I believe this is empirically false. Einstein, Newton, Curie, and most of the greatest scientific minds in human history worked alone. The same is true for literature, whether it's Chaucer in lockdown during an epidemic, or Shelley in a summer retreat, or Solzhenitsyn writing away in a remote cabin in Vermont. Teams are great at work, but I don't think they're great at the deep thought that results in new ideas, especially when surrounded by chit chat and buzzing overhead lighting.
> The best . . . collaboration happens at the office.
This is more plausible, but I'm still not convinced. In-person collaboration tends to be lazy and involves all kinds of weird social dynamics getting in the way of collaboration. Telework requires a bit more thought on the front-end, leading to overall higher quality of collaboration. Performative intelligence-signalling [what happens at most in-person meetings] doesn't contribute to collaboration. Putting real thought into solving a group task, and communicating that clearly in writing to your team, does.
"Doing great work generally requires fairly large chunks of time alone." -Paul Graham
Pick up stuff and run away, not necessarily in that order.
Go shopping. Or have your pet go "shopping" for you.
Have your pet kill things. This removes threats and gets you loot and through maybe half a dozen levels, helping you gear up without leveling up (and yes, eventually you want to level up, but you want to do it very slowly if at all while gearing up, because the faster you level up, the more likely it is the game will generate tough monsters you're probably not ready for, like soldier ants or crowds of orcs with poison arrows).
Try to find your way downstairs while avoiding monsters too dangerous to fight and collect more powerful items. Standard NetHack strategy is that you should try to collect an "Ascension kit" of items and know when to use the tools in it.
What makes it hard for me to trust online news nowadays is click-bait. As advertising dollars going the way of polar ice caps it's gonna get worse, not better.
I never got laid off, but the whole thing left me with a bad taste, so I have decided to go out on my own. Sure, there is risk, however there is also risk being with a large company and the whole 'we are family' culture kool aid is show to be the BS most of us knew it was. Recently we have seen profitable companies drop workers for no reason other than to appease activist investors. Now sure, this is their prerogative, can't argue with that, it's my prerogative to give (or not give) them my time. So just as my own business could fail, so could my position with a corp be liquidated, yet without being able to read the financial tea leafs and see it coming.
At the end of the day though, I am going to regret not trying then I am giving it a go. Right now I am in my thirties and have some flexibility to roll with the punches of capitalism, but that won't be the case when I hit 40/50+ when the one acceptable 'ism that everyone turns a blind eye to starts to playout ; ageism.
> Recently we have seen profitable companies drop workers for no reason other than to appease activist investors. Now sure, this is their prerogative
I blame stock buybacks. Reminder that theyy were illegal untill recently.
And they perform no legitimate function other than being unregulated, tax-evading dividends.
> But in the United States, capital expenditures aren’t accelerating. Instead, new cash is being used to reduce the number of equities available, thus artificially driving up their value. That practice has been exploding. It’s an irresistible temptation, partly because everyone is doing it. Nobody wants to be left out. And the cash is just sitting there, idle, because it’s a rare C suite that has continued to invest in new, creative growth rather than pick the low-hanging fruit of easy money to be made through financial maneuvers. It was a good thing that companies receiving stimulus money to stay in operation during the Covid-19 shutdown have been banned from using it for stock buybacks. But it’s too little too late.
their entire function is to serve as a "tax-evading dividend". I fail to see why there is a difference besides on tax revenue for a buyback vs a dividend. Can you expand on why they are so bad? Would you be equally unhappy if an equal amount was spent as a dividend instead of buyback?
Dividends can only be paid from profits, that have already been taxed.
Stock buysbacks can be leveraged, can be financed with debt and you could use them to raid the company.
They also have different effect on stock price - you pay out dividends, and then market reacts. A human being decides if now your company is more valuable.
When you buyback stock, the effect is purely mechanical - sell orders are closed, and the more expensive sell orders now sell the price - price goes up in milliseconds, without any human decisionmaking.
If you paid 1 billion in dividends, it will not raise price as much as spending 1 billion on shate buybacks.
> Right now I am in my thirties and have some flexibility to roll with the punches of capitalism, but that won't be the case when I hit 40/50+ when the one acceptable 'ism that everyone turns a blind eye to starts to playout ; ageism.
There have been studies which put the average age of successful founders in their mid-40s. We romanticize the kid in college making something happen, but the reality is that people need experience to see problems worth solving.
>There have been studies which put the average age of successful founders in their mid-40s.
There have also been statistics which put the average percentage of succesful founders among attempted founders at 0.0001% (number pull out of my ass, but the gist is: most startups fail).
So, this is not as reassuring as it sounds, as it amounts to something like:
"You might be fired at mid-40s under an IT sector that discriminates against hiring older developers, but don't worry: you can always start your own startup with odds of it succeeding not that different to winning the lottery".
That number seems excessive. There are a lot of numbers out there but the most frequent one seems to be 90% of startups fail. It should be remembered that this is also why people say "fail fast", if your business is going to fail it's better to get it over with quickly so you can iterate on the next idea. That's the second insight, you don't just get 1 shot especially in tech where the startup costs are so low.
I think the message is getting garbled. The person doing a startup is in their 30s and wasn't fired. The next response was someone offering assurance that even 40 isn't too late in response to their concern that it was "now or never".
I don't think we're advising any particular person, we're just talking about the potential for a dev to do a startup at any point in their life. Obviously if someone is going to attempt a startup they should know their own situation which includes knowing you have enough money and the inclination to go into business for yourself. Whether the 10% would be higher or lower if everyone did it we can't really know. A lot of people that have great ideas and can execute them well probably never attempt to go out on their own, same for the opposite.
Oh yeah. Take it from me. I'm 60, and ran into this, five years ago, when I was looking for work.
As far as startups go, I would have been absolutely ideal for a risky startup, as I didn't need the money, and was willing to work cheap, if the project interested me, and take chances (and work hard). I am also skilled in a gazillion different aspects of shipping software. I've shipped software all my life (Since I was 25 or so).
All I have been doing, is shipping software. All my adult life. Deliverable has been my life's labor.
I'm also used to shepherding a project through its entire lifecycle; from napkin sketch to shrinkwrap and beyond. That usually takes years, for most halfway ambitious projects. Requires a lot of patience. Lots of boring stuff, too.
But, you know, gray hair, and all...
So, nowadays, I work for free, with folks that can't afford folks like me. I've been working on a fairly ambitious project (backend and frontend), for the last couple of years. It should work nicely.
If I were you, I would make as much money as I can working for a big tech company (e.g. gigantic monopolistic company with too much money on their hands). When you're 40/50+, you'll see what your options are.
Reminds me of some movie I saw where something like that happened.
It may have been the movie The Machine (2013). But I am not sure. It’s been a while since I saw the movie I am thinking of. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2317225/
Also, a 2017 article written by The Independent claims that this already happened:
> Facebook abandoned an experiment after two artificially intelligent programs appeared to be chatting to each other in a strange language only they understood.
> The two chatbots came to create their own changes to English that made it easier for them to work – but which remained mysterious to the humans that supposedly look after them.
That really depends which addional parts of Qt you use and what additional services you need. The core is LGPL, which is free even for commercial closed source use.
I don't know the details, but you're likely right. We certainly use more than just the core -- the core isn't where the value of Qt really is.
That said, the cost really is extreme. So much so that there is an ongoing effort to remove Qt from our products entirely. There is general agreement among the devs that the cost is not justified by the benefits, and nobody can remember why it was chosen in the first place.
All that said, I like Qt. It's quite capable and you can produce decent, portable UIs with it. But I agree it's too expensive to justify.
Period.
Edit: Fine, disagree with me.