People claimed GPT-3 was great at coding when it launched. Those who said otherwise were dismissed. That has continued to be the case in every generation.
What "current results" are you referring to? No, people 50+ years ago weren't arguing that cliffs can lead to disincentives, they were arguing that the whole system is "socialism" and bad - something that has been repeatedly disproven.
There are few things more evil in our society than the breed of conservative that will talk about how their family needed social welfare growing up to survive, how it worked and they did survive, but how "ashamed" they feel so they thing we should tear everything down and remove the ladder now that they've climbed it.
> What "current results" are you referring to? No, people 50+ years ago weren't arguing that cliffs can lead to disincentives, they were arguing that the whole system is "socialism" and bad - something that has been repeatedly disproven.
In fact, we have disincentives like that because they were arguing that having a flat benefit for everyone would be socialism.
If you don't reduce benefit with income level, these disincentives vanishes and that's how all post-war systems worked in Europe (can't talk about the US) before the neoliberal crew started dismantling everything in the name of “reducing public spendings” for greater economic efficiency.
A flat benefit for everyone that doesn't reduce with income level would be universal basic income, which has many supporters in theory, but has never been implemented in practice so far, not even in the most socialist countries of the 20th century...
No it's not. Not all benefit is “income” and not all such income is universal. And it also has nothing to do with socialism (socialism is about forbidding the private property of the means of production! Please stop calling every kind of public intervention “socialism”, that's as ridiculous as calling all Republicans “fascists”).
For the non-income version see countries with free schools or free hospital, and for an example of an income benefit see the French Allocation familiales, which until 2015 were given to every family with 2 child or more no matter the parents income.
There were plenty of such systems, and some of them still exist (AFAIK the US social security is one of those, you don't lose access to the benefits even if you're rich)
Ok, those are valid examples (also, how about free roads for everyone? Everyone seems to take that for granted and wouldn't dream about calling it "socialist"), but in your original post you wrote about "a flat benefit for everyone" that doesn't reduce with income level, and the examples you gave are either non-income or not for everyone (e.g. not for families with less than two children, not for people who didn't pay social security taxes for at least 10 years etc.).
> Ok, those are valid examples (also, how about free roads for everyone? Everyone seems to take that for granted and wouldn't dream about calling it "socialist")
This exactly.
> but in your original post you wrote about "a flat benefit for everyone" that doesn't reduce with income level
Yeah, my writing was confusing. By “for everyone” I meant “no matter the income”, not that we should give children's allowance to single adults. Just that we stop index these things on income. By the way I also think we should give more in nature (“the medical operation is free”), and less in cash, but that's independent.
It is both of those if you use a typechecker, which is the whole reason it exists (in fact, the first popular typechecker existed before the annotation syntax using type comments; type annotations were developed specifically so that it could be accommodated in the language rather than becoming its own separate language.)
That's the problem! The code should not run if the types are wrong. Having an external tool is an antipattern.
Having to rely on process for validity is a recipe for bad. We already know how the greater python community has been with requirements.txt and dependencies. I've spent days fixing this garbage.
It's a tooling problem. Good tools make good habits part of the automation and stop you from having to think about it.
Generative UI is incompatible with learning. It means every user sees something different, so you can't watch a tutorial or have a coworker show you what they do or have tech support send you a screenshot.
The solution could be search. It's not a House of Leaves.
Joe implemented feature A. Sandra implemented feature B. Raj implemented C. All launched in July. Since then metric X is up 20%. Who gets credit, and what does that credit really mean?
Now say all 3 did that in 3 different products. One produced a 200% improvement in an internal product, one a 40% improvement in a product with thousands of users, one a 1% improvement in a product with a billion users? Compare *that*.
200% improvement may just be the result of feature A and 40% may just be the max performance gain from feature B. Comparing developers over the effectiveness of features they implement is mostly rating the PMs or the leadership they work with. Its a dice roll and its a measure of one's luck to be at the right place & right time to work on the right task.
People complain about using metrics. People complain about rating performance based on what your manager or coworkers say about you. Performance reviews are an unsolved hard problem.
> People complain about rating performance based on what your manager or coworkers say about you.
Do they? This definitely seems better to me, and I don't think I've really heard complaints about it. Not without flaws, of course, but preferable to chasing a made-up metric. It's arguably the entire point of a manager, to know what their employees are doing at a high level. We managed to do this for hundreds of years without needing shiny dashboards and counting every meeting attended.
Metrics have their place as well, of course, but they should be one data point, and should not be chased after so religiously that recording the metrics becomes significant work on its own.
>Do they? This definitely seems better to me, and I don't think I've really heard complaints about it
"My manager hates me, how do I get promoted?"
"My manager looks down on me because I'm a member of a different caste, what do I do?"
"My manager keeps hiring only people of their race and playing favorites with them, what do I do?"
"Coworker X gave me a bad review because I wouldn't go on a date with them"
Even in the best case it biases heavily towards the people most enthusiastic about selling an image of themselves rather than those who are necessarily contributing.
Relying on someone's perception/vouching for you rather than performance metrics can be an absolute disaster - for the people involved and for the company if it turns into a lawsuit.
> My manager looks down on me because I'm a member of a different caste, what do I do?"
There may be legitimate cases but if someone runs into these issues often, may be its just excuses for bad performance. If the issue is genuine, find out what your specific organization can do about the situation and resolve it within that framework or find a better manager.
No amount of metrics are gonna help if you are going against a hostile manager, team or leadership.
These are all pretty extreme cases that apply if your managers/coworkers are horrible people. Most people are thankfully, as a rule, pretty normal.
Obviously discrimination exists, which is why metrics should still be used (as data points) and why larger companies need an oversight process.
Turning ourselves into automatons, promoting and praising people exclusively based on some arbitrary set of numbers, just to try and make it fairer, won't lead to a happier or genuinely fairer workplace. At the end of the day, most jobs relevant to HN are complicated and explicitly involve a lot of human interaction. You need humans to judge performance in human-interaction jobs.
If there's one person in a team discriminating unfairly, that should be pretty obvious if they're the only one objecting while everyone else thinks an employee is doing a fine job.
If the entire team is discriminatory, then as the sibling comment said, metrics aren't really going to save you either, they will find a way to push their will through. And that is probably a horrible place to work that won't be made more palatable by being promoted.
Again, I'm not saying these aren't real issues, but relying solely on metrics is not the solution. You need both qualitative and quantitative data for a healthy environment and to make good decisions. Just because some humans are bad people doesn't mean the solution is to become inhuman altogether.
"everybody else" doesn't scale. If you have 10 people, that's 90 reviews to be written. No one's going to go into much detail, and in general you get a culture of only saying nice things so that others only say nice things about them.
Seems like a skill issue, my friend, not sure what to say.
Again, we managed to do this for literal centuries without needing to turn workplaces into metrics-obsessed assembly lines. A manager should know what's going on in their team and should know who's doing well. It's kind of the whole point of being a manager.
For most of human history we didn't have organizations of hundreds, much less tens of thousands. When we did they were rife with nepotism, classism, brownnosing, racism, and more. We aim to do better these days, which is a hard problem.
Most of human history, sure, but I'm talking about the last few centuries. We've had plenty of organizations of that size; corporations, governments, militaries.
But why on Earth is the total size of the organization relevant? That's the whole point of a hierarchical design, one manager just needs to know the people or abstracted teams that sit below them. Even in a "modern" org there's nobody sitting looking at a spreadsheet of 200k employees going "gee how will I figure out who to promote, better sort descending by lines of code written".
And yes, we've been talking in circles at this point. I agree a fully vibes based "promote who you feel like" approach has all those flaws, which is why I'm saying you need both quantitative and qualitative data. But in general qualitative should hold slightly more weight in complex, non-linear, interaction-heavy jobs like engineering, because it's hard if not impossible to find fair metrics for literally everything an employee possibly does.
Not the OP, but my proposal is to acknowledge that unsolved hard problems are... unsolved. Instead of inventing bullshit and pretending it's constructive. Some people make a career out of that bullshitting, others complain about it because it actually has a negative impact on them.
"What's your proposal", in my experience, is often used as a defense against someone calling bullshit. My proposal when I'm calling bullshit is that the bullshitter start being professional, but it's not exactly something I can say.
"What's your proposal" is a response to unhelpful griping.
Performance management does have to happen. If you aren't rewarding good performers with money and growth most of them will leave. Losing them is expensive. Hiring is expensive. To reward your high performers you need to be able to identify them.
"All of these options are bad" isn't useful if you don't have a better option.
My whole point here is that "doing whatever bullshit makes you feel good" is not necessarily the better option. Either you can prove that it's worth something, in which case you will not have to ask "What's your proposal?" because people won't complain about it, or you're just doing something for the sake of doing something, and your only recourse when people show you that it's bullshit is to get defensive.
> If you aren't rewarding good performers with money and growth most of them will leave.
And if you don't identify good performers properly and don't reward them, they will leave as well.
A pragmatic approach is to reward your team, as a team. If you go with "we fire the lowest 10% every year because there have to be low performers", you're creating an adversarial situation. Wanna know what happens if you're my manager in an adversarial context? Easy: I will be an adversary. How constructive is that? Not my problem, I did not make the rules.
> One produced a 200% improvement in an internal product, one a 40% improvement in a product with thousands of users, one a 1% improvement in a product with a billion users? Compare that.
Try to assign money/revenue/PR to that and you'll have decent proxy for impact.
Again: what money is attributable to each feature? Are subscriptions up 2% because of the new payment flow or because it's tax refund season? Are they down because of the new UI or because of tariffs? It's not realistic to tell them apart most of the time.
Far better for consumers to be able to binge Game of Thrones/Silicon Valley/whatever and cancel HBO Max than to have to pay twice as much for a subscription to both libraries to get either.
Yeah until Netflix adds tiered pricing for content and you end up paying more than what Netflix + HBO Max together would have cost because Netflix is the only game in town for that content..
I think like all media consolidation this will send a lot of people back to the seven seas..
Which is why it won't happen, what would the revenue benefit of that be?
In the medium term you'll get a D+/Hulu-esque split with maybe a discounted bundle of Netflix and HBO Max together - the evidence is pretty strong that bundles reduce churn.
If they ever do go to one library, it'll be because Netflix feel they are able to push prices to the same level as both services combined.
I'm actually a little surprised that, some discounts for annual subscriptions notwithstanding, the streaming services haven't done more to discourage short-term jump on/jump off subscriptions.
But they have the data and I don't. I assume there's enough stickiness and inertia that most people are not canceling and restarting services all the time. I know I don't. I just decide I don't care enough about most content (and don't really watch much video or binge watch anyway).
As much as people complain, maybe if I was still 22 and dirt broke, I'd do something like that, but more likely I just wouldn't watch TV. I didnt own a TV back then and it was fine. Now, sure, I don't exactly like being nickle and dimed from a pure intellectual perspective, but these streaming services are what? Like $15 a month a pop? That's 1/40 the cost of groceries. It's annoying but makes no difference and isn't anywhere near worth the hassle of starting and stopping. If it was a $120 a month gym subscription or the old cable bundles I used to pay $200 for, then it's getting to the point that it's worth caring about.
The stickiness is probably just that. Even as they raise prices, it's still less than we're paying for pretty much anything else. Gas, electricity, food, housing. Cut Netlix and well great, I just reduced my monthly spend from $5000 to $4980. Really making a dent there. I can retire comfortably now. It's almost as patronizing as the old avocado toast thing. Avocado toast might be overpriced and nowhere near worth it, but it isn't the reason anyone is broke.
I do keep a vague eye on subscriptions/credit cards/etc. that I'm really not getting value out of over the course of months.
But, yes, if you're either poor or optimizing points on an airline or whatever is sort of a hobby, then sure. But otherwise, it's just not very interesting to many of us and involves mental overhead we can just live without.
A big part of the reason I keep my Paramount+ subscription month-to-month despite mostly just watching Star Trek on it is that they sold me a pretty good annual plan discount.
Annual plans are a big factor in the stickiness of Amazon's efforts. Especially with Amazon's dark patterns around trying to make people forget they pay it (and making it hard to cancel).
It is curious there aren't more explorations in increasing stickiness. Though admittedly cable's biggest trick (long term contracts) is maybe thankfully out of reach for most of the streamers.
Bundles, where they exist, are a big stickiness factor. Especially during COVID, getting stuff delivered to my door before I'd have gotten around to the hassle of going to the store, was a big factor in making Prime more useful to me than it already was.
Apple is less pronounced but I'm very much in the Apple ecosystem so TV+ isn't really a big adder.
>Though admittedly cable's biggest trick (long term contracts) is maybe thankfully out of reach for most of the streamers.
Yeah. You make too much of an on/off ramp for just a streaming service and that's a hard pass for me.
As you say, most users probably don't bother stopping/starting subscriptions. Besides, if they make it harder to cancel some users might not subscribe in the first place in fear of being locked in.
They're probably making more with users saying "I'll subscribe now but cancel when I'm done watching this show" then don't bother cancelling.
Services have costs. They don't lose money. No one says the US military "loses hundreds of billions of dollars a year" or expects them to cover it back.
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