Michael O. Church

An interesting titbit Aston leaves out about his early days is that he was actually cofounder of AutoAdmit.com[0], a law school admissions forum, semi-notorious for its defamation lawsuits and being an incubator for troll, Michael O. Church[1] (banned on Quora, Wikipedia, and Hacker News for being a thorn in Paul Graham and Dan G, sides) that formed after the great Princeton Review Discussion Board exodus and has persisted with an active user base for almost 13 years now. I wonder if he's ashamed of that history since he fails to mention it (despite it being on his early resume!). [0] http://www.autoadmit.com/ [1] https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/

One of the cases was banning of michaelochurch ( https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/ ), who was heavily criticizing YC, Paul Graham, and VCs in general and was relatively popular, banned for swearing or something like that. While many of his posts are extremely negative, some of them have ideas worth considering.

He's written quite a bit on the topic. It's worth taking a look at if you're interested in that kind of thing. http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/

This reminds me of a paragraph I recently read on another blog: > I’ve been writing for a long time. In 2010, I started a blog, focused on the technology industry—topics included programming languages, organizational practices, and development methodologies—that reached a daily view count of about 8,000 (some days more, some days less) with several essays taking the #1 spot on Hacker News and Reddit (/r/programming). I quit that kind of writing for many reasons, but two merit mention. One: Silicon Valley people are, for lack of a better way to put it, precious about their reputations. My revelations of unethical and illegal business practices in the technology industry put me, literally, in physical danger. Two: since then, my work has become unnecessary. In 2013, my exposures of odious practices in a then-beloved sector of the economy were revelatory. Ten years later, tech chicanery surprises no one, and the relevant investigative work is being done with far more platform, access, and protection. The world no longer needs me to do that job. And thank God. Source: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/

I suggest checking out the blog at https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/. He has written a ton of stuff about VCs, programmers, etc. His riffs on the Gervais Principle are really good. He followed that up with some other gold. The scale-of-10 stuff is his concept of how there is a mismatch of skill and power in the tech business world -- particularly between the programmer and the business folks. For example, highly-rated business people don't even work in tech -- they do other finance like private equity or hedge funds. That means that most of the top VCs are maybe 7s, and they're bitter about their relatively low status among their B-school peers. That also means that the top tech people (the 10s) struggle to find business people who are their equivalent of awesomeness. This is a short summary.. read the original stuff on the blog. Some folks on HN do not like MO, so they seem to downvote him out of principle rather than based on the content. While I think that his tone can be terse at times (it seems to have gotten better in the past year or so), the content is often frighteningly spot on. I think that this makes some people uncomfortable.

I think trying to find satisfaction in your day job can be a lottery. Since these methodologies are so popular, there's no guarantee the next job is going to be any better. This article - on the topic of such methodologies working great for the employer but not for employees - may resonate with your personal experiences [1]. Given that everything else about the job is good, I suggest staying there, coding your own software at home, doing it in whatever way you enjoy most, and finding satisfaction through your personal projects. [1]: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/why-agile-and-especial…

Yes, they own it, in exchange for protecting you from the 90% chance of failure (perhaps you should save your best ideas for when you've acquired enough resources to build it on your own? I don't, ideas are cheap, it's the executions on those ideas that has built value for me). And I don't think startups are reckless, but I think a lot of the people that join them fail to do rudimentary financial calculations as to whether doing so has a better expected return than a safe(tm) job. Otherwise, they wouldn't accept chicken scratchings worth of lottery tickets and 20-50% lower compensation. But yet they do, over and over, no matter how many people lay it out how bad an idea this usually is. https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/dont-waste-your-time-i…

One thing to keep in mind - coding for a living and coding as a hobby are two VERY different things. To get a taste of what you can expect in the industry, see for example Michael O. Church's blog (https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/)

Summarizing some of Michael O. Church's screeds on the topic (https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com), I would say that the value of fresh graduate developers comes mostly in how much they undervalue themselves, and therefore how much excess generated value can be "skimmed off" by the company. A software consulting firm, after all, is usually a bunch of fresh grads headed by one "architect" with experience. Most of the work is done by, and most of the decisions are made by, the fresh grads, but the work is being billed at a rate that assumes the senior "figurehead" developer, and others like him, are doing the work. (This is also true in law, finance, advertising...) Or, in other words: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/02/robin-hansons…

"This is what happens when you attack meritocracy in the name of making people feel good." Calling the tech industry a meritocracy is an assumption. There are plenty of well thought out viewpoints that disagree, its probably worth reading some. https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/04/11/meritocracy-is-the-sof… https://medium.com/@jocelyngoldfein/techs-meritocracy-problem-a6e5e0a5…

michaelochurch is many things, but I don't have any doubts in my mind that one of his talents is writing a lot, and writing it really fast. http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/

For that "paranoid thriller" sort of feeling, try reading these blog posts: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/

> I just wished there were some way (beyond a traditional resume) that I could express how I truly would've been a great employee at Google[x]. Well, actually, there is -- the only thing that can express that would be making progress on the problem... If you're ready for a big dose of realism (and at the risk of fueling some dangerous fires), one can dig deeper into the trust disconnect that fuels acqui-hires here: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/12/23/vc-istan-7-solving-the…

This man speaks the truth. Michael has elucidated the the nature of employee/employer relations in tech with surgical precision. Highly recommended. Particularly, this article [1] about the perceived status of engineers vs. managers solidified my suspicions about the status hierarchies inherent to the industry. 1. http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/07/13/how-the-other-half-work…

When Michael read about the Gervais principle it inspired about 100,000 words of response: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/?s=gervais&submit=Search

He has a blog[1] that he's linked a couple of times. I'm just amazed by how long the entries are, I can never force myself to write that much. http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/

Apart from the issue that we're talking about an introductory CS course, the greater problem remains that you'll only load up "technical debt", which may well lead to problems later on. Michael O.Church briefly talks about this in his article on startup culture: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/dont-waste-your-time-in… Also, see the recent HN post, "Ask HN: I just inherited 700K+ lines of bad PHP. Advice?": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4557919 Lastly, in my article I highlight Open Office, which still has comments in German in its source code.

Is this him? https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/

This does bring up the general question of who is sensitive or insensitive to humiliation. I am reminded of something Michael O. Church wrote a few years ago [0] in connection with agile/scrum and the issue of intense observation of an employee's work process: "Another topic coming to mind here is status sensitivity. Programmers love to make-believe that they’ve transcended a few million years of primate evolution related to social status, but the fact is: social status matters, and you’re not “political” if you acknowledge the fact. Older people, women, racial minorities, and people with disabilities tend to be status sensitive in the workplace, because it’s a matter of survival for them. Constant surveillance into one’s work indicates a lack of trust and low social status, and the most status-sensitive people (even if they’re the best workers) are the first ones to decline when surveillance ramps up. If they feel like they aren’t trusted (and what else is communicated by a culture that expects every item of work to be justified?) then they lose motivation quickly. Agile and especially Scrum exploit the nothing-to-hide fallacy. Unless you’re a “low performer” (witch hunt, anyone?) you shouldn’t mind a daily status meeting, right? The only people who would object to justifying their work in terms of short-term business value are the “slackers” who want to steal from the company, correct? Well, no. Obviously not. The violent transparency culture is designed for the most…

No, compared to conventional project management, i.e. having a project manager who understands the technical aspects but also meets with the stakeholders to balance feature development with solving technical debt, it is much slower and more frustrating to work in. Its really not that hard to manager a team of developers - keep track of whos working on what and make decisions with the team if something is blocking a piece of work being done. SCRUM tries to formalise everything with explicit rules which in reality robs developers of their ability to use common sense to get things done and results in hours and hours of meetings to discuss, review and improve the various rules and protocols. I think it is a fad, most of the people I know who are big fans of it are also fans of whatever other tech fad is going on at the moment i.e. blockchain, nosql, the latest frontend framework etc. I find it extremely unfortunate that SCRUM is so widely practiced in the software industry now, at one point it actually caused me to quit my job to move to a different IT career, though in the end I went back to development because I love coding and I've just had to realise that SCRUM is something I'll have to live with. There has been plenty written on this subject, here is some more reading: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/why-agile-and-especial… http://okigiveup.net/not-big-fan-of-scrum/ Queue the "thats not scrum" responses..

Five letters: BATNA What is your best alternative to a negotiated agreement? In any negotiation, with any party, your strength lies in your ability to walk away. If a vendor isn't offering you the product, or features, or price, you want, then having the alternative to walk elsewhere gives you strength. It's what lies at the foundation of the concept of a competitive market (though there are other elements as well, many involving information access). Businesses, and recruiters, such as the one offering this exceptionally poor advice, have far more data, and far more experience than any given single worker in engaging in labour negotiations. Hell: It is their core competency. Accepting the terms of an employer or recruiter in engaging in the battle directly is the worst possible thing you can do. Which includes this still-born advice to never accept a counteroffer. Are there counteroffers you shouldn't accept? Yes. Are there counteroffers you should accept? Yes. You'll find discussion in this thread on both sets of circumstances. (A general guideline: if it's the money that's been what's making you unhappy at a given job, go for it. If it's been other matters, that is what you should be negotiating on, though sweetening the pot doesn't hurt either.) The degree of ignorance exhibited by far too many technologists on the concepts of negotiating, power, leverage, and advantage is vast. I include myself. I can only suggest: go out and start studying the…

Lemme guess, Scrum Master? Although those faux titles may be technically wrong, the use of capital-A Agile usually implies association with Agile the brand (the noun), not "agile as in agility". > That is so catastrophically false that I don't even know where to start. Doesn't sound like a great argument. The highest performing teams I've worked with were small groups of highly skilled, talented (IQ and EQ) and passionate people. These groups are usually familiar with various development methodologies and able to come to agreement on which processes to adopt and which are cargo-culty and should be thrown out. I don't think OP is arguing for zero process. In fact the opposite is clearly stated in the Agile Manifesto list: "They figure out the process that works for them and for the current problem they are working on." Here's a much better articulated criticism on Agile that I enjoyed: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/why-agile-and-especial…

I think you might be referring to the early exit syndrome of Midwestern startups [1]. The point of the article was not to say that exits are bad, only that to develop a cultural milieu of technology in a particular region, there is a need for at least some companies to stick it out and remain determined to become long-lived and predicated upon a chosen workplace culture. If companies never do that, then a given region can't generate enough inertia to remain a competitive place, and this has all sorts of bad effects on the employment market in that area. I thought Michael O. Church had a great extension of that article in his recent post [2]. He argues that the broader short-term goals of VCs in general are misaligned with the fundamental value creation premise that undergirds the idea of start-up culture (or at least what was start-up culture when the term was new). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10579370 [2] https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/11/17/its-not-early-exit-dis…

This link has already been posted, but I think it deserves some discussion around the subject of unions. https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/programmers-dont-need-… A union doesn't necessarily seem suited for software development. As people have already explained in much better details than I'd manage, a union aims to help all, but exceptional programmers would be limited by trying to keep everyone to the same level. Some of us would get a pay rise, but many more of us would see a significant drop in salaries, and that's not really fair to those that can justify that kind of salary. Turning Software Development into a chartered profession seems like a no brainer to me, and I'd be interested in opinions as to why this hasn't happened already. In my mind, one reason is obvious, and that's the fact that hardly anyone seems to know the best way to do anything. More often than not, there's a huge difference in how one company and one stack will do something compared to another. Hell, two groups could write entirely different code based on something ultimately trivial, like their choice of CMS. Any professional body would need to be tech agnostic while also being able to set a high standard for anyone in professional development. In all honesty, I think most software developers write code for absolute peanuts when you consider how vital the code is to the running of a business. I imagine that becoming a chartered profession would go much…

> Since the parent mentioned C and Java. What are you missing in Go compared to Java besides generics? That's a clever way to attempt to constrain the conversation away from the elephant in the room. "Other than the bullet in your stomach, how are you feeling?" Not having at least Java-style "dumb" generics, in 2015, is unacceptable; the existence of `go generate` should mortify everybody involved with Go. Not having better than that--consider what you can do with Scala even before you get to something like Shapeless--is not quite unacceptable but short-sighted and limiting because suddenly I as a human have to do what a moderately smart compiler can do around type checking and leveraging types to solve problems. Go's general ignorance, and the community's general ignorance, to really basic functional programming that so hugely improves your life is probably borne out of the stupid type system; things like composition (Try monads) for error handling, so I'm not vomiting `if err != nil` everywhere, things like functional transforms for data structures so I'm not writing for loops until my eyes bleed. And you can't really do that in a statically typed language without either blind casts (which Go partisans recommend, because clearly everything should be `interface {}`, remember the days when java.util.ArrayList just gave you Objects?) or generics. It's just...dumb, written for the lowest common denominator, and I guess the lowest common denominator is dishearteningly low.…

> In the unlikely event that your equity is EVER worth anything, the difference between 0.1% and 1% and 10% is...Not a meaningful difference for many, as far as the incentive structures go. Only if you're a financial moron. Even "IPO" doesn't mean Facebook money 99.9% of the time. If you're fantastically lucky, and the company you work for pulls of a $100M IPO, the difference between 0.1% and 1% is the difference between $100,000 (a nice bonus) and $1M (a nice nest egg). And that's if it's not been diluted (and it will be). More likely, your company will fail (you get nothing) or get acquihired for $10M cash, at which point the difference between 0.1% and 1% is the difference after vesting between $10,000 ("yikes, will I even have anything after taxes?") and $100,000 (a nice bonus). Seriously, if you're a developer thinking about working for a start-up, do yourself a favor and take half an hour to read the following two articles: 1. http://rob.by/2013/negotiating-your-startup-job-offer/ 2. https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/06/23/heres-the-proper-way-t…

> but I have yet to see an explanation that truly seems to work The 70's was when energy started getting expensive again. And we did nothing to deal with the problem, not even now. The 50's and the 60's (and the 70's, 80's, 90's, 00's...) were marked by huge growth in govenments worldwide. Something that we simply never experienced before. It's quite possible that we reached an inflection point by the 70's, and it become almost impossible to inovate. This guy[1] has some interesting theories about the way administration evolved at the XX century. A world dominated by corporations is a new thing, and it may be true that the natural evolution of a society dominated by them leads to a period of stagnation like we have now. All of the above explanations have data backing them (but less backing for the third), and people on the net eager to push that data to anybody that asks. Any of them alone could explain a worldwide stagnation of a few decades (or longer for the first). All of them seem to be happening, but causation on a system as complex as humanity is hard to stablish. Maybe we need to technological revolution on system analisys... [1] http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/ EDIT: Another possibility is that we reached a level of development where going forwad is really that hard. And we have a lot of work we need to make on tooling before we see fast widespread development again.

Yup, this seems very directly like a transfer of risk from the employer to potential employees. But remember -- there's an engineering shortage! We can't hire good people! We need ten times as many h1b visas! (Pay more? Take a slight risk? Hire someone without five years of experience (in a four year old tech) doing exactly what we think we want them to do? Now why would we do something like that?) Edit: and nonsense like this is going around. I recently talked to a very early stage startup that just raised either a very large angel round or a smallish round A. The phone screen went well, and my experience and skills were a great match. But then the ceo wanted to do a reference check to proceed not to an offer but to an in-office meeting with the other founders! I said that, well, my references are ceos and chief scientists and they're very busy; I can't impose on them just to see if maybe there's a fit. But again, I'll bet good money he's complaining to his peers about how hard it is to hire. edit2: I'm gonna channel michaelochurch: this is beyond fucking amazing. Not all positions lend themselves to candidate auditions. At Entelo, Joor and Weebly, candidates for senior executive positions rarely go through a trial process. So yeah, all that shit about how execs are treated better? That's it right fucking there. At Entelo, Joor, and Weebly, if you're a regular asshole and dumb enough to want to work there, you gotta suck it up and audition. But…

I have been working 25 hour weeks for a little over a year now, but agonizing over finding a good number for years before that. I've found that for difficult problems to crack, I may only work 1 or 2 hours per day. But for easier stuff like initial setup, a little refactoring, translating wireframes to layouts, etc, I can easily manage 6 or 7 hours per day. 8+ is too much, and working 3 or more days in a row at that level has a taxing effect on my health. I just don’t think humans are built to be sedentary with high levels of cortisol. So short prolific bursts interspersed with long hours of introspection seems to be the best route to writing the least amount of code for me. I would say 50-75% of my efforts are subconscious, so I spend 5 or 10 minutes as I’m falling asleep thinking about the problems to be solved the next day, and the answers either come to me or suggest some way in which I misframed the problem (wow misframe is not in the Mac OS 10.9.2 dictionary, but I digress). I spend my off hours with a few dozen windows open with 50 or 100 tabs each, basically a web of interests. I use Javascript Blocker in Safari to reduce overhead, and periodically turn off Javascript and Flash then force quit and relaunch to restore my workspace. It’s crude but until I have an indexed, version controlled browser with everything I’ve ever viewed, it gets the job done. The number of days since I’ve viewed HN is a good barometer for either how far in the zone I’m in (if I’ve…