stock grants don't solve the principal agent problem at a sufficiently large company. if I have an absolutely incredible year as an IC, I might increase my employers revenue by a few basis points.
I have plenty of internal metrics to demonstrate my contribution, but nothing I do measurably affects the stock price.
for better or for worse, gaming has gone mainstream. there are now a lot of dollars chasing easy wins. even a computer graphics enthusiast, it is really sad to see that they have optimized for incredible rendering pipelines and utterly forgettable assets, mechanics, and stories.
but if you rewind your render quality expectations by about ten years, there are still great games being made for way under $100mm. I'll plug two of my current favorites:
* factorio ($20). if you don't already know what it is, I can't really summarize it here. the entire team is < 10 people, but it's rare example of engineering excellence combined with a carefully curated user experience. I try to get all the devs and PMs I work with to read their blog.
* zero k (free). a bit more wacky, but one of the best rts of all time. they also have an interesting dev blog, and for a nice cherry on top, it's open source. some feature requests on the forums get the reply "great idea, I look forward to your PR", which I find pretty funny.
I think the creative sweet spot is somewhere around the playstation 2, maybe a midpoint between PS1 and PS2, especially if the gross hardware speed takes optimization work out of the picture.
Modern games are wrestling with a lot of uncanny valley stuff still. They've improved a lot from the polar Express movie, but it's still an issue.
I recall the recent ads for first descendant where a guy is clearly smoking, which I thought was some vaping thing in realtime, but the smoking is even worse. Probably cigarette companies shadow funding things there.
It's been pretty lightspeed how the days of google do no evil has went to the great woke purge after covid and now is no holds barred mamma sociopathy. It was like 5 years.
I get the MBA sociopathy has been bubbling under the surface and lots of scary movements around the borders, but it is scary what is going on with big tech.
You may not recall, but the rabble in Google for about a decade would publicly demonstrate against the company for being in China, or various diversity goals, or other fairly liberal things that typical capitalist companies really don't tolerate.
Then the post-COVID layoffs happened, and poof nobody does that anymore.
I don't necessarily oppose a lot of the agenda that the employee advocates were pushing for, it was the pitchfork mob tactics that went hand in hand with those people. And without those loud people, the companies have very rapidly pursued much more diabolical ends.
the "unvested stock" thing is largely misunderstood. you have a target compensation number, and every year you get new awards to keep hitting that. if the stock goes up fast, your effective comp is higher than planned in the short term, but you get very few RSUs in the subsequent rounds. unless the stock goes up like a rocketship for many years in a row, your comp converges to slightly above target in the long term. although it has a strong psychological effect on some people, it's usually not rational to wait around for unvested shares.
eh, big company, many different opinions. working on stuff that's already built can be pretty chill. you spend a lot of time being hard blocked on approvals from external teams. no amount of extra hours can change that, and management generally understands. the downside is that promos are harder to find and there's a greater risk of some VP figuring out that your org doesn't really do anything useful. then it's time for the next round of musical chairs.
if you're more ambitious and/or genuinely enjoy building things, new product teams are the place to be. you don't have to deal with approval hell so much, but the dates are more aggressive and managers will do anything to hit them. this is where you learn what "building the plane while flying it" means.
I find people exaggerate how bad it is, but you definitely need to be good at reading the room to stick around.
It’s no exaggeration when you witness two new engineers cry on two different calls because they are not getting any support from the more senior engineers and are at risk of being pipped.
what is the mechanism for that "funneling" though? intentional programs to make diverse candidates feel more welcome? more money? if big tech is actively working to attract diverse candidates and other companies aren't keeping up, it doesn't sound like it's through no fault of their own that they can't retain those people.
Retention improvements are generally a net positive for industry wide diversity. If someone leaves your company for harrasment reasons, they are more likely to leave the industry all together.
Sponsorship is generally net positive as well.
The funnelling I am talking about is entirely in the "recruitment" bucket. If you hire a woman software developer, they were already looking for a job. They already made a significant personal investment in getting the job. The industry is still enough if an employees market that they were probably going to get a job. You did nothing to bring that women into the industry. All you did is increase the chances that they end up working for you in particular. On the margins, this is still probably a net positive for industry wide diversity, but that is a much smaller effect then the chair shuffling effect.
Of these three buckets, the most effective way of increasing your diversity numbers is in recruitment (unless you have horrid retention). In the current environment, there is no way for a large company to get anywhere near 50/50 without a significant investment in the recruitment bucket.
Smaller companies can't compete with FAANG salaries. So when FAANG prioritizes hiring women, and there are still many fewer women than men in tech overall, smaller and poorer companies can't compete with the offers women are getting from FAANG.
>hire promising juniors and do on the job training.
I chuckled. I yearn for these days, but this isn't the experience I had (late millenial/early Gen Z). No one trains, you get maybe a week to adjust, expected to go full steam ahead, and leave or are laid off 2-3 years later.
We train juniors for years (we accept interns as young as junior year of high school) and its been pretty great. I really don't understand why more companies don't do it.
That seems to imply that they singlehandedly (or fivehandedly) exhausted the promising pool and kept it dry since! But that's not the case, right? So whatever they did - while definitely important at the margin does not completely change the bulk of the market.
We can look at their employment numbers, they did not hire millions of people, yet there are millions of capable juniors globally eager to jump head-first into software development.
Bootcamps closed because hiring slowed down. (Because ZIRP ended, everyone doubted that the Fed can do a soft landing, and on top of that the certified bubble of AI-mania meant that companies increased spending on buzzword driven development, and ... on top of all this increasing cloud costs and slowing growth meant that no one felt the need to hire juniors.)
Oh, and of course due to the amazing tech demos where this or that LLM created a site/game in React in a few minutes, or even issued a PR, the meme of end of coding led to a pretty significant belief about the end of juniors.
> This guy has it all backwards. No developer in his right mind is going to plow billions of dollars into high density housing without existing rail access.
this is the default option? build a big complex with a courtyard, then surround it with a parking lot or dedicate 1/4 of the building to a garage.
I'm interested to see what happens with the new potomac yards wmata stop. I appreciate they are trying to expand rail in anticipation of growth, but it looks kinda dumb right now. it's a good 15 minute walk through parking lots to get to the nearest store or apartment building. you would never use that stop if you could afford a car. to be fair, the station just opened. it could look very different in 5-10 years. if they waited for it to densify first, people might be complaining about how much more expensive the station was.
idk, I honestly think congestion pricing would still be a good idea even if they just lit all the toll proceeds on fire. I almost wonder if it was a political blunder to couple "reduce cars in lower manhatten" with "more funding for MTA" in the first place.
Congestion pricing has little impact on the unlimited number of cars (unlike regulated taxis) that can enter Manhattan and drive around for hours for Uber/Lyft.
I haven't yet chosen a side in the great uber vs taxi debate. but in general, driving lots of different people around all day sounds like a pretty good use of a car. it would be great to have a more comprehensive approach for pricing the least productive vehicle uses out of the most congested areas, but setting up tolls in a few choke points is a good start.
Perhaps academics or NYC can analyze and publish data from Uber/Lyft on average rideshare occupancy by time of day and GPS location, e.g. what percentage of time is spent driving around empty (consuming energy, polluting), carrying a paid passenger, or parked in an area close to expected customers.
Unlike in other cities, Uber/Lyft in NYC are regulated like taxis and limos. NYC has been paying a congestion surcharge on each ride since 2019, which was set to go up as part of the new congestion pricing program.
There's always the opportunity for street/sector level surveillance via automated license plate readers. Your favorite neighborhood or street has too many cars? Impose quotas, vary the quota by time/season that only a computer can decipher, then sell "Fast Pass" exceptions to generate more revenue. Win for neo-feudal middleman, without brand licensing fees for the "environment" that justified a new digital on-demand toll economy.
I don’t understand what this has to do with congestion pricing, which AFAICT had a very simple (arguably too simple, per complaints about charging blue collar workers) fare schedule.
(I also don’t think anybody would describe Manhattan’s CBD as their favorite neighborhood.)
Try a web search for geo-fencing, which is closely coupled to modern technology for enforcement of geo boundaries that are not gated by a physical barrier.
Manhattan Central Business District (CBD) is defined as "Manhattan south of and inclusive of 60th St" excluding some through-traffic highways.
> don't think anybody would described Manhattan’s CBD as their favorite neighborhood
Uber/Lyft drivers in NYC need special plates (that start with a "T"). The commission that regulates them can simply restrict how many plates it issues/renews.
seems like a false dilemma to me. the platform owner should do all those responsible things that you mention. they should also offer an escape hatch for turning all those portions off, should the owner of the device so choose. I respect Apple's attitude much more than Google and Microsoft these days, but they really go too far with locking down iOS.
so what? broadcasting on unauthorized bands is essentially painting a "come fine me" beacon on yourself. surely the FCC (or it's Japanese equivalent) can handle these sorts of revenue opportunities without Apple's help.
If Johnny Nobucks makes an illegal broadcast using an Apple device - or rather if Johnny Nobucks makes an app for the express purpose of doing the illegal broadcast, and distributes it to 1 million other users on Apple devices — the FCC equivalent would faaaar prefer to sue 1 rich person (Apple) - with a chance of getting big bucks — than 1 million and 1 poor people — (Johnny no bucks and his users). But I’m pretty sure Apple would be able to put together a license model that makes them safe in this case, long before they were put in any legal danger.
Anyone who claims it’s an intractable is using it for a different purpose -/ either trying to keep their sweet monopoly - or wishing they could sue apple.
idk, I see it the other way around actually. if you kill someone in another country, that's still bad, but it's not clear why the US government should be the entity that holds you accountable for it. seems more appropriate to turn you over to that country's government upon request.
whereas if you bribe public officials in other countries as normal business practice, that might give you an advantage over other companies that also operate in the US. if they have to also engage in bribery to compete with you, that seems like a much more direct harm to another US entity.
Why stop there and not take it to the next step? Surely company A killing whistleblowers or rabble rousers overseas lets it outperform company B that isn’t doin that state-side? Doesn’t that encourage company B to do the same on red, white, and blue soil?
are A and B both operating in the US in your example? if yes, then USG has a legitimate interest in removing that perverse incentive. if not, then the US criminal justice system seems like the wrong place to solve the problem.
my point is that the jurisdiction of the US criminal justice system should be limited to the US. if people do things in another country that demonstrably harm US residents, that's fair game. otherwise, it seems like an overreach for the US to enforce laws that might not even exist in other countries. just my opinion, you don't have to agree.
>it's not clear why the US government should be the entity that holds you accountable for it. seems more appropriate to turn you over to that country's government upon request.
This would make it very easy for Americans to be mercenaries and assassins for foreign governments.
I have plenty of internal metrics to demonstrate my contribution, but nothing I do measurably affects the stock price.
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