If a SWE could truly output 20x their effort, that person would probably be better at freelancing or teaming up with another SWE. If something can be automated away to AI is Project Management. Also, there has to be a point where delivering more and faster code doesn’t matter, because the choke points are somewhere else in the Project Life Cycle, say waiting for legal, other vendors, budgets, suppliers, etc, so productivity could max out at say 3X, after which, unless you have a strong pipeline of work, your engineers will be sitting around waiting for the next phase of the project to start.
Except now you also team up with people who are adept at sales, marketing, accounting, etc. now to form a cooperative instead of a corporation. Maybe workers can get back some of the rights and fruits of their labor.
This is a very reductionist way to calculate the value of a software team or any team within an organization. That’s because many times the value delivered by a team is not necessarily monetary but strategic.
I think this has been attempted many times before by other nations including Brazil without success. It’s one thing to replace a few hundred workstations in a non critical governmental office, another to replace the entire infrastructure of a government which also collaborates with the private sector. Usually these projects start with a lot of passion then die off when can’t justify the investment.
Meyer Optik Görlitz is another company bringing back vintage lenses. They carry what in my opinion is the best of all vintage lenses, the Jena Biotar 1.5/75
As an avid reader and outdoors enthusiast, I feel there’s a lot of value on “wasting” time with a movie or limited series.
Absolutely, there are so many better things to do and experience than watching TV, but no one should be stressing out about maximizing their time doing them.
In fact, going against that mindset once in a while, and allowing yourself to not do the thing you think you should be doing, is an experience by itself.
Also, it doesn’t need to be a complete waste of time. If you like history or art, there’s a lot of content both as fiction and non fiction that you would find intellectually stimulating (I highly recommend Criterion for this)
One cold November night my wife picked a movie called
Babette's Feast. I absolutely loved the photography. I did some research and found it was inspired by Danish painter Hammershoi, which I never heard of. For Christmas, my wife gave me a beautifully printed, limited edition of his work by the Jacquemart museum in Paris.
Later this year we plan to make a stop in Copenhagen on our way to Sweden to visit friends, so we can see Hammershoi work at the museums.
Seriously you can have a very pure experience interacting with media. I did a mushroom trip ~5 years ago and was having a not great time walking around outside. Cars, other people, sun, bugs etc. were all not sitting right. I went home and watched "Life in Colour", an Attenborough documentary about amazing uses of color in animals. It was a top experience and I still remember scenes from it years later.
Anyway don't throw the baby out with the bathwater and all that, there is a reason we developed digital entertainment.
Wasted time should not be defined as unproductive time, it should be time you did not experience, time you were completely clocked out, not even enjoyed, not relaxed or relished. Wasted. It is a subtle difference but critical to remember if you want to reclaim your time rather than claiming it for capitalism.
Yours was a clever answer to a stupid question. Tech interviewers need to leave college behind and start treating candidates as professionals. Puzzles, white boarding and riddles are unique to software engineering roles, you would never see a lawyer, an accountant, a doctor, or engineers in other disciplines going through any of this nonsense. These methods are proven to be a poor predictor of job performance. In my last role as lead engineer we would chat with the candidate over lunch about random topics. We first wanted to see if they would fit our team. Then in the afternoon let them work in a little project that was actually part of active development. This way we discovered that most candidates who went through the screening process could actually be pretty good team members. Our issue was having to decide who to give the offer to, while other companies keep rejecting candidates over bubble sort. Our attrition was also pretty low. So it happens that software engineers will surprise you when you treat them as grown ass adults. Who would have guessed?
When I see this type of titles, before reading I first stop by the comments to see if someone found any BS. Most times someone did, so I skip. Thank you, BS checkers.
I spent some time in China working in manufacturing. I remember talking to some of the guys there. As it was explained to me, everything they had, their home, kids school, wife’s job was owned by the employer. Meaning if you lose your job you lose everything. I remember how incredibly difficult was to get things done there, no one wanted to make decisions. That was many years ago, maybe things have changed.
You're taking about statistical averages but I'm talking about a significant minority of over-70s who are wildly dangerous. Most of them only stop driving when they cause an accident. Sometimes its a serious one.
There are already some measures for young people, like the 6 point thing. Maybe there could be more. Doesn't change the facts about dangerous OAP drivers
They also get less likely to commit crime, but that’s not how we gauge risk. We don’t generally say “that teenager’s crime risk is going down so they are less risky than that geriatric whose crime risk is fairly constant.” Risk probability is usually the area under a hazard rate curve.
Over a long enough interval, that reduction in risk would be important. So what is the appropriate time interval for these risk assessments?
Yes - I’ve seen the pricing algorithms at several large insurers. Massive surcharges for young people 16-25, rates level out 30-55, and then slowly start to go back up, but it’s a slow increase compared to the young ones.
AIUI, that's a misleading figure, because the elderly self-correct, in awareness of the greater difficulty, by driving a lot less, so the greater danger is masked in the per-unit-time accident rate.
So, in theory, policy could appropriately adjust for this dynamic by only requiring the test of over-70s driving more than X miles/year, but that adds hassle to enforcement.
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