It is! Ende was raised under the esoteric Anthroposophy philosophy, and I suspect much of his works are dedicated to debunk its nonsensical beliefs. The second half of The Neverending Story is a philosophical treaty on itself (it hurts the book as an action story, but gives you a lot to ponder about).
His child books certainly have a deep second reading as adults.
Well, as opposed to hearing "oops our black box implementation of your information got hacked", I honestly don't mind the trend of "read the contract, it is code". Sure it can be misleading, sure it can be intended to trick someone. However, code is law, and even backdoors are "code". Instead we should fix the backdoors so that code can be reasonable "law".
It pays for engineers to be able to inflate and justify their worth, especially when moving ships.
It is not about everyone getting equal pay. It is about everyone having equal visibility. The former creates unmotivated employees, the latter creates one of two outcomes:
1. Satisfaction of relative comp for the amount of work done -or-
2. Understanding of what is valuable in this venture; how to spend your time
Often times in larger establishments (after playing enough politics to gain visibility), I found myself in camp (2). What you think is important is seldom actually important to the powers that be. If you find yourself disagreeing with the last statement, go hug your management team / coworkers!
To be clear, IMO, people want equal total comp per input. We have to consider all inputs like, including the person themselves (some comp is worthless to me personally, eg certain health benefits for situations I will never have, or considerations for needs that I do not have.
* average and best/work weeks of hours worked
* stress load
* future value of today's learnings
* inconvenience factors - like do I have to work during my kids' <important event>
* feel good factor -- obviously personal Am i working on shiny fluffy things or bombs?
* extrinsic compensation like "clout" or "status" -- Do you think working at google might give you some "cred" or greater viability in the dating pool? that's a form of comp
I'm sure the list goes on an on, hence one reason that seeing Engineer 5 yrs exp, $X comp is too little info to compare what you _should_ be paid, though informative of what you _could_ be paid if you conformed to all the variables of that job .
Considering that there has been a fair amount of collusion to suppress engineer salaries, are you surprised that engineers feel unmotivated? People work harder to hold onto something they value.
Do you have evidence for this? I feel it would be difficult to orchestrate collusion across thousands of private companies especially during our current skilled labor shortage.
What you think is important is seldom actually important to the powers that be.
Underrated point. People should reflect on whether the powers that be might actually know what they are doing. Not always and everywhere, but be open to the possibility.
Anyone who has boiled water understands the difference between the working enough to make steam vs working enough to keep the water hot.
Regardless of how much this made, the OP sold a business and crossed a chasm many find very uncomfortable to cross. Congrats on breaking past the inertia to ship, and then sell; it is truly commendable regardless of the naysayers.
Super interesting. Been reading some Alan Watts lately, and he points out that while you go to "work", you "play" the piano, you don't "work" the piano. You don't "work" basketball, while still expending effort and incurring risk!
Life is like a musical piece. If it were all about getting to the destination, then the best composers would be those with the fastest songs. Play is about the journey, rather than the result.
In this sense, shed-building is somewhere between work and play. The act is enjoyed roughly as much as the product.
Saying "I want to build a shed", is like saying "I want to lose 10 pounds", it is a way to achieve a measurable goal. One where it is easy to see your progress, humans like the constant reward (or reminder).
We live in a world where even if the outcome is measurable, often times, it is not in our control. A shed, the gym, other such "hobbies" are tangible goals with indicators along the way where our influence of control intersects the measurable progress we see. These are essential to sanity, methinks.
I spend a lot of time designing the thing I am trying to build to be spread-out vs built-on-top. This way, I have a big list of fun and interesting problems to solve, after which comes the gluing them back together for the prestige.
In reality, it never quite works out that way - but I still maintain it is a good way to start. Like many have said, it is essential to identify the path by which you multiply engineering as demanded by the needs of the thing you are building.
Many projects can keep that factor to 1, but it has to be about the love of doing it, not the outcome. The minute the outcome is more important, hire, scale and delegate!
This looks like a very fun thing to get into, and I love the idea of being able to help in this new (for me) field. However, thumbing through the issues listed in the GH repo leaves me realizing that there is a bunch of terminology that I would need to catch up on (15% of the stuff feels familiar). Any pointers on what stuff I could read / study that would serve as a nice primer into the terms and ideas being coded and modeled?
Could you leave us a git issue on terminology you don't understand? We've tried to make the documentation in the code to make it clearer to non-biologists what is going on (for example, https://github.com/TimothyStiles/poly/blob/prime/seqhash/seq...), but we're honestly too deep to really understand what is not known and how to explain nicely what is going on. If you could help us with asking naive questions that'd help us write a nice primer (which is very useful, since we'd like to recruit more software engineers rather than biologists).
