I loved Dave Winer’s take on angel investors:
A bunch of guys (they’re almost all men) play at entrepreneurship the way other men play ponies. They’re not going to live the life of the 20-something. They couldn’t, it’s too much stress, and they have lives, and more important they have cash. It’s hard to push that hard when you aren’t betting it all. The young guy (he’s almost always a guy, too) is like a racehorse. The angels all get to hang around the stables, and watch the game closeup.
The other day al3x on Twitter linked to a Seth Godin blog post about structural unemployment. Godin talks about the effects of the changing economy in blunt terms:
The networked revolution is creating huge profits, significant opportunities and a lot of change. What it’s not doing is providing millions of brain-dead, corner office, follow-the-manual middle class jobs. And it’s not going to.
And here’s his prescription:
The sad irony is that everything we do to prop up the last economy (more obedience, more compliance, cheaper yet average) gets in the way of profiting from this one.
What’s clear to me from his post is that he doesn’t have much sympathy for the people whose jobs are being restructured out of existence. He displays a level of callousness that I find to be common among people who work in the technology industry, one often displayed by people who, as Ann Richards said of George Bush, Sr. were born on third base and think they hit a triple.
People need work, regardless of whether their specific skills are as marketable as they once were. The fact that some of us are in professions that continue to be viable or even lucrative and others are in professions that are no longer in demand is attributable mostly to luck. I often tell people that I’m one of the luckiest people in the world. I’m a white man, born in America, whose family placed a high value on education. Lucky. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with computers and the first thing I wanted was a modem so I could get online. Lucky. Did I know when I was a kid that being a computer geek would eventually lead to gainful and happy employment? No. But it has, and I’m very fortunate for that.
The other career I considered was newspaper journalism. Had I taken that path, I’d probably already have been laid off with no prospects for a new job in the same field. Or, even if my job was fine, I’d still be in an industry shedding workers at an alarming rate. It wasn’t strategic thinking that led me to choose software development, it was the realization that I didn’t really like interviewing people.
At this point, if the economy changed and the need for software developers evaporated, I would have no prospect of finding any other job near my current level of compensation. I’ve spent my entire career getting better at building applications to the neglect of nearly every other skill I could have possibly honed. The labor market encourages people to specialize, but the same specialization that yields large rewards in the right markets can put you out of the job market entirely as the economy changes.
The question we face as a society right now is what to do to help out people who’ve lost their jobs and don’t have the opportunity to find a new job that matches their skills. Maybe we need to make people who are over age 55 and have more than 100 weeks of unemployment eligible for Social Security early. Maybe we need to make it easy to get grants to start new businesses for people who are among the long-term unemployed. Maybe we just need to extend unemployment indefinitely. I’m not sure.
As Seth points out, the structural changes in the economy created an awful lot of wealth. If you believe that this is created entirely through foresight and cleverness on the part of those who have reaped the benefits, then your response to structural unemployment is likely to be, “Suck it up,” or more often, just to ignore the actual people who lose their jobs entirely.
There’s no doubt that individual merit plays a part in individual success, but luck plays a part as well. It makes sense to tax the lucky so that we can help the unlucky stay on their feet as the economy transitions. Few people can accurately predict decades in advance which career choices will serve them well for their entire adult life and which will leave them in a lurch before retirement age. Besides, it’s good for society and for the economy when everyone is making the contribution that they can.
Acknowledging the fact that a good portion of the current level of unemployment is a result of structural factors isn’t the end of a conversation, it’s the beginning. And yet, the conversation about what we need to do to help out the victims of economic restructuring is not one I see occurring in the political discourse right now.
Last week I read this essay by Anthony Bourdain for aspiring chefs. In it, he lists all the reasons why going to cooking school is a bad idea. Being a chef may have a more extreme list of downsides than some other careers, but you could make such a list for any profession.
But what I found more interesting was his advice to people who do go to cooking school and want to be great chefs. And that advice is that it’s far more important to work in great kitchens than it is to get paid a living wage. Jobs in the great kitchens of the world are in high demand, and the best way to get them, above and beyond being brilliant, is to be willing to work for nothing or next to nothing. He lists as his great regret that he got a decent paying job right out of cooking school, and that once he’d adjusted his lifestyle to that wage, it was impossible to even consider sacrificing that wage for the opportunity to learn from great chefs.
This advice holds true for people in other professions as well. If you want to reach the top of the legal profession, it’s best to start out with a judicial clerkship. They don’t pay nearly as well as jobs at law firms, but they offer a huge leg up in the legal profession. There are plenty of other examples as well. I’ve heard of the unpaid internships at National Geographic referred to as the world’s finest finishing school.
The bottom line is that just as the prices for food and lodging are highest in the world’s most popular tourist destinations, so too are the wages lowest for positions that matter the most in the pursuit of ambitious career goals.
Bourdain’s article was already on my mind when I read Paul Graham’s article, What Happens At Y Combinator. In it, he explains how the Y Combinator startup incubation process works. Y Combinator’s program is the equivalent of working for a Michelin-starred restaurant in Europe for a newly trained chef. You have to take a few months to live in the Bay Area focusing solely on your startup, and in the end you have hopefully launched a new company. It’s an opportunity best suited to the young and hungry, not the old and complacent.
That’s true for working at startups in general. I’m not talking about small businesses that have enough revenue to hire experienced people and pay them a competitive salary, but startups that demand insane sacrifices from their employees and can’t really afford to pay very much. The only people who can take that on are those who have already been successful enough to live off their savings, or more frequently, young people who don’t have a mortgage, a car payment, or familial responsibilities.
People who get out of college and wind up with a job developing software at a big company rarely wind up working at startups later on. Once you get used to the lifestyle afforded by stable employment at a company that pays well and is run in some sort of sane, structured fashion, it gets harder and harder to make the leap into the craziness that is a startup.
Bourdain’s advice applies for any field. The seemingly risky choices you make early in your career aren’t really risky. The stakes are lower than you think and the potential rewards are as great as they can ever possibly be.
Kwame Anthony Appiah lists three criteria for evaluating whether a current practice will be condemned by future generations:
First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn’t emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries.
Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, ‘We’ve always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?’)
And third, supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them to face the evils in which they’re complicit. Those who ate the sugar or wore the cotton that the slaves grew simply didn’t think about what made those goods possible. That’s why abolitionists sought to direct attention toward the conditions of the Middle Passage, through detailed illustrations of slave ships and horrifying stories of the suffering below decks.
Click on the link to see which four current practices he sees as likely to be condemned in the future.
Remember how people made fun of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for banning Blackberries because RIM refused to allow them to control and monitor their users’ online activities? Well, the Obama administration is going to submit a bill that would require RIM and every other company providing communications software to include loopholes that enable the US to tap into them as well.
A legal mandate that requires peer-to-peer communications to be subject to monitoring will essentially kill it off. Likewise, software that uses public key encryption in the client would also have to be fundamentally changed in order to comply.
And, of course, people with a clue will always be able to encrypt their communications so that they can’t be easily monitored, through the use of open source software that can be made illegal but can’t be eradicated.
The New York Times article linked above is very good, and covers most of the obvious problems with this legislation. You should also read Glenn Greenwald’s post on the subject.
What really irritates me about this is that the Obama administration is supposed to be more technically savvy and pragmatic than its predecessors. I’m sure there are plenty of smart people in the administration who know everything there is to know on this topic. So why push for this legislation? I have a theory, but I’m not even going to bother to write it up, because it’s not important. This legislation is an obviously bad idea and wandering around in the forest of systems theory doesn’t change that. As an activist, my role in the system is to attack the government for taking action that I disagree with. I’ll leave the role of government apologist for other people.
Update: Be sure to read Declan McCullagh’s take on the proposed legislation.
In a post discussing the value of liberal arts education, Tyler Cowen talks about why he’s interested in food:
I am interested in food (among other topics), not only because of the food itself. I also view it as an investment in understanding symbolic meaning, cultural codes of excellence, the transmission of ideas, and also how the details of an area fit together to form a coherent whole. I believe this knowledge makes me smarter and wiser, although I am not sure which mass-produced formal test would pick up any effects. I view this interest as continuing my liberal arts education, albeit through self-education.
Ricardo “Mr.doob” Cabello headed up the programming behind the amazing Arcade Fire interactive video The Wilderness Downtown, which was built using HTML5 and JavaScript. He’s documented how the video was made on his blog, and it’s worth reading for JavaScript hackers. A few years ago, I worked on a project that replaced a Flash-based promotional application for a health insurance company with a version built using JavaScript and HTML. The end result wound up being pretty decent, but my main impression at the end was that it was a ton of work for results that fell short of the original Flash application in terms of dynamic impact. I attribute their more impressive results to the fact that they didn’t have to deal with Internet Explorer 6. Hat tip, Webmonkey.
Anil Dash writes about the culture of forking in the open source world, and how the introduction of Git changed that culture. Before Git, forking could just as well have been called secession. After Git, forking is seen as a healthy form of participation.
What I find interesting about this is that Linus Torvalds didn’t set out to change the culture of open source software when he created Git. He was trying to efficiently manage the work being done on the Linux kernel.
Linux kernel development is (or at least was) handled differently than most other large projects. Linus approves all of the code changes that go into the official kernel releases. Below him, there are a number of lieutenants who each have their own branches and their own approval process. In order for your code to make it into the official kernel, your change has to be accepted into one of those other branches. Below those, there can be any number of other branches as well.
In order to support this style of work, a source code management system was needed that would make it easy to push changes in all directions. The lower level branches need to easily pick up all of the changes that are accepted into the official branch, and people at the lower levels needed a way to push their changes up the chain to whatever branch was used to create their branch. Furthermore, nobody wanted to be dependent on a single centralized server that would host all of this work.
As it turns out, Git satisfied a lot of other people’s needs as well, but originally it was created to scratch a very specific itch.
Paul Krugman and Robin Wells assess the various explanations for what caused the financial crisis and come to their own conclusions in a piece for the New York Review of Books. They also take a stab at explaining why the recovery has been so lackluster. It won’t surprise you to learn that they see the poor recovery as being caused by a lack of demand driven by people paying off debt at every level of the economy, and that continued deficit spending by the government is the only thing that will see us through. Despite other explanations, it seems pretty obvious at this point that lack of demand is what’s slowing recovery, and that the real debate is over whether it’s preferable for governments to spend more money and risk inflation down the road, or to let more people suffer because they don’t have jobs right now.
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Content management is still an unsolved problem
Content management remains an unsolved problem. Untold billions of dollars (and hours) have been spent building commercial, open source, and custom content management systems since the first Web page was pushed to a Web server using FTP, and yet they all still suck.
Former Salon editor Scott Rosenberg ruminates on the fact that TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington lists frustration with technology as one of the reasons he’s happy to be selling TechCrunch to AOL. That doesn’t surprise me.
I’ve worked on many content management projects in the past, and to be honest, I’d be perfectly happy if I never worked on another one again. For some reason, finding an adequate balance between usability, flexibility, and performance is nearly impossible.
When building content management systems there are two options. You can base your work on an existing system which is just inflexible enough to make your life a living hell on a daily basis, or you can build something from scratch and spend a large amount of time repeatedly reinventing the wheel. Frameworks like Rails and Django make it a lot easier to reinvent the wheel, but you still can’t escape the fact that you’re spending time creating forms that enable users to enter content that will be inserted in a database so that it can be presented on a Web page.
That’s why it’s hard to find competent engineers to work on content management systems for publishing companies.