What I gained, lost and learned while working for Microsoft - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@alicjaes/saying-goodbye-to-microsoft-bb5db8662656 <comment><USER2> In many ways, the piece is basically a story about someone young and naive becoming an adult, so to speak. That process gets conflated with "working for Microsoft."

I'm a former military wife. The military does a lot of moving around. Affairs are common when spouses are separated. Etc.

So that kind of thing is hardly something peculiar to Microsoft.

It also sounds like she is European and speaks English as a second language. So going to Seattle for a while was possibly a case of culture shock. That also shouldn't be attributed to Microsoft per se.

I spent most of my early life in the city I was born in. The first new place I moved as an adult was a horrendous shock. It was trial by fire and I was so, so miserable and I hated that place. I blamed that place.

It took me years to realize that place actually treated me pretty well and the real problem was the shock of leaving everything I had ever known, so I would have been miserable anywhere. It wasn't the place per se.

She seems to make an effort to not be too blamey of Microsoft and to express her gratitude for the good parts, but the framing really fails to be evenhanded about this. Starting with the title, it attributes a very ordinary growing up experience to becoming disillusioned with this one company.

<comment><USER3> Seems to me it's a story about someone who's too impressed with a lot of superficial stuff. The appearance of a "perfect life", business travel, expensive hotels, uber rides (?), overpriced seattle apartments with a great view that you can't actually afford, etc. The irony is that these things are all rather unimpressive to those that actually have them within reach, so citing them as evidence of your lavish lifestyle tends to mean _you don 't actually have one_.

<comment><USER4> It's all relative. I spent six years at university without ever taking a single taxi and I still consider Uber rides a luxury, because I can also take the bus for a quarter of the price or bike for free.

Also, as the OP mentions, the trap of getting used to nice things is that while you soon stop appreciating them, you will feel their loss quite painfully.

<comment><USER3> There's a huge difference between a luxury and something that indicates you have achieved a lavish and impressive lifestyle. A cup of coffee at starbucks is a luxury.

<comment><USER5> Off topic warning.

> A cup of coffee are starbucks is a luxury.

In Melbourne, Australia a coffee at Starbucks is considered:

1\. A sign that you're a tourist.

2\. A sign that you're a masochist.

3\. A cry for help.

4\. All of the above.

Sorry, I couldn't help myself :)

<comment><USER6> Care to explain?

<comment><USER5> A joke in poor taste. Melbournians are notorious coffee snobs. As jpatokal said, locals wouldn't be caught dead in a Starbucks. Basically if the cup is taller than 4 fingers 8-10cm or the ingredients include anything other than coffee, water and milk, or it was made by percolating - then it's not coffee as far as we're concerned. It's either dishwater or a confection of some sort. It may be a fact that Melbourne has more coffee shops per capita than any other place on earth.

<comment><USER7> Those rules seem to eliminate both Turkish and Cuban coffee. That would be a shame.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, sorry - a modicum of sugar is allowed :)

(I love my Saturday morning Turkish)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think many young people in tech learn this lesson the hard way. They get excited with all the free food, laundry services, and events that tech jobs offer. They end up spending all of their waking hours at work and work becomes an identity. Then one day something changes and they realize they spent the last N years of their life at work, not building real lasting relationships, pursuing hobbies, dating, etc. It truly is a cautionary tale and startups and big companies alike want their employees to drink the Kool Aid.

Personally, I love all the perks tech jobs offer but work-life balance always comes first.

<comment><USER9> I think a lot of people learn this the hard way, yes. But I kinda don't see what is wrong with this. Having work life balance is somewhat of a luxury, and it's a luxury to be able to say "money doesn't make me happy". It's a luxury to come to that conclusion.

How do you arrive at that conclusion without going through the ringer first?

<comment><USER10> > Having work life balance is somewhat of a luxury, and it's a luxury to be > able to say "money doesn't make me happy". It's a luxury to come to that > conclusion.

Exactly. Any time anyone says "money doesn't make me happy" what they really mean is "I already have enough money that it's no longer the limiting factor in my happiness."

The vast majority of peoples' lives and happiness could be markedly improved by giving them more money.

<comment><USER11> I think this is unnecessarily cynical. I've been through multiple periods of both success and extreme hardship in my life. I can confidently say that money doesn't make me happy, because I've managed to be happy at my lowest points of financial stability. If losing financial stability robs somebody of all their happiness, then I'd say they should question whether they were really happy to begin with, or just comfortable. But to say that anybody who has financial stability can't say 'money doesn't make me happy' denies the possibility that they've lived experiences that genuinely brought them to that conclusion.

<comment><USER12> I've gone long stretches unemployed because of chronic health issues.

Money helps reduce anxiety. Health insurance even more so.

Once you have responsibilities, mouths to feed, it's no longer just about you. Now that I'm an empty nester, I care about money a lot less. I'm practically happy-go-lucky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reading articles like this always makes me wonder where all this crazy drama is going on. I work at one of FAANG, and I go in each day, code/analyze things from 8-5, chat with some people about their cycling or cooking hobbies, then go home. If people are having affairs and flying to resorts, then I'm just totally oblivious to it. Either that, or I'm the most boring 28 year old that works there.

<comment><USER14> > Either that, or I'm the most boring 28 year old that works there.

You are, presumably, male and doing technical tasks.

It's much easier to get into drama when you are a 1) young female, whom _lots_ of people want to interact with, hired to do 2) marketing, where your _job_ is to be extremely social with semi-strangers.

This is simply the way of the world.

<comment><USER15> Spot on, different roles and different "reasons" let's say

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've worked for both startups and corporations. Corporate jobs are soul- crushing because everything about the environment seems to hinder you from producing real value and from learning new useful things. Corporate jobs hurt your inner creator and they destroy your sense of pragmatism.

Most of the stuff you learn in corporations are anti-patterns that you have to unlearn after you leave.

The reason why corporate jobs feel so meaningless is because most tech corporations have had a long term monopoly over their respective markets. They haven't had to really struggle on the market for several decades in some cases... Inside a corporation, mediocrity is the definition of success. If employees can produce something mediocre that only just works, it will translate into disproportionate revenue gains due to centralizing and monopolistic market forces. I think that this is what is meant when people talk about the "golden cage".

That's why I try to avoid corporate jobs. They pay well and you do learn some stuff in the first few months but after that your skills start degenerating and a lot of people don't notice it when it happens to them; then they get stuck in that job (or other corporate jobs) because no efficient company exposed to normal market forces will hire them.

Also note that the definition of 'normal market forces' is relative. Most startups which don't go through the normal corporation-controlled VC funnel (e.g. bootstraped startups) have a really tough time working against centralizing and monopolizing market forces.

<comment><USER12> I think about the case study of Borland's Quattro Pro a lot.

TLDR: There's a core group that "get's it". Per Pareto and organizational psychology, most people have no idea what's going on.

The initial Quattro Pro team was just 4 people. They all had prior experience. Were colleagues who worked well together. They had management meat shields who fought off the rest of the org, so the core team had enough time and space to finish a thought uninterrupted. As the product progressed, the "surface area" increased, they brought in people to help.

None of my corporate jobs have been like that. They've mostly felt like a "choose your own adventure" games, where you wander around asking NPCs for help to accomplish the latest quest, hopefully finishing before someone gives the ant farm another good shake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I really don't know why I read what I just read.

There's a lot of red flags - going to clubs, going to burning man, having an affair, renting a penthouse apartment in freaking Seattle.

I'm not passing judgement on those who wanna live life to the fullest, but the failure of achieving the white picketed fence type of life she originally wanted to live is totally on her and not on Microsoft at all.

<comment><USER18> This comment is close to how I feel. Whilst things happened that weren't great, some self reflection on her own behaviour might be worthwhile.

I say this as someone who was once in this situation.

<comment><USER19> There are always good reasons why people decide to do things the way they do. At some point in people's lives there come times where you have to make a decision and learn that there are consequences for it.

I think I didn't have much to compare to in my 20's (like social media posts) so I made plenty of bad decisions in my life. I was lucky to survive, learn, and calibrate my decision making process.

I'm glad you came out okay. It seems that the auther of this post may not learn or is possibly susceptible to being in this same situation again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > A few guys working both for Microsoft and Partners were treating me like a > cute puppy or telling me they wanted to have sex with me while drunk, but > all of it seemed minor and acceptable — I was getting so much in return.

jesus, how is this minor and acceptable? i'm a woman in engineering and I can not even imagine having to deal with something like this. Is it that Marketing is that much different? Or am I just lucky to be working with human beings?

<comment><USER21> > jesus, how is this minor and acceptable?

I suspect working in an Eastern Europe satellite office far more regressive than your typical US west coast office. Not that it makes it either minor or acceptable, just... different.

<comment><USER22> My cousin works in tech in Poland and I get the impression from her that workplace culture is changing rapidly to a more "international" style where this kind of behavior is not acceptable. Then again, she may not tell me the worst stuff.

I would love to hear from people on the ground about their experience, and whether that's true across other tech workplaces in central and eastern europe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> 8f2ab37a-ed6c Similar exit experience. I left to go to graduate school and my skip level (a MS lifer), who was a mentor and a role model for me, with whom I had regular meetings for years, didn't even say goodbye, he pretended he didn't see me while walking past me down the hallways. It was a serious breach of company loyalty in his mind. Ironically a few months later he was out himself working at a different company, as the project we were on was panning out poorly and people started to jump ship. I don't miss it there.

Like the OP said, I'm sure there are plenty of great teams at the company, and you can still have long, fulfilling employment there, but I could never relate to that experience.

</comment><comment><USER23> Lots of fuss and fury about what is basically just another large company. They're not your friends and never will be. Dunno why there's so much surprise here, I guess it's just another youngster hitting the immovable object of the working world.

A friend of mine who went and got a job at Microsoft (a rarity in my circle, they don't seem to be heavyweights in the graphics or video world) and made a smart move. His deal was they he got the job but that he didn't go through any kind of interview rigmarole. The gig didn't last forever but at least someone was spared a bit of craziness.

<comment><USER24> The Microsoft interview experience remains awful, Satya or not. I've tried a few times but with one exception I was treated like dirt every time by recruiters and interviewers.

(Edit) One interviewer blew cigarette smoke in my face, for example. That's not to say that there aren't plenty of decent people there.

<comment><USER25> I interviewed with most of the "tech giants" and Microsoft's process was by far the best (professional and down-to-earth). Maybe this was due to the target (language team), maybe due to the location (Redmond), but at least with me they left a great impression.

<comment><USER26> I think it really depends on the individuals you interview with. I've been through Google's supposedly infamous interview process and had a very positive experience (even tho I didn't get an offer).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It felt like the key parts of the story were being left out here.

From her telling, it sounds like everything was going well for her in Poland. Then she did a very short stint in Seattle where everyone was _" extremely closed minded... only caring about their manager's approval"_. I'm not sure what that even means, but it sounds like that triggered in her a major depression. After which she spent a lot of time "pretending to work", which eventually resulted in her being fired. Clearly something major happened in Seattle, but we have no idea what.

Is there anything that MS could have done differently here, to avoid the problems she ran into? Or is this just a case of her investing too much time into her career and burning herself out?

<comment><USER28> She never said she was very good at what she did. Yes, she was working like crazy but that is a different thing. Being overly invested in career mostly makes you very good at what you do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > One of the first things I noticed is that almost everyone working for > Microsoft had this perfect life???a spouse, kids, nice houses, good cars.

I'm continually surprised how often this kind of life is considered 'perfect'. Every item in this list adds more liability and commitment to your life which is something very few 20-somethings (including myself) have enough experience with to handle it let alone know it's what they enjoy.

Beyond financial security, investing time in what you actually want to do with your life and your own hobbies is going to be much more rewarding and important than nice cars and houses. Even kids can become just another status symbol intended to virtue signal to your class appropriate 'friends' that years latter downgrade to just peers and colleagues.

> Huge campus, nice cafeterias, woods, a pond, overwhelming space. Everything > seemed great....

Ugh, this trend to make work environments indistinguishable from a university campus is just the latest trend to warm up new employees until their fully committed to the boiling sewage that is a life that is all work and ass kissing. You only have to remember that FAAMNGS are committed to their shareholders to know that for every dollar invested in their campus, they need two back from you.

<comment><USER30> > You only have to remember that FAAMNGS are committed to their shareholders

By committing only to shareholders, they miss out on other stakeholders: employees, suppliers, customers, community. (Jonathan Haidt discusses at 18:50 onwards in this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOu_8yoqZoQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOu_8yoqZoQ) When the company emphasises only shareholders, they miss out on building cooperative relationships with the other stakeholders).

<comment><USER29> I say that meaning their fiduciary responsibility is to their shareholders. Their other stakeholders are by nature secondary. I'll have to check that video out but unless the shareholders themselves vote to prioritize employees and others above profit, the company and, more directly, upper management risks lawsuits and loosing their own lucrative positions.

<comment><USER31> Not a lawyer but it seems like in practice, the fiduciary responsibility thing seems like more of an ideology that some people buy into than a legal constraint? Management can choose to do all sorts of crazy things and argue that it's in the company's best interest. (But also read Matt Levine on how everything bad is also securities fraud.)

The thing that really aligns employee incentives with shareholders is restricted stock and options. Employees directly benefit when the stock goes up, so of course it creates a culture where most people want it to go up and aren't happy when it goes down.

<comment><USER32> It's not an ideology it's an excuse for board members and CEO to do what they want without being called on it. Namely loot the company.

The guys in the mahogany suite say look the only people we are responsible to are the stockholders. Who most of them it turns out have very little coherent control. That's very convenient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Work is trading money for time. Some will offer more time (show up earlier, go home late), others less time.

With your time, you can make small contributions or large contributions: a high quality decision that saves time or money, close a big deal, an efficient and reusable process/abstraction that saves effort, recruit the right person for the right job...

Or you can be counterproductive: have redundant meetings, waste people's attention, be toxic and make people feel like shit and less productive or engaged with their job, be closed minded and waste valuable opportunities, create a shitty abstraction that people's wastes time and makes people feel frustrated, recruit a jerk, interrupt someone that is about to say something important.

What you do with your time can be vastly more important than how many hours you work.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm not sure what to make of this post.

3.5 years of which 2 years or so are in dedicated program to rotate jobs across the world seems like an amazing deal to kick off a career many would dream of. Not much responsibility but a lot to learn and observe!

More objectively reflecting ones own performance and actions might good to understand reasons for what happened.

This is business and work, not family and friends. I see a lot of younger people struggling to make that distinction.

<comment><USER35> The point IMHO was that this business and work swallowed up all time from family and friendships.

<comment><USER34> If one chooses a career that requires travel or is in a foreign country altogether while your family & life long friends are at home - maybe the initial decision to accept the job is to blame and not the job or the company? In my experience finding close friends later in life is more difficult compared to childhood, teenage and college years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I am dumb or everyone is missing the point in their comments.

It's not about disillusion or work-life balance. It's about how smart people go into submission of the corporate b.s. so quickly and for so long. You can count on your fingers, if you actually know, a place where you can work and derive from it your own fulfillment and generate a real impact to real human beings.

People get lost along the way, put money first and use politics as a mean to get that. That's the cause of all shitty jobs you may have and all shitty services you have as a consumer. This capitalism overfitting. There is no real mission behind people, except for the cold hard hash or power over other humans.

I invite you to think, even for a minute, about this statement written on Simon Sinek's website: "Imagine a world in which the vast majority of us wake up inspired, feel safe at work and return home fulfilled at the end of the day."

How come this statement is simply reversed nowadays AND people don't make an effort to change it. Holy Moly ...

<comment><USER37> People are animals before they are humans and life is a battle for survival. Money and sex always come before morals and values. Classic red pill vs blue pill and hardest lesson I ever had to learn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I find her story fascinating as many glimpses into big corporates are for me.

I've spent my 20s constantly oscillating between going broke trying to build a scalable startup and earning good money by working freelance. I was breaking my back getting things off the ground but also managing the freelancing projects, the effort left little place for holidays/friends or parties. I basically never went to conferences as it was either way to expensive or time that could be potentially billable.

After realising how toxic my lifestyle focused on "making it" had become I decided to join a profitable SaaS company that needed my skills to build a future proof software platform out of their legacy system.

Now at 31 I've got a good position in that company with a good chunk of stock options, I'm awaiting my second son.

Reading her story to me makes me wonder how much I've missed, just finishing University and applying to a large tech company might have been equally backbreaking, but at least I would have seen more of the world, networked more and maybe ended up with some usable savings to show for it. Typical greener- grass situation I guess.

<comment><USER39> > I've spent my 20s constantly oscillating between going broke trying to build > a scalable startup and earning good money by working freelance.

I think the "scalable startup" fixation is the worst legacy of our industry.

There has always been an enormous professional world of people in many fields start either a solo consultancy or an agency/firm/practice and by their 40s they are paying themselves somewhere in the six figures.

"Will it scale" in the VC sense is not one of their concerns. They still get rich.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> College students are falling all over themselves, learning each FAANG's interview process, drilling large numbers of problems for the whiteboard tests/hazings, being frontloaded with a bunch of VC dogma about startups, learning lousy frameworks before they have to, etc. But I'm not sure they have much idea what industry and particular companies are actually like.

<comment><USER41> That's because big tech companies are the new IB/MC. You see the same types of behaviors there.

<comment><USER40> I've been wondering that, and there's evidence.

Tech does still get traditional nerds, who'd do CS even if there was no money in it.

But I wonder how many of the traditional nerds are choosing other STEM fields partly because of the perception of current CS jobs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> There is definitely a lot of cautionary tales here. I especially relate to the working 24/7 part ;). You'll see the same problem with offers that require you to go to other countries to work. If you're a young person you'll probably think its an amazing opportunity and want to go straight away. But the reality is from the moment you touch down, to the moment you leave, the company basically owns you.

If you think separating work and life is hard now try doing it when a company is directly paying for the place you go to sleep. No space or time will really be "yours" in any sense. They'll virtually know where you are at all times and be paying for you to be there. Hence, its strongly implied you live and breathe for the company.

Btw, I'm not saying people shouldn't do this. It can honestly be a really fun and motivating environment. But the trade-offs are something to keep in mind when accepting offers that seem too good to be true. I've found that constantly traveling and spending all your time working is super unproductive for me. All it leads to is burn-out and I usually end up doing far more when I'm happy, healthy, and in control of my own life.

Remote positions are god-tier for this. It's hard to beat being able to lie in bed writing code for something you love. I'll take that over other perks any day. Also, side note. It's always depressing reading about the sexism that women have to face in tech. If you're a women dealing with this at the moment I hope you continue to flourish and don't let stupid remarks get to you. Not everybody acts like this

</comment><comment><USER34> What I would recommend to everyone in their 20s is to get a mentor who has been in the workforce for 30-40+ years.

You will learn and hear invaluable stories on how companies treat employees, how firing works, how being fired is and generally just meaningful information that will put your own present misery into perspective and prepare you for the things to come.

<comment><USER43> I've been in the workforce over 20 years, and I can barely relate to someone just starting out:

\- I have no idea what is expected from a junior developer starting out in the workplace. I was self taught before going to college and my first job I was the sole developer writing a decently complicated networked data entry system. What should I expect the typical junior developer to know? I've only worked at companies who don't hire junior developers.

\- If someone's dreams and aspirations are to "work for Big N" (the stereotypical r/cscareerquestions poster), what do I know? I've never studied leetCode/"Cracking the Code" in my life and don't plan to.

\- I'm not sure someone who has been in the industry 30-40 years will be able to relate to someone just starting off. Things are different now. Things are different from when I first started. Technology was just another decent paying, middle class career field when I entered it.

Someone in the industry 30-40 years is probably a company man and still believes in company loyalty.

<comment><USER34> Well, as a start you should share exactly what you are writing here. You dont have to tell young people what they should or should not do - just how things evolved throughout your career and how companies you worked for evolved (mergers, acquisition, crazy reorgs,..) and things like that. Invaluable stories I always appreciate to hear from more experienced people.

EDIT: and that you dont care about leetcode probably also says something about how important that stuff is in the grand scheme of things :)

<comment><USER43> I'm much better at advising people who have been in the industry for 8+ years who want to stay active, hands on developers about how not to get stuck in "expert beginner" mode (been there done that), how to stay relevant, and how to exercise "soft power" without going into management.

But as far as your edit....

ME: I'll never spend a year of my life grinding at leetCode to work at a FAANG

ALSO ME: I'm going to spend three years of my life grinding through all things AWS so I can work as an SA at Amazon (or a partner).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Yes a lot of big companies are like that. Everyone's friends, but when your time is done, it's done. In many cases like this one people are conditioned to push through bad situations, and the company does a favor by terminating the relationship.

<comment><USER45> Absolutely. If you're thinking about quitting, but keep putting it off, and they end it instead, they've done you a couple of favors:

1) They supply all the initiative you can't muster.

2) Having been _involuntarily_ terminated, you can usually collect unemployment if need be, and sometimes a severance package.

If even, say half, of your emotions about it consist of relief, it was the right thing; it needed to happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Wow, seems like most of the comments here are just blaming the author, trying to find all the flaws with her story, or dropping truth bombs about big companies and jobs in our society ("coworkers aren't your friends", etc). I still think it was a worthwhile read for me, since I'm about to start working at MS next month. Good to be aware of stuff so I can keep an eye out for it, and try to make things better.

<comment><USER26> I agree that it's good to be aware of & I enjoyed the read. But honestly it would have "prepared" you just as well if you were starting at amazon or google - there was nothing MS specific about the experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I worked for two years at Microsoft, and I saw nothing like this. Maybe the most telling part of this post is where she says many people had (she says fake) pleasant lives, presumably the same people she criticizes for being "closed-minded", apparently for being focused on delivering for their manager.

It was a no-drama workplace full of great people who come in to work every day to do their job well and then go home and do what people are supposed to do, build a fulfilling family life. And if anyone had a disastrous personal life, it certainly wasn't something they brought into the office.

I left Microsoft because I wanted to go a totally different direction with my career (I'm in law school now), but it really was a delightful place to work full of great people.

</comment><comment><USER48> I think the hardest part for me to think about when I read these articles is that this is an industry with a purpose of making quality of life better for people. If the people involved in designing these products can't figure out how to make a 40 hour work week work or be compassionate to their coworkers what kind of expectations are going to start slipping into their products?

I do get that right now that a modern tech company is competing under "winner take all" scenarios so this stuff is hard to avoid. But it really does seem like we need to stop and reflect a bit on what the importance is of the things we are building.

</comment><comment><USER49> I always thought Microsoft was one of the tech companies with the best work life balance. Is this not the case? Is it because of the gender disparity/sexism? Can any share some insight how it's to work for MS in Mountain View? Is it a bad idea for someone starting a family?

<comment><USER34> Microsoft is probably one of the best options you can pick if you want to have great WLB but still do worldwide impactful work - and majority of teams have good culture and are fun. At least that's the vibe I get from friends that work there.

<comment><USER50> I got a job at Microsoft through acquisition (not located in Redmond) and I gotta say, I am kinda loving it. Very challenging and good tools. Happy to be here. I think the Satya era is an improvement, from what I hear. To me they seem pretty serious about being a good environment for women.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Went through a similar experience like hers many years ago working for a consulting company. In big corporations, it sometimes feels like there are many little smaller companies within. Often they have very distinctive and rigid cultures which could make one feel like you're just a cog in the system, and because they are so big it's difficult to make any significant individual contributions that could generate real impacts. You either fit in or you don't. Besides, the corporate culture is usually being dictated and passed down from higher level management executives who are not really involved in your office day-to-day so it could feel a little foreign at times.

I used to work at a big oil company where its culture was obsessed with safety and they took it very seriously. It's actually a good thing and I get it if you're one of the workers at an oil extraction site because those jobs could be very dangerous. However, we were just the business operation team working in an office located deep inside the city. We still had to follow the same corporate culture and rituals about safety, so without fail every week we had to conduct meeting where team members would discuss various topics related to safety. Since none of us has actually ever worked down at the oil fields, we slowly ran out of topics over time and people started telling random stories like tripping on electrical wires, spilling hot coffee while they were driving, etc... I think it's such a perfect example of how some passed down cultures could feel a bit foreign at times, depending on which unit or team you belong to. Great company though!

</comment><comment><USER52> This sounds like I was like about 10 years ago. Wrapped up in a company. I don't do "work friends" anymore.

<comment><USER53> Work friends one on one outside of work are fine but avoid the group social. Anyone part of that will drop you because your connection is the social.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I wonder what OP thinks about this: [https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais- principle-...](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or- the-office-according-to-the-office/)

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</comment><comment><USER56> It's strange to see this story on HN (I read the post). If anything, this shows HN's bias against MS. If there was no MS, it would still have panned out in similar fashion. Young person's first job, leaving home and relationships, realizing there's more to life. There was no reason to mention MS

</comment><comment><USER57> Be thankful with what you got. Looking back and ruminating on my failures and my bad actions that make me overlook opportunities (like joining coding competitions because somehow my mother managed to get me a free teacher) and being an unthankful stupid kid with many perks and ways to succeed but failed

</comment><comment><USER58> Hmmm, there's no mention of burn-out in the article, but it sounds a lot like that was involved too.

eg too much time focused on one thing ("overdose" on it) -> burn out -> lack of motivation/focus -> needs 5 week (or more) break to gain perspective. (etc)

</comment><comment><USER59> I've worked at the stereotypical big SF tech co and agree not everyone can thrive at that kind of place...including me. I can't drink the koolaid and I don't like feeling like I have to fake excitement to fit in.

</comment><comment><USER60> I'm curious about what she means by "community leaders", who are these people, like software influencers or famous conference speakers?

</comment><comment><USER61> "...focusing on politics, I would do great there". The story of too many workplaces.

</comment><comment><USER62> Reading it I can't really sympathize with the author too much. Having affairs doesn't speak much to her character. Neither does staying home and pretending to be on Skype.

Because of that I'm somewhat skeptical of some of her claims. For example:

>The people I worked with were extremely closed minded. Most of them with many years of experience working in a corporation, so even more closed minded, only caring about their manager's approval.

If these co-workers or managers could share their side, what would they say? Your manager is the one giving your performance reviews, bonuses, promotions, etc. If you worked hard to deliver good results, could that be interpreted as "sucking up to your boss?"

<comment><USER63> >If these co-workers or managers could share their side, what would they say?

Can't agree with this more. The Seattle bit feels incomplete, there was something there that I'd tentatively describe as 'culture shock' or 'cognitive dissonance event' and I really really wonder what would the 'seattle co- workers' say about this piece.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I'm not sure what the takeaways are from this article, if anything concrete. It sounds sad and frustrating that some supposed friends inside the company didn't say goodbye when she was let go, but I guess I don't see that as surprising or noteworthy at a large company. Maybe there's a warning sign to not go all-in on a company, but she doesn't sound remorseful for having done it? I hope she finds satisfying and balancing work in the future.

<comment><USER65> The key takeaway is to be wary of cognitive dissonance. She just casually got into an affair at the office, while claiming to want to build a relationship with her existing boyfriend, for example.

<comment><USER53> The key part was when she called everyone at Richman fake then said proceeded to tell us she was pretending to be nice.

It sounds like others more experienced actual developerd wanted her job with the perks. Microsoft wanted a different face, younger/well spoken/diverse gender/etc. Because she drank the cool-aid she was able to do great at her job without being a developer. The social aspects that supported her start changing. Meanwhile Microsoft responds to the public outcry and makes everyone like her learn to code and things aren't fun anymore. She quits and finds out her support system is gone and thinks everyone is fake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> > _The people I worked with were extremely closed minded. Most of them with > many years of experience working in a corporation, so even more closed > minded, only caring about their manager's approval. I was devastated. My > team members were the most fake people I have met still to this day. I > cannot even explain how terrible it was for me to have to help them, show > interest and pretend that I support what they're doing. You might be > thinking — why weren't you honest with them instead? I tried, but no one > cared and my role was minimised, so at the end I was only doing a 1 Excel > file._

In my experience when someone says everyone else is the problem, it's more likely they're the problem but they lack the introspection to realise it. I mean really which seems more likely, that everyone else was awful, or that something she was doing rubbed people the wrong way? It sounds like Microsoft was just a backdrop to a turbulent few years.

Also after cheating on her boyfriend and spending large periods of time faking doing work (which I'm guessing contributed to her firing) her takeaway at the end is.. to focus more on herself and blame Microsoft and her former coworkers for her mistakes? How is that not just narcissism? I mean self care is important, but maybe her takeaway should be to act with integrity..

<comment><USER67> I don't know her, and I don't anyone else from the story, but this part

> the most fake people I have met still to this day

followed immediately by

> I cannot even explain how terrible it was for me to have to help them, show > interest and pretend that I support what they're doing

Taken out of context at least, there is exactly one person that seems exceptionally more fake than anyone else...

I dunno, maybe I have just been lucky to have sufficiently many sincere people around me in my life, but if I perceive someone as being insincere I will avoid those people — not stay around them and pretend that I like them.

Of course, if you perceive everyone at a place to be fake then you can't really avoid them.

I don't know what to do in that situation really. But I agree that some introspection would probably be in order. Though personally I have in the past had the opposite problem — being overly harsh on myself and critical of myself.

<comment><USER68> Yuk. What a horrid pair of comments!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> This has nothing to do with Microsoft, and instead reads like a blog entry of a narcissistic, selfish young lady. Good riddance.

<comment><USER70> I think the crazy infighting along Microsoft teams is fairly well known at this point.

Do you know of any recently successful teams that were not built up from entirely new people isolated and protected from the old teams?

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Welcome to capitalism, little bird.

<comment><USER72> There's a truth to your quip, I think.

Phrases from the article that jumped out for me were: The real world will eat you alive. Everyone was fake.

Much of that cruelty and superficiality arises from the dominant ideology driving corporate culture. It can be tough and heart-breaking growing up in such a world.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does creating a startup helps you get interviews in big tech companies? - <AUTHOR> I am a starting a startup. Have quit my job recently and will be working on it for next couple of months. I would like to know if someone got any jobs after failure from startups, (obviously success would mean a different story) in any big companies. The roles such as Product management etc.<p>Or generally how is the job scene after startup failure. <comment><USER2> I think it depends on the reason for the startup and how close to success you got.

I have friends who started a startup, got VC money, and ultimately shut it down after 2-3 years. They didn't have any issue getting another job as they had a product to show and they worked with a standard team. It was essentially a 'business that failed' and they were able to show the successes they did have (fundraising/launching/hiring/etc).

I have friends who tried consulting/solo startup and gave up after a year of no traction. They had a harder time getting a job afterwards because people felt they were just going to leave after they got another idea for a startup. "Less likely to put up with work politics" or they felt they "just took a year off" because they didn't have much to show for it.

I've started startups/businesses as side projects and I've found that it has only helped me. Most people are curious about them, gives me something to talk about, and I get to discuss pain points and things I've learned. But, they don't see it as a threat as I present it as a way to "learn" and keep my skills up to date.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you start a startup to close it in 2 months, don't do it. You won't get anything good out of it.

If you work on your own startup, and eventually shut it down, in SV at least is not seen as an issue and you'll have many opportunities. It all goes down to what you achieved in term of product and team.

If you run your own project for 2 months, you're not much better than before. If you grow a team even of 3-5 people, maybe raise some money, have a compelling story about your product, and hustle for a few years, that's a completely different story.

Best of luck.

</comment><comment><USER4> Having run a successful startup, I keep getting offers from middle-tier companies, not from FAANG.</comment>


Blood of recovered Covid-19 patients is becoming a hot commodity - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/blood-of-recovered-covid-19-patients-is-becoming-a-hot-commodity-11590744600 <comment><USER2> > For instance, Biomex said supply is drying up as the number of cases in > Germany falls. Another issue: Only around a third of donations have high > enough concentrations of antibodies to be used as a positive control for > antibody tests.

I'm not sure I understand this: if you are looking at recovered patients, the number can only grow, albeit slower if there are less new cases? Or do the patients have to be very recently recovered? Is the issue with the antibody concentration related to the severity of the disease or to the time since recovery? If the antibody concentration falls so sharply after recovery, that doesn't sound good for long term immunity...

<comment><USER3> I can't find the reference, but there was a recent dutch preprint on a study from 1985-2020, studying four other coronaviruses and reinfection. Immunity lasted 6-12 months, reinfection was correlated with symptoms. Unclear if symptoms were _as_ severe, or merely symptomatic.

Antibodies 50% gone by six months, 75% by a year.

Also highly seasonal, for what it's worth. Only 10 patients, all in the Netherlands, but a long study period.

<comment><USER4> This isn't the one you're thinking of, but it has similar conclusions: [https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/27/1000569/how- long...](https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/27/1000569/how-long-are- people-immune-to-covid-19/).

"They found that people frequently got reinfected with the same coronavirus, even in the same year, and sometimes more than once. Over a year and a half, a dozen of the volunteers tested positive two or three times for the same virus, in one case with just four weeks between positive results."

<comment><USER5> Well, that doesn't bode well for vaccine development, or does it?

<comment><USER6> Identifying the antibodies involved with COVID-19 was a major step towards developing a vaccine.

However, if you get antibodies from somebody who had COVID-19, then it does not confer you immunity. Those antibodies do not give your body a memory effect that allows your body, on its own, to respond to the infection as a preventative measure for COVID-19.

What it does though, for people who are actively infected with COVID-19, is reduce the severity of the infection. The influx of antibodies are believed to "neutralize" the COVID-19 virus already present in the body, by binding to the virus itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://archive.md/wfHBT](https://archive.md/wfHBT)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm surprised this hasn't encouraged more aggressive antibody testing of random people to better estimate the virus's spread and source more blood.

<comment><USER9> Oregon has established a program where a representative 100,000 people statewide are being tested on a regular basis to monitor the spread.

[https://www.oregonlive.com/coronavirus/2020/05/how- oregons-s...](https://www.oregonlive.com/coronavirus/2020/05/how-oregons- statewide-coronavirus-study-with-100000-people-will-work.html?outputType=amp)

<comment><USER10> 10000 of them will be tested[1] regardless of symptoms. Very nice. I don't understand (and have often wondered) why we, in Europe, haven't been doing this for months. Plenty of testing capacity.

[1] the article doesn't specify, but presumably a PCR test

<comment><USER11> Luxembourg is planning nation wide testing [https://www.fnr.lu/research- luxembourg-announcement-of-large...](https://www.fnr.lu/research-luxembourg- announcement-of-large-scale-testing-strategy/) and already performed a serological study [https://www.fnr.lu/research-luxembourg-first-results-of- the-...](https://www.fnr.lu/research-luxembourg-first-results-of-the-con- vince-study/)

Also other EU countries have done number of studies but results are often published in their own language only.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In Moscow the post-covid blood donors are getting $70 for 600ml of plasma instead of regular $50.

</comment><comment><USER13> I donate blood semi-regularly, and they have been hammering my inbox lately about giving again. I am sure donations have dried up and the reserves are low, but I am wondering, if I unknowingly had C19 and recovered, would the blood donation banks profit from this?

<comment><USER14> The blood bank "profits" from every donation. That's what a donation is.

If you're asking if they specifically test plasma for COVID-19 antibodies and scalp it to brokers, my guess is "probably not". My blood bank has documentation about the disease tests they do, and they say nothing about testing for COVID-19 in particular.

<comment><USER6> > The blood bank "profits" from every donation. That's what a donation is.

This especially applies for plasma donations, even though plasma donors (often poor people, and predominantly in the US) are paid for their donations (although a meager amount considering what is involved along with the side effects of plasmapheresis). Basically the US effectively supplies the majority of blood products for the world, and plasma is a precious human resource. The US also has extremely lax rules on plasma donation.

There have been scandals relatively recently around paid plasma, where Mexican nationals on visitor visas cross the border 2-3 times a week to do this. The donations can in some cases be enough income to get by in Mexico (or so I heard, but probably not well). This is important due to cartel violence, as it is considered to be "safer".

However, watch the video on this page which details the scandal: [https://www.propublica.org/article/pharmaceutical- companies-...](https://www.propublica.org/article/pharmaceutical-companies- are-luring-mexicans-across-the-u.s.-border-to-donate-blood-plasma)

The 2 main people in this video, Mexican nationals, ended up having severe health effects from the frequent (and legal) plasma donation route. In fact, the female in the video literally had a secondary immune deficiency from donating plasma so much, and if she continues (she was advised not to, by a Mexican doctor) she definitely can end up with a primary immune deficiency and other severe health problems.

Sure, plasma donations are necessary (I require a blood product due to a rare neurological disease affecting my peripheral nervous system) but it is some really sad stuff, too.

> If you're asking if they specifically test plasma for COVID-19 antibodies > and scalp it to brokers

Sometimes these plasma companies do test regular donors for certain (often rare) antibodies, such as for whatever shot that is given to Rh negative mothers who are pregnant with a child that could be Rh positive.

<comment><USER8> > Sometimes these plasma companies do test regular donors for certain (often > rare) antibodies, such as for whatever shot that is given to Rh negative > mothers who are pregnant with a child that could be Rh positive.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Harrison_(blood_donor)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Harrison_\(blood_donor\))

This guy is in Wikipedia _for being a blood donor._ He's estimated to have saved 2.4 million lives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If a patient gives too much of their blood for this, would they have less antibodies for themselves if they get reinfected?

<comment><USER16> They would die of blood loss before that happens

<comment><USER17> No they wouldn't. The blood (including antibodies) that is removed has been removed.

The question is equivalent to "if you give blood, doesn't that mean you have less blood for yourself?" and the answer is "yes, for a little while".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> [https://archive.md/wfHBT](https://archive.md/wfHBT)

</comment><comment><USER19> >$1,000 for one milliliter

</comment><comment><USER20> I am not able to access the article due to the paywall, but I assume that the high prices are being charged by hospitals to researchers, and that the volume of blood per patient is very low - test quantities vs donation/transfusion quantities.

I can imagine that there would be a huge market for large quantities of donated blood from recovered patients for transfusion purposes, so I would expect to see several business sprout up in short order to exploit this market.</comment>


How to Test the Working of your Antivirus – EICAR Test - <AUTHOR>

Have you ever wondered how to test your Antivirus software to ensure it's proper working? Well here is a quick and easy way to test your antivirus. The process is called EICAR test which will work on any antivirus and was developed by European Institute of Computer Antivirus Research. This process can be used by people, companies and antivirus programmers to test the proper functioning of the antivirus/antimalware software without having to deal with the real computer virus which can cause damage to the computer. Here is a step-by-step procedure to test your antivirus.
1. Open a notepad (New Text Document.TXT) and copy the following code exactly onto it, and save the notepad.
EICAR Test code X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H* 2. Rename the file from New Text Document.TXT to myfile.com
3. Now run the antivirus scan on this myfile.com file.
If the antivirus is functioning properly on your computer, then it should generate a warning and immediately delete the file upon scanning. Otherwise you may have to re-install your antivirus.
NOTE: Most antivirus will pop-out a warning message in the Step-1 itself You can also place the myfile.com file in a ZIP or RAR file and run a scan on it so as to ensure whether your antivirus can detect the test string in the compressed archive. Any antivirus when scanning this file will respond exactly as it will do for a genuine virus/malicious code. This test will cause no damage to your computer even though the antivirus will flag it as a malicious script. Hence it is the safest method to test the proper functioning of any antivirus. <comment><USER2> You need to enter the following in the test file

      X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*

ie ignore the "EICAR Test code" bit.

Anyone familiar with disassembly want to give a quick breakdown of what the code does? Never mind, wikipedia has a handy link to exactly that:

<http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/eicar/eicarcom.html> [http://archive.cert.uni- stuttgart.de/bugtraq/2003/06/msg0025...](http://archive.cert.uni- stuttgart.de/bugtraq/2003/06/msg00251.html)</comment>


HashLink is a virtual machine for Haxe - <AUTHOR> http://hashlink.haxe.org/ <comment><USER2> Looks like serious attention is finally being paid to Haxe performance:

> Initial benchmark shows that HL/JIT outperforms Adobe AIR and Node/V8 in > many cases.

I am very interested to see how that stacks up, as well as seeing what sort of compile times we get.</comment>


Homeownership Does Not Guarantee Middle-Class Prosperity - <AUTHOR> https://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/homeownership-does-not-guarantee-middle-class-prosperity/ <comment><USER2> Real estate is valuable because it is a constrained asset rather than a productive asset. Given supply and demand, there are going to be areas where property is extremely valuable, but wealth creation is not accomplished primarily through owning constrained resources, but through making limited resources more productive. Owning land may signal prosperity, but a culture where it is expected to be the driver of prosperity is going to have issues.

Interesting paraphrased quote: "Saying your home is the best investment you ever made says more about how bad of an investor you are than it does about how valuable your house is to you".</comment>


Show HN: Parsr – A toolchain to transform documents into usable structured text - <AUTHOR> http://par.sr <comment><USER2> It appears images and PDFs are the currently supported document types. If so, is there an opportunity to support web pages? We have quite a few verbose legal documents that consist of auto-geneated HTML that average 100 pages. A tool like this would be helpful in automatically dividing these into their respective section heading. It would also be beneficial to detect / remove extra info such as page numbers. Thanks for posting this!

<comment><AUTHOR> We plan to support HTML as an input (its in our backlog). If possible you can DM me one of your document and we can make sure it work.

<comment><USER3> Is the HTML processed using a DOM / visual parser? I'm looking for something like Readability or Diffbot that can extract rich text / markdown from web pages.

<comment><USER4> Is there some reason that pandoc[1] won't work for your use case?

[1][https://pandoc.org/](https://pandoc.org/)

<comment><USER3> The visual parser is because I want to grab content from any web page and fit it approximately to a pre-defined scheme using the underlying dom and visual cues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems like a super useful way to package and deliver this kind of tool chain! I've been looking for PDF parsers on and off the last couple of years, and have found it challenging to get most tools set up for data extraction and analysis.

This one packages a off the shelf version into a Docker, and starts a GUI website locally. Looking forward to using this more!

</comment><comment><USER6> Hmmm, looks useful. The list of dependencies is basically a who's who of doing various types of document parsing. Is this basically just a unified interface that wraps them all up into an API?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an interface that wrap multiple document tools into a common API, allowing you for example to switch your OCR from Tesseract to Google Cloud Vision or Abby without changing much of your code. More cloud vendor / OCR will be supported in the near future.

More than just wrapping the OCR, there is also a document reconstruction / cleaning pipeline that take care of reading order, heading detection and classification, table detection and reconstruction, ... so that you have an as clean and usableas possible Text / JSON as an output.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was really excited to try this until I saw that the only extraction methods are pdfminer, finereader, and tesseract. I was hoping there was something you rolled on your own. I've been trying for a long time to parse tables (and nested tables) but the available extractors seem to only work on really simple, idealized tables with virtually no skew or warping. The best I've found so far as Amazon's Textract, but it's not that great either. Alas, every attempt I've ever made at generalized table extraction has quickly regressed to templates.

<comment><USER8> Shameless plug: Would you like to join the club of happy customers at [https://extracttable.com](https://extracttable.com) \- API to extract tabular data from images and PDFs without worrying about co-ordinates.

A comprehensive competitor comparison, along with outputs, is available at [https://extracttable.com/compare.html](https://extracttable.com/compare.html)

<comment><USER9> Suggestion: use a simpler synonym for idempotent on your high level pricing overview. Something like "automatically makes sure you aren't charged for duplicates"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Are there any example inputs and outputs to quickly see what's possible?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is no inputs and outputs example in the repo to allow you to see rapidly what is possible. We should definitively add them.

For a quick test you can either run the jupyter notebook

[https://github.com/axa- group/Parsr/tree/master/demo/jupyter-...](https://github.com/axa- group/Parsr/tree/master/demo/jupyter-notebook)

or run the docker with the UI interface and just drag and drop documents / play with the configuration

       docker run -t -p 8080:80 axarev/parsr-ui-localhost:latest

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Apache Tika is a powerful text extraction engine.

Why this over Tika?

<comment><USER12> That's a really good question! I've been using for quite some time Tika as the Swiss-army knife for text extraction.

They don't seem to be even using Tika behind the hood as any of the bundled tools. Perhaps anyone has some comparisons?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> That looks like a great comprehensive tool kit for data extraction. I understand the bundle is licensed under Apache, I'm curious to check on the needs/rules-to-follow to include a service like Abbyy.

We, extracttable.com - extract tabular data from images and PDFs over API, are interested to contribute and integrate the service into the bundle.

</comment><comment><USER13> My old beater is insured with AXA. I didn't know they had any open source projects going on.

</comment><comment> all-out-of-hope Very cool, amazing this is OSS.</comment>


Commodore Basic as a Scripting Language for Unix and Windows  - <AUTHOR> http://www.pagetable.com/?p=48

<comment><USER2> Commodore BASIC actually was my first experience with a scripting language (and my first experience doing any programming at all a few years before).

When I was about 12, or thereabouts, I operated a BBS that ran the Color 64 BBS software, which was an assembly core with BASIC scripting. The assembly core made it just fast enough to serve out to a 2400 baud modem, and the BASIC scriptability made it really easy to add new games and features, and without having to restart the whole system (BASIC with line numbers allows overwriting of lines by using the same number...so, it's like a LISP machine...if you squint really hard, and hit yourself in the head a few times). The fact that a program could be _both_ BASIC and assembly was something altogether novel to me. Of course, now I know that UNIX guys had been doing it for years, but at the time I'd only ever seen programs written entirely in assembly or entirely in BASIC. Never one that was a seamless combination of the two.

I still have the Color 64 manual and floppy disk. It was hand-bound and printed on a dot matrix printer. I could never bring myself to get rid of it, in the numerous cleanings over the past 20 years. And I think the reason is that it taught me something that has stuck with me all these years (that one should use the right tool for the job--not necessarily the one that is "fastest" or most popular or the same as everything else in the toolchain).

Now that I think of it, I'm wondering if it actually extended the BASIC syntax (making BASIC a DSL for BBS software, of sorts), or if it just did the networking in assembly and rerouted standard IO from BASIC to the modem. If the former, I think I owe some more props to the author of Color 64 (above and beyond the $50 I paid for the software 20 years ago...though that _was_ when $50 meant something...it'd be like six grand in today's dollars).</comment>


Warning to film/photo(ers): Barrow Lenses - <AUTHOR> http://charliecurran.com/word/?p=249 I've had an incredibly infuriating experience with Borrow Lenses, the largest mail-based camera lens rental company in the U.S. and I hope none of you have to go through what I have in creating your projects. <comment><USER3> I'm afraid the lens rental company comes out of this looking a bit better than you do. Having spent many years in indie film, I understand your position well, and am familiar with the steep cost of gear rental. On the other hand, a request for 7.5% of the item price as a reward is somewhat excessive - that's more than the insurance premium. You had a legal duty to return it, and the reward offer was at their discretion. The account manager should not have given you to understand that it was a done deal, but you would have been better off clarifying the terms of your agreement at the time, and - <USER2> importantly - not counting your chickens. On a slim film budget, this is an understandable temptation, but one you must learn to resist or delegate to a producer. Honestly, I think you'd be better off waiting for a response to your complaint letter than going public with it.

<comment><USER4> > _On the other hand, a request for 7.5% of the item price as a reward is > somewhat excessive - that's more than the insurance premium. You had a legal > duty to return it, and the reward offer was at their discretion._

All of this seems to be responding to the complaint that Borrow Lenses' offered reward was insufficient, but I don't see any such complaint in the post. To my eye, it looks more like his complaints are a) that they misled him and in so doing caused him financial injury, b) that they falsely accused him of lying, and c) to add insult to injury, they spitefully refuse to do business with him after he took umbrage at their false accusations, despite the fact that he has dealt fairly with them and he is the only one who was injured in the whole affair. Points B and C really seem to be the crux of the matter — that is, it's not that they reneged on the promise, but _how they treated him_ after they reneged — and it does sound like very unprofessional behavior from this company.

Also, he did not actually request $600 from them, but two free rentals. Unless this company is operating at a loss, the cost to them should be substantially less than $600.

> _you would have been better off clarifying the terms of your agreement at > the time_

Upon being told "That sounds fair — we will give you two rentals free when we get the lenses back," what kind of clarification would a reasonable person seek? Based on Charlie's story, this doesn't sound like a misunderstanding, but one party simply going back on its word. (It could be that the exchange was actually less specific than it sounds in the post, but I think we're just dealing with how the situation comes across there, right?)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the insight anigbrowl, I'm a 21 year old film student, so I'm definitely still learning all of this. I didn't truly expect a 7.5% reward returning the gear, I returned it to do the right thing. It was a far shot, but with a three thousand dollar budget for the project when he offered me compensation and asked what I hoped for, I thought why not, $600 isn't a huge amount to ask. After all it's rental of two lesnes and a microphone for three days. They might not even have orders for them the weekend I requested...

I still truly believe that being called a liar and hung up on trying to explain my position was an unnecessary line to cross when dealing with someone who had been consistently renting from them withut issue and had returned their lost gear notifying them within 24 hours of receiving it. But then again, that may just be me. :/</comment>


Why Do Dedicated Game Consoles Exist? - <AUTHOR> http://prog21.dadgum.com/181.html

<comment><USER2> I was once contracted to be an expert witness in a case involving the definition of an "appliance" versus a "computer."

The bulk of the argument was than an appliance was designed (and often constrained) to doing the 'thing' it was designed to do, and a computer was designed to embrace doing many different things.

As the author points out, a game console is a computer which has sacrificed generality in order to achieve a cost advantage in the market where it competes. As the cost of generality goes down, the comparative advantage slowly evaporates.

An example of how this plays out is with robotics. You can consider your dishwasher to be a robot, it reacts to conditions (dishes, no dishes) it has various schemes for cleaning them, and that is pretty much what it does. A clothes washer is another robot of the genus 'washer' but works only on clothes. A general purpose robot could, in theory wash clothes, or dishes, and pretty much anything else if you programmed it to do so. So where do you draw the line between robot and appliance?

I posited the line was based on the relative cost/complexity advantage of one over another. When a computer was targeted to a particular task, and could do that task at a significant market cost advantage over the general purpose implementation, it went from being a 'computer' to being an 'appliance'.

Game consoles are appliances that play games, which is not to say that iPhones don't play games, but if you _only_ want to play games then a console has a cost advantage over a phone.

</comment><comment><USER3> As to why a system like the 2DS or 3DS or Vita is compelling when we all have iPhones or Android devices, for me it comes down to the control systems.

Touchscreens are fine for a narrow band of game types, but I wouldn't want to play the latest Mario platformer or Little Big Planet or 3D FPS with one. For lots of games I'll take the physical d-pad and/or analog sticks and physical buttons any day.

And while you technically can get such controllers to sync with touch-centric devices, it isn't quite the same if you have to carry around a separate controller. Even more importantly, it isn't the same if the controller type is not completely standardized so that games for the platform can expect it. External controllers are a fine solution for emulation on phones and tablets, but not for core games on the actual native platform.

<comment><USER4> >it isn't quite the same if you have to carry around a separate controller...

As opposed to carrying around a separate game console?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Speaking to the portable gaming space, I'd also add that a big part of games is the controls. Phones don't have a d-pad and buttons (or analog sticks, etc..). That pretty much makes games like Super Mario Brothers impossible. You can have your simplified endless runners, and that will probably satisfy most people. But for serious gamers, you need more precise control than a non dedicated console can provide.

<comment><USER6> Check The Open Pandora Pocket Gaming Handheld. It has physical controls and IS portable. Way better than a phone for Gaming, and it comes with a full Linux distribution for more serious applications.

<comment><USER7> Still a dedicated gaming handheld.

<comment><USER6> Not sure what you mean here. It runs a linux distro so you can use it as a computer (more like as a netbook replacement) and not just a "gaming only" console. Plus, being open, you can create and port your own applications on it using standard languages.

<comment><USER7> What I mean is you're plugging how it's open and uses standard languages in a thread titled "Why do dedicated game consoles exist?". That stuff is irrelevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Because a lot of people aren't technoweenies like us.

The reson why consoles sell is because largely they "just work" Hook it to the TV pop in a disc and you are rivalling the arcade. No dealing with popups, driver incompatibility, installations, etc.

Why are consoles are popular for developers? Because if they write some super spiffy game for console X it will run on ALL of them since they all have the same hardware - no-brainer to buy, not too hard to support, etc.

Where if they write something for a PC you have to cross your fingers everyone knows what sort of system they have (even Aunt Edna buying little Tommy's Duke Nukem Forever game), that their system is relatively virus free, they have the proper controllers, a decent monitor, understand what it means when they need to update a driver, etc. etc.

As far as quality, a lot of folks, don't really care. As long as the game is reasonably fun and they can take it out of the box and have it playing in under a minute. Heck I appreciate the resolution of DVDs, but frankly I don't give a darn about blu-ray, the ability to see Leonardo DeCaprio's nose hairs doesn't make really make the movie all that more enjoyable to me. Only thing that sometimes compels me about blue ray may be some exclusive feature... But again, like consoles, most blue-ray stuff is also on DVD primarily because all the DVD and Blu-Ray folk can use it and there is better potential sales.

</comment><comment><USER9> Here's my guess: 1) It's easier to say here pay $300 and you'll be able to play graphically intensive games vs here pay $200, install this video card into your computer, update your PC and drivers, etc.

2) Much harder to pirate console games. <\-- probably the main reason.

</comment><comment><USER10> A good reply to such articles: [http://www.lostgarden.com/2005/09/nintendos- genre-innovation...](http://www.lostgarden.com/2005/09/nintendos-genre- innovation-strategy.html)

> As a side note, folks who argue Nintendo should just make games for other > platforms are completely missing the point. Nintendo needs to control their > hardware platform in order to force innovation to occur in the control > mechanisms. Other console manufacturers who rely on the hardcore audiences > and standardized genres don't see this need. They would happily standardize > the console platform and make it into a commodity. Microsoft has > historically made major comments about having one universal development > platform.

> The moment Nintendo loses control over their hardware, they lose a major > competitive advantage in terms of creating new genres.

<comment><USER11> I feel like PCs are a sliding scale. You have to keep updating them to play the latest games. Wheras consoles are a known - you pay once, and it's good for what, 5 years?

<comment><USER6> That's less and less true for PCs. I had to update my PC every year or so before to keep up with the latest games, but nowadays it's clearly a slower moving target, and even with a 2 years old PC (equipped with a good graphics card at the time) I play most games in full/medium details in Full HD.

<comment><USER7> This seems to be kind of artificially introduced by consoles. The current generation of consoles stuck around forever, and they so dominate the gaming market that games were basically anchored to that rough level of computing ability for years.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, totally agree. But this is also because the PC has lost a lot of exclusive games which were usually pushing the specs higher and higher. Nowadays most games are made for consoles and ported later (or at the same time) for PC. The PC is not a target platform anymore, except for a few genres.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Because people are still buying them.

Once they do, they have to buy your product and it's harder to pirate, so publishers win.

Why do people buy them

A. People get a quick high when they buy objects, this is big part of capitalism.

B. They are only game machines. When you use a console there's no emails coming through to stress you out, your body relaxes in game state. (Why ebooks readers if they are smart won't add features, books are meant to be stress free)

C. 80-20 rule. The little bit of extra work on a PC can be a deal breaker, even if it's cheaper and better.

<comment><USER13> Also, they're considerably cheaper than a gaming PC. I can get an Xbox 360 for $250. I'd need at least twice that for a modest PC. While the PC would be more powerful, the optimization allowed when having every user on the same machine with the exact same specs on a closed platform makes a big difference too as far as performance goes.

<comment><USER14> You could probably buy a hardware equivalent PC for $250, or even less.

<comment><USER15> $250 PCs (I own one) suck for games.

<comment><USER16> $250 _gaming_ PCs are possible, if self-built.

<comment><USER17> Really? LogicalIncrements says that kind of money only gets you Intel HD 4000 power with no peripherals. How is that in any way a gaming PC?

<comment><USER16> Skimp on CPU, buy AMD and budget mobo, go to eBay for GPU.

<comment><USER18> At which point your PC costs $250 only if your time is worthless.

<comment><USER16> If you need a $250 PC, your time probably _is_ worth less. If you're buying $60 console games instead of $5-$30 PC games, I hope you're saving a _lot_ of highly valuable time.

Why would you want to waste your time with a retail PC anyway, loaded down with time-wasting adware and free trials?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've found it interesting that arcade games have gone in the opposite direction. Most modern arcade games are released on the Taito Type X, Sega Lindbergh and other similar platforms. These are basically just PCs with Intel processors, Nvidia or ATI graphics cards, and Windows or Linux.

A good example is Street Fighter. Street Fighter 3 was release for the CPS3 [0], a completely proprietary platform that ultimately only had 6 games released for it. Street Fighter 4 was on the Taito Type X2 [1], which is pretty much a PC.

[0] [http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=799](http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=799)

[1] [http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=903](http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=903)

</comment><comment><USER20> This ignores another big part of the equation historically (I don't know if it applies today, and AFAIK it never applied to Nintendo) which is using a clever business model. Many consoles have been sold at a significant loss at launch. An equivalently powerful PC would have cost much more, and did, in fact, cost the manufacturer more than they were selling it for. The cost would then be recaptured in game royalties.

</comment><comment><USER21> It's simple, they're cheaper and easier to use.

</comment><comment><USER22> Besides the cost advantage due to the economies of scale, specialized gaming consoles offer something that both developers and gamers want: a consistent experience due to a common hardware platform.

The QA effort that goes into PC games vs a Console games is a considerable difference. The myriad of hardware configurations (amount of RAM, GPU types and its capabilities, processor speed, etc) make for complicated debugging and graphics quality compromises to capture the mean population of computer performance capability. Contrast this to console development, developers can guarantee the performance of their game and optimize accordingly because they only have to account for one hardware and OS configuration (or 2, if they are going for multi-console release). Likewise, gamers can be confident that they won't run into performance or compatibility issues.

Due to the specialization and simplification of these computer systems, gamers also get to enjoy the sheer convenience of gaming consoles. They boot quickly, jump strait into your game and are fairly no-nonsense.

At a low enough price point relative to general purpose PC's or smart phones, they are still the best experience for enthusiast-level gamers.

</comment><comment><USER23> > Is the custom hardware so fundamentally critical to the experience that you > couldn't provide it otherwise?

You could spin the question around and ask why do point & shoot cameras (analog: consoles) or SLR's (analog: PC's) exist when you're always carrying a camera in your pocket? The answer is level of control, depth of experience and quality. Such hardware will be used by enthusiasts, whereas those who just want something to snap selfies, dinners out etc will stick with whatever is most convenient.

I can play games on my phone anywhere I go but they lack the richness and intensity of playing a multiplayer FPS or RTS game on a stable wired connection and dedicated controller.

A way around this was mentioned in the article - tactile displays. A display or bezel that can raise parts of its topography into customizable shapes that react to touch. This will largely solve the input issue. It might even make it better than the fixed human-machine interface like a controller because it provides freedom for the developer (or user) to craft the input mechanism to perfectly suit the game/app.

</comment><comment><USER24> Probably because the iPhone lacks tactile input buttons/joysticks.

Isn't iOS 7 supposed to add some sort of support for bluetooth gamepads? Will that help out?

<comment><USER25> Android has had support for bluetooth game controllers for years and has yet to get widely adopted by end users. I think there's even been some companies that have tried specializing in controllers for Android.

<comment><USER24> To be fair, developing for an iPhone is a lot closer to developing for the 3DS, because there tends to be one per year. Android devices vary, even if not by much, it's not the same. Especially when it comes to demanding games.

So while Android wins out on bluetooth support, it loses on the standardized console platform aspect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Tactile controls are something that most phones are missing. But there seems to be a problem of culture. The games developed for mobile phones are targeted at mainstream casual markets. And there is also a culture of free beer with mobile gamers. When the client won't pay a proper price for the game, it is too much of a risk to create a large game. Which is why developers target simple casual games, and tries to nickel and dime with some targeted psychological tricks.

I enjoy more complex game, even with mobile platforms such as Nintendo 3DS. My most played games are Fire Emblem Awakening, Etrian Odyssey IV, Devil Survior Overclocked and Monster Hunter 3 U. The first three games would not even require tactile controls; but I don't think any mobile gamer in the current culture would buy them for 30 to 40 dollars.

With dedicated game consoles the culture of actually paying for a good large game is still alive and well. And I think that is the reason why developers make games for them. If the day comes when free-to-play casual games are the only mobile games available, it will be a sad day for me.

</comment><comment><USER27> The reason I prefer console games is the control. I prefer a controller where my hands are upwards, like a Playstation, instead of a keyboard and mouse. There are peripheral controllers for PC, but since games are built with the expectation of just a keyboard and mouse, they don't make maximum advantage of the peripheral control (except flight yokes and steering wheels).

<comment><USER28> > There are peripheral controllers for PC, but since games are built with the > expectation of just a keyboard and mouse [...]

These days, that's simply just not true. Sure there are a good amount of games that are just kb/m, but the many of the newer games support the have full 360 controller support (or PS3 controller if you want to fiddle around with some settings).

<comment><USER18> Indeed. My living room XBMC/Steam PC has a Logitech wireless controller, and Steam highlights controller support as a feature in the game pages these days. It's pretty common, especially given so many games are cross-platform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The quality of games are significantly lower on mobile than dedicated consoles, a lot has to do with hardware, a lot has to do with strategy. A PC was a lot closer to the ps2 than an iPhone is to the ps4. Casual games may be the hot new thing, but you should be able to see the difference when you compare the production value to a Naughty Dog title.

<comment><USER30> There are very few mobile games that I want to play, and lots of console games I want to play. Most mobile games are small and simple. And I think the $1-$4 cost of most apps has killed much of the market for serious apps. Apple's 30% cut is far too much for apps over $20 and further drives developers away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Lukas Mathis has a series of articles about Nintendo that I think is worth to read:

[http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2013/08/29/nintendo/](http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2013/08/29/nintendo/)

[http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2013/09/03/more_nintendo/](http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2013/09/03/more_nintendo/)

[http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2013/09/05/lateral_thinking_wi...](http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2013/09/05/lateral_thinking_with_withered_technology/)

[http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2013/09/07/where_do_people_use...](http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2013/09/07/where_do_people_use_portable_gaming_systems_/)

</comment><comment><USER32> Nintendo DS vs iPhone comparison:

Nintendo DS can be a gift to a 6 year old. I am not giving a phone with open data and calling capability and store to a 6 year old.

Also a NDS costs $200 while the iPhone is $450 for cheapest model without a phone contract (was more until recent anouncement).

A PS3 cost 400 at launch. And still plays new games till this day. SURE they are not as good quality but they work well. Meanwhile you keep having to upgrade your PC, and since I assemble my own, I can make a $600 / $700 pc, most people end up spending 1.5k+ for that.

So cost is still a huge factor.

</comment><comment><USER33> Set design spec sheet allows developers to target their games more appropriately. Engines like Unity come in, drive more innovation. Low price point compared to a PC, and no additional hassle of making sure drivers are compatible etc.

</comment><comment><USER34> Phones can take pictures. Why do cameras exist?

Because a phone is a shitty camera.

</comment><comment><USER35> If the controls are the thing, maybe Nintendo should make a controller that docks to an iPhone and have exclusive games that require their controller.

</comment><comment><USER36> The same reason modern smartphones do. PCs (whether windows, Mac, or linux) are horrid from a usability perspective. It boggles my mind how regular people manage to put up with the shit that it takes to use a computer effectively. But I know that the answer is that they don't, and the result is that they are exposed to a vastly degraded experience of using a computer compared to an expert who can easily troubleshoot and solve the vast majority of problems that they run into day to day.

Gaming consoles (and DVRs, and every other device which is basically just a computer) are simplified systems which remove a lot of the hassle of using them. Even a PS3 or a Wii-U (which are excruciating to update) is orders of magnitude easier to use than a general purpose computer.

</comment><comment><USER37> Because games that aren't shit require buttons.</comment>


The Latest Dump of Alleged NSA Tools Is 'The Worst Thing Since Snowden' - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/the-latest-shadow-brokers-dump-of-alleged-nsa-tools-is-awful-news-for-the-internet <comment><USER2> _" This FUZZBUNCH framework contains the closest thing to a cyber weapon since Stuxnet," Hacker Fantastic said. "It is packed full of exploits. It's Metasploit but with zero-days."_

This describes a whole category of commercial products that anyone with a few thousand dollars can buy, and have been able to buy for at least 10 years.

<comment><USER3> That's a great point. The barrier to entry for "internet weapons" is way lower than people are making it seem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm more interested in their NSA hacking "tools". If the NSA can be compromised and have dangerous assets stolen, whether or not there are Windows cracking tools available seems to beg the question.

Also, will heads ever roll at the top of the NSA for these apparent failures? Isn't it akin to stealing weapons from military armories, except that these weapons can be effortlessly, instantly, and infinitely reproduced and distributed worldwide - a risk the security experts at the NSA clearly must have been aware of ahead of time.

<comment><USER5> Rather than heads rolling what will happen is doubling or tripling of budget requests to safeguard the crown jewels, setting up new battalions of watchmen to watch the watchmen and so on.

History tells us as these budgets grow uncontrollably sooner or later the empire runs out of cash to pay the soldier.

<comment><USER4> > History tells us as these budgets grow uncontrollably sooner or later the > empire runs out of cash to pay the soldier.

In which nation has that happened? The U.S. certainly has had more serious problems in its defense institutions, and its level of defense spending is relatively low now, relative to post-WWII budgets, and especially relative to GDP.

<comment><USER5> It's a long list. Google Paul Kennedy.

<comment><USER4> Name one or two?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is the most recent dump also from <=2013?

</comment><comment><USER7> link to dump?

<comment><USER8> [https://steemit.com/shadowbrokers/@theshadowbrokers/lost- in-...](https://steemit.com/shadowbrokers/@theshadowbrokers/lost-in- translation)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why do you want to start a business? - <AUTHOR> What are the things that motivate you? When did you decide it was the right path for you? What does/will having a business provide for you?
I think there is a big hype around startups and starting your own business, and I am wondering how much is influenced by social pressure, and how much by innate will.
Obviously not everyone who visits HN wants a startup, but I am asking the ones that do. <comment><USER2> For me, it was two things:

1\. I saw lots of problems that I had ideas about (ideas that I'd pay for if they existed). A business was - is - the only way to implement those improvements and discover whether they actually helped other people as much as they helped me.

2\. While I enjoyed working on problems for other people, other stuff - broadly, poor execution by parts of the business I didn't oversee - got in the way.

#1 led me to implement many things over the years (businesses, projects, whatever), but #2 was basically the catalyst to do it full time.

</comment><comment><USER3> In software you are often working in an organization where the "important" people are not software people and there is just no path for advancement.</comment>