Before the industrial revolution, there wasn't a ton of difference. If you look at a plane made in the early 19th century in both Japan and the US or Europe, they'd look pretty similar. A carpenter on one continent would probably be able to orient and use tools on the other easily.
Modern metal-bodied planes do work similarly, in that both let you set a blade slightly beyond a flat sole, allowing you to remove high surfaces on wood. That's about where the similarities end.
Japanese blades are laminated steel, and quality blades are hand-made by smiths. Smiths use proprietary techniques to make blades that can maintain edges for longer than machine-forged steels. Chipbreakers are made of laminated steel as well and can keep the primary blade under tons of tension, allowing it to remain stable even when cutting against the grain. Wooden bodies allow skilled users to adjust the blade depth within microns without sacrificing stability. Wooden bodies are easily adjusted to fit the needs of the user.
To use an analogy: using a western hand plane is a lot like trying to race a Camry rather than a Porsche. It's not that the Camry is wrong - it's just built differently. The Porsche is really easy to drive into a ditch if you're not careful. It'll break down a lot, but it'll also perform much better for a skilled driver. The Camry, conversely, will be easier for anyone to drive and probably go a lot longer without maintenance. It works fine as a daily driver, and you can tune it so that it'll perform like a Porsche would, but a very well-tuned Camry is probably not going to outperform a well-tuned Porsche and a person used to driving a Porsche is probably going to complain about the Camry's handling.
Metal bodied planes are adjusted with thumb screws and levers - they just aren't accurate enough for fine work.
Re: a woooden body, there are a couple reasons it's preferable despite the maintenance - the biggest is that they can be adjusted to fit a specific blade and chip breaker. Since the blade and chip breaker are made by hand, you can't mass produce a body and still have the tool perform. The other big concerns are weight and economy. Metal bodies are way heavier. And if they break or are damaged, can't be easily fixed. A wood body can be made in a few minutes with materials that are usually found on hand.
Americans got robbed of something between 20-40% of the purchasing power of their dollar depending on what they're buying. People aren't stupid, they know they're getting hoodwinked when someone focuses on the fact that the rate of robbery is slowing down rather then the fact that they didn't stop the robbery in the first place.
Wages in aggregate outpaced inflation in aggregate. That's not necessarily going to make it feel like your living situation has improved, especially if your consumption patterns don't perfectly match the CPI model and if you're financing major purchases. Compared to 2020, rent indices are up 30%, houses are up 50% (in value, not monthly payment - that's worse), used cars are up 30% currently but peaked at 40%. Groceries are up 26%. Costs of borrowing have skyrocketed across the board, and Americans live on financing.
If Americans own stock at all (38% don't), the majority of it is in retirement accounts.
I managed reviews like this as a team lead, manager, and director at three startups. There are a lot of misconceptions from employees about the process.
It's true that managers have a lot of latitude to read self summaries and either amplify or disregard them. The #1 thing you can do to avoid problems with your own reviews is to actually understand what your manager's and the company's priorities are and align your work to them. I have given poor reviews to people who invested lots of time and energy in projects and probably even did good work on them, because they were _completely_ off strategy and completed before anyone who knew better could tell them they were a waste of time and energy.
This isn't malevolent. It's because every manager is tasked with supporting the company's overall goals, frequently with very limited resources. Work that veers off into left field, even when perceived as valuable from the employee's or peer's perspective, is basically lost opportunity to do something more valuable. And that gets very expensive when trying to grow quickly.
If you want to get ahead, you and your manager need to work together to make sure the work delivers results, is aligned with strategy, is timely, and is visible to other managers and execs. Hit all four, and the need for recognition is obvious. I've seen execs argue against managers that individuals deserve promotion. Miss one, and you're probably relying on your manager's good will and clout to make the case.
If the work is not aligned with strategy or didn't deliver results but took a lot of time, your manager will look like a fool arguing that you deserve recognition for it.
Also, re: exceeding expectations, this comes up in every org and with every team. Everyone is always graded on a curve, both within your individual team and across each exec's organization. This is because the budget for compensation is fixed ahead of time based on assumptions about the percentage of employees that will exceed expectations. As long as each exec gets roughly the expected number of employees exceeding and meeting expectations, their recommendations for promotions, bonuses, and comp adjustments will likely be approved.
If the ratio for a given exec is out of whack, the only options are:
1) Get it back in line,
2) Take budget from someone else, or
3) Increase the compensation budget.
(3) frequently can't be done without board approval, so is not really an option. (2) is going to start a knife fight between execs over whose employees deserve it more, which nobody wants. This leaves (1). This is why alignment and upward and outward visibility is so important - it banks you social capital with the people who have to allocate limited resources.
With all due respect, outside of staff+ levels, if your reports are off in the weeds being productive building the wrong things, isn't that more of a management problem? Even very persuasive reports should require sign-off on how they spend large chunks of time. It's a hallmark of good management to push back and regularly ensure goals are aligned. Empowering employees is important, but that should be for the 'how', not the 'what'.
Your visibility is above theirs. You are regularly in meetings they are not. There is a distinct information asymmetry. It's your responsibility to convey what is important. Same with your manager to you, your skip to them, and all the way up the chain. No matter what the company's overarching goals are, at the IC level they may only have enough visibility to understand how valuable the business segment/team they're on is and read between the lines and move to another team.
Yes, really good employees can learn and bubble things up from cross-functional work or skip meetings to cover their supervisor's blindspots, but that's not a good look and could be potentially harmful, ie. could damage relationships if not handled carefully.
Being resource constrained is not an excuse. Hire or slow down. Business can't support it? Well, it's not a great business. Inmates running the asylum and all that jazz. Scapegoating reports for operational failings is toxic.
> I have given poor reviews to people who invested lots of time and energy in projects and probably even did good work on them, because they were _completely_ off strategy and completed before anyone who knew better could tell them they were a waste of time and energy.
Alignment is really hard to do when management claims they're there to "support" engineers and their decisions, and not dictate from above. I see this as a great CYA move, couched in empowering language.
It is even harder when they visibly reward shiny new features while trumpeting a pivot to reliable infrastructure, only to change their mind and behavior on a whim. Mixed signals.
I totally agree with everything you said about information asymmetry and responsibility to provide context. Maybe I didn't explain clearly: it's not an operational failing if someone just decides to "take initiative" to solve an irrelevant problem without telling their boss. It's not the managers job to monitor everything their employees do. It is their job to state goals, assign work, and monitor progress.
One off things here or in the name of taking initiative... drawing down tech debt, POC's to prove a point, internal tools to help grease team productivity, sure. Stuff that a dev might do on their own time that they ensure doesn't get in the way of their assigned work.
But large chunks of work that form the corpus of a performance review? No. I've been doing this 26 years now and the only time I've seen that kind of maverick behavior on a team is when a manager is overwhelmed/distant/checked out or simply afraid of a particular employee because they're a chaos agent with a bit too much power, and IME, pretty dang rare.
> This leaves (1). This is why alignment and upward and outward visibility is so important - it banks you social capital with the people who have to allocate limited resources.
The problem is that (1) means that exceptional people in one org miss out (and leave or become demotivated) because they're in a higher bar org and those with low potential/performance in another org are protected because the bar is lower in that one. This is not good for the organization as a whole and is an anti-pattern.
This is spot on. Obviously there is a lot to dislike about performance reviews, but big companies need some process to determine who gets a raise, who gets promoted, etc. Although flawed, performance reviews are the best process for that.
I think the things that companies can do to make them better are:
2. Have transparency about the ranking system and distribution to all current employees and future employees.
3. Ensure that some amount of accountability is shared at the department level and also at the team level, so you can have somewhat objective conversations about trade-offs between departments and teams.
Unfortunately the malevolence comes when your manager was trying to do something out of scope and pushing the team in a direction to win some points, and failed miserably. And then, not wanting to take the fall, throws you under the bus even though you might have signaled your reluctance and risks associated with deviating away from the path the organization needed. There is no way to get out of that other than leave or get canned.
The issue is that "stablecoin" doesn't mean anything legally. US regulators have collectively abdicated their responsibility to create fair rules that encourage innovation while protecting investors and creditors.
Tether publishes their reserves [1], only 4% are Bitcoin. 84% is "cash & cash equivalents & other short-term deposits", 3% is precious metals, 5.55% is "secured loans". They report $5B in net equity, ~4.2%. So basically, if their collection of assets declines in value by 4.2%, they become unable to redeem every coin. There are a _lot_ of ways for that to happen with 87% of their assets in T-bills and money market funds. If the shortest T-bill is 4 weeks to maturity, they have plenty of time to incur interest rate risk (e.g.: Silicon Valley Bank).
One metric of how bonds are susceptible to interest rate changes is duration [1].
My calculations show that for a 4 week to maturity T-bill, the duration is approximately 0.077, meaning that if interest rates go up by 1%, it loses 0.07%. So even if rates go up by 5% in a week, they only lose 0.35%.
The problem with SVB is they weren’t holding very short dated bonds. Pretty much every large company has to deal with interest rate risk but as long as they keep the average duration low it doesn’t tend to be an issue.
Having lived in Brooklyn and Jersey City for a combined 12 years, starting when an office worker could still buy a literal house in Prospect Heights, I'm fully convinced that "gentrification" is a meaningless phrase and we need a completely different way of studying this issue that looks at the role of finance and government in displacing the poor.
Wealthy individuals moved into "gentrifying" neighborhoods _after_ massive movements of capital, not before. In 2007, no professional was leaving the upper east side to move to Williamsburg or Prospect / Crown Heights. After Bloomberg rezoned the waterfront and rammed Atlantic Yards through, boatloads of money moved in. Vacant lots and abandoned buildings were torn down, new ones were built, "luxury" housing stock was created and _then_ rich people moved in.
It's not all that different than VC money in startups - investors are sheep. Once it becomes clear a big fish has made an investment in an area, money floods in and drives up prices. To justify the increase in land values, investors have to raise rents. To raise rents, they need to improve the housing stock. This creates the inventory that the wealthy purchase.
> It's not all that different than VC money in startups - investors are sheep. Once it becomes clear a big fish has made an investment in an area, money floods in and drives up prices. To justify the increase in land values, investors have to raise rents. To raise rents, they need to improve the housing stock. This creates the inventory that the wealthy purchase.
Priming the pump is the economic term for this, old Timey pumps needed to have a bit of water poured into a mechanism to lubricate and and make it possible to pump water out.
My memory from the US Midwest is that Williamsburg already had a reputation as a hipster-level gentrifying area--to the point that the PBR-sipping indie set was already eschewing it for Bushwick. Then again, whomever I spoke to could have been parroting an odd blogosphere take by then.
I can attest to that, as I've seen something of this sort happen in two cities already.
City councils talk of "revitalising" an area, but it's really about getting the most out of prime locations where the rich would had moved in already if it weren't for the dilapidated state of the mentioned.
Interestingly the shift seems to affect businesses the most. The moment the first luxury condo is built/renovated you start seeing a change in the types of services offered. The other day I bought a particularly expensive bagel in a cafe that looked really out of place in the barely standing building where it was located. I'm sure almost none of the people that are long-term residents of this area go there.
Fellow former tradesman and perennial DIY-er here, I think this is dead on.
There is a fundamental mismatch between the economics of startups and the economics of trades. Startups and technology work best when you can achieve scale quickly and without friction by using the same solution repeatably. Software is ideal for this, it scales (nearly) infinitely and can continuously deliver the same result. Work in the physical world frequently requires site-specific solutions. It's more akin to consulting than engineering.
It's not surprising that startups in the space came in overly optimistic and imploded quickly. I think most tech people have a bias against the trades and think it's easily understood grunt work. The reality is that it requires deep subject matter expertise, familiarity with local markets, sites, and housing stock, and a healthy amount of on-the-fly creativity.
The company has no mechanism for determining that a person has entered into a contract unless someone tells them. Prohibitions on transfers prevent the cap sheet from growing, and the company from getting marked to market when they don't want to. Also makes it easier to create golden handcuffs.
There is always a nonzero chance that the deal falls through because the you are the first to get sued and lose their shares. If it were me, I'd want the contract to eliminate my liability in that scenario. If it were to happen, the buyer would very likely litigate on their own behalf rather than lose the shares that they paid for. These contracts are much more of a negotiation than a straightforward asset purchase on a stock exchange.
Tl;dr the options agreement is a private contract and so is the forward sale. If you're going to enter a forward contract and take hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, you need a competent lawyer to scrutinize the contract and limit your downside liability. Then it's up to you and the buyer if the risk/reward is worth it.
I live in upstate NY - plenty of people rely on heat pumps as a primary source. You need backup systems for natural gas and oil in this climate too, for what it's worth. They won't run when the power goes out.
This isn't unique to open source, the behaviors described are easily recognizable to anyone interacting with end users of SaaS or, really, any software. It does not matter how well things are communicated and how much effort goes in to change management, _someone_ will ignore the communication and insist that changes be reverted.
If you're interacting with users, it's important to publish crisp and defensible promises to end users and deliver on them (when these promises are backed by a contract, they're an SLA). Boundary setting is as much about what you will do, and delivering consistently, as it is about being comfortable saying no when the error is the user's. Stating clearly what you expect people to do (sign up for this email list, upgrade on this cadence) goes a very long way.
Policies and promises stated and delivered are usually enough to get people past the anger phase of grief to bargaining, which makes the interaction a lot easier to manage.
This is correct. The only difference between this and commercial software is the user expects a fix for free. No commercial vendor is going to revert an important change for a customer giving them zero money. If you are paying them millions, then sure.
Open source can be the same. Offer Reem millions, your problem will likely get fixed. Even a low bug bounty might work. But, exactly like commercial software, people won't break lots of users to fix one user without a lot of motivation.
Modern metal-bodied planes do work similarly, in that both let you set a blade slightly beyond a flat sole, allowing you to remove high surfaces on wood. That's about where the similarities end.
Japanese blades are laminated steel, and quality blades are hand-made by smiths. Smiths use proprietary techniques to make blades that can maintain edges for longer than machine-forged steels. Chipbreakers are made of laminated steel as well and can keep the primary blade under tons of tension, allowing it to remain stable even when cutting against the grain. Wooden bodies allow skilled users to adjust the blade depth within microns without sacrificing stability. Wooden bodies are easily adjusted to fit the needs of the user.
To use an analogy: using a western hand plane is a lot like trying to race a Camry rather than a Porsche. It's not that the Camry is wrong - it's just built differently. The Porsche is really easy to drive into a ditch if you're not careful. It'll break down a lot, but it'll also perform much better for a skilled driver. The Camry, conversely, will be easier for anyone to drive and probably go a lot longer without maintenance. It works fine as a daily driver, and you can tune it so that it'll perform like a Porsche would, but a very well-tuned Camry is probably not going to outperform a well-tuned Porsche and a person used to driving a Porsche is probably going to complain about the Camry's handling.