CoRecursive: Coding Stories

> Got sick of the people aspect and the fact that my employer takes 99% of the value I create

You are on ycombinator, where there is all the information you need to know on how to capture your value. If I deconstruct your complaint, it is inherently capitalist. If you want to receive profits you need to be a risk-taking owner.

Why is it fair that employees do not get paid what they are “worth”?

Firstly, a startup example. What you perceive as profits, are often the returns for risks. Risks a well paid employee doesn’t take. A VC needs to get 30x* returns from the 1 in 10 successes they get, just to break even on the risk adjusted returns for an investment where capital is locked up for more than a decade. Employee’s risk free wages are sometimes the largest cost for a startup. If you are a very early employee then only you have the incentive to negotiate ownership (and also deal with all the risks of ownership!).

Secondly, an example of an existing business. Apple is a business that makes huge profits: Apple pays as little as possible to create as much profit as possible. A new employee never created the money machine (e.g. Apple), instead the employee joined it long after it was created, and the employee has no right to claim to the profits that the machine creates. Anytime you are late to the party to become an employee of any business, you will struggle to claim profits, and will only receive what you beg for. Capitalism 101.

I know all the above is stating the completely obvious, but your statement is simply not coherent with reality, and that disturbs me. YC is about as capitalist as you can get so your statement seems jarring - HN is one of the few places founders can get good advice.

If you wanted to “get your value”, perhaps join a cooperative (where membership is ownership). Or go to a country where rewards are spread more evenly to everyone. Or parse the benefits of being in the top 1% of the world as your rewards (assuming you work as a programmer in the US, you are likely in the top 1% of earners in the world).

Actually you appear pretty angry, bitter and disappointed with your work. Perhaps investigate if you can learn a new attitude and be more satisfied with what you have. Just becoming an owner is unlikely solve your negative feelings IMHO. Note that I know plenty of people that echo what you are feeling - it is natural and you are definitely not alone!

Disclaimer: I am a well off hippy capitalist that chooses to live in a socialist democratic country. I have been a whiner about wages in the past, and I have had a minor win at the capitalist lottery.

* https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/the-meeting-that-showed-me...

PG quote: “Great programmers are sometimes said to be indifferent to money. This isn't quite true. It is true that all they really care about is doing interesting work.”.

Quote from https://corecursive.com/leaving-debian/ ””” Adam: Around this time is when I first heard of Joey. And the thing that caught my interest about him was he looked like this platonic ideal of a hardcore software developer. He was just working on what he cared about and living out in the woods. At the time, everybody was talking about entrepreneurship and startups and how you can work crazy hard as a software developer and make a whole bunch of money, and then you’d be set for life. And here was Joey, and he had been through the first bubble and it seemed like he had cracked the code. He said, you’re looking at the numerator how much money you need to do what you want, but I’m looking at the denominator. I’ve just decreased my cost of living. I made the Zen move, so instead of hitting a big score, I can just do what I want right now. At least this was my impression from the outside. So that’s really the question, I wanted to ask Joey: Was this idyllic life you’ve built in a cabin in the woods as great as it looks?

Joey: There’s always a backstory that might not live up to the romanticism. But I certainly do feel very lucky that I do have a lot of ability to take some time and just think about an idea and then be, okay, I’m going to go spend whatever amount of time it ends up taking, because it’s worth doing this. It’s hills around me here and a few mountains in the distance, but dense forest and I’m kind of down an oval bowl with basically completely isolated from whatever’s going on, except for whatever noise might filter up from the distant road a mile away. And yeah, it’s a very calm and peaceful place. And for me that’s more of just a background thing, I just know that, I can sit down and work for five hours and that’s a really nice thing. And I know that if I need a break, I can go and easily take a walk and refresh my mind. And so yeah, it’s the little things really that make living in a rural place nice. I wish more people have that ability and I feel very, very lucky to have it right now. Who knows how long it will continue. ”””

I've thought about this. Too much. For purposes of this reply, Jordan Peterson will be the exemplar for a self described Rationalists and new atheists (whatever they call themselves) and misc intellectual dark web characters.

My primary criticism is lack of novelty. I've heard it all before. Tell me something new.

A positive example of this, for contrast, is how Ezra Klein is able to have constructive conversations with people he disagrees with. Most recently David French. So I've learned stuff from people I would have never given the time of day. Which reflects poorly on me, I know. But I'm trying to change.

My second criticism is my befuddlement. I just can't figure out what most of the celebrity pundits are saying. I've given Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and many others more of my time and attention than I care to admit. Because I want to know what others find compelling about their ideas. And mostly I'm just not getting it.

My best immediate, aggregious example of this is Eric Weinstein's interview of James O'Keefe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LN-eGN8VSpA

Going in, I thought "Ok, I utterly oppose anything and everything O'Keefe has said and done. He's just a troll in the mold of Lee Atwater. But Eric sounds smart. I'd like to hear O'Keefe describe what he does in his own words." I'm a masochist, I know.

Whatever Eric's criticism of O'Keefe is, I couldn't understand it. I actually listened twice. Because these are smart people, right? Surely I'm missing something.

Alas, Eric's not even wrong. His notions, assumptions, basis for "journalism" are so far off base as to not being worth criticism.

Frankly, it just felt like mental masterbation. Like high school seniors debating "What is Art, really?" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100142

Like a lot of smart people, Eric assumes his obvious competency in areas outside of his own expertise. He's not just willfully ignorant (incurious) of journalism as a profession and it's tortured history, he actively rejects it. So he's doing a drunken sailor's walk thru a problem domain that has already been thoroughly beaten to death by many others with far more intention.

So I learned nothing.

The end result is I now regard Eric as another boring dilettante and don't take him seriously. He's apparently got some heterodox theories about physics, cosmology, or whatever, that might prove interesting. But I'll let people smarter than me chew on those.

--

The thing I most enjoy, savor from Lex's podcast is the novelty, the unexpected learning. I've read Emperor's New Mind and I've read the back and forth about Penrose's theories. So I wasn't expecting anything. But having Penrose himself relate the backstory and his own learning since that book was published made me smile.

Another episode that delighted me was Corecursive's interview of DHH. I really dislike Ruby, right? My study group worked thru a Ruby book, back when RoR was the new hotness. It's not quite the bight on humanity like PHP or JavaScript, but it's pretty bad. Though I was aware of DHH, I didn't know anything about him. I thought, "Well, I like Adam Gordon Bell and if he thinks DHH is work talking to, I'll at least listen for a bit". And I just fucking loved DHH. I want to be DHH. I regret not paying attention to him for all these years. https://corecursive.com/045-david-heinemeier-hansson-softwar...

I suppose they must. Because car is a hazard on road and may not end well if you don't put enough man-hours within design, documentation, testing etc.

Now, who's gonna pay you for writing that single functionality whole year? Sure, you tested, documented, did everything right, you may have almost no bugs, pretty code, decent test coverage, unit tests, integration tests, UI tests, performance tests, edge cases ironed out, top notch performance, UX no-one matches, one click deployment, static code analysis, linters, fuzzers, vulnerability scanner tools, monitoring, auto scaling... while you get there, your startup may be no more. Or maybe just a money sink: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/unseen-effort

Alright, I'm little off the track, but not every software project is comparable to automotive/air/rocket/med/... industry. Ofcourse you will put 10x+ more money/time/effort if human lives may be impacted with your commit.

To put that into context, let's appreciate SQLite - software that is thoroughly tested and your airplane shouldn't be afraid to run those. From the creator of SQLite:

> I’m going to write tests to bring SQLite up to the quality of 100% MCDC, and that took a year of 60 hour weeks. That was hard, hard work. I was putting in 12 hour days every single day. I was just getting so tired of this because with this sort of thing, it’s the old joke of, you get 95% of the functionality with the first 95% of your budget, and the last 5% on the second 95% of your budget. It’s kind of the same thing. It’s pretty easy to get up to 90 or 95% test coverage. Getting that last 5% is really, really hard and it took about a year for me to get there, but once we got to that point, we stopped getting bug reports from Android

https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/#testin...

Compliance with the DO-178B standard was not easy for the SQLite maintainers. It required several years to achieve.

By adhering to the DO-178B standard, the testing is confirmed extensive and satisfies requirements for use in avionics.

"Rockwell Collins... introduced me to this concept of DO-178B. It’s a quality standard for safety-critical aviation products, and unlike so many quality standards, this one’s actually readable... one of the key things that they push is, they want 100% MCDC test coverage.

"Your tests have to cause each branch operation in the resulting binary code to be taken and to fall through at least once.

"At the machine code level... actually, MCDC’s a little stricter than that. Let’s not dwell on the details, but I had this idea, I’m going to write tests to bring SQLite up to the quality of 100% MCDC, and that took a year of 60 hour weeks. That was hard, hard work. I was putting in 12 hour days every single day. I was just getting so tired of this because with this sort of thing, it’s the old joke of, you get 95% of the functionality with the first 95% of your budget, and the last 5% on the second 95% of your budget. It’s kind of the same thing. It’s pretty easy to get up to 90 or 95% test coverage. Getting that last 5% is really, really hard and it took about a year for me to get there, but once we got to that point, we stopped getting bug reports from Android."

https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/

Indeed, SQLite is used for flight systems on the Airbus A350. No other major database vendor is certified to do so.

https://www.sqlite.org/famous.html

Crash reporting is only needed if you write software that crashes in the first place.

Do you think the SQLite developers have ever felt like they need automated crash reporting from their users? (see https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/ , which got discussed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27718701 ) And SQLite accepts way richer input (SQL queries) from users than Audacity does (audio files).

There are many ways to reduce bugs. Extensive coverage-guided testing, like SQLite does, is one. Automated fuzzing is another. Writing in languages with strong type systems that let you statically verify the program's behavior is another. Collecting crash reports is another, and it's certainly one valid way, but it's not the only way.

It's pretty clear that Audacity's users, in aggregate, aren't that concerned about needing crashes fixed - or at least are less concerned about it than about their privacy. Maybe Audacity already is sufficiently bug-free for their needs!

While I also think that the "telemetry" argument is overblown, and I think automated updates are basically table stakes, and I wholeheartedly agree with you re JS and Electron, I think it's entirely reasonable for users to say that they don't find automated crash reporting valuable, and I don't think that it's particularly reasonable for developers to say "We know better than you."

technically this looks really impressive. great to see a new compression approach that supports extremely high performance decompression, with a high performance open source implementation.

re: winning adoption of new compression approaches, there's an interesting podcast interview [1] with Yann Collet (of lz4 / zstd):

Some factors Yann discussed that helped lz4 & zstd gain traction were: permissive licensing (BSD) ; implementation in C -- widest support for including it into other software ecosystems ; open development & paying attention to issues raised by users of the software ; the new compression approach able beat an existing popular approach in some use cases with no downside: e.g. if a hypothetical new compression approach has 200% faster decompression but offers 10% worse compression ratios, then there's friction for introducing it into an existing system, as the new approach might first require purchase and deployment of additional storage. Whereas a new approach that is 50% faster and has exactly the same or slightly better compression ratios can be adopted with much less friction.

It looks like the Iguana code has recently been relicensed with Apache instead of AGPL (which used for the rest of the sneller repo), which could lower the barrier for other projects to consider adopting Iguana, although there are still dependencies from the Iguana code to code in AGPL licensed files elsewhere in the sneller repo.

[1] https://corecursive.com/data-compression-yann-collet/