"assuming they had training on par with what you received" feels unfair: Generally, what makes someone a 10x engineer is exactly that most people lack that level of training, experience, and skill. It's not about innate talent, but it's still a valuable, rare, and therefore marketable skill.
Achieving 100x results isn't something you can guarantee, and it doesn't even involve writing a lot of code. It comes from blocking off a week to automate a task, and never having to deal with it again. It comes from having the experience and political capital to veto a project that would have wasted a year, because you've seen it go wrong before. It comes from improving some tools for the customer service reps, so that they're 5% more efficient (which then adds up to hundreds of hours a day if you're large enough).
Anyone CAN do this, but the people who have the insight, motivation, and skill to actually DO it are rare, and a smart organization should desire to keep them around for years just in case they do it a second time.
If it's a question of experience then lets briefly discard the bottom 80% of earners, of the 20% left how different do you think their levels of experience could be when they retire?
Do you think the senior devops guy who can single handedly debug a network issue while enjoying a day on the beach is lacking in experience compared to a CEO or did they just get a different type of experience because companies only need one CEO but they need a bunch of devops guys.
I believe a good group in upper management does improve company performance but 100x is unreasonable. There is a talent to being able to respond correctly to different scenarios but you also need to be lucky enough to be in a scenario where wild success is possible and your response is only made possible by the team of people that drive the engine beneath you.
Fair PVP and Personal Loot are both rapidly becoming genre standard, since the only people who complain are griefers/trolls.
I can't argue about the tonal shift at all. Acts 3+4 were a lot of fun, but nothing that held a candle to Diablo 2.
Both games are painfully easy when you're starting out. I think Diablo 1 is the only game in the franchise that was even slightly challenging in the first half?
Really surprised by the "locked down/narrow" aspect, though. Diablo 3 has the option to play the linear Campaign, or you can do Rifts (randomized dungeons), or Bounties (flit around to complete 5 mini-events across the act). There's also a ton of randomized and optional mini-events that will come up as you do the campaign. It was one of the few things I really appreciated over D2 :)
> Fair PVP and Personal Loot are both rapidly becoming genre standard, since the only people who complain are griefers/trolls.
Or people who simply thinks everything being fair all the time is boring. Guess why free for all, super unfair battleroyale games is so popular? Fair is boring and has always been boring.
> Both games are painfully easy when you're starting out. I think Diablo 1 is the only game in the franchise that was even slightly challenging in the first half?
I am too young to have played D1, but I remember D2 first act being very hard. Dying many, many times starting out and the first act boss was very hard. In d3, its pretty much impossible to die the first time you play through it. Since I like playing hardcore, it's not even a bit frightening.
I don't know if these things existed when it came out, haven't really played d3 since then. But I just thought D3 was much more linear with a narrow path to push forward. I think it could be the artwork, often you are on some mountain, bridge or something like it with a background of something that is far away making it feel like you're on a narrow path.
I don't really care if it is narrow though, it's the other stuff that is so frustratingly annoying. Blizzard has forgotten how to make fun games. That is why you will probably see surge to World of Warcraft: Classic because it is like most their other games, much better in it's classic form than the shit we have today.
This was posted by "Working Washington", so it seems reasonable to look at Washington state law: It requires tipped employees to be paid minimum wage. So does the rest of the west coast, including California (where Instacart has it's HQ).
It is, of course, entirely possible that the worker in question is not on the west coast, but Instacart is still welcome to pay a fair wage even if not required to by law, and Instacart should certainly avoid lying about their business practices either way (from the article: "Even Instacart seems to know how messed up it is to pay workers less when they get tipped more — which is why they’ve denied the practice when speaking to reporters at Business Insider & the Miami Herald.")
Washington state law does not apply. All of the State of Washington laws and constitution are fully invalidated and superseded by the American Arbitration Act.
> It is, of course, entirely possible that the worker in question is not on the west coast
The receipt was for a store named Wegmans. Those stores are located on the East coast (New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey).
The problem is, "nothing but trouble" describes both genuinely problematic employees, and those that simply push back against toxic cultures or bad management. If you were already disillusioned, it's possible that it really was a bad atmosphere, and they were just less shy about calling a spade a spade.
I've also noticed that people tend to measure whether someone looks busy, not whether they're producing results. Some people will just start writing code, and they get called "productive". Others nip off for 2 hours to think it over and sketch out architectural diagrams, and then finish the whole task in half the time - but they're the ones that get called lazy because they weren't at their desk.
> "nothing but trouble" describes both genuinely problematic employees, and those that simply push back against toxic cultures or bad management.
For sure, but that's not what I'm talking about here: every now and again one makes a bad hire. It happened very rarely, particularly in product development where this individual was, but that's what this individual was - just a bad hire.
Now there were reasons why they were a bad hire that I think were perhaps not their "fault" (although fault/blame isn't a helpful concept here), which I'm not going into the specifics of due to #reasons, but the fact remains they chose to deal with that by acting out and introducing toxicity into their team.
"For example, available data suggests P/R didn't actually substantially contribute to SC1/2."
That's a pretty wild claim to repeat. Not a single person on the original team agrees with it, and they've filed the copyright registration in court[1]. There's basically no evidence at all for that conclusion, except that Stardock made the claim (not supported it, not provided evidence of it, merely made the claim)
Even if you do believe it, it's legally irrelevant as the team has signed the copyright over to them[2], and they released The Ur-Quan Masters back in 2003 using that copyright.
I was a member of the community back in the lat 90s/early 00s and this was common knowledge even back then.
Stardock has acted like scum through the whole ordeal. On top of the lawsuit against P/R...
1. They attempted to trick the UQM project leadership into signing a document that said Stardock owned the rights to everything in Star Control II. Stardock would then "generously" license rights back to the UQM project as "protection". In reality it would put the free game under Stardock's thumb[1]
2. There are leaked conversations of the owner of Stardock labeling the UQM forum and star-control.com as hostile to his company and how he is going to shut them down
3. There are two subreddits for Star Control. The fan owned /r/starcontrol and the Stardock owned /r/StarControlOfficial. An unknown reddit account took over /r/starcontrol under strange circumstances and sowed havoc for a couple of days before reddit intervened and removed the new mod. There are theories that Stardock was behind it.
I really can't think of any reason they'd be invalid.Keep in mind copyright doesn't need to be registered to be valid - the actual copyright applies since they created the work, this is just a formal registration of that.
There's also a ton of evidence supporting this copyright: The game CDs, manual, and box art all also say copyright Fred & Paul; there's email threads with Accolade discussing the possibility of merging the copyright and trademark; the fact that they published the game with no change other than removal of the "Star Control" trademark; and basically the entire team signing off on this.
If someone else was claiming to have written it, I could see a credible conflict, but literally everyone involved in the actual creation of the game says that, yes, it was created by Fred & Paul.
Except the premise is in accurate. He wasn't left with $1m. He was left with hundreds of millions in cash and cashflowing assets. Had he invested $250mm in the markets back then, he would be much ticket today.
Except it was likely property, and he couldn't liquidate those properties without incurring capital gains taxes (set at 49% in 1970)?
I don't know, perhaps you couldn't very easily leverage properties back then for cash (i.e. once they had been paid off), or interest rates were very high (a quick google teaches us that in 1970, the interest rate was 8.5%)?
It actually wasn't property, a large portion was cash in terms of salary collected as an infant or various gifts. There was a report by NYT not too long ago.
agreed -- not likely, and it assumes those gains every year which is not reasonable. More, it ignores one very important fact, the destructiveness of losses. A one-year loss can be devastating to a fund. which is why many favor "safety" over "gains".
It's not uncommon for aggressive growth funds to take a 20% tumble in a year. Downside is much, much more destructive than many understand especially when one must also account for fund management fees (typically .7%) which are collected whether the fund gains or loses!
But the simple fact is that a 50% loss requires a 100% gain just to get back to even, which is still a loss once inflation and operating costs are factored in.
Here's a simple question that most people fail:
Q: A mutual fund loses 50% in a year. In order to break even the next year, your fund must earn ?
1) inflation
2) 50% + inflation
3) 50% + your income tax rate
4) 100% + inflation
5) 100% + inflation + operating costs + 'it depends'
The correct answer is 5. The correct answer is nearly 106%- One must make up for actual loss (100%) PLUS operating expenses for both years (usually 0.7% per year: 1.5%), plus inflation for both years (2%/annum: 4%). Of course there are tax implication for gains/losses taken outside of a qualified retirement plan (401k,403b,etc.) and sheltering losses can complicate substantially, but hopefully this illustrates a point about the impact of losses.
You're not considering a) leveraged stock purchases (using debt, like he did with real estate) and b) that his inheritance was significantly more than 1MM. Check out this analysis from forbes:
Achieving 100x results isn't something you can guarantee, and it doesn't even involve writing a lot of code. It comes from blocking off a week to automate a task, and never having to deal with it again. It comes from having the experience and political capital to veto a project that would have wasted a year, because you've seen it go wrong before. It comes from improving some tools for the customer service reps, so that they're 5% more efficient (which then adds up to hundreds of hours a day if you're large enough).
Anyone CAN do this, but the people who have the insight, motivation, and skill to actually DO it are rare, and a smart organization should desire to keep them around for years just in case they do it a second time.