A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it's bad for you - <AUTHOR> https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/a-belief-in-meritocracy-is-not-only-false-its-bad-for-you <comment><USER4> Once again we are presented with a false dichotomy: either embrace meritocracy wholesale or reject it entirely.

Despite the authors best attempts, the truth peeks out in the article: merit is often a necessary, but not sufficient cause for success. Not sufficient, particularly, for extraordinary success.

By embracing the healing power of "and" over the divisive and thought-killing "or", we can achieve a better understanding of reality. Yes, successful people usually merit their success. Yes, luck also plays a large part in it, especially as the scale of that success grows. Both of these facts should be given proper account as we morally reason about things.

<comment><USER5> Rejecting meritocracy entirely as an ideal to even strive for is pure poison. How could a society possibly function if it doesn't elevate competence above incompetence and expertise above charlatanism? I think we're going to find out!

<comment><USER4> I think one of the reasons smarter folks tend to fall into manichean thinking on luck vs. talent is that, as the level of success grows, luck plays a larger and larger role. So it is an emotionally powerful fact for people competing at the higher end of the success curve.

The mistake is generalizing this proportionality across the entire society and, thus, giving too much weight to luck and not enough to merit.

Discussing luck in the case of billionaires makes a lot of sense. Discussing luck in the case of a successful franchisee in town makes less sense.

<comment><USER5> Success comes from merit, luck, and corruption in some proportion. In successful countries merit is a larger portion than in unsuccessful countries. When people say the entire concept of merit is %PEJORATIVE BUZZWORD% so we should stop striving for it what they are really saying is they want success to be allocated by luck and corruption and they think the corruption will benefit them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article is misleading they gloss over the key point that makes it such, "Most people don't just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic."

Specifically the part after the comma after meritocratically.

That is a false belief, because the world is not meritocratically run. This leads to all subsequent false beliefs and issues of entitlement and selfishness the article discusses.

However, a belief the world _should_ be run meritocratically does not necessarily have the same issues and, personally, we should strive to "even the playing field" and make it more so.

The writer should have chosen a better title such as "A belief that the world is currently meritocratically run is bad for you", but I bet it would get less clicks because frankly, no shit.

<comment><USER7> The biggest issue with the idea of a meritocracy is defining merit.

One recurring issue I've seen throughout my career (and I have to admit to having fallen for this trap when I was younger) is, as an engineer, overvaluing technical merit and undervaluing both interpersonal and product/business skills.

<comment><USER6> Yeah I personally believe a senior engineer or lead is defined by the latter married to the former and that the latter becomes much more important at that level.

So I agree that defining the useful characteristics to evaluate for merit is very difficult. I personally don't know what the right system would be I just more often then not see people who have no business being at the senior level or management level etc etc have no business being there as I would evaluate it.

<comment><USER7> > have no business being there as I would evaluate it.

That's the key insight here. "As I would evaluate it". We simply don't know enough about most topics to be able to evaluate merit. Likewise, we don't know enough to choose _the people who can_ , beyond simple heuristics like "they've been working on this for decades, they should be good".

For example, we can probably agree that Trump is a bad president, but who was better — Obama or Bush? While I have an opinion on that, I also know that opinion is dominated by my political leanings, and I don't know nearly enough to cogently answer that question.

<comment><USER6> Oh I'm certainly aware in fact that is probably the seminal issue of the idea of merit -- it's not an objective quality.

Applied to a small system of homogeneous groups it's probably fine, as applied to society it falls apart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Bad citations in this article.

Original article:

> Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called 'grit', > depend a great deal on one's genetic endowments and upbringing.

Linked article (on 'depend') has the following conclusion which explicitly disagrees with this claim:

> Our results based on 584 effect sizes from 88 independent samples > representing 66,807 individuals indicate that the higher order structure of > grit is not confirmed, that grit is only moderately correlated with > performance and retention, and that grit is very strongly correlated with > conscientiousness. We also find that the perseverance of effort facet has > significantly stronger criterion validities than the consistency of interest > facet and that perseverance of effort explains variance in academic > performance even after controlling for conscientiousness. In aggregate our > results suggest that interventions designed to enhance grit may only have > weak effects on performance and success, that the construct validity of grit > is in question, and that the primary utility of the grit construct may lie > in the perseverance facet.

Further, the logic here is unsound:

> According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is > great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There > are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed > to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have > merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.

The author asserts Gates was successful because he was a good programmer, and that therefore other good programmers should have equal success. Yet most people understand Gates is not an amazing programmer but rather has his strengths in understanding business. Microsoft did well because of business positioning in a new and rapidly evolving field, not because they were a revolutionary future codebase.

<comment><USER9> I would add that Malcolm Gladwell talks about how much Gates had been programming at his age compared to other people at the time. He wasn't competing with nearly as many people as programmers today are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's fair and fine to critique the implementations of "meritocracy" that we see in the world, and also to critique the inflationary aspects of how it's usually articulated (e.g., person X is good at taking calculated financial risks that result in lots of money, therefore that person is "good" and should possess political power and authority).

But the sort of rhetoric presented here risks throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If you attack also the noble parts of the meritocratic ideal -- impartial, universalist fairness -- what's to stop you from winding up with what amounts to a caste system wherein unfair a priori privileges go unexamined and treated as merely "the way things are"? (Which, historically, is the norm for human societies?)

Far better to reconstruct meritocracy, or replace it with a new iteration, that 1) provides genuine, unfettered opportunity to all individuals _at all stages of life_ (so, for instance, one can obtain education, however defined, at any age) and 2) grants only domain-specific authority, without making false generalizations about aptitude (e.g. someone who's good at X isn't sloppily regarded as having some sort of a priori genius that also makes them good at Y and Z).

<comment><USER11> > what's to stop you from winding up with what amounts to a caste system > wherein unfair a priori privileges go unexamined and treated as merely "the > way things are"?

I don't think you have to have meritocracy to avoid this. The way I see meritocracy is it is a tool for those with priori privileges to fool themselves and others that they are deserving of those privileges. It's slightly more convincing (and therefore more sinister) then just justifying it with "the way things are".

But really I don't see why you need either system. Why not a system where nobody has these unfair special privileges?

<comment><USER10> > But really I don't see why you need either system. Why not a system where > nobody has these unfair special privileges?

I guess I tend to think that a reconstructed meritocracy would be precisely such a system -- genuine equality of opportunity, as an ideal constantly striven for and with far more pressure applied to actually have it realized, even if it never purely is -- and that there would be no real alternative means of realizing this in practice. (Reconstructed meritocracy would in my view require remediation of unfair special privileges for coherence.)

I completely agree re: the problems of the current meritocracy and its deployment in illegitimate self-justification, and accentuation thereof -- having been a grad student / instructor at a "fancy" school, for instance, I've seen the awarding of an A- as the mean and mode grade (the modern incarnation of the "gentleman's C", at least outside of STEM subjects, i.e. an average performance earns the second-highest possible grade) defended on the logic that it's "really, really hard to get in" to this school, so _any_ undergrad student who meets the bare minimum requirements of the course must be deserving of an A-. It's heinous and unfair. But without meritocracy, it would be worse, as this would be a scenario in which there's not even a need to defend the unearned grade; rather, it would simply be "the way things are" \-- hence the use of the term "gentleman" (i.e. someone from the "correct" socioeconomic background/family/etc.) in the original phrase. (And yes, maybe grade inflation wouldn't happen without the sinister side of our present "meritocracy," but "gentleman's C"s didn't stand in the way of many elites who got them and went on to wield considerable power and authority.)

It's a complicated issue, to be sure, and much depends on how one defines one's terms, but I guess the bottom-line for me is, without meritocracy there's no need to "show your work": it's simply accepted that some people have access to power and others don't. In the early 20th century, if you told someone you went to a fancy school, they'd probably say "You must be rich" rather than "You must be smart." Today they'd say the latter, even though the former is often true, and the latter often not. But before the advent of even this flawed meritocracy, the person who went to the fancy school would still have unquestioned access to power in a way that even smart poor people wouldn't, even if everyone knew it was unearned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article tries to make a moral point by (ab)using intellectually dishonest arguments.

It blatantly attempts to confuse meritocracy as a _value_ / _goal_ and as _state_ / _belief_. Replace "meritocracy" by "freedom" or "equality" or "justice" or "safe driving" \- it's a constant struggle, a distant goal that we're continuously falling short of, and obviously the belief that we've achieved that goal results in less effort expanded towards it and falling more behind. That's not a _paradox_ , it's just _logic_.

 _> the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false._

False dichotomy; why not both?

 _> In the UK, 84 per cent of respondents to the 2009 British Social Attitudes survey stated that hard work is either 'essential' or 'very important' when it comes to getting ahead_

Again, why not both? How many successful people are there that _didn 't_ work hard? But yeah, obviously you need to be lucky, you won't achieve much if you die at 5 from malaria.

 _> They found that, in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance evaluations_

That's not a failure of meritocracy, it's a failure of a specific policy used to implement meritocracy. Managers / police / judges / assassins are not impartial? Implement policies that enforce more impartiality (in this study's case, if you have a statistical benchmark to compare "performance evaluations" of different employees and contrast them with managers' appraisals, why not use that statistics _itself_ to dole out rewards?)

</comment><comment><USER13> I wasn't a big fan of the article, it feels too nihilistic.

I do agree that recognizing extrinsic vs. intrinsic factors in success is important for empathy and to help others - i.e. looking at work given your circumstances not just work - but it felt like it ended without making a conclusion. Is it asking us all to become fatalists? And does that somehow make for a more empathetic and just society? I feel like it wouldn't - if we believe that none of us are in control at all, why do anything to help others? And doesn't a belief in meritocratic ideals mean that we should be going out of our way to remove barriers? For example, I found this article[1] that talked about income mobility in different countries.

An interesting question it made me think of though: in separating luck versus grit, what is your prior?

For example, we'd probably all agree one is lucky to be born in a wealthy country, and that if you are you have inherent advantages. And that the circumstances you are born to are pure luck.

If growing up you had strict family (lucky or unlucky depending) that forced you to have good study habits, and you did well in school in a large part because of those habits, which in turn opened up other opportunities - is that luck or grit?

If I stumble across a good mentor, then go out of my way to learn from their teachings is that luck or grit?

If I'm starting a company, and I make 100 cold calls to find my first customer - do we attribute that to luck or grit?

If through exercise, genetic luck and healthy eating I'm able to stay healthy throughout my life, is that luck or grit?

[1] [https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/moving-up-the- income-...](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/moving-up-the-income- ladder-takes-generations-how-many-depends-on-where-you-live/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Perhaps these authors should suggest some sort of alternative, if they wish to convince people that meritocracy is not only not the case, but is actively harmful. Else it seems no ideal is truly being put fourth, only talking down at the status quo. How would they prefer things worked instead?

<comment><USER15> The idea that we only should examine and evaluate our systems if we have a better proposal already set is a dangerous one. If you don't understand the flaws in the first system any system you design after is doomed to repeat those flaws. At the same time the people who are criticizing a system may not be the best to design a new one, so putting up imaginary hurdles just works to protect the status quo.

<comment><USER13> That's a fair point, and I agree there is value in just identifying flaws. The flip side though is that it's easy to find flaws in any system since there's a large surface area - and the author is not just pointing out flaws, but saying the system is wrong. At the very least, I'd argue that we should hold people to at least trying to quantify the flaws they see in the system, especially when making such strong claims about it. Otherwise, how do we affect change?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Oh the irony of this coming from Princeton! They accept a third of alumni children compared to 5.5% of everyone else. Is this meritocracy or luck?

[https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2020/06/princeton-...](https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2020/06/princeton- admissions-legacy-athletics-recruitment-testing-waitlist)

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't think people should either deceive themselves about the existence of or the downsides of attempting to follow pure meritocracy. Nor should they ignore people who have been disadvantaged.

But when we create a system for recognizing / rewarding / incentivizing achievement, with rules that are not unreasonable, people want others to follow the rules that have been created! Not creating hole after hole in a system to fix things that are not the direct fault of the system.

Social beings want rules and structure to know how to interact and what to expect from each other, and the systems in which they live. You will produce unexpected bad side effects when you keep shifting people's expectations about what seemed to be a reasonable system, that people lived their lives by.

Otherwise, let the picking and choosing of who your favorite beneficiary (today) of semi-meritocracy is continue.

</comment><comment><USER18> The article makes very nuanced points that don't transpire in the title, and thus get straw manned in the comments. Here are the salient points:

\- The article says nothing against creating a fairer world (aka equality of opportunity)

\- Many believe that the world is meritocratic, which is not the case as there are many cofounding factors (plenty of which we don't have control over) that get in the way of finding a causation between hard work and outcome.

\- The paradox of meritocracy: believing you acts meritocratically results in less fair outcomes.

\- Being grateful to the impact of luck makes you more generous and fair.

\- Meritocracy can be used as a justification of our own success and self- worth, so in this situation any criticism of meritocracy can be perceived as an insult and threat to what we have and are

<comment><USER19> > Meritocracy can be used as a justification of our own success and self- > worth, so in this situation any criticism of meritocracy can be perceived as > an insult and threat to what we have and are

This last point is why I expected to see commenters here indignantly raging against the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am sympathetic to the practical issues & biases at play when discussing the systems we often call meritocracies; especially when those systems result in anti-meritocratic behavior.

However, what is the reader supposed to come away with here as an alternative? Equality of outcome? Should it really be that any given combination of work ethic, dedication, novelty, and a bit of luck will not land you above the mean? I personally am all for improving meritocracies so they live up to the name, but abolishing them due to their implementation failures seems silly and more importantly, the alternatives are dangerous.

<comment><USER21> Well the traditional alternative is that you inherit your profession from your parent. In terms of political leadership this would be aristocracy but it was pretty common for others too. Men with the last name "smith" expecting to follow their father in becoming smiths for example. But of course levels of employment in different jobs are nowhere near as stable as they were back then. Not too many smiths around and we've gone from 80+% of people working as farmers to less than 5%.

I suppose you could have everybody randomly assigned to jobs. Or you could people have a list of preferences and to the extent that there are more applicants to a given job than open slots randomly assign them then move the other applicants to their next slot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Luck exists – checkmate people that value hard work!

Yawn.

<comment><USER23> I also find it plausible that advancement is allocated based on work/virtue/etc. more in some societies and systems than others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless > failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many > have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.

I think Marc Andreessen addressed this when he asked whether team, product, or market was the secret to success. He concluded that product-market fit was key. Bill Gates found product-market fit several times; luck it was not.

Perhaps "market meritocracy" is a better way of framing the question.

<comment><USER25> That still doesn't explain it. There's no obvious product reason why Netscape should have won compared to Spyglass. Bill Gates talking about product-market fit when Windows and Office's success based on illegally leveraging the DOS monopoly, is particularly rich.

There are multiple studies that have compared luck with skill, and luck is always the dominate factor. You can event simulate wealth concentration with fair coin flips. [https://github.com/jonathankoren/oligarchy- game](https://github.com/jonathankoren/oligarchy-game)

Most damningly there (which sadly I can not find right now) where the university created a bandcamp like site, and has people listen to the bands, and recommend them to each other. The idea being that the most talented bands would be the most successful (plays, stars, whatever). The twist was that they A/B tested the community. (For example if there were 1000 listeners, they were split into two 500 person groups, with no interactions between them.) They found the most important factors determining success were random.

<comment><USER26> Spyglass didn't. Microsoft may have started from the Spyglass codebase, but I don't imagine there was much left by the time IE 4 was released. The Netscape guys like to talk about how Microsoft's monopolistic practices killed Netscape, but by the time of Netscape 4.6 vs. IE 4, IE was a far superior browser in speed, stability, and CSS support.

At the time, it was really Netscape's market to lose. It was not difficult to download Netscape, and in the IE 2/IE 3 era, that's what everyone did. Netscape just stopped being the best and didn't recover until Firefox was released.

<comment><USER25> I used Spyglass back in the Mosaic Communicator and Netscape 1.1N days. There was no real difference. The big draw of Mosaic Communicator over NCSA Mosaic was in-line jpegs.

You could have easily replayed the world and Spyglass and Netscape's fates would have been switched, because they had identical products in an identical market.

<comment><USER26> Well things moved pretty fast back then, but in my recollection, Netscape had progressive rendering (i.e. you didn't have to wait for everything to load before the page was rendered) and Spyglass didn't. I believe IE 1.0 (derived from Spyglass) also lacked that feature. Spyglass might have worked OK on a university network, but over dialup, progressive rendering was a killer feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The two main problems I have with the concept of "meritocracy" are:

Incoherent/circular definition: Nobody can actually tell you what merit really is in a specific way, so we end up just measuring it by existing social status. "This guy made it into Harvard Business School and to F500 CEO, he must have a lot of merit". But maybe he got into Harvard because his rich parents were donors and then leveraged those connections for his CEO job, no merit involved. This thing that is meant to determine social status is measured by social status itself and is thus useless.

Meritocracy doesn't fairness or justice or compassion or dignity: Imagine a society which is one big ongoing gladiatorial tournament, meritocracy is defined purely in terms of combat. This would be a very meritocratic society - but would also be a very brutal, unpleasant, and unequal one. If meritocracy can still result in all of those things, what use is it really?

</comment><comment><USER28> Focusing on who "wins" and who "loses" and what role luck plays has an important ideological function. It makes it seem like the outcomes of the game are unquestionable.

Like, of course it's reasonable that we're playing a game that determined who gets healthcare and who doesn't; or who gets access to quality education and who doesn't; or who must spend their days being humiliated by the institutions that they depend on for survival and who doesn't. That's unquestionable. The only question to answer is who should win and who should lose.

Not that a certain kind of "fairness" to the game isn't desirable if we're going to play it anyway, but if you can't bring yourself to ask if the whole game is fundamentally flawed to begin with, you've already given up on the kind of fairness that really matters.

</comment><comment><USER26> Many people in the thread seem to be talking past each other, I think because a meritocracy has different presumed purposes.

Purpose #1 is to make society more fair, in that in principle anyone can rise to the top, and you're not held back by your position of birth as in an aristocracy. Even in a true meritocracy though, you may still be held back by innate talent or upbringing.

Purpose #2 is to make society run better. This happens in two ways: More able people are selected for more responsible positions, so that hopefully decisions with more impact are made by more qualified people. Secondly, people have an incentive to try to become more qualified so that they can occupy these more responsible positions.

</comment><comment><USER29> A lot of comments here point out to some of the more obvious flaws of the article.

To me what shocks me the most is that there isn't even any discussion on "what is success". The author apparently measures success just by net worth, which I can't avoid but feel sad for him/her.

</comment><comment><USER30> It's very important to have this conversation out in the open - contempt for meritocracy is a persistent undercurrent of the social strife in the west, and left unattended it will derail most efforts to improve our society.

</comment><comment><USER31> Believing that the system is meritocratic is not the same as believing that it _should_ be meritocratic.

Meritocracy is the fairest system for individuals. Achieving it is an endless struggle.

</comment><comment><USER32> Oh my, this required some digging.

The article relies on an experiment that basically presented a gender stacked (70% male, 30% female) panel of MBA students with hypotetical company with a set of hypothetical "core values" and then looked at how these influenced managerial bonus allocation decisions.

They test three sets of "core values", A,B and C (see below). They labeled A as "meritocratic values" and B and C as "non meritocratic. They find there is a male bias under A, a female bias under B and no bias under C.

They then conclude their pre-assumed hypothesis, that meritocratic values (A) favors males, is valid. When they stumble upon as strong a female bias in their "non-meritocratic" value set (B), they they decide it might be down to wording and look for a wording to make that disappear (C) They never try to do a similar rewording of (A).

They never seem to see how they are fishing for the desired outcome, never consider alternative explanations (people that are prompted they "earned" their position tend to look for similar traits in subordinates) etc.

The conclusion we can draw is MBA students seem to be potentially influenced by the wording of value statements in hypothetical reward games.

As promised, here are the 3 hypotetical "core value" sets as worded:

Set A: labeled "meritocratic"

(1) "All employees are to be rewarded fairly";

(2) "whether employees deserve a raise is determined by their performance";

(3) "raises and bonuses are based entirely on the performance of the employee";

(4) "promotions are given to employees when their performance shows that they deserve it";

(5) "ServiceOne's goal is to reward all employees equitably every year.

Set B: labeled "non-meritocratic"

(1) "All employees are to be evaluated regularly";

(2) "whether an employee deserves a raise is determined by their manager";

(3) "raises and bonuses are to be given based on the discretion of the manager";

(4) "promotions are to be given to employees when their manager decides that they deserve it";

(5) "ServiceOne's goal is to evaluate all employees every year

Set C: labeled "non meritocratic"

(1) "All employees are to be evaluated regularly";

(2) "performance evaluation forms include a quantitative as well as qualitative component about the employee's performance";

(3) "performance evaluations are part of the employee's official personnel file";

(4) "performance evaluations are discussed with each employee every year"

(5) "ServiceOne's goal is to evaluate all employees every year

</comment><comment><USER33> "The world is a meritocracy" is a bit of a straw man, because who really believes in the Platonic ideal of a meritocracy?

The steel-plated version would be a recognizable descendant of the Middle Ages: as the king is annointed by God, our leaders are too, in direct proportion to their merit. So Donald Trump would be 1,000 times more meritorious than the average person, as confirmed by his net worth.

No one believes this nonsense.

What happens is, individual _companies_ believe they are meritocratic - <USER2> the world at large, which they rightfully recognize as beyond their control.

The problem here is that you can use the meritocratic argument against the meritocracies cited in the article.

> They found that, in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core > value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female > employees with identical performance evaluations.

Well... in a meritocracy, your performance evaluation _is_ your merit. They should be interchangeable; there should be no discrepancy between them. Ideally if my performance evaluation is 1.5 times better than yours, consistently, my salary should be too.

I think it's fine to drop the language around 'meritocracy' and just reduce it to incentives: the equivalent of working at a factory, where someone who makes 2x as many widgets makes 2x as much money. Basically these are this department's goals and the people who hit them, based on these markers, make more.

Now I know there are different ways to measure that. I know bias can creep in. But, c'mon: if we both make the same number of widgets as measured by performance evaluation, there is no reason for me to make more than you based on my gender, which is the differentiating factor here and deeply anti- meritocratic, after all.

So if you drop the (apparently, empirically, problematic) meritocratic language, but keep the merit-based indicators and - this is crucial! - <USER3> to them, it seems like you can resolve the issue.

<comment><USER34> A factory worker who makes 2x as many widgets doesn't make 2x as much money in my experience in US industry work. The way it typically shakes out is that the workers are part of a union, and the union negotiates compensation and benefits based on length of tenure. In some cases, the factory and union determine a "quota" level of production, and any production in excess of that garners a small bonus. Assuming that 1x is the quota, and the median worker makes $15/hr, producing 2x over the course of a shift _might_ result in an extra $5/hr. Even that number would be higher than I've typically seen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Why do so many people aspire for meritocracy everywhere? Imagine if there really was meritocracy in the political system. All we would have is someone who would pander to the local population and eventually lean to be xenophobic as a process.

This is why in politics, candidates have to be controlled and sometimes not allowed to participate even if their opinions would be much more popular. Sometimes more intelligent people have to control how the political process works for the greater good even if it is undemocratic.

Free for all will _always_ eventually lead to someone like Hitler. Being more tribal is an easier but regressive path to chose for humans, and humans always chose the path of least resistance, not the optimal global maxima.

</comment><comment><USER36> Can someone "on the left" please shed some light on how they reconcile the following three beliefs?

      1. Jobs should be handed out on merit.
      2. Protected class X has been educationally disadvantaged.
      3. Representation of class X in the workplace must
         match their representation in the society.

It would seem that one out of three has to be given up, and meritocracy is an obvious choice, as the article suggests.</comment>


Another reason to use SSH keys, not passwords - <AUTHOR> http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1267612.1267637&coll=Portal&dl=GUIDE&CFID=1943417&CFTOKEN=28290455

<comment><AUTHOR> People are on their way to addressing the problem:

[http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/openbsd- misc/2008/9/12/327...](http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/openbsd- misc/2008/9/12/3276694)</comment>


Was the Art of S-Town Worth the Pain? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/04/was-the-art-of-s-town-worth-the-pain/522366/?single_page=true <comment><AUTHOR> There is something voyeuristic about how the creators portray the subjects in the story. For most of the subjects, they signed off the same way that anyone signs off on being portrayed in any piece journalism (I presume). But for John B, a lot was revealed about him posthumously, which I think we have good reason to believe he wanted to keep private; he explicitly glossed over (lied about?) aspects of his life, like "church", implying that he did not want to publicize this side of him.

At a higher level, I wonder if the fact that this is more narrative, more art, changes what the signoff requirements should be.</comment>


3 Man Chess - <AUTHOR> http://www.3manchess.com/

<comment><USER2> For those speaking German, there's also quite an elaborate version using hexagonal pieces at <http://www.dreierschach.de/>

</comment><comment><USER3> this is a round version.

There is a Bulgarian startup that provides another version that you can play online with a community of other players: <http://www.threechess.com/en></comment>


Why Building A Startup In Russia Is Less Risky Than In The Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.arcticstartup.com/2011/04/27/why-building-a-startup-in-russia-is-less-risky-than-in-the-valley

<comment><USER2> The positive points mentioned in the article might be valid, namely:

1\. Less local competition in adopting Western startups to Russia 2\. Easily recruited qualified developers

One point not mentioned in the article, this kind of startup specifically favors someone of Russian origin who has lived and breathed Western startup culture for a few years.

Someone local might have completely different experience, and so would a Westerner without any knowledge of Russia.

Finally, article completely ignores the big white elephant in the room: Russia's rather tenuous grasp on rule of law.

Since the original interview was in forbes.ru it is only fitting to mention <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Klebnikov>

Thus, I would argue that it is not less risky to create a successful startup in Russia.

<comment><USER3> Even assuming that you won't get murdered, there's still plain old corruption: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=689205>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> (cough) [http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/20/russia_s_cr...](http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/20/russia_s_crime_of_the_century)

<comment><USER5> Not to mention the widespread, ongoing corruption of the local authorities, government employees, and infrastructure managers. Imagine having to constantly pay bribes to keep your Internet connection available, the lights on, and your building open. These are all significant issues in Russia, per my Russian colleague who has now emigrated to the US recently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Most importantly, there is less competition and markets are more open for conquest. 'Russia has many markets that are not dominated by anyone while in other countries similar markets have companies that are already worth billions',_

If that's the "most important reason," I think I'd rather go to Brazil, Africa, the Middle East, or virtually anywhere else that isn't going to lock me away for trivial things. (Not that the aforementioned countries don't have problems)

<comment><USER7> I don't think either the rule of law or the corruption situation are significantly better in Africa or the Middle East than in Russia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a Russian I am very happy to see what Serge is doing. However, knowing Russia from inside I presume that "building a startup in Russia" in fact means "having an R&D office" not "registering as a Russian firm and planning to grow a to a big corporation". It is not impossible but you have to have some kind of gut and connections to navigate corrupted government on all levels expecting you to bribe your way through, racketeering (attempts) by organized crime, and shady tax practices. For example, in Russia it is quite common to pay part of the salary bypassing the books (so called "gray salary") and as such you are at competitive disadvantage if you want to pay market salary _and_ pay proper payroll taxes.

</comment><comment><USER9> The market in terms of consumer consumption is also _very much_ different from US one. There aren't many profitable web 2.0 or mobile start-ups here targeted for local market, even copying US ones don't usually work.

The only profitable model I've seen these days are Groupon-clones and i believe they really work just in Moscow & Saint-Petersburg.

My company is also working on the similar services in Russia, but we make products for international brands like Sabre & TUI, and while I like the fact that such start-ups do appear here, I'm not sure it's "less risky".</comment>


SecurelyShare easy file-sharing solution that encrypts and tracks any file - <AUTHOR> http://securelyshare.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I saw WireOver (YC W12) in this space too but charging for sending the files securely. Any other that doesn't depend on the file size?</comment>


A Brief Guide to the Common Lisp Object System - <AUTHOR> http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~jeff/clos-guide.html

<comment><USER2> Starting from classes and describing generic functions as a way to send messages is pretty backwards for CLOS.

CLOS is best used primarily by defining a protocol with generic functions, then using methods and (optionally) classes to implement the protocol.

[http://xach.com/lisp/jrm-clos-guide.html](http://xach.com/lisp/jrm-clos- guide.html) has a copy of Joe Marshall's "Warp Speed" CLOS guide.

</comment><comment><USER3> For more on CLOS, "Object-Oriented Programming in Common Lisp" is a fun little book. It has some reasonably practical examples and touches on just enough of the system's low-level details. It doesn't have much to say on the Metaobject Protocol, though, and I think for that "The Art of the Metaobject Protocol" is pretty much _the_ standard text.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed on both recommendations. It's a pity that further standardisation stalled; the MOP would make a good addition.

<comment><USER4> And that the ideas of 'self-extensibilty' & intersession haven't been further developed. IIUC one can change a class metaclass in Pharo/Smalltalk but not in CLOS. Rhodes idea of extensible specializers seems very useful

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A strongly typed version of CLOS generic functions would look a lot like Haskell typeclasses, right?

<comment><USER4> IIUC, the primary method of the standard-method-combination look's a lot like Haskell Typeclasses.

The standard-method-combination has a middleware-like dispatch as shown in here [0]. CL comes with other method-combinations like +, append and you can also define new method combinations.

[0]: [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Method- combination.p...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Method- combination.png)

<comment><USER5> Ah, I forgot about before/after/around. That makes sense, thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Twitter's no-lawsuit pledge: "We will not join the patent wars" - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/04/twitters-no-lawsuit-pledge-we-will-not-join-the-patent-wars.ars

<comment><USER2> As with most things, easy to say, hard to do.

Someone comes along and sues you for patent infringement, you have two choices; pay them off or pay lawyers.

Either way is expensive, and expensive can kill you. Now it would be doubtful they would be willing to simply disband as an entity in the presence of a lawsuit, so minimizing the expense means having a defense, and that generally means building an arsenal of patents.

Then when you are running out of cash, and maybe looking at death by a thousand cuts, those patents stop looking like defense and start looking like a way to save the company. Voila, you've just become an active combatant in the patent wars of the 21st century.</comment>


How to improve your programming skills - <AUTHOR> http://www.antoarts.com/10-ways-to-improve-your-programming-skills/

<comment><USER2> One interesting trick I've learned regarding "Don't rush to StackOverflow. Think!" is that it sometimes helps me to go to StackOverflow and __write out __the question using clear, precise language and code examples. Nine times out of ten, the simple act of writing out the question helps me to solve the problem on my own. If it doesn't, __then __I can click 'submit'.

<comment><USER3> Same here. I consider my "stack overflow question composition" skills to be my most valued programming skill. "Send me teh codez" questions don't get answers anyways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> comments from last year (it's a repost): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2713736>

<comment><USER5> thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> tl;dr: Read more, learn more, and do more programming.</comment>


Uber Data and Leaked Docs Provide a Look at How Much Uber Drivers Make - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/internal-uber-driver-pay-numbers?utm_term=.lepAPYXbLB#.oyXg84QPbD <comment> tuna-piano I don't see how you can criticize Uber for low wages. Uber is a marketplace of buyers and sellers of rides. If Uber raised prices, more people would want to drive and less people would want to ride - leaving drivers sitting around doing nothing. And of course, as a market, Uber does pay drivers more (2x,3x...even 9x their normal wage!) at certain times. To consistently increase an Uber drivers income, you have to either reduce the supply of drivers or increase the demand of riders.

This would be like criticizing ebay for the low price of used products.

<comment><USER2> In general I am all for Uber and think that they are providing an interesting and creative service.

That said, I don't really believe the argument that they are a marketplace.

First, they don't allow either participant (rider or driver) to set prices. eBay has a bidding system where sellers can set price floors and buyers bid with each other. Uber abstracts the price away and sets it based on...well we don't _really_ know what they set it based on since their Surge Pricing "Algorithm" is closed source. Which plays into my second problem...

Uber wants to classify drivers as contractors, which ties in nicely with their marketplace argument, but ultimately _they_ set the price and standardize it across their service. I think Uber is the only company which can call their drivers "independent contractors" and then turn around and tell these contractors what they can "independently" charge. To forward the eBay parallel you drew, it would be like eBay telling a seller that, sure, you can sell your used Macbook Pro, but you have to set your price floor at $XXXX amount. This whole conundrum is magnified by the fact that neither driver or passenger even knows what the final price will be...so they can't accept or deny rides based on cost considerations...further taking away their purported "market" choice.

Ultimately, I still generally support Uber, but (IMO) they are a service, not a marketplace.

<comment><USER3> Don't taxi companies qualify their drivers as independent contractors, while the rates are set by someone else (sometimes not even the taxi company, but some municipality)?

<comment><USER2> You know I am not well informed on the finer details of the traditional taxi business...but a couple of things:

* Taxi companies don't portray themselves as "marketplaces" for regulatory purposes.

* Taxi rates are publicly displayed and known prior to rider entering service agreement with cabbie.

* If you are correct, then rates aren't sent by cab companies but a regulatory, unlike Uber who sets the pricing dynamically.

Although I want to reaffirm that I am generally a supporter of Uber and similar ride services, I just don't see them as marketplaces.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It may not be profitable to a full-time Uber driver, but I think Uber can be a good part-time job. You can driver whenever you want, so you can work when no other work is available.

Further, I've heard you can deduct car-related from your Uber earnings. If you have a car already and can do this successfully, your Uber income is effectively tax-free until the IRS cracks down.

</comment><comment><USER5> I love the bit about Uber not knowing how to calculate driver costs. One of the most data driven companies in the world can't figure out how to create a lookup table of gas prices, mileage, and car deprecation?

</comment><comment><USER6> I believe they are also 1099 contract workers as opposed to having W2 employee classification. 1099 means you owe self employment taxes, which can take a significant cut out of your gross earnings (ball park 10-15%). You also may have to make quarterly estimated tax payments or you can get a penalty fee when you file in April.

Looks like [https://ttlc.intuit.com/questions/2561815-uber-driver- questi...](https://ttlc.intuit.com/questions/2561815-uber-driver-questions) shows some of the tax issues related to being an Uber driver.

<comment><USER7> > 1099 means you owe self employment taxes, which can take a significant cut > out of your gross earnings (ball park 10-15%).

It's an additional 7.65% over what a W-2 employee pays directly. You pay both employer and employee halves of payroll taxes. But payroll taxes are generally believed to be fully incident on wages anyhow, regardless of how you file them ([http://www.nber.org/papers/w5053](http://www.nber.org/papers/w5053) [http://www.nber.org/papers/w9537](http://www.nber.org/papers/w9537)), and you get additional deductions that W-2 employees don't, which may end up working in your favor. The bigger variable is the value and cost of employer-paid nonwage compensation, primarily health insurance and retirement plan contributions.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How useful is Pair Programming? - <AUTHOR> How useful and practical really is Pair Programming? Does it really work and scale up well?<p>What are the advantages and disadvantages? Statistical data/study would help. <comment><USER2> I've led agile teams for the past three years where there has always been some pairing and some solo work. I'm sorry I can't offer statistical data, only my anecdotal observations:

* Pairing is particularly useful when breaking new ground.

* Pairing is good for knowledge sharing.

* Pairing is good for quality.

* One pair is slower than two solo developers.

* Based on the last 3 years I don't buy the idea that long-term pace is higher because we'll have less technical debt due to pairing.

* Improved quality may not be worth the lower overall pace

* You hired professional developers - let them work the way they think is best or find new developers i.e. respect their preferences for pairing or going solo.

<comment><AUTHOR> > we'll have less technical debt due to pairing.

Could you explain this point?

I think most of the points you make a pretty good points. I have not worked in a pair programming environment myself but find it quite attractive. Mainly because sometimes I tend to rapidly analyse multiple ideas for pros and cons and to try and break them and having someone as a sounding off board is something that I would like.

<comment><USER2> Sure - this point starts with the idea that pairing is slower in the short term but creates higher quality software. We might also believe that pairs will create systems which are easier to maintain i.e. pairing leads to better systems design. So, we might believe that it will be cheaper to change those systems in future and we won't be spending so much time fixing 'technical debt' (solutions which turned out to be poor technical choices). Some advocates of pairing will claim that this means pairing will actually be more productive than solo work in the long term (since those solo folks will be spending more time wrestling with poorer quality code and less well-designed systems). In my (limited and subjective) experience I haven't found this to be the case.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah.. Oh.. Well, logically, I came to that conclusion as well (as indicated by my comment) You comment indicating otherwise needs more investigation. I wish there was some statistical data to help determine this more conclusively :)

<comment><USER2> Yep, unfortunately <http://martinfowler.com/bliki/CannotMeasureProductivity.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Pair programming is useful when the project is so heinous and boring that nobody would work on it unless there's another person sitting next to them keeping them on task.

<comment><USER4> I think you just described my entire CS undergrad experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Microsoft did an internal study you might find interesting:

[http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/abegel/papers/...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/abegel/papers/esem-begel-2008.pdf)

I also know that they sponsored research by the Stanford CS department where they gave pairs and individuals the same programming task (completable in an afternoon), but I have no idea what the results of that were or if they were ever published.

My personal experience is pretty analogous to other people's: it causes you to work more slowly and carefully, it's good for knowledge transfer, and some people are better suited for it (personality-wise) than others. I find it most effective when avoiding errors or technical debt is imperative or when you want to transfer knowledge, and not as useful otherwise.

I've also noticed that my perceived productivity is lower when pairing than it actually is; I'm so used to cranking by myself that slowing down so someone else can talk with me about what to do, or being the "navigator" and not coding at all, makes me feel like I'm not getting anything done. In reality, though, I'm actually getting a fairly decent amount done, and more importantly we're probably avoiding mistakes or blind alleys that would have cost me time in the long run. That makes it hard to measure the real productivity difference: if two people had coded by themselves for 8 hours, more "work" would have been done than if those two people paired for 8 hours, but how much of that would have been wrong, or unnecessary, or overly-complicated, or introduced more technical debt?

It's the sort of skill that takes work, and that gets easier as you do it, so I'd encourage you to try it out. As with any new way of working, it'll be awkward at first and then get easier, and I think it's worth at least learning so that in the future you'll be able to judge for yourself when you feel like pairing will be most useful and when you're better off flying solo.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that is the most fuzzy part. Determining combined productivity, factoring the "improved" quality and the knowledge sharing and gain is a lot more difficult than simply adding up the individual productivity of each programmer (whatever may the metric for measuring the productivity be), but in this case, not tending to factor in improved code quality, constant code review and higher probability of catching subtle bugs

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pair-programming as a dogmatic part of the development process is, IMNSHO, very overrated.

Coding standards, simple interfaces, commit policies, etc are far more important.

Pair programming is useful for,

* Building small but critical pieces of code which everyone interfaces with on some level inside a group (a core plugin API would be a good example)

* Knowledge transfer. I use PP extensively to work-in new people and get them comfortable with a codebase, svn commit policy, documentation, etc. (I let them choose the tools, read on for more on that).

* Solving short coding problems in a common piece of code.

Code review also plays a much more important role than PP. The ability to read, understand and change each others code should just be built into the development process instead of trying to force an artificial level of quality/shared-knowledge via PP.

As an example, in my spare time I'm implementing a simple and clean Ruby version of some core functionality that we have in C# and JS (yes, I know, odd combination). A colleague is tracking my commits and implementing the same system in Python (also in his spare time). At any point in the future, someone wanting to implement this in Perl (for example) can just follow the commit changes on this reference implementation.

PP is also tricky when you choose to do something other than C# or Java, because in those cases you have a common IDE that's used in the company.

If you're doing anything unix-y some people will use emacs (setup _their_ way) and others screen + vim (setup _their_ way). Some poor misguided fools will use Notepad++ on Windows, and while that's fair enough if it works for them, that doesn't help matters any for PP.

I'm not dismissing PP, but the XP model just isn't suited for every environment.

</comment><comment><USER7> From what I've seen, this is something with a lot of hype. I've seen a lot of smoke, but little fire.

Anecdotally, I've heard and seen that it helps, and that it hurts. I've seen people praise it as the answer to all productivity problems (along with TDD and ATDD, of course) and I've seen people curse it.

My opinion? It's good for leveling out the programmers on a team. If I had 6-8 team members I might have one pair going at all times -- usually the pairing up a weak/new developer with somebody who can help him. But I wouldn't expect productivity improvements -- I'd simply use it as a way of level-setting the team. It seems like a good mechanism for bringing people up to speed quickly.

Having said that, you have to let the team be the judge. If they like it, do more of it. If not, don't. Whatever you do, don't let hype and religion get in the way of the team performing. Life is too short to make it miserable by doing something everybody thinks is stupid.

Some of the TDD guys are doing ping-pong pair programming. That's where person A writes a test for new code, then person B writes code for the test and then writes a new test for new functionality. It bounces back to person A, who writes the new functionality and then a new test for new stuff, etc.

That at least seems more interesting for folks.

Personally, I don't like it. But I try to be open-minded about it (especially since I teach this stuff!)

Be aware that in some anal-retentive shops, pair programming is a security violation. (You're not supposed to be sharing your terminal session with anyone)

</comment><comment><USER8> Almost all of the methodology promoted as "Pair Programming" is at best neutral, but there is a kernel of awesomeness in the idea:

Get two developers working in close proximity, criticizing with each other constantly as they work. The more yelling the better.

</comment><comment><USER9> The bloke in my next cubicle practices it and I hate it!

All day long they are always discussing where to put an if condition, assert or what to name their variables. And fuck I cannot concentrate.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've read that pair programming is good for mediocre or novice programmers.

<comment><USER11> Citation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's both sides of pair programming... recently I attended a presentation where the presenter basically said that pair programming should be mandatory... on the other hand, I've done pair (and even triplet) programming... Here's my thoughts:

* Advantages \- Works great in initiating a new team member in to a large project \- Gives each developer a chance to do code-review on the fly \- If there's good rapport, pair programming can get a lot more done

* Issues \- Requires good co-ordination between team members \- Two similar thinking people may not be able to take full advantage of this technique

</comment><comment><USER4> The fact is that very few studies have actually been done so most of what you get are anecdotal accounts. I think pair programming has it's uses, for example, when a developer is stuck on a problem and can't move forward it's often helpful to have another set of eyeballs, but I have yet to see it effectively used full time (except for consultants who get to bill out at a double rate!).

A good book to check out with some counter arguments to pair programming and XP in general is "Extreme Programming Refactored: The Case Against XP".

</comment><comment><USER13> In my experience, pair programming is to programming what eating less and exercising is to obesity: most people simply can't bring themselves to do it, even after trying it and experiencing success. My advice is to just forget about it, like doctors these days who prescribe drugs for cholesterol and high blood pressure without even bothering to mention that those conditions can usually be controlled via lifestyle changes. Unless you're really lucky, you won't find anybody else willing to practice it with you.

If you actually get a chance to introduce pair programming to your organization, go for it. In my unfortunately limited experience, pair programming paid for itself by virtually eliminating some classes of mistakes. Typos and other oversights are caught faster and more efficiently, of course, but more importantly, things that lone programmers tend to put off figuring out, the mental and sometimes subconscious TODOs, get hashed out immediately. That saves time rewriting bad designs.

Unfortunately, as with lifestyle change, people start enthusiastically but quickly sour on it until the mere mention of it evokes anger and resentment.

</comment><comment><USER14> _very_ useful, but not exclusively. pairing is great for gaining momentum, learning a new technique or domain, focusing on solving a particularly hard problem and mentally syncing with your co-prorammer. it is draining and ineffective if done for more than a week or two.

</comment><comment><USER15> If you have access to trade journal type archives (IEEE, ACM, etc) you can find a lot of articles/studies on pair programming. Most of those that I've seen tend to be positive in their attitude toward pairing, though it's sometimes hard to tell if bias is at work there; also, many are in an academic setting environment rather than a corporate or startup/consulting environment, which may lead to some different results.

If you're a student, or know one, it's very probable that your school's library might have online access to some of these journals. If you want statistics, that might be a good place to start.

</comment><comment><USER16> This was discussed on HN recently. Lots of good comments here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=490173>

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah.. Thanks for the link. I missed that during my vacation..

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Three words: Pair as needed.

<comment><USER18> Couldn't agree more. Any set of talented developers in an open environment will naturally pair when one or the other has a critical piece of code to write or some code they want input on. The key is getting the right sort of developers who know when they are stuck, and a no-blame environment where you can be called on bad code decisions.

Trying to mandate this sort of sharing through policies strikes me as ridiculous and the sort of thing that drives good developers out. Training a junior is one thing, having them assigned to 'help' is something entirely different.

I've always thought of pair programming as something that consultancy firms dreamed up to charge clients twice as much for the same amount of work. Perhaps I'm just cynical and tainted as it was a highly-paid consultancy firm that first tried to sell me on the idea.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there a better employment route to high earnings than FAANG? - <AUTHOR> I'm a 20something software engineer on a year sabbatical from a FAANG company and thinking about my employment options. My earnings are relatively high I think (at senior now, ~350k total comp with bonuses and auto-sell RSUs). However, the idea that I've already reached the max expected value for the effort I'm willing to expend as an employee in the industry is a little dreary to me (note: I am very lucky and also feel bad about saying that).
Does anyone know of a route to equivalent earnings outside of FAANG? Assuming that I am willing to live anywhere and work on any type of software, but do not want to go into management or start a company.
edit: thank you for the responses <comment><USER2> Not on a salaried basis.

One path is to migrate your thinking from the terms of labor and income to terms of capital and asset development and accumulation. In software this usually means starting a business (eg SAAS) which becomes an asset by establishing a reliable income stream from a customer base. That income stream asset can be sold, yielding a net capital accumulation of more than 300k per year for the time that was put into it.

This is of course extremely difficult to do, with a very high (99.9+%) failure rate, and success is almost always more dependent on non-technical skill factors.

I would advise instead seeking the path of gratitude, finding the capacity to more deeply appreciate your incredible good fortune, and address your psychic discomfort in the value of your labor by performing work that tangibly helps others less fortunate than you.

Good luck to you.

</comment><comment><USER3> It feels dreary because you feel you have nothing left to strive for because you're only measuring your progress by your salary. Find another way to feel accomplished. 350k total comp is enormous and I don't know how you could expect to be even that valuable let alone more valuable to an enterprise (unless you're exceptional, in which case you would not be asking this question).

BTW I'm not judging you. I'm just saying I don't know why you would expect that that is not indeed your top earning potential given your skillset.

<comment><USER4> > I don't know how you could expect to be even that valuable

I've had roles where I changed ~5 lines of code that resulted in at least my yearly salary worth of reduced operating costs. Programming can be a high- leverage activity, FAANG salaries aren't necessarily irrational.

<comment><USER5> Is it possible that those ~5 lines of code where introduced by your predecessor who had a similar salary?

<comment><USER4> No, they were introduced by the founder, and were getting the job done, just not anywhere near as efficiently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You can go significantly higher than this, for example:

\- From your comp I assume you are a L5 at FAANG. Getting to L6 is challenging but not impossible and would put you in the solid ~500k range. From there, you could push into L7+, which would get you close to ~800k+, but that is more rare and reserved for truly brilliant and lucky folks. L6 is definitely achievable though.

\- Join a unicorn on a good growth trajectory, enter with a standard ~300k offer, and hope in a couple years you'd get to ~1M thanks to equity appreciation. I know several friends who entered into the right unicorn at the right time and made ~1M+ per year just by doing senior SWE work. It's riskier than the above option, but much less riskier and with better odds than joining an early stage startup, which I wouldn't recommend at all. The key is, when you are interviewing don't ask about what technology or text editor they use, ask to see their growth rate data and make sure you join an already-exploding rocket ship, backed by real numbers. I think there are some good arbitrage opportunities for candidates looking to join a unicorn.

Finally, don't squander your cash flow, live frugally, save aggressively and invest.

I am at a slightly higher but pretty similar compensation, and the game has become growing my investment portfolio. Just this year, my portfolio itself has returned well above 200k, which is the amount that I usually save from my paycheck every year, so I literally had an employee (more senior than me!) working for me this year and making me money :-)

Once (if!) I get to ~4M, I'll quit and chill for a couple years around the world. I'm halfway there.

<comment><USER7> That's a great return on your portfolio. Can you tell us more about how do you invest? Have you hired some fund managers or invest by yourself? What are your suggestions for investing aggressively as the '20s something FANG employee starting at L3?

<comment><USER6> All by myself, my portfolio is a standard combination of VTI, VXUS, BND. It won't always be as good as this year (yearly return ~15%), but achieving an IRR of ~8% throughout my life would be amazing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You are pretty much at the peak of income for your current amount of effort and risk for any role in the global economy. There are higher paying positions but you'll have to risk a lot and work a lot harder.

How much of a life do you have outside of work? What would you spend your time doing if you were independently wealthy? Do you have a family? You are honestly at an income level where you can do nearly anything you want, maybe take some time and figure out what that is.

</comment><comment><USER9> Money is great at measuring things measured in money. If you want more of it, go searching where people measure everything in money: finance.

But given that you're taking a sabbatical and there's slight undertones of an existential/"bullshit jobs" crisis here, perhaps investigate wealth that isn't measured in money. Have you spent time with a really good friend lately? Your family? Have you taken some time to pursue your (non-FAANG-tech) intellectual interests? Or maybe just take some time to disconnect and grow a garden? How's your spiritual energy, be it recharged by God, gods, crystals, or just staring into fractals?

Sounds like you're doing pretty well for yourself. Are you really searching for better employment, or better something else?

</comment><comment><USER10> Outside of a FAANG I doubt it. Maybe something stock trading related. Considering the income for most software engineers is very far from 350K even if that is the limit for how much you can make you are still doing a lot better than most ever will.

Just for reference here in Canada the average income for sofware developers is around 70k CAD which is maybe 55k USD.

What is it in particular that you find 'dreary' to think you have maxed out your earning potential doing the same type of job you are doing now? Do you enjoy doing what you are doing?

</comment><comment><USER11> I would tough it out for a few years. Put $2mm in S&P, then plan on a withdrawal rate of 3.5% a year. That would give you a very safe practically permanent salary of $70k which goes a long way in the Midwest or over seas.

<comment><USER12> Define "few years". If we put some numbers and suppose after taxes and not living in their car or on the street, OP is able to save $150k a year. That would take just over 13 years to accumulate the $2M. A bit less if 7% annual total market returns continue. $70k is a modest investment income, definitely won't provide the lifestyle OP was enjoying during the accumulation phase.

The games rigged; even a top earner like OP can't break into the lowest echelons of wealth and lifestyle by working for a living.

<comment><USER13> Yes - and $2 million is still a long way from the $10 million needed if you want to be a part of the 1%. Even if you're a top performer in the rat-race, you're still a rat.

The only way to be free is to setup something that will cause an exponential growth in wealth. Usually that means starting a business, accumulating assets and then getting acquired.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You could start buying income producing assets.

You could buy real estate and rent it out.

You could also buy an existing profitable business from a motivated seller (owner is wants to retire or tired of the business). Then you use your tech skills to add value to the business. This is potentially less risky than starting one from scratch but you got to pick a good deal.

Also how are your finances? Credit Score? Any bad dept? do you have an emergency fund? Are you living paycheck to paycheck? If you are planning to do this you should definitely get your finances in order. You cant focus on making more money on a sinking ship.

You are earning a lot than most people. It's completely in your reach to become a multi millionaire if you make the right financial decisions. Go for it and strive for financial independence.

Also how are your expenses? If you are living in silicon valley I imagine that the bills there getting a large chuck of your income plus the taxes in California.

</comment><comment><USER15> Probably not, but honestly I'd try helping with an early startup that is trying to solve problems that truly matter e.g. immunotherapies. You may be rewarded well in case the company grows and you are an early employee. And it will bring a lot of satisfaction. Maybe you can do this during a FAANG sabatical, to hedge your options.

<comment><USER16> Where do you find start ups like that?

<comment><USER15> In biotech hubs. I guess mainly SF, Boston, Oxbridge and Switzerland. But also other places. Biotech is a bit less concentrated.

I'm planning to start up my own one almost immediately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> You have a problem that you will never be able to resolve, even if you are making $1m per year. Learn to be satisfied with what you have.

</comment><comment><USER18> Sheesh, I'm making 18k$ a year after taxes, after 6 years at the current company. Basically, you'ved earned in one year what I would earn in half of my career.

<comment><USER19> 18k$ a year which means you are not working in the US or some other developed country so I am not sure what is the point of that comparison.

<comment><USER20> You know the median American makes $30k per year? Bottom 25% of Americans make under $18k per year.

These numbers are pretty similar in NYC as compared to the country as a whole, too.

<comment><USER19> Shouldn't you be looking at the median for software devs?

<comment><USER21> The $18k salary was never specified to be an engineer salary. There are a wide range of users on this site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Finance pays more, is also more competitive.

<comment><AUTHOR> Software engineering in finance, you mean? How specialized is this?

<comment><USER23> It's a big field - I'd say buyside algo funds pay best in the space; I expect you'd be able to increase your income if you find the right fund and the right position.

As everywhere else, the closer you are to the profit centres, the more you get paid: e.g. exchange connectivity specialist at an HFT shop, devops maintaining the plumbing and infra for ML systems, data wrangling specialist etc. Also, some funds are notorious for having made weird decisions regarding their main programming language (e.g. ocaml or q/kdb), so being a language specialist can also prove lucrative.

You can also look to join a trading team inside a fund - the ceiing is much higher on what you can be paid, but it's a lot riskier too. Generally, working on the infra side of a highly sophisticated algo fund is less risky.

<comment><USER24> > the closer you are to the profit centres, the more you get paid

Yes, this. I would go further and say that if you're "IT" in a finance firm you're a second class citizen. You want to do engineering in a trading role: designing prop trading strategies, managing portfolios and pnl.

There are very few financial firms that are tech companies at the core. The landscape today is certainly better than it was ten or twenty years ago. Today, the firms who have a standing chance to compete in the arena have automated everything.

I'm making sweeping generalizations, so obviously YMMV.

<comment><USER22> This is outdated. Top non quant funds still pay their programmers 400 - 700k. Places like bridgewater, pimco, etc.

<comment><USER23> Yes, but the harsh truth is, you are still a 'second class citizen', even if a well paid one.

It's really a matter of culture; virtually all places will have a clear delineation between Investment and Technology, with various perks given to Investment people: better visibility into what is going on, access to higher management, general power to influence which projects need work etc. Also, Investment people tend to hang out together.

EDIT: Just realised you were maybe not commenting on the 'second class citizen' bit. I'll leave my comment here anyway.

<comment><USER22> So what, if youre paying me 600k a year to write code, I'll accept some abuse. Its why they pay so much

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Assuming that financial growth is your main motivation, here are few more examples:

\- Change industries - move into finance, look for small proprietary trading shops. Depending on your skill level, this may (or may not) yield better total compensation levels

\- Lower your taxes (may not be possible if you are from the US, but I did not make any assumptions). You can do so by changing countries, changing legal entities

\- Lower your cost of living through remote work and geoarbitrage. 350k in NYC may buy you the same life as 200k in West Chicago. Bonus points if you can remote from Asia or South America. Morphing into this arrangement from an on- premises job is easier than looking for remote work right away

\- Diversify active income streams - 2 part time jobs might give a better yield than 1 full time. Make sure there is no conflict of interests

All of these will eventually plateau, together with your development skills. At that point, the only way to grow is to diversify into skills that scale better (go into management, go into consulting, start companies, teach courses).

Hope this helps.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think this thread gives you some great answers. I'd only add to think about exactly what you want from that extra money since there are ways to optimise your life for enjoyment without it. I'm older than you and I don't earn anything near what you do and probably never will but I work for myself, pick my projects, tech stack and hours and generally work around 20 - 30 hours per week. I fill the rest of my time with personal projects, hobbies, friends and family and live in a pretty affordable place.

</comment><comment><USER27> If you are struggling with your bills, you could consider talking to your financial institution or ask some fellow HNers to help.

Why exactly do you need more money?

<comment><USER28> Op doesn't seem to have an issue with paying the bills, it looks like he wants more to have something to look for? That's a dangerously frustrating way of thinking imo as you'll never be happy or satisfied

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> There is no commonly known route. There are a lot of niche spots you could fill, but few places where an SDE will make more as an employee.

</comment><comment><USER30> Build your own product. Start your own company. Take it public or sell it. That's really the only way to make significantly more dough than you already are. It carries risk - but at your age, with the money you've been earning, you should be able to weather a storm or two. Good luck!

<comment><USER30> PS: Just saw you do not want to "start your own company". Building product and selling it doesn't necessarily require starting a "company' per se (in the traditional sense). If you're a creative software developer, and you're young, taking some risk to create a product will motivate you - and can end up making a lot of $dough$-re-mi. ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> If you are very good (top 1% of employees), the max comp even for individual contributors is far higher than 350k/yr.

It's not uncommon for senior staff engineers to be making 1M/yr all-in. But this is for people leading important efforts, who it would be considered damaging to lose.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm probably pointing out the obvious, but if you're not able to find higher earnings, there's always trying to achieve goals and find fulfillment in other parts of your life, e.g. home improvement, investing, family, etc.

</comment><comment><USER33> Yes. My income is comparable and I work at a private company. Full cash comp. Salaries are generally high but I took a few risks and my earnings have compounded based on that. I'm currently a IC but on track for leadership.

A lot of it is politics.

</comment><comment><USER34> Learn APL well. Apply to jobs in finance or heavy industry. That's second-hand advice, but apparently those guys can pretty much set their price.

<comment> non-entity Wait are finance companies actually using real APL? Like not J or some derivative, but actual, mathematical symbols APL?

<comment><USER34> Dyalog APL

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Request 'vacation raise' instead of pay

</comment><comment><USER36> I call BS. FAANG fantasy porn.

<comment><USER37> I'm not at a FAANG and am doing $340k in south bay, all cash, before things like medical / 401k. I'd say the salary is realistic. Throwaway account, don't want anyone to know how much I make.

These comp values are not an illusion, but you have to be good at what you do I guess, and show the company you're worth that much.

I do not have a college degree, btw.

<comment><USER38> What do you do and why are you sufficiently good at it?

<comment><USER39> You don't need to be good, you just need to be at one of the high paying companies. FAANG and some startups will pay these salaries across the board. Some lesser paying companies will compete on occasion but generally there's a big gap between top paying and not.

<comment><USER37> I have not found a startup that would be willing to pay that much plus equity, or even paying that without it.

I would be okay taking a ~40% cut with good equity if I felt the startup / team was extremely solid. I have a friend who did that who made the same as I did. My friend does not regret the decision as the company is doing very well.

(I did not consider joining because of location - north bay vs south.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Coming To A Gas Station Near You - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/07/google-coming-to-a-gas-station-near-you/ <comment><USER2> Wow. Techcrunch beaten to the punch by a newspaper...

<comment><USER3> FWIW, Atlanta Journal Constitution wrote the story and ran with it right after midnight, then it was picked up off the wire by the Houston Chronicle around 1 or 2. TechCrunch picked it up from AP and basically dropped the whole thing verbatim into their post. I'm sure the Journal Constitution got most of it from a press release from the company mentioned. Wonder how much value they added before putting it on the AP wire.</comment></comment>


A dull, resilient stream processor in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Jeffail/benthos <comment><USER2> Hey everyone, author here. We use Benthos as a general stream swiss army knife for all the dull tasks, but you can also use it as a framework for writing your own stream processors in Go.

It doesn't provide any tools for idempotent calculations yet, just at-least- once delivery guarantees. But when you use it as a framework you get the benefit of all the configurable processors in your new service.

<comment><USER3> After reading the section about processors it is not clear whether it can do stateful computations, for example, running sum or moving average. Can I define sliding windows? Can I join two or more streams?

<comment><USER4> For stateful processing you need something like:

* [https://kafka.apache.org/documentation/streams/](https://kafka.apache.org/documentation/streams/) \- Kafka Streams (and its KTable)

* [https://flink.apache.org/](https://flink.apache.org/) \- Flink

* [https://spark.apache.org/streaming/](https://spark.apache.org/streaming/) \- Spark Streaming

* [https://github.com/asavinov/bistro](https://github.com/asavinov/bistro) \- Bistro Streams

The focus of Benthod seems to be performance and resilience (implemented without persistence).

<comment><USER5> Or to toot the horn of the project I work on:

* [https://github.com/wallaroolabs/wallaroo](https://github.com/wallaroolabs/wallaroo) \- Wallaroo

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting! We use NSQ at work to collect logs/messages from various systems and forward them to various endpoints (Kafka, ELK, archives, Prometheus). This looks like a more advanced/flexible system, where as we just use a handful of single purpose daemons writen in go (nsq2kafka, nsq2es, nsqarchive, nsqstream- metrics).

I gave a quick intro to nsq talk at our local go meetup recently. If you haven't used NSQ before I highly recommend giving it a try.

[https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1e9yIm-0aNba_H1gX_u7D...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1e9yIm-0aNba_H1gX_u7D1Qe5VWeU26FCjg7EEzoUztE/edit?usp=sharing)

</comment><comment><USER7> Talk about timing!

I'm in the process of rejigging our live telemetry pipeline (dealing with petabytes) to improve flexibility and resiliency and have been looking for something to replace our similar systems that have grown organically. This fits the bill exactly; it's designed exactly how I imagined our new system should look.

I'm wondering if HN has their personal favorite for these sorts of problems.

<comment><USER8> We've been using logstash as our go-to stream processing glue, its large selection of input, output, and filter plugins lets it handle just about anything, reliably. My one complaint would be the use of the jvm, particularly the slow startup time it causes when doing development.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Supported Sources & Sinks: Amazon (S3, SQS), Elasticsearch (output only), File, HTTP(S), Kafka, MQTT, Nanomsg, NATS, NATS Streaming, NSQ, RabbitMQ (AMQP 0.91), Redis, Stdin/Stdout, Websocket, ZMQ4.

</comment><comment><USER9> I must be missing something. It doesn't look dull.

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks like this could be useful for webhooks delivery, a problem our team is working on at the moment.

We have 100's of tenants, each of which could get their own stream with some delivery guarantees set. If one tenant's endpoint is down or another tenant fills the stream with 1M messages, it should not affect delivery rates of other tenants. Seems to fit the bill.

I see the HTTP output mentions some retries, but I guess these run as part of the delivery step, blocking this goroutine as opposed to rescheduling the message? Sometimes it takes hours for clients to restore their receiving systems and it would be great if messages for past N hours would still be delivered..

<comment><USER2> Hey, the HTTP output has a fixed number of retries, after which you could either have some mechanism in place to fall back on or by default it will simply continue the retries again whilst blocking upstream. You might also be interested in running Benthos in streams mode: [https://github.com/Jeffail/benthos/tree/master/docs/streams](https://github.com/Jeffail/benthos/tree/master/docs/streams)

Streams mode lets you run as many isolated stream pipelines as you want in the same process, which in your case could be a simple queue -> webhook bridge. You can manage these pipelines either statically in config files, or dynamically through a REST API.

<comment><USER10> That seems really promising, especially configuring pipelines with API calls. Many wheels may be left uninvented.

Thank you for making your work available!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This seems pretty similar to Wallaroo but with more focus on connecting to everything. And of course golang vs Pony

<comment><USER2> Hey, Benthos doesn't yet provide any general tooling for exactly-once processing like Wallaroo does, that's possibly a goal for the future.

My main focus has been providing general purpose stateless processors. So you can build a your own stream processor focusing on what makes it unique, and then the moment it's compiled and packaged it can read and write to anything, and convert any kind of payload to anything else just through configuration.

<comment><USER5> Hi Wallaroo developer here,

I'm curious, does Benthos manage state for the user/application like we do in Wallaroo or is it purely stateless computations at this point?

<comment><USER2> Processor implementations are able to carry their own state, or share state across worker threads or deployments using their own mechanisms, but Benthos doesn't provide any tooling for that. None of the processors you get out of the box need computational state. You currently get an ALO stream (provided you use ALO protocols), vertical & horizontal scaling as per your config, and any glue you need between services.

It would be a nice stretch goal to have standard tooling within Benthos to share distributed state, perhaps with some ability to do exactly-once processing, but that's not the focus of the project right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is "dull" a technical term or does it literally just mean boring here?

<comment><USER2> Yeah just boring. Benthos is mostly a collection of standard processors for doing boring stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> In what situations would a tool like this be useful? Asking honestly. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER14> This seems quite a bit like Heka. Very excited.

</comment><comment><USER15> Super exciting, I can imagine using this instead of Kafka for more simple use cases. Wonder if they will add a full logging system so we can dump Kafka completely

<comment><USER16> That doesn't seem to fit with the project goal, it's not Kafka-centric. It's more like an alternative for Kafka Connect in that regard imo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> did you think of using the Go apache beam API ? any comparisons with oss alternatives?</comment>


SpaceX rocket engine explodes during test at Texas facility - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/8/16624022/spacex-merlin-rocket-engine-failure-mcgregor-texas-falcon-9 <comment><USER2> For those who don't obsessively follow SpaceX:

SpaceX is working on three projects right now. #1- Falcon Heavy, strapping three Falcon 9s together to make a super awesome rocket. #2- The BFR. All over the news lately, going to be a humongous rocket that does New York to Sydney in under an hour, or take humans to the Moon or Mars.

And #3, they are working on what's being called "Block 5", the supposedly final upgrade to the Falcon 9 rocket, including upgraded Merlin engines. These would make the rockets just that much more powerful, increasing payload sizes on both Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches.

So, this is probably one of those new Merlin engines. And it exploded. Which is going to delay Block 5. Damn.

<comment><USER3> >#2- The BFR. All over the news lately, going to be a humongous rocket that does New York to Sydney in under an hour, or take humans to the Moon or Mars.

Does BFR happen to stand for "big fucking rocket"?

<comment><USER4> Yes. This is from the same CEO who wanted to name his first 3 models of car "S, E, and X" (the 3 was going to be the model E, but renamed due to ford's trademark).

<comment><USER5> And the one after that will be Y.

I always tell people that BFR stands for "Big Rocket." It's more fun to let them fill in the blank.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good that it happened on the test stand instead of in a rocket! Hopefully they'll have good data on what failed and end up with an improved engine.

<comment><USER7> That's why they test them.

<comment><USER8> Yea, its almost a non-event.

When I saw the headline I worried it was a Raptor, that would have been much more depressing cause it would have set back BFR schedule significantly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> as usual when talking about exploding rocket engines, go read Ignition! if you haven't already: [https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...](https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf)

<comment><USER10> I love that book so much. My favorite part is the section on chlorine trifluoride (ClF3):

"It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively.

It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes."

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Based on the article it sounds like they have backup capacity that can keep them on track...and the reality is that in space flight these things happen. Better for it to happen on a test stand than in a rocket. I just Wonder if they will try and blame a sniper this time[0].

[0] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/implication-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/implication- of-sabotage-adds-intrigue-to-spacex- investigation/2016/09/30/5bb60514-874c-11e6-a3ef-f35afb41797f_story.html)

<comment><USER12> > a SpaceX employee visited its facilities at Cape Canaveral, Fla., and asked > for access to the roof of one of ULA's buildings.

> The SpaceX representative explained to the ULA officials on site that it was > trying to run down all possible leads in what was a cordial, not accusatory, > encounter, according to the industry sources, who spoke on the condition of > anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.

I wouldn't exactly call that trying to blame a sniper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This sort of thing does happen in the industry and better during testing than half way up.

but I worry that there will now be an increase in the amount of FUD being pushed in the news. It already seems like the amount of muck being thrown at ANYTHING elon musk related has increased over the last few months.

<comment><USER9> your feelings appear to be right, there was even a discussion about that here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15600878](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15600878)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > The company said Tuesday in response to questions that it is "now conducting > a thorough and fully transparent investigation of the root cause" of the > explosion. "SpaceX is committed to our current manifest, and we do not > expect this to have any impact on our launch cadence."

</comment><comment><USER15> How is Raptor engine progressing?</comment>


T-Mobile may offer free signal boosters to stop subscribers from fleeing - <AUTHOR> http://www.bgr.com/2011/08/31/t-mobile-may-offer-free-signal-boosters-to-stop-subscribers-from-fleeing/

<comment><USER2> > In order to take the signal booster, which will be free of charge, customers > will need to sign a new 2-year service contract

The subscriber is considering leaving (they're almost able to get out of their current contract), and you're asking them to sign a 2-year service contract?

I predict that the response to this offer will be lower than T-Mobile hopes.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is US T-Mobile, not UK T-Mobile, German T-Mobile, or any other T-Mobile; or at least: the article doesn't say which T-Mobile, but includes an image containing "$0.00".</comment>


The Tunnel Vision Fallacy - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/the-tunnel-vision-fallacy-4847fc16fb9d#.clkdpy3eb?yc-news <comment><USER2> As much as I can empathise with the sentiments expressed here this unfortunately comes across as a self-absorbed and indulgent caffeine-fuelled episode. Perhaps I wouldn't be so critical if I understood the extended context. Time to read more from the author...

<comment><USER3> I came away from it thinking the author places far too much value on self- esteem, and on self generally. How you feel about yourself is really important only to yourself, and often overvalued in that case. The view that you are not all that important in the vast scheme of things is the best antidote to this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey there. I am actually the author. I completely agree with your point. The issue I was having starting the company where my immaturity and naivety hurt me was investing too much into "my problems, my issues, my company." I think a lot of people fall in this trap and come to that realization that you made that placing value into yourself or accomplishments is where you'll inevitably falter. I actually wrote something as an antidote later about the importance of shared purpose in organizations: [https://medium.com/@DanielTawfik1/fencing-in-the- mirror-23d5...](https://medium.com/@DanielTawfik1/fencing-in-the- mirror-23d5b9cd72ea#.aisqg0cqq)

<comment><USER3> That is encouraging. I think many learn that lesson sooner or later, since the end of pursuing self is always bad. For some, though, it happens so late in life (or never) that recovery is near impossible.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cormac/papers/2009/SoLongAndNoThanks.pdf#

<comment><AUTHOR> _Looking at various examples of security advice we find that the advice is complex and growing, but the benefit is largely speculative or moot. For example, much of the advice concerning passwords is outdated and does little to address actual threats, and fully 100% of certificate error warnings appear to be false positives. Further, if users spent even a minute a day reading URLs to avoid phishing, the cost (in terms of user time) would be two orders of magnitude greater than all phishing losses._

<comment><USER2> 1) I do remember a post a while back where a Firefox user submitted a bug report due to actually encountering a MITM attack, so not 100% are false positives. (the post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=353376> )

2) A minute a day may outweigh the phishing losses, but who says you need to spend a minute? My browser has warned me once in the past 4 months about a possible phishing site, so I spent something like 1 minute in 120 days to check it out.</comment></comment>


Why even your ultra-hip startup team needs job titles - <AUTHOR> http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/16/why-even-your-ultra-hip-startup-team-need-job-titles

<comment><USER2> Titles are earned not given.</comment>