I didn't read the book but that is entirely too simplistic and comes across as american exceptionalism to me. Not to mention the author has a well defined political agenda to sell I don't necessarily agree with.
I've lived all over the country and all over the world and between countries I'd say it is 100% cultural.
In "europe" employee protection laws make it difficult to quickly hire and fire employees, making it difficult to scale.
In Chile failure was shameful. A stable bureaucratic government job was the most coveted job.
In Japan you are a social outcast if you aren't a company man.
I found quite a bit of entrepreneurial effort in west Africa, however I think that area lacks the required infrastructure to support large scale innovation.
I don't buy the concentration argument within the US borders. The bay area has a population of 7M, the greater NYC area has a population of 20M. Purely based on population numbers it is difficult to believe the bay area has a higher concentration of educated people.
>In "europe" employee protection laws make it difficult to quickly hire and fire employees, making it difficult to scale.
And IMO US anti-discrimination laws are also flawed. I think a good compromise is to only include certain kinds of jobs like manual labor under employment anti-discrimination laws.
How do you believe they are flawed? I hear this most often from people who have heard rumor or trash news from America and they think American companies have Affirmative Action "quotas" where they have to hire a certain number of people of each ethnic background. This is false.
Though quotas have been outlawed in the United States, the European Union has had a recent push to punish companies whose boards aren't composed of at least 40% women. And India, Brazil and Malaysia, among other countries, have laws and policies that address affirmative action in schools and throughout society.
There are lots of anti-discrimination laws in the US. While affirmative action is usually spoken of in general terms, there is no singular policy or implementation of the ways in which affirmative action take shape in government organizations, colleges and corporations. It varies.
Court cases continue to refine interpretations of how race is used at the university level. Some schools have experimented with a variety of ways of non-race-based models, like the Top 10 model that the University of Texas employs, to ensure the racial diversity of students.
A 2005 study by Princeton sociologists Thomas J. Espenshade and Chang Y. Chung compared the effects of affirmative action on racial and special groups at three highly selective private research universities. The data from the study represent admissions disadvantage and advantage in terms of SAT points (on the old 1600-point scale):
In 2009, Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and researcher Alexandria Walton Radford, in their book No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, examined data on students applying to college in 1997 and calculated that Asian-Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores of 1550 to have the same chance of being accepted at a top private university as whites who scored 1410 and African Americans who got 1100.
While the data and legal interpretation of Affirmative Action and anti-discrimination laws in the US are constantly changing today it has the largest real impact on Universities and Government.
The problem is how these laws are enforced. For example, statistics and performance reviews are often used, which probably do work fine for manual labor jobs where employees are treated as a commodity (and for which these laws were probably originally designed for). Affirmative action BTW is not a good idea either, but not bad enough to outlaw IMO.
You mean expensive lawsuits? That is true. Everyone in America is filing expensive lawsuits all the time especially if you own a business the first hire you must make is a good lawyer.
I don't see how this is related to discrimination specifically?
If your problem is too many lawsuits why don't you mention hot coffee at McDonalds? Or the problem with drivers causing accidents and suing in China?
> Purely based on population numbers it is difficult to believe the bay area has a higher concentration of educated people.
At this point, I don't think it's arguing that. There's a critical mass of domain specific professionals in SV, pure and simple.
The argument is that if anyone wants to create a competitor to SV, they'd be playing catch up because there is already an established core in SV. You'd need to peel away a large number of folks already established there before that concentration is no longer as strong as it currently is.
There's a limited number of experts in the world. Wherever has the highest concentration is going to have an innate advantage in terms of appeal, regardless of cost, etc. Creating an affordable alternative elsewhere can't compete on that level.
Interesting idea, and I see age discrimination at my tech company every day, but I think the name is pretty lame and I can see it probably exacerbating the issue.
Do you think you've ever had to do something as algorithmically complex as recursively walk a graph?
Sometimes these questions are used to probe the meta understanding of a candidate and using Graphs/Trees/DFS are universally understood concepts that make doing that easy.
Define "algorithm". In the broader definition, yes. Kalman filtering, motion compensation, track association, XY-mapping, and similar signal processing algorithms. For NLP it has been various forms of statistical modeling and general multithreaded architecture and coordination.
As for the algorithms typical of computer science, not really. Searching and sorting has not been much a part of what I have done. My experience is mainly in translating math into code, often into code with real-time deadlines.
Most very large enterprises have 2 tracks: IC and management. Typically most employees start out at IC and through defined and mutually agreed to career development plans train for the management track. This may take a few years. When the time comes for you to be a manager you have been operating in a management role for some time. This is the Peter Principle.
I'd be extremely wary of a surprise promotion in to management where a discussion about that possibility hasn't happened. I've seen this before and it can lead to disaster. You may be setting yourself up for failure or even worse someone is setting you up for failure.
I have seen a few ophthalmologists seeking treatment for a condition resulting from computer use. I think CVS is a catch all that makes sense on the surface but doesn't really address the damage that has been done. There is some interesting research being done in this area, but it has taken a while for the eye health community to catch up.
My story goes back over 4 years ago, one day like the flick of a switch I could barely keep my eyes open. Now I live with it but it is extremely uncomfortable and distracting and I no longer hack on anything outside of work. My issue isn't so much dry eyes but strained and fatigued eyes. Imagine the most tired and strained eyes you've ever experienced. Multiply that by 10 and that is how my eyes feel starting from the moment I wake up. Luckily I still have 20/20.
Basically, let this be a warning not to take for granted your eye health.
I was in a similar situation for a couple of years. Recently I started doing warm compresses on my eyes and it has made a huge difference.
I also recommend changing one thing about your routine every week and keeping an eye pain diary. That will help you identify things that help. It takes some work, but as you said eye health is super important.
There was an article where the cofounder mentions everyone gets the same lump of stock depending on pay grade. He also mentions it helps incentivize people to work nights and weekends so based on his unrealistic expectations of work life balance and giving out stock based on "lumps" I can come to my own conclusions.
I've lived all over the country and all over the world and between countries I'd say it is 100% cultural.
In "europe" employee protection laws make it difficult to quickly hire and fire employees, making it difficult to scale.
In Chile failure was shameful. A stable bureaucratic government job was the most coveted job.
In Japan you are a social outcast if you aren't a company man.
I found quite a bit of entrepreneurial effort in west Africa, however I think that area lacks the required infrastructure to support large scale innovation.
I don't buy the concentration argument within the US borders. The bay area has a population of 7M, the greater NYC area has a population of 20M. Purely based on population numbers it is difficult to believe the bay area has a higher concentration of educated people.