> Do you understand how widespread this kind of research is? Literally everyone does this.
One of the main objections I'm seeing from people (in my bubble) isn't that Facebook did this, but that Cornell, UCSF, and PNAS participated in this. Facebook can do this, and while it's unethical it's not illegal. Same goes for manipulative people in your everyday life (let me not tell you about the horrific human being of a girlfriend I once had). The point is that science and the people who purport to carry it out should be held to higher and rigorous ethical standards. If those standards are not met, those people should be excluded from science and their findings ignored. They should not be awarded serious consideration in a journal such as PNAS. That is what is happening here as far as I can see, and while a bit dramatic fashion I think it is correct.
Also, if I may toss my personal interpretation of the research into this... ethics aside, the study is extremely weak, and I honestly don't see how it can be published in such a "good" journal. The effect size was < 0.0001. They hand-wavingly try to explain that this is still significant given the sample size. I'm personally not convinced, at all. Sounds like they needed a positive conclusion out of the study and so they came up with a reason for one. If this landed on my desk for review I would have reject on that alone.
OK, this is interesting. I don't think this is people turning their nose up at it, just because [insert endowing authority here] is somehow seen to have endorsed it. Apparently someone actually did something wrong here...
If it's the case they should be held to a higher standard simply because it was academic research, it's seems like a terribly inconsistent position to take. But if true, then FB walked right into it, and all we can do is shrug.
Ethics committees can and do give the all-clear to experiments that have a negative impact on people, as long as the experimental procedure is generally tight, anonymous, information is well-controlled with little scope for leakage or abuse, and with a potential for a result that is solid and informative enough to be worth the inconvenience or other negative impact.
Silicon Valley and the tech sector is full of adult babies. Watching the twitter reaction to this news (and others) is pretty fascinating. You're all so doom-and-gloom the first second the government tries to regulate something. Let's not discuss the histrionics that come out on other topics. Further, you act like there could be no possible logical reason why these things should be regulated. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of onerous regulation or regulatory capture, but you guys are just a bunch of babies.
I think there should be rules about drones, because I can easily think of several really fucking bad things that could happen if everyone who wants to tinker can just fly their drones around because they've got the money and know how. What happens if Amazon tries to deliver a package, but the software fucks up and the drone flies over the airport (assuming the engineers even thought of that problem in advance)? What happens when multiple business start flying drones around and they start crashing into one another, falling on people, highways, or whatever? I've seen a video where a guy decapitated himself with his gas powered toy helicopter. Are these drones going to be safe if they crash into me, or should I walk around with a shotgun?
We need rules. We don't need onerous rules, but we need rules.
You're absolutely right that there should be regulations. The reaction you are seeing is because the FAA is so behind the times that it hurts. This topic is just now coming into mainstream news, but it's been going on for a long long time.
In 2012, Congress told the FAA to hurry up. Do you know how far behind the FAA had to be for Congress to notice that the FAA wasn't doing their job? Yeah, it's that bad.
I've seen a video where a guy decapitated himself with his gas powered toy helicopter
There are no toy gas powered helicopters. The idea that they are toys are what gets people in trouble in the first place. Even small electric palmtop RC helicopters can cause significant injury if you accidentally fly it toward your face.
>They could have just surveyed users back then to find out where they were screwing up, but in typical Google fashion, that would have involved actually engaging with their users, which Google is borderline allergic to.
Yup. Google never grew out of that phase--the Steve Jobs Phase, I like to call it. Obviously when Google started they knew what users didn't even know they wanted. Efficient search. Great webmail. Etc. But then Google (should have) realized it was a business with customers who aren't always idiots. It did not. It still really hasn't.
So it seems when writing in English for a French audience that using more often "an" would lend "an helping hand" to understanding (by supporting the internal voice)
Northern UK here. "An' istoric" is very common in informal speech, even in the south but more so in these parts, but I wouldn't expect to see it written that way.
I think it's a very valid criticism if your best people (not talking about "most" people, who don't start companies and create new stuff) can easily move to another country (or other state inside the US) and earn WAY more for the same job or skill set.
It's not a valid criticism if the gov. footing 80% allows these companies to now offer SV/NY competitive salaries. Which I suspect will happen if they do it right (both the governement and the entrepreneurs).
>I think it's a very valid criticism if your best people (not talking about "most" people, who don't start companies and create new stuff) can easily move to another country (or other state inside the US) and earn WAY more for the same job or skill set.
I think, what a lot Americans overlook, is that most people in the rest of developed world want more from life than a high salary. Moving from somewhere with the highest standards of living in the world, such as Toronto, to somewhere that doesn't even make the list of top 5/10 in North America alone such as NYC, might come with a salary increase but it's a significant trade off in terms of other factors.
Looks a lot of Canadians have overlooked it too - all but 2 people in my graduating cohort are writing code in the US.
You are welcome to delude yourself into thinking that "real" Canadians don't value a high salary, but in reality it's causing a massive brain out of the country.
Yea, the lesson is: If you find yourself in a situation like that, bail out as fast as you can. When we're young we are often not taught—or more importantly we do not have the opportunity—to simply GTFO of the crappy situation we're in (Family, Bullies, etc.). It has tragic consequences both early in life and later on. It's (one of the reasons) why we get school shooters, why people stay at crappy companies when they don't have to, why people stay in destructive relationships.
Modern society often allows us the freedom to avoid people and situations we can't control but don't want to be in. For the love of god, please take advantage of that.
We are also not taught how to make the decision to GTFO. I've recently had to make such a decision and really had no prior experience to based anything on. It was a completely new experience.
Yes I eventually made the decision to GTFO but it's still lingering in the back of my head if I made the right one.
I've done it multiple times now since I've graduated from college. It makes you uneasy each time and shortly afterwards I definitely questioned myself. But today, I don't regret it one bit.
I think that's probably telling in itself. I've GTFO'd twice; one time was by my own choice, while in the other I had to be helped along by the organization a few months after I failed to follow my sensible instinct to resign. Both times, once I was finally out the door at last, I found myself feeling like a weight had come off my shoulders.
I could be wrong, but I don't see any way it's possible for that feeling to come along with a lurking realization that I'd made a mistake. (Certainly it never has in my experience, at least, and I've made plenty of mistakes.)
If you bail on every company that's dysfunctional and political (that's about 90%, including of startups) you'll probably get stuck with the job-hopper stigma before you find a good company.
Employers get away with horrible conditions and general dysfunction because of the job hopper stigma, but unfortunately, one person leaving bad situations immediately (instead of wasting months to years trying to make lemonade out of piss-lemons) is not going to break that stigma. In fact, it's going to lower your value and make you more likely to end up in dysfunctional companies.
A better strategy is to play the game, well, by learning how to do enough in typical, semi-dysfunctional environments to get career credit, while keeping an eye out for better opportunities. This all-or-nothing attitude that many young people have toward corporations ("if they think that way, then I don't want to work for those losers anyway") doesn't pan out in the real world. Even the good companies have plenty of stupid, political people in them.
The answer to "job-hopper stigma" and any and all other competence-trigger hurdles is simple. Sell the benefit, not the feature.
In other words, change the conversation from "who you are" to "what you can do for them". A track record of accomplishments does a lot more to convince a stake-holder that you know what you're doing than a list of previously-held positions. If all you have is a list of previously-held positions, then sure, if there's more entries on it than years, you'll have a rough go at it. But you don't have to operate this way.
Nobody is unemployable. There are only people who have figured out how to convey competence and people who haven't.
Well. Conveying competence is, indeed, a valuable skill. But the most it can do for you is to get you a seat at the table. What will you do once you've got the job, and it comes time to play the game?
And, while we're at it, why assume that the only possible reward for playing the game is the opportunity to keep playing the game? Isn't it possible that, in playing the game with sufficient skill and artistry, you can create for yourself the opportunity to do the work you joined that company to do?
...to be honest, I really don't know the answer to that last question at all. But it sure is an interesting question, don't you think?
Do your job? I'm having trouble understanding what you're getting at. If you don't like your work environment, then leave. Just don't take six months to figure that out. But really, you should know whether you would like working there before you take the job. It's not that hard to take a few of their current employees out for coffee and ask them what it's like to work there.
Not every job has the insane level of politicking described. Just find a place where you fit in. It exists.
> really, you should know whether you would like working there before you take the job.
My worst work place had an extreme micro-manager of a president. People were fired after working there 15 years on the spot and others their department was under performing for years and years never were let go.
Final straw: Unannounced layoff of 10%. They fired people at their desk all morning and afternoon and did not have an all company meeting till 3:30 pm. The bonus the job had a loop hole and didn't have to pay unemployment tax. So everyone didn't know they did not qualify for unemployment and were left with 2 weeks severance pay and found out they didn't qualify many weeks later after they were denied their unemployment.
Should have known: This was a place I knew intimately for 5+ years. I was friends with most of the staff. I did have coffee with half a dozen people and well made a 10+ year commitment mentally before taking the job left 6 months afterwards on my 4th year of employment. Now I LOVE my job working for Head Start.
Hardly an "insane level of politicking", as you like to put it; in a relatively close parallel early in my career, I cost my contracting firm a moderately lucrative client, and verged closely upon getting us sued, out of the same sort of sheer ignorance, as applied to vulnerability reporting rather than feature improvement.
I mean, sure, it would (possibly) be ideal if everyone in our field simply looked at the technical aspects of everything, without any personal or emotional investment whatsoever. What about your experience on this planet has given you to imagine that it's reasonable to expect any aspect of human life, singly or in the large, to be anywhere near ideal?
I disagree. I work at Google, and I can't imagine getting in trouble for making an unambiguous improvement to someone's code.
There is, of course, some politics. It's just not at the level where people could openly be pissed off just because someone made them look bad by doing better. Politics happens over much more ambiguous things, like what length people from one team should go to to fix bugs affecting another team. These are areas where there are legitimate differences of opinion, so it's only natural that people's biases affect their work.
Virtually all startups are dysfunctional in a variety of new and surprising ways, but I think you can clearly identify the main dysfunctions (or at least, things which won't be addressed) in 50-500 person companies, and figure out how much you care about those factors.
It's probably a lot cheaper to crowd source the solution. You'll get a lot more effort for the money. Crowd sourcing a problem for a prize is a well proven method that's centuries old. Here are some famous examples:
The one improvement would be to crowd-source the challenges and the money. Think KickStarter but participants vote for the projects and donate the prize money.
IMO it's definitely Second-system syndrome. Maps worked fine and didn't need much added/changed, but someone decided that they needed to keep iterating and now we're stuck with all the cludge built on top of it now.
It wasn't iteration. They threw away code and started from scratch. Things you should never do [1].
Several months ago Google releases totally new version of Google Maps. Google Maps consistently stays as a poor product since then. I think that even first version of Google maps (introduced in 2005) was better.
What surprised me more was that the Canary Islands was one of the first markets for IKEA (before 1985). I mean, the Canary Islands before Madrid or New York? WTF? I can only assume they were using as a test market, like Kansas City for Google Fiber, but still... wow!
Well there are a lot of swedish stuff in the Canry islands. It's probably the number one holiday spot for Swedes. Or at least it was back then. Just walking down the beach there you'll hear swedish everywhere. And there are plenty of swedes who owns a house there...
A lot of IKEAs early international expansion was franchisees, so it's probably more a question of someone there was interested in starting a franchise than that IKEA made a conscious decision that it was a market they were interested in.
One of the main objections I'm seeing from people (in my bubble) isn't that Facebook did this, but that Cornell, UCSF, and PNAS participated in this. Facebook can do this, and while it's unethical it's not illegal. Same goes for manipulative people in your everyday life (let me not tell you about the horrific human being of a girlfriend I once had). The point is that science and the people who purport to carry it out should be held to higher and rigorous ethical standards. If those standards are not met, those people should be excluded from science and their findings ignored. They should not be awarded serious consideration in a journal such as PNAS. That is what is happening here as far as I can see, and while a bit dramatic fashion I think it is correct.
Also, if I may toss my personal interpretation of the research into this... ethics aside, the study is extremely weak, and I honestly don't see how it can be published in such a "good" journal. The effect size was < 0.0001. They hand-wavingly try to explain that this is still significant given the sample size. I'm personally not convinced, at all. Sounds like they needed a positive conclusion out of the study and so they came up with a reason for one. If this landed on my desk for review I would have reject on that alone.