Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

My only issue has been if you buy options from a startup, and their value increases (even if you don't sell them, and the company hasn't actually gone public), you can get hit with big AMT penalties.

Heard this on NPR this morning and thought of this thread:

http://www.npr.org/2017/08/04/541417748/could-a-bus-with-sleep-pods-replace-airplanes

Cabin, an overnight, SF-LA bus with sleep pods. Introducing the story, David Greene referred to them as "hermetically sealed." Yikes!

Not as "disruptive" or flat out ridiculous as other tech shit, but still has some chuckles. Like this last bit:

"You may be wondering how I slept for so long, since LA to San Francisco is only a six-hour drive. Well, to guarantee a full night's rest, the creators of Cabin turned it into eight hours — by driving slower and using back roads."

lol

re the google guy can I just

Presidential Physical Fitness Award 2005, 2006, and 2007
Highest Ranked Rise of Nations Player in World 2004

this is on his cv guys

lol. link?

www.gorelab.org/James_Damore__CV.pdf

Should we have the obligatory conversation about "doxxing" someone who has already been thoroughly doxxed, or just skip it

his name was on the manifesto and he wrote it to be read, so this is not doxxing

he posted a document for everyone within his publicly held company of 70k people to see with his own name on it, and all of these things are on the public web

fucking lol

I put the sports I lettered in on my college application but it never occurred to me to carry that shit over to my resume

tbf that's a resume from very early in his graduate career

presidential fitness awards on the resume is never ok

Sadly, I suspect boasting about one's gaming prowess on a CV is all too common these days

fired.

http://www.breitbart.com/ a treat right now

Ugh I gave it clicks and now I feel like I need a shower.

Wow, you ain't kiddin'. They're going full-drudge-siren and everything

watch this fucker get a book deal

does this guy have a case if he decides to take legal action against google?

i thought this bump would be for this:

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/aug/07/secrets-of-silicon-valley-review-are-we-sleepwalking-towards-a-technological-apocalypse

which was on BBC2 on sunday and pointed out that Disruption wasn't usually a good thing.

(the reporter did have a man-bun and a ponytail mind)

that's my first time venturing over to Breitbart in a long time and just lol @ this headline

T-Shirt Company Attempts to Rebrand Swastika as ‘Symbol of Love and Peace’

womp

Harvard University tells me James Damore did not complete his Phd. He completed a masters degree in systems biology in 2013

— Nitasha Tiku (@nitashatiku) August 8, 2017

and this reply is from an extremely well-connected googler

Did you ask Harvard University whether he was ever disciplined or whether he was ever the subject of a harassment complaint?

— Liz Fong-Jones (@lizthegrey) August 8, 2017

lol

this dude's week is about to get much worse i guess

Lol

Liz really asking the right questions here

it would be extremely interesting if he had wafted the aroma of phd over his resume when applying to google

not that there's any chance harvard would answer

this shit didn't happen to jerry maguire smdh

not that there's any chance harvard would answer

I think those records are confidential unless criminal charges are pressed against you, at which point it becomes part of the accessible public record. Don't quote me on that, though.

really wondering if the career/life strategy of asserting you want an active role (nay, deserve it!) in determining the work you do really hit a brick wall when he got to google and realized it's full of people with similar backgrounds and getting promoted isn't just a matter of making noise

wouldn't be surprised if he skipped out on his phd track after finally getting an advisor or superior who wanted him to present a thesis that was actually useful work. I have an acquaintance who ran into just that: had a thesis topic, was pretty much doing work for his advisor's lab, and then his advisor left and the new one vetoed his topic as trivial

yeah, life suddenly gets challenging for all but a tiny minority of the academically successful at the 2 year point of a phd program. no shame in that, but it doesn't get easier if you move to google.

http://15809-presscdn-0-93.pagely.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/media/MTIyMzAxNjk5ODY3MDQ1MTQ1.jpg

this rug was on the floor at github

utopia and meritocracy, both coined first as sarcastic takedowns, then adopted uncritically as an ethos

xps: yes dan, standard academic practice is what i had in mind. i think telling that someone attended, and received a degree, is the most any university will do.

https://medium.com/@bobwyman/back-in-the-1970s-when-i-first-got-in-the-software-business-i-remember-there-being-a-much-higher-f70e8197fbd9

excellent comment

Yeah, I was thinking about this recently myself; at the beginning of my career, everywhere I worked was very close to a 50/50 split between male and female software engineers/managers; around the tail end of the dotcom boom, everything suddenly became very, very male. Now, we have I think 3 women on our team; 2 in QA, 1 in development. A 4th recently left the company. All 4 are among the top performers in our group and are in high demand; this has been true of the vast majority of women I have worked with over the past 20 years.

When I started in software development, my first workplaces were very unstructured as far as job role went, and developers were more closely linked to the people outlining business needs. One of the first restructuring processes divided the role of analyst and developer, where the former would be more involved in talking to business clients and determining scope and what software would do, where developers were on the implementation side of things.

It was pretty obvious at the time that many of the women I worked with were put in the analyst role as opposed to the implementation side, and the implementation of software diversified with teams having more roles (software architect, specialist roles, junior and senior developers) where the analyst side of things shifted more to the business aspects over time. The implementation groups grew a lot faster.

I've only ever reported to women in ten years in the public sector it's cool because you can blind them with logic iirc

you don't actually go blind when you roll your eyes all the way back

Ha

time for some levity

can't believe Google just fired me for sneaking up on Indian co-workers and using my calipers on their skull... I have a right to my opinion

— real gabagool 🔷🥇🆒 (@jimpjorps) August 8, 2017

lol

nice

you're much too emotional right now to engage on a rational level with me. good-day, sir

— real gabagool 🔷🥇🆒 (@jimpjorps) August 8, 2017

Yeah, I was thinking about this recently myself; at the beginning of my career, everywhere I worked was very close to a 50/50 split between male and female software engineers/managers; around the tail end of the dotcom boom, everything suddenly became very, very male. Now, we have I think 3 women on our team; 2 in QA, 1 in development. A 4th recently left the company. All 4 are among the top performers in our group and are in high demand; this has been true of the vast majority of women I have worked with over the past 20 years.

I got this impression from where I work too. If you filter everyone who's been there for 20+ years, you get a pretty even split. Nowadays our training classes are something like 80/20. I thought that Medium comment hit the nail on the head but I can't help but wonder if gamer/nerd culture which is predominantly marketed to men has a lot to do with it as well. When I was in college I couldn't help but notice I was one of like three comp sci dudes who didn't want to make video games. I imagine a lot of young gamers choose coding as a career by default. Sometimes I wonder if I did.

money attracts young, stupid men. it's not that complicated.

this happens to any industry that gets "hot", it gets overrun by young asshole men looking to get rich, they're like lemmings. evil lemmings.

I guess in America you can append "white" to that and still be reasonably accurate