from.

<comment><USER18> In that case, it's not an article, it's an advertisement.

the term "sources" and "poorly sourced" are also often paired with "source confidentiality", "source checking" and other similar terms are often subjects in press and media establishments of notable quality.

I imagine Wikipedia has co-opted this kind of standard operational diligence in an effort to not suck. Unfortunately, in my opinion, this article does not burden itself with such impedimenta.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why New York City is about average - <AUTHOR> http://www.santafe.edu/news/item/city-ranking-bettencourt/

<comment><USER2> _A wealthy but dangerous town like Fairbanks, Alaska is rare._

Lots of things about Fairbanks break the rules, which makes the discrepancy from the norm reasonable. It's remote, for one, and much of the employment is with the government.</comment>


Working from Home Can Make You Happier and More Productive - <AUTHOR> https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/working-from-home-makes-you-happier-less-likely-to.html <comment><USER2> As someone self-employed at home, I must say: it's easy to have a grass-is- greener-on-other-side-of-the-fence feeling. Open office plans are awful, but the options aren't only open-office or work-from-home. There's also better office designs… For that matter, there are various setups to working from home, some that work well, and some that lead to WELL DAMNIT WHY AM I WASTING TIME REPLYING TO SOME BS ON HACKER NEWS‽

<comment><USER3> > _Open office plans are awful, but the options aren 't only open-office or > work-from-home._

In many companies, they are.

And even with "better office designs" there's also the daily commute.

<comment><USER2> Long daily commutes in single-occupancy motor vehicles are on the short list of sources of society's greatest miseries, problems, and failures.

There are ways to make commutes meaningful, like a beautiful bike ride along the river or a couple mile walk or carpooling with friends or good podcast/audio-book/music during a drive… but even with all this, long commutes eat up _so_ much of life. Add in the insanely massive list of ills caused by car-centric life and infrastructure…

Probably the right balance is something like working one or two days a week in an office with appropriate flexibility on how to use the space. I dunno.

Meanwhile, people should put much higher priority on living close to work, above most other considerations about where to live.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My experience is that it's difficult to stay productive at home, since there are too many temptations luring you away from work. And when the kids come back from school, it becomes nearly impossible to do anything useful.

This funny piece by the New Yorker describes it pretty well: [http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/i-work-from- home](http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/i-work-from-home)

<comment><USER5> "OK Ill make you a _second_ lunch"

"No, you need to take the dog out - I am working"

"Ill just watch thi one segment of 'X'"

"Just a short nap to clear my mind"

There are far too many temptations to do other things at home - Each child is a 10x multiplier.

<comment><USER6> I have 2 kids, and working from home has only been positive for me - I think the key is having a dedicated office room with a door. When I'm working, I'm working. I'm upstairs in my office, my wife and kids are downstairs, so noise isn't a problem.

I don't have to commute, so I save money, get to have breakfast and lunch with my wife and kids (and help out), and after work I have time to cook us a healthy meal from scratch (I actually enjoy cooking too).

I have a fiber internet connection, so no issues on that front.

I honestly have far more distractions on the 1 day a week I go into the office (which is open plan and includes a co-worker who does little but chat _all day_...).

<comment><USER7> You need to set expectations. When you are working at home, you are not daycare, dogsitter, handyman or generally at leisure. I have worked at home for eight years now, and my family generally understands this.

As someone who now manages a remote team, it can be tricky to help people adjust to working from home. Some people just have to have that physical partition because they or their family won't adapt. I recommend a co-working space for those people; that partition can be essential for keeping them productive and happy.

The other side of this coin is making sure you set that time aside for your family and personal recovery. If you had a coworker who never left the office, you should worry about ingrowth and their health. The same is true for a remote worker who seems to be always online and always working.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I totally agree, I've never been more productive than at home/beach/forest etc. where I wasn't constantly distracted by other people. Always wondered how people get anything done when I am at crammed offices of Google or Facebook - the noise/distraction level there is just off-putting and in stark contrast to what I would call a productive environment :-/ Microsoft used to have rooms with 4-6 people, SUN used to have single mini-offices for everyone; now that is long gone in the name of cost-optimization and "sharing ideas".

<comment><USER9> Google NYC used to have cubicle-like individual desks on most floors, with shoulder-high soft fiber walls separating them. These muffled noise pretty efficiently; headphones are a still a better option, though.

<comment><USER8> Yeah. I always had to use earplugs and that gets tiring pretty fast :-( Not to mention commute, which is such a waste of time. I solved it partially by buying Novation Circuit and making music on a subway train while on my way to/from work...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Biggest upsides (+) along with flipsides (-) of working at home in my experience:

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>

+: Get to define your own hours for the most part

-: Convince your partner and friends these hours are real and you're not just making them up as an excuse to ignore them

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>

+: Can work in your pajamas

-: End up looking like a bum when someone swings by

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>

+: Get to spend more time with the kids

-: Young kids (mine are 1.5 and 3yrs) have absolutely no respect for what you're doing (my boys seem to have some sort of sixth sense to tell when I'm debugging & they'll have none of it)

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>

+: Team discussions and communication tend to have more thought and planning put into them

-: Some simple questions/coordination become games of phone tag and far-more drawn out then necessary

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>

+: No commute

-: Home doesn't feel as relaxing when you've been working in it all day

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>

For me, ideally there would be a happy balance. Maybe one and a half office days a week and the rest from home. I do mostly enjoy working from home.

<comment><USER3> All the "working from home" negatives are soft issues -- things that can change with the right mindset/effort on your part (dressing properly, respect from spouses/kids, coordination, etc).

The "work at office" negatives on the other hand are hard limits or require change of ways of doing business for the whole company -- commuting, meetings, fixed hours.

<comment><USER10> I largely agree. The way you put it makes me think of the trade-offs when choosing between configuration or convention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As an engineer it is massively more productive. The work I'm doing is so complex my brain would freeze in a loud open office. When you're trying to solve a very hard problem at least fore silence is golden, no music no headphones no random conversation just pure work and problem solving for me it's engineering heaven to be able to control my space for noise and distraction.

<comment><USER12> Same here. I don't want to listen to music or other people talking. I also hate earplugs.

In my cubicle it's often so loud I would be better off working in sports bar during super bowl:)

Just give me a small office. It's even ok having a team with two or three people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> 20 years ago, the computer at my office was much better than my home computer at home. The Internet there was way much better than my crappy 56k dial-up modem. I had a nice landline phone with many buttons and I could call the world for free--at the office.

Now, I have the best computer with 2x 5K displays and a all-in-one super fast printer which is always working--at home. I've never had such a setup at any office. And video call based meetings with screen sharing are more productive than real meetings.

Why an office?

I made friends at the office, dated here and there, met my later co-founders. However, I have made only a handful friendships at the office. So is it of value? IDK. An office is a mixed bag.

</comment><comment><USER14> What's most interesting to me is that the work-from-home employees were reportedly not just more productive and happier, but also physically healthier. Although there could certainly be some uncontrolled variable like crappy fluorescent lighting, poor HVAC, or pathogens in the building, it makes me suspect that there might be a chronic stress component to working in a space owned (in a psychosocial sense, not a legal one) by someone else. Perhaps there would be some way to change office structure or culture to get the benefits in the office building environment and not just at home. In one of Jamie Zawinsky's old "gruntles" (not linked per the infamous referer abuse), he mentions putting camo netting over his cube and that it made people _ask_ to come in. In vague terms, that's the sort of effect I'm thinking of.

<comment><USER15> _the work-from-home employees were reportedly not just more productive and happier, but also physically healthier_

One of the key advantages I've found working from home is that when I want to take a break, I'm inclined to get out of the house & walk around the neighbourhood. I'd often choose to work from a park instead, getting sunlight & fresh air. When I was doing that earlier this year, I was getting up to 16,000 steps a day, and that level of walking significantly improved my health.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've read that unless you have a room dedicated for work, working from home will not be a productive solution.

It really makes sense.

You can't have people coming and going.

When my girlfriend was out working, I was productive at working my personal projects, but when she came home, made herself a meal, started some chores or cleaning up, or even stood there next to me, I just could not work.

So the reality is just that you move your office to your home, so you will actually need a larger place to live.

But I guess it's still cheaper and more ecologic to do things that way, so actually you would get a raise.

What I would like, is a simple software that blocks a list of website of my choice so I can stay productive. As long as it is self imposed, it would feel okay.

<comment><USER17> It depends on the person, but as a generalization, that's simply not true. I was more productive before getting a house with a separate office when I just had my bedroom to sleep/work in. I'm still way more productive than in any office situation, but the point is that you don't need a separate office at home to be productive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Working from home for years now, I've found that I get more deep and meaningful , uninterrupted work done. I've also found that I have a harder time working a 'full' 8 hour day because it's more obvious at home that there's more to life than just working.

Offices are designed to keep you there and focused on the work as much as possible. At home I have my pets, wife (when she's not at work too), things I like, in a location I chose to live. People call these distractions but they're your life at least as much as your job is. At some point, working at home, I'm going to stop and pet my cats, go for a walk with my wife, sip coffee and read a book, visit a friend, whatever. When I have kids, I will get to be there and see them grow up.

When you're able to get a good amount of great work done because you have that uninterrupted time, it makes the idea of working 8 hours 'just because' seem stupid and opposing your productivity and your happiness. I get more and better work done these days. I make more money, for both myself and my clients, working from home, and I much more rarely need sick/mental health days because I'm basically happy and healthy all the time as a result of working from home.

The things I miss, like socializing with a team, I can get other places. I still talk to other devs during the day, just on the phone, over video chat, or something like slack. I go to meetups dedicated to the things I'm interested in, chalk full of smart and interesting people. I have friends to socialize with, many of whom are from those meetups, so I get to talk about tech even more if I want to.

Basically, the downsides for the employee/worker are heavily, heavily outweighed by the benefits in my opinion. I also think that's the case for companies as well, but only have my own small experience as a very small employer to back that up so maybe someone else could comment there.

<comment><USER19> As a remote worker for a not-small company one downside I've noticed is that I have basically no idea which way the wind is blowing corporate-politics-wise. Most of the time it doesn't matter, but once in a while it does matter and one is caught by surprise. When I worked in the office that was way easier to gauge.

Another is that you don't have any chance to rub shoulders with the higher- ups, so to the extent you are on their radar at all it's usually because you either delivered something awesome very recently, or they see your name next to a figure they'd like to spend on something else. This can negatively impact career development.

Also, depending on _where_ your remote work is done, you can end up with an advancement problem: much career development in tech is done by changing companies, and most significant salary increases are backed by the prospect that you might leave for more money. If you work remotely, or work locally from home and insist on keeping it that way, then your options for changing jobs are much more limited.

In terms of the _company_ I think they lose out in two specific areas:

1) Brainstorming, which I think is better done in person. 2) Mentoring, which ditto.

However I agree that WFH, with the right people, is a win-win situation for the employee and the employer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> When thinking about WFH as a "software person" I often come back to the case of the writer.

In the ideal case, i.e. if we factor out the employers, what we do is not so different from what novelists do. Of course it's not the same, but the physical aspects of the work are remarkably similar when you think about it.

And where does the novelist usually work? In a home office if they can.

So while I am sometimes frustrated with my (very privileged) position as a remote worker for a software company, I try to remind myself that in the ideal version of the work I do, I already have the ideal workspace.

(And yes, in the ideal version the Programmer codes for four good hours a day, just as the Novelist writes for about that long before going out into the world for inspiration and Life.)

<comment><USER20> _In the ideal case, i.e. if we factor out the employers, what we do is not so different from what novelists do._

I very much agree with this as an ideal case.

The voices saying "software should always be written by a team" are very loud at the moment, though.

(A reasonable number of novels _are_ collaborations, but the authors generally come together "organically" rather than being thrown together by the publishers. Closer to starting a contacting shop with a couple of friends than the standard software team setup).

<comment><USER19> I admit that my novelist analogy breaks down a little when you're building, say, Facebook.

But how many people who wished to be writers ended up working in advertising, or government, or someplace else where they do write a lot, in collaboration with others and subject to requirements handed to them by their bosses?

I think most of us write software the way a copywriter writes copy at McCann[0]. It's great to make Creative Director, but...

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCann_Erickson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCann_Erickson)

<comment><USER20> Interesting analogy and one I'll give some thought to.

I can't really see copywriters doing the kinds of "team rituals" (daily standups, etc.) that are _de rigueur_ in parts of the software world -- but maybe I'm wrong about this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> As someone who switched to remote work over two years ago I have an observation: the most exhausting part of the day is the commute.

I used to commute by bus - 70-80 minutes one-way trip. After I bought a car, which shaved a good 20 minutes off of that time, I noticed my productivity went up. A friend of mine even went as far as to move to a place close to the office and that changed the quality of his life(and naturally productivity) considerably.

To me the hardest part about working remotely is managing distractions and monitoring your health - I found that without a daily march to the office it's much easier not to notice that you have e.g. a fever and are too weak to work.

</comment><comment><USER22> I disagree with this blanket statement the article is making. I think flexibility is key here, being able to work from home or being able to go into the office to connect with co-workers. In this article's study, it seems that the employees still had to go into the office one day a week.

<comment><USER23> I agree. In my first full-time remote job I quickly realized how much I missed the personal interaction that comes with being in an office setting. Sure, needless meetings get tiring quickly but in my current role I now have the flexibility to balance in-office time with working from home so I have a little more control over the amount of "dead time" I have to suffer through.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've worked from home for the last 10 years. Before that I had regular jobs but also ran hobby Open Source projects from home too.

Reflecting on this time I don't think I would have done it differently. I'm certain that I'm more productive and happier at home. But as you gain family responsabilities, i.e. wife/husband+kids things become considerably more challenging and unavoidably productivity decreases. Today with two kids and wife, I know I am still way more productive than I would be on an office, but also less productive than I was 10 years old. The reason I think I am still way more productive working from home has been discussed over an over: much less interruptions. Also, something that is not discussed that often is that ( if you are a professional - some others would say dumb ) you end up working way more hours at home.

That holds true as long as we are talking about engineering work. However, I don't think it is true when we move above the management scale. When you move into more managing roles, even if they are technical management (architect, lead, CTO, ... ) things become very challenging at home if your company is not fully distributed. Many things that were natural when you were an engineer start to feel awkward like having all team members on physical site and a manager on a different contintent, having all managers on a place but you on a totally different part of the world, etc. etc. It is very easy get out of the loop and keeping up with everything becomes stressful.

I think working from home in general is great but it needs to be part of the company's DNA.

</comment><comment><USER5> No, it does not - especially if you have multiple kids, ADHD and or you need to interact closely with people face-to-face.

The comment that "makes you happier and massively more productive" reads to me is if that line was written by someone still in their 20s.

</comment><comment><USER25> We used to have an informal "Work at Home Wednesday". It's helpful if the team can agree on a specific day or two. Then you still get in-person in-office communication the other 3-4 days a week.

Higher-up managers tend to worry if they don't see people at their keyboards, in my experience. (More visible with open-office floor plans.) So if it's just 1 or 2 days, they tolerate it better.

</comment><comment><USER26> For me personally (I have worked 80% of my professional life of 25 years from home) it is all about time management. Doing traditional office hours would and does basically squash my productivity. I see that with many people around me: they work but not in a way I would describe as productive. The work gets done eventually but there was way too much interference. That is required for a team to work sometimes, but if you need to produce, quiet and your own comfort zone is probably preferable. Depends on what you do ofcourse. Mixing job roles in one open office (sales, product dev, pm and software dev) is one of the more efficient ways to get very little done in the alotted time. That is why I think, if someone has the discipline and the right job for it, working from home is efficient.

</comment><comment><USER27> > Well, the Open-Plan Office Nazis have it all wrong

I stopped reading here. "All" wrong? "Nazis"?

Different people have different needs and experiences. Some people are social and need other people's interaction to function. Some people need more guidance on their work. Other people will be happy if they were alone in the world.

Open plan offices have advantages and disadvantages, to know them helps to create better places to work, or if an open plan office is right for your type of business.

<comment><USER28> For me, open plan is all wrong. Perhaps for the author as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Abstractly, you're choosing to only hire from a limited radius, taking these really expensive knowledge workers and shipping them all into a big room where common sense and study after study shows they can't concentrate. It's kinda bizarre. Forgetting a wider cheaper talent pool and increased concentration - even the math around commuting alone should be enough:

        E = size of engineering team
        C = round trip commute (45 *2 ~= 90 minutes)
        P = Productivity increase per day
        H = Avg hours worked per day per engineer

        (E*C)/(H*60) = P
        For a 20 person engineering team:
        (90 minutes * 20 engineers)/(8*60) = .1875 or 3.75 more engineers or almost another working day per week.

I like the absurdity of the self driving analogy - We're inventing this fantastic new technology so we can better shuttle people around instead of bits which we're already pretty good at. My theory is that the people making these decisions are usually extrovert MBA-types who like the 'energy' of open offices and or most tend to generally model successful companies who have, so far, yet to make a big move here but the dominoes seem like they have to fall at some point.

</comment><comment><USER30> I've been working remotely for three years. It was mostly a positive experience, but I've decided to move back to an on location job due to a few negatives that were making me unhappy;

* My routine decayed over time and work and rest became too intertwined. I felt too stressed while relaxing and too lazy while working. * As an extrovert, long days at home in front of the computer are isolating. * Collaboration with coworkers was so difficult that projects often took much longer than needed, delayed by "phone tag" and simple misunderstandings that usually took 24 hours to correct, vs 30 seconds in an office.

Of course, working remotely does have advantages and there were some times I was very happy to be doing so. I'm surprised it hasn't become more common for companies to offer remote work allowances. Say three months of working remotely a year, and working from the office the rest of the time. They could specify "all hands on deck" weeks, for the busy times of year, and otherwise employees could schedule remote time like they schedule vacation time, they'd just get a lor more of it.

</comment><comment><USER31> If you're more productive at home that's great but I most definitely am not.

I'm single. I look forward to the social aspects of work. Maybe if I had a family that would be different but I doubt it.

At work I can compile our 100k file program on the corp distributed build system. It's at least 100x faster than building at home. Sure if you're doing web stuff maybe your laptop is ok or maybe you're doing backend and ssh is all you need get into the system. I was working on a giant desktop app. It took 1 to 4hrs to build at home.

At work I have a 30inch monitor, a 24inch monitor, and a workstation class PC with 12 cores, 64gig of ram, 256gig SSD, 3TB of storage. At home I have an gamer PC with 16gig of ram. The work machine is much faster.

Also when I worked on AAA games working at home was basically impossible because there are terabytes of data modified by the artists daily and I need access to that data to do my job. There are also dev kits that have to stay at the office because of NDAs etc. I'm sure other programmers have similar requirements.

<comment><USER32> So remote into your work system. Isn't that the solution to all the things listed above?

<comment><USER31> Really, how do I remote into my Xbox One dev kit? How do I debug GPU blue screen drive bugs remotely?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Having worked remotely for 2 years it all depends. Its not perfect, it depends of the company, there are terrible places to work at remotely.

Usually if everyone works remotely if better, but if you are the only one its not so good.

It's way better than open plan office.

I think the ideal would be 3 days remote, 2 tops at office with everyone on the same day at office so you can integrate or make pair programming sessions.

</comment><comment><USER34> In other news, the sky is blue, and vegetables are good for your health.

</comment><comment><USER35> These kind of generalizations are entirely humorous. Whether remote or on-site works better for someone is entirely situational, and mostly depends on the personality/disposition of the person. For many many people, remote just doesn't work for them for many reasons, and on-site is where they may thrive. Ridiculousness.

</comment><comment><USER36> It's an interesting experimental outcome, but I wonder to what extent the results are impacted by the type of work being done. From the TEDx talk, the company, C-Trip, was actually based in Shanghai. It's a travel agency.

It's not mentioned, but if the employees' salary has a variable component and the more they sell the more they earn, then eliminating their commute and giving them an extra 1-2 hours per day to sell travel services, and thereby earn more money, will certainly increase their productivity. I would be interested in knowing if that is the case for these workers.

What if the workers were instead, say, an AP/AR department at a fortune 500 company? Would they see the same increase in productivity? The same decrease in turnover and absenteeism? I am not arguing that they wouldn't, only that I'd expect different types of work to have different degrees of improvement.

</comment><comment><USER37> I have the option to work from home, but I almost exclusively work in the office now. Even though the open concept can sometimes be distracting, I am much more productive and happier at the office. On the occasion when I do work from home, I end up working longer hours, feel like I accomplished less, and am more tired.

</comment><comment><USER38> I work from home and I am bored out of my mind. I don't enjoy it and it's a terrible love-hate relationship. I crave and need human contact, and that distracts me from my work. Additionally being at home means everything is a distraction.

</comment><comment><USER39> For those of you software engineers who-- like me-- work from home in a non- tech hub, how do you network/socialize/meetup with other tech people?

</comment><comment><USER40> Happier, sure, but massively more productive? I think you need really good management for this to hold. In my last company WFH basically meant a day off.

</comment><comment><USER41> Come on Hacker News, less click-baity next time. This was a Buzzfeed like article in terms of generalization and Nazi references.

</comment><comment><USER42> Not having to travel to work is great. Having very tolerant boss (me) is awful. Having boss that's not me is even worse.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Places_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_G...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Places_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#NowWhat)

</comment><comment><USER43> I also see ecological reasons to justify working from home. Less people on the road= less traffic, less pollution.

</comment><comment><USER44> "few pundits seemed to object when Yahoo, IBM, and Aetna rolled back their work-from-home policies."

News reported that - insinuating that work from home doesn't work for those companies. however it is a known fact that it was a round about way to lay off some people without actually doing it directly.

</comment><comment><USER45> The title should say "..more productive - For Me"

</comment><comment><USER46> is it me or do these magazines, inc, fastcompany all consist of crappy filler material that is typically associated with a clickbait title?

<comment><USER40> Yeah, what is this? "The results will astound you.". Sounds like a parody. I thought Inc Magazine was serious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Comfortable

Not drinking too much

Regular exercise at the gym

</comment><comment> tek-cyb-org working from home is definitely not productive for me.

</comment><comment><USER48> Numerous studies show this not to be the case. It's bad for your mental health and it's bad for your work.

Obviously this doesn't count for everyone, a single mum forced to do a 2 hour commute might be worse off having to go to work. Same for some personalities.

The article seems to be hiding the source? Is it in the TED talk? But from memory the Singapore company employees did non-teamwork work, fairly menial labour.

And it's a really old study, that was talked about years ago.

<comment><USER20> _Numerous studies show this not to be the case. It 's bad for your mental health and it's bad for your work._

Care to cite some?

(Although I'd argue that averages shouldn't matter here, it ought to be about what works for the individual -- and the constant "team, team, team" refrain in contemporary management speak seems like a somewhat-deliberate attempt to distract from that).</comment></comment>


It Makes No Sense That Word Processors Are Still Designed for the Printed Page - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/it-makes-no-sense-that-word-processors-are-still-designed-for-the-printed-page <comment><USER2> Many here are likely familiar with it already, but emacs' org-mode is a great interface for writing notes, articles, essays - perhaps even whole books. Highly extensive and yet still eschews much of the nonsense you find in traditional word processors.</comment>


Lightroom Dashboard – Photo Analytics - <AUTHOR> https://www.lightroomdashboard.com

<comment><USER2> Looks useful, but I find the 2 1/2D (almost-3D) graphs make my head hurt. I find 2D graphs work really well and can look aesthetically pleasing without making them harder to interpret.</comment>


Phishing 2.0 – Credit Card Redirection on Compromised Sites - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sucuri.net/2013/07/phishing-2-0-redirecting-credit-card-payments-to-malicious-domain.html

<comment><USER2> _The domain paymentiexpress.com was just registered a few days ago ... And is currently live and not blacklisted by anyone_

I'm guessing not for long....</comment>


BYTE Magazine's Smalltalk issue (1981) - <AUTHOR> https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08 <comment><USER2> I think this was the first issue of Byte I bought, I remember hoovering up every little detail at the time.

</comment><comment><USER3> dartlang.org is the modern heir-apparent to the Smalltalk language, backed by Google, and gaining a lot of traction.

<comment><USER4> Though Smalltalk is quite alive and happy in a niche way. I use pharo.org, but there's also Squeak, VisualWorks and a few others.

There's some good recent work on compiling to JavaScript, which seems to be the universal solvent these days.</comment></comment>


Up: A smart armband + mobile app that tracks sleep, exercise, and diet.  - <AUTHOR> http://jawbone.com/up/product

<comment><USER2> I'm surprised Jawbone didn't stipulate that the UP should come packaged with different colours, similar to Jawbone's packaging strategy with various external shells (and colours) for their bluetooth headsets.

Perhaps this is in the works. Looks like a competitor to the Fitbit.</comment>


WebFPGA: Rapid FPGA Development System - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanmjacobs/webfpga-rapid-fpga-development-system <comment><USER2> "Our cloud-based toolchain performs synthesis on our backend"

Last time I looked into doing something like that, the software licenses prohibited exporting the proprietary toolchains like that. Comment?

Or is it using something like:

[https://symbiflow.github.io](https://symbiflow.github.io)

<comment><USER3> We're using the equivalent of Symbiflow for Lattice chips -- specifically IceStorm.

<comment><USER2> This is great! Maybe you should display that somewhere in the fine print. In my mind it reduces your legal risk quite a bit that you use free software instead of some draconian vendor software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good but need to do a bit more comparison.</comment>


Is Google Analytics Slow or Not? - <AUTHOR> http://www.woopra.com/blog/2009/02/04/is-google-analytics-slow-or-not/ <comment><USER2> I've had the analytics tag on our sites for about 6 weeks, so this is based on limited data.

To date there have not been any instances of slow page loading that I could pin on the analytics tag.

\- it loads pretty quick according to my own measurements, much faster than the pages that it is on

\- it is placed at the end of the page, so almost all other elements on the page get precedence in the browsers fetch queue

\- if it should load slow that will only result in the browsers 'loading' indicator to be active a bit longer, the actual content will be on the page already</comment>


This Valley is my Hollywood - <AUTHOR> http://www.31fps.com/2008/08/26/this-valley-is-my-hollywood/

<comment><USER2> Good article on the whole.

One fallacy though:

 _These are the guys that looked impossible in the face and knocked it out in the first round._

They knocked it out in the 50th round, but you didn't hear about the other 49 rounds.

Also, seriously... leave the concert just to meet some guy? Don't idolise people. As the old buddhist saying goes: If perchance you meet the Buddha wandering on a mountain path, kill him.

The author unfortunately has his priorities all wrong...

<comment><USER3> Well the Radiohead concert kind of blew anyways, it was way oversold and I was 500 feet back. And some guy was standing right in front of me so I couldn't see. So that made the decision a lot easier.

Love your buddhist saying :D

<comment><USER4> I have a rule about this: If it's a band that _everybody_ has heard of, their concerts are no longer worth attending.

As much as I enjoy Radiohead, it would never cross my mind to go to their concert. Best show I've ever seen was the Flaming Lips about ten years ago, maybe longer, in a crappy concert hall in Houston called The Abyss (held about 900 people, but only about 400 were at that show...I paid $12 to get in and thought it was a bit steep). But, even though I have exceedingly fond memories of that show, I would not go see the Lips perform today. It'd just be a letdown.

<comment><USER5> I saw the Lips 3 years ago and had a blast, one of the best shows I've ever been to. There's an art to entertaining a small crowd, and one to entertaining a large one. My guess is that the Flaming Lips are masters at both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is good to study the "old masters" and to learn the lessons of the successful, but I don't think cults of personality or "celebrity" of the successful is putting the emphasis where it belongs.

<comment><USER7> I am reminded of the poem by Matsuo Bashou -

古人の跡を求めず、

古人の求めたるの所を求めよ。

kojin no ato wo motomezu,

kojin no motometaru no tokoro wo motome yo

Seek not to follow in the footsteps of the wise;

seek what they sought.

<comment><USER6> that's probably a better translation than the one i was familiar with / alluding to: "Do not try to imitate the old masters. Seek what they sought." also, I agree with the above. points for comprehensiveness!

<comment><USER7> The poem is a fragment from a larger epistle... there are probably a dozen accurate translations of it, all different. I went with this one because I like the way it reads in English.

Disclaimer: My Japanese proficiency is pretty limited. I studied it for a couple of years and have a passable accent, but mostly I just know enough to get myself in trouble :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm reminded of a woman's description of what it was like to live in LA. She said it was like "being an ember in this big, blazing bonfire."

</comment><comment><USER9> Speaking of Hollywood, the term there for people who behave like this is 'starfucker'.</comment>


Apple iWatch Was "Released" But We Didn't Realize It - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/the_bet/2014/02/apple_iwatch_it_s_already_out.html

<comment><USER2> Provocative title (from Slate themselves), but I'm pretty sure the article doesn't at all indicate that an iWatch was released. Just some enabling technology.</comment>


Need For Concern - Business Lending Tightening? - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8QTU7SG2.htm Initially, this was a concern only to the housing sector but it seems to be taking a toll on the market as a whole. Is this something that will hit tech startups down the road?
<comment><AUTHOR> Will this hit tech startups looking for funding down the road?</comment>


Training Convolutional Neural Network to detecte pavament cracks using Keras - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/TTMRonald/AerialCrackDetection_Keras <comment><USER2> Curious if it is being used out in the field.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you rent your modem from the ISP? - <AUTHOR> I do.  I just never got around to getting a different one.  Anyone else? <comment><USER2> No. I've always owned.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes. From Comcast. For a fortune.

<comment><AUTHOR> residential service? how much from Comcast?</comment></comment>


Facebook is so last year - welcome to the hit websites of 2008 - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/24/facebook.socialnetworking?gusrc=rss&feed=technology <comment><USER2> Twitter is on their list? I guess it shows the validity of that list.</comment>


How the Verge Totally Misrepresented the DAO, and Bitcoin - e-sushi http://bitcoinist.net/verge-misrepresent-dao-bitcoin/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter <comment><AUTHOR> So, in other words the Verge is totally right, and there IS a common thread between Bitcoin's issues and DAOs.

It's just that (as admitted by the author here) instead of the technology per se, it's the people implementing the technology and offering the services -- because those people are financial (and/or technological) newbs and not-to-be- trusted random businesses -- more like lemonade stands than traditional banks.

That's small comfort.</comment>


Tesla's Disappearing Data - <AUTHOR> http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/05/08/teslas-disappearing-data/?nl=business&emc=edit_dlbkam_20130509

<comment><USER2> Why this Tesla dooms day obsession for New York Times.

NYT now feels like lobbyist for Gas powered automobile companies

<comment><USER3> [http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/problems- wi...](http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/problems-with- precision-and-judgment-but-not-integrity-in-tesla-test/)

Because Elon made them look dumb.</comment></comment>


U.S. tech companies expected to lose more than $35B due to NSA spying - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailydot.com/politics/nsa-prism-fallout-35-billion-us-tech-firms/

<comment><USER2> I noticed that the ITIF report contains this recommendation:

 _5) Complete trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership that ban digital protectionism and pressure nations that seek to erect protectionist barriers to abandon those efforts. "_

</comment><comment><USER3> This situation has several evolutionary stages to go through yet. Simply moving servers to another country is nearly meaningless. Servers can only be reached by passing through hostile territory. End to end security, and security for data at rest has to become pervasive.

</comment><comment><USER4> > In particular, European cloud companies, like Cloudwatt, Hortnetsecurity, > and F-Secure, proudly boast of their non-American credentials and their > resistance to NSA spying against foreigners. And the French government has > invested $150 million into two cloud startups designed to keep data out of > U.S. hands.

I think that is really the moneyshot of that article. Western governments can throw hundreds of millions at developing "French" or "German" or [insert country here] and build effective competitors to the US for commodity services like hosting websites.

The US's advantages [despite Silicon Valley] aren't really insurmountable if you have foreign governments throwing a few hundred million at the problem.</comment>


The Poor Man's Voxel Engine - <AUTHOR> http://et1337.com/2015/02/18/the-poor-mans-voxel-engine/# <comment><USER2> _Long story short, the garbage collector doesn 't like to clean up large objects. I end up writing a custom "allocator" that hands out 3D arrays from a common pool. Later, I realize most of the arrays are 90% empty, so I break each chunk into 10x10x10 "sub-chunks" to further reduce memory pressure._

 _This episode is one of many which explain my present-day distaste for memory-managed languages in game development._

If you push any programming environment far enough, you will always end up "writing a buffer pool" or some other such memory management optimization task like this. So are memory-managed languages all just "bad?" No. That's way too simplistic. Memory-managed languages are just one particular set of tradeoffs. You can think of it as a kind of "technical debt." Is debt always bad? No. Sometimes it's the smart thing to do.

So where should the blame lie? Either on the person who chose the tool, or just chalk it up to the "unforeseeable" and switch to a better tool.

(And this is why building modular, well-factored systems is often the smart thing to do.)

(EDIT: It occurs to me that this story parallels the development of many industries. Things start out "hacky" and cobbled, but then standard interfaces are established so that components become "modular." Then, when people in that industry learn more about precisely what people need and what works best, modularization is left out to build a leaner and better performing widget. Yes, modularity is sometimes the smart move -- but like all things, it is very dependent on _context_!)

<comment><USER3> I think you're substantially agreeing with the author you've quoted, at least as far as the quote. Expressing distaste for memory-managed languages in game development and being able to cite a specific scenario for that is not the same as saying that memory-managed languages are all just bad. I think you, the author and anybody with a modicum of technical maturity can agree that "fast" memory-managed languages are not at an absolute global optimum because they make specific tradeoffs that not everyone will always want to make. Granting this, if we have even one reason to still keep around a memory- managed language (and that's not hard to come up with) then we have a case for keeping multiple languages around and being able to interface among them.

Not everybody realizes this; especially among people who argue about programming languages on web forums, there are still a large number who are still married to the idea that one language has to do everything and if any language has any weakness, we should leave it alone as "bad" because its flaws mean that it is not the Miss Universe of programming languages. It apparently takes some technical maturity to realize that significant flaws are often part of complete packages of tradeoffs that make something a great choice for some contexts even while they are not the best choice for some other context.

<comment><USER4> Is there any cross platform language that does it like Objective C w/ ARC? I find that one a pretty good balance between being able to go nitty gritty with optimisations while not having to care about memory management details for the standard use cases. IMO it's also much easier to learn than C++. Could Rust be the answer?

<comment><USER5> C++ std::shared_ptr does the same thing as ARC (reference counting based on scope/lifetime). Rust probably has something similar in it's standard library.

FWIW I wouldn't use reference counting in game development if I could avoid it, because it has pretty bad performance characteristics as well (the only thing it really has over GC is that it's deterministic, and that, with the exception of in Objective C, you can choose where and where not to use it).

<comment><USER6> Most games don't do any heap allocations at al during runtime(or at least very very few), so you shouldn't/don't end up with garbage collector pauses during normal gameplay. If you refcount your main structures, they can be auto cleaned up /removed when changing levels/loading scenes/swapping chunks out on the fly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Really good read, and takes me back to my younger days of feeling around in the dark trying to work out 'the one true way'. A couple of things that went through my mind that I don't see mentioned, or is kinda brushed over:

* You mention you originally rendered everything, then later moved to breaking into chunks?

* How do you decide what's 'in view', do you do any culling?

* You don't mention culling polygons that are pointing away from the camera?

Sorry if I missed those, but my thoughts were:

Use an octree [1] to register the scene blocks, you can then recursively intersect the viewport with the tree to find out what's in-view. There's perhaps even some cunning way you could 'rasterise' the blocks in the viewport using Bresenham's algorithm (tracing the edges of the viewport) [2].

In terms of the polygons facing away from camera, you can get the dot-product of the normal of the polygon and the vector of the camera. If it's negative then it's pointing away, if it's positive it's pointing toward the camera (or vice verse, I can't remember). In a tight loop that can be damn quick, and saves rendering something that can't be seen.

Apologies if this is all obvious, and you're already doing it, or if it's all handled automatically. It's been over 10 years since I've had to do any of this stuff, so just dredging it from the depths of my memory ;)

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octree](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octree)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bresenham%27s_line_algorithm](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bresenham%27s_line_algorithm)

<comment><AUTHOR> You pretty much nailed it. I store data in a bastardized octree, more or less. I break the world into chunks to facilitate culling. I check the bounding box of each chunk against the view frustum. There are generally under 100 chunks in view at any one time, so the culling doesn't have to get fancy. And yes, the GPU handles back face culling automatically these days. :) I do use Bresenham's for raycasting.

<comment><USER7> Good stuff and good luck with the project :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I read this yesterday and came away extremely impressed with your self- analysis, documentation and the game's progress itself.

Is this entirely a one-man operation?

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you enjoyed it. More or less, yes. I've brought on a few contractors at times to help with audio, animation, and a few other things.

<comment><USER9> You should write a post on how to delegate.

<comment><USER10> Or get someone else to write one for him :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> He is not alone. I have followed several projects that try to create Minecraft-like Voxel engines. Thanks for the article.

Minecraft was originally inspired by Infiniminer: [http://thesiteformerlyknownas.zachtronicsindustries.com/?p=7...](http://thesiteformerlyknownas.zachtronicsindustries.com/?p=713)

It was coded in C# (.Net 2) and XNA 3.0 runtime. The code was not obfuscated and someone published the code. As Infiniminer was a multiplayer game, hacks and bots destroyed the game community as well as several knock-off clients. That everyone had to download dotNet 2 and XNA 3 didn't help either. So Minecraft with its original Java browser applet won the audience by storm. The rest is history and Notch just bought the most expensive house in L.A.

The history of DirectX support on non C/C++ is a sad story of deprecated APIs:

* Visual Basic 6 with DirectX 7 support: _Direct3D retained mode_ (COM-based scene graph API), _Direct3D immediate mode_ and DirectDraw (2D)

* Visual Basic 6 with DirectX 8 _Direct3D immediate mode_ (different API), no DirectDraw (2D)

* C# with managed Direct3D (Microsoft.DirectX.Direct3D), supports only DirectX 9: [http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/DirectX/Csharp/Series1/...](http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/DirectX/Csharp/Series1/tut1.php)

* C# with XNA 1-4 (DreamSpark/MSDNAA license), supports only DirectX 9: _Released in December 2006, XNA is intended to push the ease of game programming to the extreme. XNA is new wrapper around native DirectX. As development on a new version of Managed DirectX has been cancelled, XNA can be thought of as the new version of Managed DirectX. Although the code is not 100% the same, it is VERY similar. No windows event handling, built-in update and drawing loops and XBOX360 compatibility are just some of the some of the reasons why XNA will become the future of DirectX game programming. XNA is built on top of DirectX 9_ \-- [http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/xnacsharp.php](http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/xnacsharp.php)

Windows comes with OpenGL 1.1 (from 1996) and one has to init its context to load a third party OpenGL 4 context: [http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/opengl/mov...](http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/opengl/moving- beyond-opengl-11-for-windows-r1929)

Internet Explorer 11 supports WebGL 0.9 (almost no extensions, current would be WebGL 2): [http://webglstats.com/](http://webglstats.com/)

<comment><USER12> > [http://webglstats.com](http://webglstats.com)

Neat. What happened in the summer of 2013?

<comment><USER13> It's probably Chrome that enabled the software renderer for users with unsupported GPU configurations. Note that the software renderer is extremely slow (it barely manages to and unsupported systems are more likely than not to have a weak CPU that further lowers performance. We're talking performance at a level barely enough to animate the cube at [https://get.webgl.org/](https://get.webgl.org/) . I don't know the value of that software renderer, other than making Chrome look better on statistics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> XNA is single most important technology that effectively enabled the indie movement. Shame they don't want to upgrade it.

[http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual- studi...](http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual- studio/suggestions/3725445-xna-5)

[https://twitter.com/hashtag/becauseofxna](https://twitter.com/hashtag/becauseofxna)

<comment><USER15> More than Unity?

<comment><USER16> More than Flash, Steam, or mobile app stores?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > The voxel format is simply a 3D array represented as an XML string of ASCII > 1s and 0s.

Oh _ow_. But otherwise, thanks for this wonderful tale of discovery and progress. I'm impressed that you stuck to it despite all such issues. My damn perfectionism would have had me dump everything in a fit of angst at the first sign of trouble.

</comment><comment><USER18> In the first voxel engine I worked on, I also attempted RLE (for network performance). Doing it in 3 dimensions is not trivial, as you show. I decided for some reason that doing it in a single pass was the "smart" way to do it.

Important thing is that you are having fun and learning. Your first attempt(s) will usually not serve much more purpose than this.

Anyhow, Lemma looks promising (and pretty amazing for your first game to hit shelves) - I was aware of the game but interesting to see how it came about. :)

</comment><comment><USER19> FTA: "At this point, I'm saving and loading levels via .NET's XML serialization. Apparently XML is still a good idea in 2010. The voxel format is simply a 3D array represented as an XML string of ASCII 1s and 0s. Every time I load a level, I have to re-optimize the entire scene. I solve this by storing the boxes themselves in the level data as a base64 encoded int array. Much better."

Sarcasm...please tell me this is Sarcasm!

<comment><USER20> I think this is rather a stream-of-consciousness style blog of the progress he made -- note that later on he said, "I eventually got a job in industry, and learned that everything I thought I knew was wrong".

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Brilliantly written. Loved all the shockingly bad decisions. :D

</comment><comment><USER22> Looks like an advertisement for C/C++.

I agree that some language features are nice to have, but you won't convince me that C/C++ is bad because it's old, or because it's too down to earth. In short: you can't replace simple tools like a simple hammer and screwdriver. You don't always need them, but they're not replaceable, so to me I'll prefer learning a down to earth language and suffer the right consequences of that. Having to manage memory is the bread and butter of any programmer. I hate going around avoiding gimmicks of new languages and API just because the language pretend that it's doing something magically, there's always something that will come back and bite you.

And for the minecraft argument: minecraft is a huge PITA when it comes to memory and I've seen servers just burn because of memory management. Notch buying large house won't convince me to use java or any other managed memory language. The argument "that guy got rich, so it's an okay language" is not okay with me...

I'm very conservative when it comes to technology and programming languages. I prefer using old tools, because if they're old, that means that they stayed.

<comment><USER23> _" simple hammer and screwdriver"_

To complete the analogy I would say both also have a blade attached to handles, so that you need to be using them v-e-e-ry carefully and only if truly needed.

<comment><USER22> Every programmer need to learn how to do his job. if a programmer don't like it, he can use something else, but he might not achieve the same result. What kind of risk are you talking about ? You won't kill anybody. If there's a bug, just fix it. C and KISS ane just not taught enough.

I find it pretty weird to see people refusing to use simple tools, because it's "too difficult". That's why I think Linus Torvalds is right about many things. I just can't like the many diverse and abstract concepts of programming that pops around now and then.

<comment><USER24> People don't dislike learning C or C++ because the languages are supposedly hard to learn. They dislike them because the tools used to build and distribute their work are archaic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I read this, all these tribulations over years, and then just chuckle as I remember all the people who love to call Notch incompetent.

</comment><comment><USER26> I wrote a voxel renderer in 2008 and found some good resources from Ken Silverman (Build engine used in Duke3 etc). There used to be a forum here:

[http://www.jonof.id.au/forum/](http://www.jonof.id.au/forum/)

I don't know if any of that stuff got mirrored but digging around for "Voxlap" shows some related results.

</comment><comment><USER27> > The CLR's floating point performance is absolutely abysmal on Xbox 360

Can anyone speculate as to what went wrong here? I thought the Xbox 360 would have very good FP performance.

<comment><USER28> XNA Vector3 doesnt use the simd instructions.

Further every

a+=b; (where these are vectors)

calls a function, which calls a constructor

You can tell by getting significant speed ups by inlining by hand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I relate. I so relate. We need some kind of support group.

</comment><comment><USER30> Is Lemma going to target other platforms than Windows?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to, but no plans for it currently. I did contribute some code to MonoGame[1] a while back which opens some exciting cross-platform possibilities. It requires a lot more development before it will support Lemma though. So, "maybe". :)

[1] [http://www.monogame.net/](http://www.monogame.net/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Interesting article.

I checked your repo, maybe use nuget for packages such as Newtonsoft.Json.

</comment><comment><USER32> great writeup, thanks for sharing the progression</comment>


Activism - <AUTHOR> http://zacharyvoase.com/2013/02/15/activism/

<comment><USER2> I'm confused. The author seems to advocate for civil, rational, open-minded discussion, and follows it by advocating that the industry effectively exile someone whose views he disagrees with.

The included quote is not a personal attack on any individual. Yes, its strongly worded - more than I would personally like. But its not a wild rant saying women are an inferior race. The quote doesn't even suggest women _shouldn't_ be in tech - it simply suggests an explanation for the gender imbalance (however accurate that explanation may be).

Why not attack that explanation instead? Leave no doubt in anyone's mind that he is painfully wrong - not by public shaming and ostracizing, but through the rational argument the author seems to so eagerly want.

<comment><AUTHOR> The article questioned the honour and motivations of men who stand up for women's rights, calling them: 'dickless wonders', posers, 'bland, craven hacks', 'docile, cringing cowards', 'buffoons', 'spineless', 'ostentatiously beta', either 'weak and stupid' or 'horny', and 'lazy, spineless weasel[s]'.

<comment><USER3> It did somewhat more than that--at least acknowledge that this is an incomplete summary of the article.

<comment><USER4> Ah, but it's a _sufficient_ summary of the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Okay, how do I put this?

1\. Mike is a big fat jerk. 2\. "everyone who ever published his words about any subject in any capacity should disavow him and ostracize him for his thoughtcrime, and everyone who doesn't is bad people" is stupid.

In conclusion, everybody sucks.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not a religious person, but I'd direct you to Proverbs 13:20. You are the company you keep. And I'm saying that if we want our community to be open, welcoming and civil, we need to foster those qualities and reject those who do not value them.

Sometimes negative discrimination _can_ be a useful tool.

<comment><USER6> This was a good blog post. If those corporations give their oversized megaphones to racists and misogynists, they should face retaliation. That's just plain activism. (Because their decisionmaking is private; they hire voices they want and exclude those they don't.)

The guy already has free speech. He can post his masculine drivel on the internet without fearing police. So much for so-called "thoughtcrime".

As for him not being able to get a cushy job writing words, we could discuss some advanced egalitarian society where we're all guaranteed a decent living. But not the world we live in, and in fact he's writing screeds against people trying to equalize gender relations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So the "civil" thing to do is to make sure anyone who's expressed a particular opinion can never be employed in the industry?

</comment><comment><USER8> Ah, political correctness... While I don't subscribe to the theory that women's brains are primed towards different things, I don't think it is really established that (on average) they aren't either. Therefore, to be honest, I think it should still be possible to entertain that notion so that appropriate research can be conducted.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you read his article? Here's another direct quote:

        I'm afraid it's time to be honest about what's really
        going on when a tech blogger – or even, for shame, a
        proper newspaper journalist – makes these impassioned
        pleas for arbitrary "equality" or – shudder – "quotas".
        Either they are weak and stupid or they are horny.

Yeah, political correctness.

<comment><USER8> I think it's a valid opinion. This will get me thousands of downvotes, but I have been wondering, too, why some men seem to be eager to proclaim "yes, we are pigs". I'm sorry, I'm fighting it, but sometimes "good doggy, good doggy" is shooting through my head :-/

Edit: I will now log out of HN and vow to not log back in for at least a week. I don't have the time for another of those discussions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mr. Yiannopoulos himself is homosexual, which means I don't think he gets to make comments like that. (EDIT: I'm saying this as a gay guy; I would never call into question the honour or motivations of a man who stood up for women's rights)

<comment><USER3> What makes you say that? Hell, why would you even be so obtuse as to bring up this other irrelevant point?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Burn the heretic! Buuuuuurn him!" is not a productive contribution to discussion.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not saying 'burn the heretic'.

I'm saying let's put up a sign at the entrance to the playground saying "play nicely or leave".

<comment><USER10> Where "nicely" is defined, in illegible fine print, to mean "in a manner that does not challenge the views espoused by Zach".

<comment><USER11> Two things. First, the article doesn't "challenge" Zach's views in any comprehensible way. It simply spews vitriol as if the author (who is also the publisher) was paid by the ad hominem.

Second, the views Zach espouses have more weight than simply Zach's endorsement. It isn't as if he's the only one who feels this way.

Putting those two things together, I don't think it's fair to use words that imply that Zach is rejecting the author solely because the author's views undermine Zach's personal and unique viewpoint, introducing cognitive dissonance.

You or I may disagree with him, but I think Zach's argument is more akin to putting up a sign that defines "nicely" the same way Hacker News defines its guidelines, namely a set of heuristics for discourse that have been found through experience to lead to productive discussion.

<comment><USER10> Of course, Zach (or anyone) isn't alone in his views.

You're wrong here, though:

> Putting those two things together, I don't think it's fair to use words that > imply that Zach is rejecting the author solely because the author's views > undermine Zach's personal and unique viewpoint, introducing cognitive > dissonance.

If a man wants to ban openly gay displays of affection, it's because _he_ wants to play king. The fact that others share his sentiment is irrelevant.

Clearly, Zach isn't alone in his bullying views or attitudes, but it doesn't matter. If anything, it makes it worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "People should be allowed to express any opinion, as long as I agree with it."

</comment><comment><USER13> [Exactly whatever hateful thing I wanted to say anyway.]

\- Anonymous

</comment><comment><USER14> Zack, just off the top of my head, I'd say you're feeding a troll. Don't.

</comment><comment><USER10> I know it's easy to suspect that Zach sees the irony in what he's saying, but he doesn't. I know he doesn't. I've stumbled across far too many people like him at my university to believe that he is merely using satire.

He really does believe that he welcomes an open discussion, despite (in the same breath) calling for all of us to exhile and ruin the professional life of anyone who dares to disagree with him.

These are the same types of people who salivate at the thought of burning "counter-revolutionaries" alive.

I hope you grow up, Zach, And I say that as someone younger than you.</comment>


Scoble talks CouchDB, the replicable mobilized database  - <AUTHOR> http://www.building43.com/videos/2010/08/19/a-powerful-replicable-mobilized-database-couchdb/

<comment><USER2> Erlang continues to kick some ass.

</comment><comment><USER3> Throwing together a bunch of trendy technologies != great product.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. Fortunately, CouchDB is great on its own merit. Also, CouchDB was using Erlang, JSON, and Javascript in 2005, before they were trendy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Love Erlang, very interested in CouchDB, but not too familiar with scoble. I think it is really cool he's covering them, but the camera work is hard to watch....</comment>


Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs on the Borderline Between Cakes and Biscuits - <AUTHOR> http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/manuals/vfoodmanual/vfood6260.htm <comment><USER2> I'm sure this issue will be revisited when/if the Jaffa becomes a favorite of tea drinkers and surpasses the digestive in British sales.</comment>


This Interview with the Guy Who Played Jar Jar Binks Is Tragic as Hell - <AUTHOR> http://io9.gizmodo.com/this-interview-with-the-guy-who-played-jar-jar-binks-is-1752488488 <comment><USER2> Jake Lloyd (young Anakin) has led a troubled life.</comment>


Show HN: Visualization library to convert any JavaScript code into SVG flowchart - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Bogdan-Lyashenko/js-code-to-svg-flowchart <comment><USER2> I would love to see the results this produces on a largish Javascript codebase - the examples are compelling, but seeing it on some real-life code would be quite neat. Has anyone fired this up on their own non-demo codebase and be willing to share the output?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, sounds good, do you mind to create an issue in GitHub repo for that? Maybe I can find some good one JS library and then add flowchat to examples.</comment></comment>