You can get by just skipping to the yellow-highlighted pages. They're 1-2 page How To's or summaries. Like a checklist of the stuff to put in your Go Bag.
2. Talk to different types of people about parenting and make notes about what's most important to you.
Don't leave out older people. Despite the mass amount of new literature about how to raise kids, being a parent hasn't changed that much in 2 generations.
Easy to skip to just the chapters you want to learn about. E.g. if you end up needing/wanting genetic testing, you could read that chapter and nothing else.
The economics can be interesting. For me to own a car means I have to pay $300/month anyways, just to be able to park it in my apartment building. After considering the cost of ownership (insurance, maintenance, gas, etc), I decided it wasn't worth it.
> There is a very strong individualist streak in American culture and a very strong taboo against lending friends or family members money
I think the individualist streak in American culture is better shown by people being unwilling to seek help from friends/family. I might call an unwillingness to help others (assuming one can afford to do so) selfishness -- not individualism. But what I have seen in American is, as you said, individualism: People are prideful and want to create wealth without help.
An interesting clarification: People will more readily accept help from strangers -- e.g. a Kickstarter campaign, bank loan, or VC investment doesn't diminish one's pride in the way that the same support from someone's parents might.
There's talk elsewhere in this article's comments here about the "killer feature" that these Indian Americans have. I would argue that the true killer feature is not even access to zero-interest capital. It's a culture that actively fights against pride and individualism.
There are surely tradeoffs, but it's hard to deny the power that can come from children and adults alike all looking to family for help... and seeing that help not as something which diminishes their power but rather as something that bolsters it.
> a Kickstarter campaign, bank loan, or VC investment doesn't diminish one's pride in the way that the same support from someone's parents might.
I don't think it's about pride at all. I think it's about face (something most Americans don't even have a word for, but which is very relevant in this case.)
Americans don't want to give face to anyone, ever. They don't want anyone to have social power over them. When an individual loans you money—or, even worse, gifts you money—you're giving them a ton of face in exchange. Americans find that idea horrifying. It's like signing up for indentured servitude, except—since it's a social rather than legal obligation—you can't even get out of it by declaring bankruptcy! (See: the way "favours" are portrayed in The Godfather movies, for an image of the American mindset on what owing someone a favour / being in someone's debt is like.)
Bank loans and VC investments are better precisely because they're legal rather than social obligations, so you can get out of them (or, say, sell them off to someone else along with the business.) And Kickstarter is better because no single individual is responsible for enough of the loan to actually attain much social-obligatory power over you in exchange. You're maybe beholden to your Kickstarter backers as a class, but you aren't scared to talk to any individual one of them for thought of what they might ask of you.
More to the point, you can never get out of the debt you incur, no matter what you do for the rest of your life. It's not just about the debt one incurs, it's about the one providing the debt and what they expect, lifelong admiration, respect, and deference. I've had insane requests and expectations demanded by family members for really small "gifts" before. Because of that I'd say that the social interest costs are too high for many Americans to be able to accept anything.
> See: the way "favours" are portrayed in The Godfather movies, for an image of the American mindset on what owing someone a favour / being in someone's debt is like.
Maybe not that extreme, but yeah, it's too easy to get guilted into something because you've become socially indebted by something large.
It's not even about being able to get out of it, like you mention afterwards with a legal exchange, it's about the exchange being forced to continue out of a mixture of guilt, politeness, and social pressure in general, simply because you don't want to accidentally kill the personal relationship.
> I think the individualist streak in American culture is better shown by people being unwilling to seek help from friends/family. I might call an unwillingness to help others (assuming one can afford to do so) selfishness -- not individualism.
It's not just practicing individualism, but insisting on it. People don't help others partly because they tell themselves that the person needs to make their own way. It is ultimately a justification for selfishness, but the justification is individualism. And I suspect many people who would otherwise not be too proud to ask for help still won't because they perceive that this is a prominent idea in American culture.
> An interesting clarification: People will more readily accept help from strangers -- e.g. a Kickstarter campaign, bank loan, or VC investment doesn't diminish one's pride in the way that the same support from someone's parents might.
I think that goes back to the same point. Those routes are branded as entrepreneurship, which is like +10 individualism points. If I asked my rich uncle for a loan, he (and many other people) would perceive this as dependency and therefore vaguely shameful. If I took out a bank loan, even though it's technically the same action, those same people would perceive it as an admirable show of entrepreneurial initiative.
While I completely see your point about the negative side of individualism, I think this attitude is also partly based on a very culturally healthy distaste for nepotism.
When you ask your rich uncle for a loan, it's hard for both him and you to really know whether it's being given because he believes in you, or because there is perceived to be an obligation. And where there is an obligation to give loans/favors just based on familial ties, it's a slippery slope to a culture of nepotism and corruption where your name matters more than your skills and accomplishments.
I'm not saying that relatives shouldn't help each other, but perhaps it's not such a bad thing that people seek out other avenues first in non-emergency situations. It's a delicate balance to be sure.
I think it's much deeper than "individualist streak in American culture".
Western Europe in the last 1000 years or so has been a very unusual place... one aspect of which is having nuclear families not extended ones. Because (crudely speaking) the catholic church wished to diminish alternative power structures, such as clans. This led to an unusually open society, which had many benefits... with generally higher levels of trust among strangers.
But it has some costs, too. Like not having tight connections for bootstrapping motels in a foreign land.
Unless you have some references, I'd call this a "nice theory" (to be read with a British accent).
Spontaneously:
* South America appeared to be more catholic than any Western European or US-American place I've visited, but family and extended family are still a big thing.
* Calvinists seem to be much more "open" than catholics to me.
* Damn, I want the secret recipe that lets me set a policy and enforce it in vast areas (at times without any reliable messenger system) and across many generations, even if my successor comes from a different faction within the catholic church.
The fairly solid part here is that the west is different, and my understanding is that the divergence in things like family/clan structures dates to early medieval times, in a zone something like London-to-Milan, core europe. Something changed, long before 1500.
The peripheral was different, e.g. Scotland had strong clans until they got kicked out (to Ulster, and thence Appalachia...). And Spain wasn't even christian at this point in time.
That the church did it is less clear, I agree. There are economic arguments too. I guess I'm persuaded that things like suppressing cousin marriage had something to do with it. I'm certainly not suggesting that there's some essential magic attached to the pope! It was core europe that invented Protestantism too... at the same time as Cortez & co were taking the reconquistia to the Incas, with the pope's blessing but a very different culture.
Extended family may be a thing in Western Europe and derived cultural areas but clans are not. Descent based political groupings are for backwoods peasants at best, not the commanding heights of the polity, unlike every other meta cultural grouping.
The recipe for setting and enforcing a policy over vast areas of time and space is incentive compatibility. It is always in the interest of one powerful political group to make coordinated action against it more difficult. The Catholic Church had a strong incentive to break up extended kin groups and they did. It was possible to get dispensations for royalty and the peasantry mostly did whatever it wanted. Keeping up the same policy for over a thousand years was enough to make Western Europe and especially Northwestern Europe uniquely atomised in human history.
If you want an academic source look below. Frost basically took what blogger hbdchick had been writing about for years, did a review article on it and didn’t cite her. http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/
The Hajnal Line and Gene-Culture Coevolution in Northwest Europe Peter Frost
He would have tipped his hand as a purveyor of speculative, just-so, white-supremacist garbage, if he'd cited her. Also, there is nothing in that paper to support your claim about the policies of the Catholic Church.
If you’re the Alex who writes Yorkshire Ranter congratulations on an excellent and long maintained blog.
If you want to know more about the policies of the Catholic Church on marriage of relatives the Wikipedia article on cousin marriage is quite good and well referenced if you want to go from there.
> First and second cousin marriages were then banned at the Council of Agde in AD 506, though dispensations sometimes continued to be granted. By the 11th century, with the adoption of the so-called canon-law method of computing consanguinity, these proscriptions had been extended even to sixth cousins, including by marriage. But due to the many resulting difficulties in reckoning who was related to whom, they were relaxed back to third cousins at the Fourth Lateran Council in AD 1215. Pope Benedict XV reduced this to second cousins in 1917,[22] and finally, the current law was enacted in 1983.
The Church’s justification for banning cousin marriage has no scriptural basis. If St. Augustine's justification for banning relatives from marrying isn’t evidence in favour of what I wrote I don’t know what is.
> Whatever the reasons, written justifications for such bans had been advanced by St. Augustine by the fifth century. "It is very reasonable and just", he wrote, "that one man should not himself sustain many relationships, but that various relationships should be distributed among several, and thus serve to bind together the greatest number in the same social interests".
As to “speculative, just so, white-supremacist” Science is generally built on a base of speculation, which researchers then attempt to disprove. Hypothesis falsification and all that. Just so stories is a common insult thrown against evolutionary psychology researchers but far from universally justified. Given the high degree of fit between the model Snow proposes and the evidence it certainly isn’t justified here.
> Just so stories is a common insult thrown against evolutionary psychology researchers but far from universally justified.
If it's not verifiable even in principle, it's useless from a scientific perspective. And it just happens to be a theory telling white people why they're genetically disposed to morally superiority, which is highly suspicious, coming from a white guy.
> Given the high degree of fit between the model Snow proposes and the evidence it certainly isn’t justified here.
You're not taking the enormous hypothesis space into account. This is not a compelling fit, by any means.
I’m neither a behaviour geneticist nor an evolutionary psychologist, merely an interested amateur so if I can think up ways to test these hypotheses I’m sure actual experts can do better.
We’re learning more and more about the genetic underpinnings of personality traits and getting betterat extracting ancient DNA. It’s also trivial to compute indices of relatedness between two people if you have either a full genotype or just SNPs. If the personality traits associated with WEIRD populations are highly correlated with declines in inbreeding it’s not proof of the hypothesis but it makes it more likely. We don’t have proof outside of Math anyway, Science is about more or less likely.
If you want to learn more about Evolutionary Psychology the Oxford Handbook is excellent and it’s on libgen.io. The introduction is only about 60 pages and addresses the most common and uncommon criticisms ably.
If you think that being unusually individualistic and unfamilistic is morally superior that’s a personal preference you are of course free to indulge.
The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama, which has a pretty long section about how the Catholic Church in medieval Europe worked really hard to break up the power of clans. (It is one reason why they forced priests to become celebate.)
Along the same lines see History of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church by Henry Lea.
South America's conversion to Catholicism came long after this period was largely over.
Family & extended family in Western Europe and the US is nothing like it is in some other places in the world. Do you -- and 50 other descendents -- take a plane trip every year to go to your grandfather's grave 1,000 miles away to pray to him on the anniversary of the day he died for good luck? We do that here.
By Calvinists I assume you are referring to Protestants? Or are you actually referring to Calvinistic Protestants? Just curious, outside of Christian circles and history I don't think I have ever seen someone reference Calvinists.
Might be different in the US, in Europe it's not too uncommon to talk about calvinists, particularly in certain countries like the Netherlands it's a well-established term (which is even used there to describe Dutch behavioral culture, because it's deemed to be so fitting), and separate from other forms of protestantism.
There are several things wrong with this line of thinking (as others have pointed out), but I'd like to draw attention to a less salient point you made:
> This led to an unusually open society, which had many benefits... with generally higher levels of trust among strangers.
It's interesting that you're portraying the openness of European society in a strongly positive light, given the high levels of abject loneliness prevalent primarily in the west.
Communal living has been a staple for much of human existence, the level of isolation most people in western Europe and North America (and now, much of east Asia) face is a direct result of European "openness" (which spread through east Asia via the British originally, and destabilization + American media later).
The biggest risk to the future of the West is the lack of strong families. That's where India, above all others, shines.
I agree that the extreme individualist end of the spectrum has downsides, for sure. Suicide rates make horrifying reading. But I think you can argue it's part of what made the west successful -- in HN terms, being forced to learn to deal with strangers, a lot, set you up to scale well.
Isn't the flip side of being on the other end of this scale -- tight happy families, or clans, maybe even castes -- something close to nepotism? Stagnation because once you've employed all your nephews then you can't grow, who would you trust?
Of course there are a million other factors etc too... anyway.
This is true. Since the article talks about Patels. Back in India after holding powerful position in politics, administration etc for long time in Gujarat, Patels are lately agitating violently to be declared "backward caste". So that they can be entitled for more government support in jobs, education etc.
It's because it's not. Literally all the cultures in which Catholicism thrives are those in which the extended family is paramount. My very large very Catholic very Indian family actively rails against the individualism of secular American culture. As do my Philipino friends who also have very close families. As do my Hispanic family and friends who also have very close families. As do my African friends who also have close extended families.
Literally the biggest group embracing individualism from my perspective are secular white people and mainstream protestants.
I'll stop now, but my church claim was only that the medieval church had a hand in changing the culture, in places which are now mostly protestant or atheist. The places which the post-reformation catholic church has thrived are indeed pretty different.
The dogma of Catholicism did not destroy the clan structure in Europe, though it was certainly used by those who did. It was the humans running the church, who had particular political objectives relevant to the time and place which are not necessarily anything like the political objectives of the people involved with the church these days.
No one here is making the argument that Catholicism cannot exist alongside close extended families, so your objection to the argument that is being made falls completely flat.
I think of the nuclear family more as an invention of 20th century ad campaigns. It’s a lot harder to sell mom cooking and cleaning products when she has help from an extended family.
Many people thought this, e.g. it was assumed in Victorian England that the past looked a lot like the present of less-developed countries, like Russia.
> Because (crudely speaking) the catholic church wished to diminish alternative power structures, such as clans. This led to an unusually open society, which had many benefits... with generally higher levels of trust among strangers.
Oh please... Indian Catholic families still act in extended structures. I mean, three of my uncles are priests and one is a bishop. We've been Christian for thousands of years. We're still part of an overbearing, very close, very extended Indian family.
The ruining of European culture can be traced solely back to issues in European culture. Let's stop blaming the church for things that Europe brought upon itself.
To be clear, my claim above is that the church, as a centralising power structure in "christaindom" circa 1000AD, played some role in pushing the culture there towards openness, or in making extended families less important.
Claiming that christianity always and everywhere does this would be pretty obviously wrong, and I did not say this. And indeed even within europe today, catholic-ness is anti-correlated with this kind of "openness" -- because the core relevant for this has long since gone protestant or atheist.
I hold this claim weakly. There are other arguments for what happened. But regardless of why, my main point was that Europe (and especially a core area) was an outlier on this universalist/clannish scale. And that both ends have advantages, depending on the situation.
But still this doesn't make sense, as Latin America was converted in the 1500s, well after the 1000 AD change that you claim occurred. Latin America, despite having 500 years for Catholicism to settle in, is still really big into the extended family.
I think a better explanation is the Protestant reformation weakened the idea that any person should subjugate their own personal individual desires for the greater good, with its emphasis on an individual quest for truth, an idea which has now permeated western culture. This makes sense with what I've experienced of non-European Catholicism, which mostly just finds Protestantism bizzare and confusing.
> I think the individualist streak in American culture is better shown by people being unwilling to seek help from friends/family.
And our families are, cross-culturally, unusually small. I talk to my parents every few weeks. Not so much my aunts and uncles. I have a few cousins who I see every fifth Christmas or so, and anyone more distant than that may as well be unrelated. This seems to be common within American culture, but it leads to weak social networks - unless you go to the right college and can network there.
I think dispersion plays into this. I could hardly live farther from my aunts/uncles/cousins if I tried (living within this country) and the same could be said for a large number of them. It's a lot harder to stay in touch at a distance. I guess given social media you might say it's easier to stay in touch when close.
Generally my American friends and family never ask for money to fund good ideas. The people asking for money are people who are asking me to throw money at things that won't produce more money(i.e. they don't have a plan for spending it wisely, have shown poor financial judgement in the past, etc).
My friend and his wife just had one of their cars stop working and they both need cars to make money. They are in debt and need to work. There's no way my friend will ask, but I will probably find a way to help them. My niece has no problem hitting up my parents for money for her latest crazy investment scheme after demonstrating several poor choices and a lack of business and financial judgement.
> There is a very strong individualist streak in American culture and a very strong taboo against lending friends or family members money for any reason.
I agree with the individualist streak, but the second part is pretty much untrue of anyone I've met in the upper plain states. Helping to bootstrap you friends and family is part of the culture.
> There's talk elsewhere in this article's comments here about the "killer feature" that these Indian Americans have. I would argue that the true killer feature is not even access to zero-interest capital. It's a culture that actively fights against pride and individualism.
I think the true killer app is family cooperation as a unit in conjunction with a deep network of relatives. My father built his business with the help of his parents, his aunt, and two other cousins who lent him money. Without their help, he couldn't have built the business as fast and as big as he did. His brother also worked for him a bit as well as some of the cousins when he was building his first shop. My mother helped him and once she had me and my brother stayed at home and took care fo the home front even though she had a masters degree. And it appears his generation along with my mothers was the last hurrah of big family ties and help as everyone in my generation up and left. I have no cousins, uncles or aunts who are close. They all did their own thing, went to school and moved away. I see them from time to time, maybe once or twice a year and that's it. Hell, even my mother has all sorts of stories about how here massive Irish family (grandma was one of 12 kids) pulled together to help each other with everything.
Contrast that with my Guyanese friend who has a seemingly never ending supply of helpful family members all in the same neighborhood. His father built himself a small real estate empire of about a dozen rental properties and most of his generation are college educated. His father started out doing handyman and light construction work with his brothers. They all chipped in and worked. Some even had a day job and came to the properties at night to work on them. One by one they fixed and flipped homes using money and labor they pooled together. Then they started buying, fixing and renting. They acted as a small family army, cooperatively building each others future.
The American family has been here long enough to thin and die whereas these foreign families are still "fresh" to America and working hard to make a good life. But they too will one day suffer the same fate. Subsequent generations won't have to work as hard as they are already comfortable. Little by little they will spread out, move away, and their once mighty army is no more. From my perspective as a true 3rd gen American (all G-Grandparents came from Europe around the same time) is that by the third generation, there are no more cultural roots. And family is culture so family dissolves as well. My mother and father were the last to really care and my father was very meh about his Polish heritage. My mother was adamant, keeping traditions alive for as long as possible but the local family thinned out as the rest moved away. She is probably the last to really care about family and cultural roots which bound the early immigrants, and their children.
At the end of the article, the author explains how "once a good developer recognizes his/her own value, [she turns] to either an individualist-mercenary mindset or a collectivist guild-like mindset."
He elaborates on the "guild-like mindset":
> The other kind of developer turns to guild-like structures, which serve as centers of balance-of-power politics in the constant wars against the developer-capitalists. Except that instead of taking on the dynamics of class warfare along an upper-lower dimension, the conflict takes the form of exit warfare along an inside-outside dimension. Rather than form a union to negotiate with management, the talented developer will simply exit a situation he/she does not like, and use guild-like resources to move to a better situation. Stock options are simply not as effective in limiting mobility as the power of Russian nobility to whip serfs into immobility once was.
I've tried to make sense of what that means, but I'm lost in the balance-of-power, upper-lower/inside-outside, and guild references. If someone has a moment, could they please explain this paragraph in clearer terms? Perhaps as a basic narrative of what a guild-minded developer would do when she recognizes her value?
In political science, a fairly well-known basic idea is that the two ways to dissent are exit and voice. Exit means you leave and go somewhere else, and was common in early political eras when most civilizations were small and surrounded by plenty of nomadic/lawless regions to retreat to. As populations increased, voice (i.e. protest, class warfare etc.) became increasingly common. The classic reference on this is "Exit, Voice and Loyalty" by Albert O. Hirschman. It's been on my reading list for a while.
For developers, it is swinging back towards exit, since the Internet can be considered a kind of virtual equivalent of the nomad regions to retreat to.
"Center-periphery" dynamics is the common term in geopolitics for dissent dynamics driven by movement inside/outside a core. Class warfare is the better known kind of dissent involving unionization etc. and involves fighting up and down a class structure.
Guilds, historically, were a medieval kind of institution that had characteristics of both exit and voice. The classic guild professions (weaving, masonry and in more recent times, things like typesetting in pre-lithography days) used their portable skills to leave kingdoms/cities and move elsewhere if they didn't like their current situation. This option was not really available to laborers tied to the land, and was essentially an urban phenomenon. This is the origin of the term "journeyman" for instance... apprentices who would follow master craftsmen around until they became masters in their own right.
This is the origin of the term "journeyman" for instance... apprentices who would follow master craftsmen around until they became masters in their own right.
No, that's not right. When an apprentice finished their apprenticeship, they would usually have to leave their master's service. The openings for masters would be fixed per town by the guild, so journeymen would work itinerantly until they found an opening to become a master. Journeymen would work for a series of masters, and their relationship to these masters was entirely different to the relationship of apprentices.
The status of journeyman became institutionalised, so that the criterion for taking up a mastership was that one had travelled widely enough as a journeyman for some length of time and had crafted a masterpiece.
I've never heard of the idea of guilds organising flights: I should think that master guildsmen had more to lose than agricultural laborers from relocation. Perhaps if several guilds coordinated, it could be less than massively destructive. Where did you get this idea?
It may help to know that while journeyman and journey come from the same French word, journée (meaning, essentially, day), that journeyman simply means someone who is entitled to charge a day rate for his work. (Masters were the "contractors" of their day; they were paid for the project, and apprentices got to eat -- they usually paid for the privilege.)
Yes, the guild system and town laws often made the journeyman itinerant, but it wasn't travel that put the "journey" in "journeyman".
Don't quite recall, but I think it was from a book about cathedral builders or something. But I'll admit my knowledge of medieval guilds is largely superficial and drawn from books where it was a side issue rather than the main topic. Your description sounds like you know what you're talking about. Got any good references (books, not articles) worth reading to get a clearer idea of how guild economies worked?
I'm not an expert: I spent a bit of time about ten years ago researching the topic, back when there was a lot of talk about guild structures being appropriate to software development.
One man’s superficial parallel is another’s thought-provoking analogy. I think a lot of what Venkat says loses substance – or even falls apart – under scrutiny, but I keep reading, because another lot of it hits on some key insights.
This is a style of writing that should be valued more for the questions it raises than for the ones it answers. As another example, take Marshall McLuhan; much if not most of what McLuhan says in e.g. Understanding Media is somewhere between flimflam and complete bullshit... but the mode of thought starts the wheels turning, and some otherwise solid seeming cultural assumptions are questioned at their core... and at the end I’m really glad I spent the time reading it.
Perhaps. But the danger of clean, attractive, reductionist metaphors and analogies is that the general public -- including decisionmakers in the business world -- tend to reify the analogies, and treat them like immutable laws of physics.
Witness, for instance, the rise and fall (and rise again?) of "The Long Tail." As a concept, the long tail certainly applies to some businesses. But not to all, and not nearly as successfully as the concept's author once claimed. But the business world was frenzied with long-tail fever for years on end. "Long tail" became the buzz-phrase of the day, even in companies for whom the concept made no sense whatsoever. People with no understanding of the underlying principles could, nevertheless, grasp the surface-layer metaphor -- and, in so doing, assume that they understood the whole thing. That's a dangerous mindset.
So there's a sort of Faustian bargain in all of this. Appending a nice metaphor on top of a concept increases the likelihood that the concept will be disseminated, talked about, and taken up. But, at the same time, it invites intellectual laziness and fads of half-baked thought.
I totally agree. The problem here is not the creation of these metaphors though, but their elaboration and reception. And the bigger problem is that we already carry around so many obsolete or suboptimal cultural concepts without subjecting them to scrutiny despite changed social circumstances or improved technology. I think continuously trying to both (a) collect granular data by immersing ourselves in its context so we can sniff out bad aggregate explanations and (b) come up with new metaphors for what we see is essential – the former keeps us honest, and the latter extends our mental reach.
As you say, the problem is just grasping the surface metaphor without examining the details. For myself, I like having the surface metaphors as a way of storing and communicating ideas, because once I’ve established that someone has a deep understanding of a concept, I can talk about it at a high level with a high data transmission rate.
These clean and crisp ideas are dangerous if you just repeat them (news stories, cocktail parties, management retreats), but not if you use them as a way to evaluate your other ideas, plans and so on.
I do agree completly with how annoying these things get, like your long tail example, when repeated so often.
Rather than move the mountain by unionizing and forcing big employers to pay up, skilled and connected developers can simply go around the mountain and disappear to the slightly better job down the street. As long as you are wired into a community of talented developers (and perhaps willing to relocate) you will have options. Spending years trying to "fix" a BigCo IT group from the bottom up is not likely to be the most rewarding use of a talented dev's time.
Based on the other replies (which I greatly appreciate - thank you), I think I have a better understanding of the paragraph. I was particularly interested in understanding the author's distinction between individualistic and guild-minded developers. It seems to me that he is suggesting the following:
When a developer find herself working in a company that undervalues her, she will typically react one of two ways:
1. "Individualistically": Such developers might begin by bargaining for better terms at their company, but they are quick to leave the company to 1) consult, 2) join/found a startup, or (following way in the distance) 3) join another company. Individualistic developers invest time in learning new technologies to stay current, because their ability to be so mobile exists primarily because they can work in such varied environments. These developers still seek large windfalls, so they "hedge their bets" - taking high-risk jobs more often than most people. Individualistic developers are probably younger than other kinds of developers.
2. "Guild-Minded-ly": Such developers will respond to workplace injustice by leveraging their connections to find another job - probably at a company with similar specifications to the one they are leaving. A guild-minded developer might be an ex-Google employee who - over the years - has built relationships with people at Microsoft and Facebook. In order of preference, such developers seek jobs with 1) another company, 2) a startup, 3) themselves (consulting). Stock options are less effective at retaining guild-minded talent, because they are not as concerned with large windfalls. Guild-minded developers are probably older than individualistic developers, and they also probably want to stay at a job for longer.
The above is probably not a 100% accurate representation of what the author was trying to say. But if it is, I don't much care for it.
While it's true that some of us are more likely to work for ourselves, or tend to be risk-averse, or desire long-term relationships with a company, I don't think the author's division of mindsets encapsulates these motivations.
There also seems to be a lot of overlap between his divisions: Both sets of developers are active in the community (individualistic developers via open-source, and guild-minded developers via whatever a guild is - and probably via open-source, too); both developers are very mobile despite attempts to retain them; and both groups supposedly represent highly talented ("10X") developers as opposed to average ("1X") developers.
I found the article interesting - though I'll need time to digest it and form an opinion. But his decision to close with an articulation of this division is strange. It seems tangential to the larger point, which is that good developers (of whatever group) are important.
It's quite funny because a group of my friends used to call ourselves the mercenaries because we had no loyalty to any existing company, and would leave in a heartbeat if the project was doomed or a bad manager was drafted in.
But there was also an element of guild behaviour in that anyone who found themselves in a good project/company tended to bring in others.
I think this is what the author was trying to convey, and the article does a fairly good job of providing information from and insiders prospective, even if it does objectify developers. I think most developers move between the two, what you stated seems to be very normal and 10x'ers seem to pick up other 10x'ers along their way. I have about 8 guys in my (guild) now and we float in between contracts and start-ups. I am working on funding of our next venture and I will be calling them in. When I do, they will come and that is very hard for someone on the outside to understand. Our dynamics work very different than other industries and it is very hard for people outside of it to understand. That is probably the think that I think made Steve Job's so formidable was his understanding of the dynamics of creative employees.
I think you hit the nail on the head already with the first part of this paragraph:
>>While it's true that some of us are more likely to work for ourselves, or tend to be risk-averse, or desire long-term relationships with a company [...]
Basically, developers with more of a mercenary mindset are more willing to work for themselves, while developers with a more guild-like disposition tend to be more risk-averse and/or desire long(er) term relationships with a company.
Both groups definitely overlap in terms of their achievements and community involvement. But how they see themselves in the market, and more importantly how they react to changing conditions, seems to be the primary distinction between the two.
Being a Forbes article and the general audience that the author seems to be writing for, I doubt that much of this is anything new for a HN audience. However, it's probably a good radar ping/wake-up call for the more general audience.
tl;dr Polarizing divisions make it easier for people to retain information.
Some of the posted samples were interesting. The one from Rebecca Baxter (http://www.behance.net/gallery/Infographic-CV-Resume/1175821) was the most interesting for me, since it offered ideas I might actually use. She seemed interested in discovering new ways of presenting her information usefully. Most of the rest seem like they were just motivated by a desire to be different.
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Note for miller_f:
On my 13" MacBook, your website's design is confusing.
The Info section on the left contains the title of the blog post, but it's pushed down partly below the fold. It took me "forever" to figure out that it's the post's title.
Then the Post section in the middle begins with a 280px-square ad, which pushes almost everything but the first header of your post below the fold. And since that header isn't the post title, it doesn't instantly register that the post is even there.
Finally, I think it's a symptom of poor design that you need text which literally points to the "Post" section.
Totally agree. I pan a bunch of these in a comment below, but Rebecca's is clear, simple, and appealing. The pie chart is unclear (as always), but the timeline + written experience combination is excellent. I would definitely invite her for an interview.
I love this, and I'll use it - and I've already told everyone I know about it. And I'm very excited to see how you build on the product. To that end, here's why this app doesn't - for me - solve the main problem of remembering music:
When I'm listening to the radio in the car, I'll use Shazam to identify a song. But the process of sending myself that song information for future reference is far too involved (and unsafe while driving).
So what I really want is a Simple Shazam: As soon as it identifies a song, it emails me the information. Otherwise I never remember to check Shazam for all the music I want to buy later.
I haven't looked into the feasibility of the above - except to discover that many other people wish there was an API of sorts for identifying music.
I don't know if the above is a pain point for you or others as well; but I figure if anyone would understand the need for Simple Shazam, it's you.
Thanks! We actually totally understand what you are saying. We have looked at both Shazam and Sound Hound (both top music recognition apps) but see not trace of a public API any time soon. However, we built this app in hopes to just see if people will use it as a tool. If we gain a large enough user base we will start investing in building our own recognition engine, but hopefully by then something public will be available.
In regards to that specific pain point, I do believe we understand that. It is def something that occurs when you are listening to a song in the car or have no idea what the name of the song is but you really want to know and download it later. We will do our best to provide a solution!
I became a dad 17 months ago. I would do both 1 & 2 if possible, and 3 if you feel like it. Total time cost is less than a weekend.
1. The Birth Partner - https://www.pennysimkin.com/shop/the-birth-partner-5th-editi...
You can get by just skipping to the yellow-highlighted pages. They're 1-2 page How To's or summaries. Like a checklist of the stuff to put in your Go Bag.
2. Talk to different types of people about parenting and make notes about what's most important to you.
Don't leave out older people. Despite the mass amount of new literature about how to raise kids, being a parent hasn't changed that much in 2 generations.
3. Expecting Better - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/310896/expecting-be...
Easy to skip to just the chapters you want to learn about. E.g. if you end up needing/wanting genetic testing, you could read that chapter and nothing else.