Comment by Haven880
9 hours ago
Most of the time, management don't even know what they don't know. As a result, entire America lost engineers and builders and now don't even know how to build rails, factories and rockets to moon.
9 hours ago
Most of the time, management don't even know what they don't know. As a result, entire America lost engineers and builders and now don't even know how to build rails, factories and rockets to moon.
I'm very sympathetic to this standpoint, but an obvious retort is why don't the engineers become their own boss and do better? What's stopping them?
I'd imagine it's access to capital and resources. I suspect many engineers/professionals (especially in eg consulting or manufacturing) would start their own business if they have the financial stability to do so.
A lot of market forces tend to "naturally" create monopolies/oligopolies. For eg if you're the biggest steel plant you can operate efficiently and keep moderate margins, beating any plants not as big (economies of scale). An independent guy (or even the entire team) can't just open a new steel plant shop down the road, even if the current one sucks.
Haven't software engineering salaries been like 200K for almost a decade? With very little actual need in capital requirements relative to a host of industries with expensive equipment, I'd say of the class of workers most poised to start their own businesses, I'd say you guys are the best placed.
To be a bit honest, I'm a computational scientist who's never seen anything near 100K and likely never will. It's hard to imagine not having around 4 times my salary and not being able to start something myself.
5 replies →
That's basically the meme, right: You rail against corporations and yet you work for one. Curious.
Anyway in general, corporations are sticky. They save resources through scale and collaboration. Famously this is a problem for free market true believers because if you believe that the market is the most efficient mean of organizing people then you would expect firms to operate internally as free markets (or disappear). There is a whole body of work about it,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm
In practice you can't just become your own boss and compete against firms.
Most people in fact do not work for corporations. But small companies rarely get into the news do they?
1 reply →
Engineering and running a company are very different skill sets. Engineers are often not good at Marketing, networking, sales, ...
Even if you are good at those, for many companies, it's more about connections than about the ability to build stuff. So if you don't know the right people, it is very difficult to get a foothold.
Sorry I should have specified, engineer here means software engineer/software developer.
1 reply →
Marketing, networking, and sales are the job. Or a large part of it. If you don't have connections, knowing how to make connections is part of it.
Accept that there are other skills besides engineering, and they can be just as challenging to learn, and just as opaque from the outside of you don't understand it.
I have AuDHD - there is no way I'm running my own company. I'm a good developer but I need someone else to have the idea and run the business and I can lead a small team to bring it about.
Given I'm now in my mid-50s, things are looking grim. And I'm not getting paid SV silly money. I'm not even getting paid US dollers.
Managing things often requires a different skillset, some want to avoid solving meatspace problems, some are not destined to be good at it.
Capital.
what?
Relevant post with some military examples as well:
https://techtrenches.dev/p/the-west-forgot-how-to-make-thing...
(Has some AI tells though, probably AI-assisted?)
Have you missed that they recently sent a rocket to moon?
They sent a module around the moon. They didn’t send a rocket to the moon. They still haven’t landed and their timeline keeps slipping.
Well, rails get made as well, I think the point was that a lot of things require reinventing knowledge that was previously known.
Or phrase it as reusing exiting tech because "it is cheaper" ending in having to reinvent it because all the people who designed it and made it have gone.
1 reply →
That happened in the reverse way. The government fired and underpaid a lot of people at Nasa ... and Musk hired incredibly experienced people, who became experienced on the taxpayers' dime, to build a rocket, for huge payrises.
The biggest but not only example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Mueller (yes, lots of subcontractors involved, however, Nasa paid, with a bonus percentage provided by the US military)
Note that Mueller gives the payment situation at TRW, and the fact that he "wasn't appreciated" as a direct reason to go to SpaceX.
What did you think happened? Does anyone actually believe Musk did the technical design for that engine, just because he claims so? Or I should say he constantly claims it, staying slightly away from direct claims to avoid getting caught in lies (well ... getting caught AGAIN).
SpaceX has nothing to do with any part of the Artemis II crewed lunar fly-by. They were considered and rejected. It was entirely legacy aerospace contractors. SpaceX is under contract for parts of future missions including the lunar lander.
This is the internet. You can’t expect HN or Reddit to be positive, especially around America. It was the same way before Trump was around.
These people and bots have no idea what they are talking about. They’re parrots.