Here are some thoughts on the market for software engineers and some reading for potential candidates and hiring staff. And some unrelated stories that I find interesting. And for even more CJM, visit fortyseconds.substack.com.
Shortland explains how a private database of stolen art, the Art Loss Register, has made the notoriously opaque art market a little less so.
Really enjoyable episode, featuring a James Bond-type character, freeports, “anonymous Russian institutions”, an allegedly authentic Turner, and because it’s an EconTalk episode, a reference to Adam Smith.
Have you ever asked yourself, “How many bites it should I take to finish a hot dog?” Fortunately the National Hot Dog & Sausage Council is here to tell you that it’s 5 bites (7 for a foot-long). Happy Fourth of July!
We built Checkout to maximize conversion by intelligently prioritizing which payment methods are presented to the customer depending on where they’re located. Whether in Mexico or Malaysia, a company’s checkout experience should feel local and include the payment methods customers are most likely to prefer. One way to more naturally build in local considerations into global products is if they’re built by remote, distributed teams. One member of the Checkout team launched a local push payment method from Singapore and another shipped address collection from Maryland. Given the nature of Checkout, we hypothesize that the more distributed the team becomes, the closer we get to the needs and mindsets of more users.
This is from “Stripe’s remote engineering hub, one year in”. Stripe’s engineering team is now 22% permanently remote.
delightful illustrations
an introduction to property rights (it’s never too early!!). Kind of a shorter version of the big boy/little tunic story in Cryopaedia
a little dark humor for the parents
Part II of a trilogy, but it stands alone well too.
“When you save data, a binary zero is set by charging the float gate of the transistor, and a binary one is set by removing the charge. To charge it, we add electrons, and the mass of each electron is 0.00000000000000000000000000091 grams. This means that an empty USB drive (which mostly holds zeros) weighs more than a full USB drive (which has ones and zeros). Add data, reduce the weight. However, you would need to weigh more USB drives than exist on the planet together at once before the difference in weight became easily measurable.” From Science Focus, via Marginal Revolution. Emphasis added.
Hope all of our many many readers are staying healthy!
I just read Robert Coram’s biography of John Boyd, an Air Force fighter pilot. It is a phenomenal book. It tracks his early days as a fighter pilot, fighter pilot instructor, researcher/designer for new jet aircraft, and eventually maneuver war theorist. He would eventually become known for saying (among other things), “People, ideas, machines … in that order” and that’s a great framework to evaluate what made him special at each point in his career (with a notable exception for his performance as a husband and father - underwhelming).
Many fighter pilots struggled to control the F100, especially when it was first introduced, let alone perform well in it. Boyd, on the other hand, turned many of his tactial ideas into maneuvers that neither the Air Force nor the jet manufacturer had considered or thought possible (like “flat-plating the bird” - basically, when being chased, throwing on the brakes, letting the pursuer fly by and become the pursued). He made the machine serve him, instead of the other way around.
Before Boyd, fighter pilot instruction was mostly one-off tactics and maneuvers taught to be used in specific situations. Mostly instruction was hands-on - practicing over and over again - and giving pilots a feel for what it meant to be a good fighter pilot. Boyd was very very good at these drills - he earned the nickname “40 Second Boyd” because he could beat any opponent in one of these drills in 40 seconds. But more remarkably he was able to articulate that feel and draw up broader, comprehensive doctrine for how to conduct aerial warfare.
Between assembling this doctrine and getting his aeronautical engineering degree, he gained his key insight that jets, given a particular speed, altitude, Gs etc, have a particular number of options - accelerate or decelerate, climb or descend etc. Every moment a fighter jet has an opportunity to improve its position relative to its adversary, so the better pilot knows (i) every potential option that he/she has at any given point and (ii) every potential option of the adversary (this is a very non-technical explanation and I might also be wrong but this is my understanding of it). Moreover, all of this could be quantified, for every plane. He called this “Energy-Maneuverability Theory” (EM)
EM allowed Boyd to further refine his tactical ideas but identifying the optimal conditions for American and enemy Aircraft. EM also highlighted how much worse American fighter jets were then their Soviet counterparts. Until EM, the Pentagon’s guiding principle for designing aircraft was “higher, faster, and farther” - maybe good qualities for a bomber but not a fighter.
So what if you designed an aircraft backwards from EM principles? Boyd and some of his colleagues/mentees (the “Fighter Mafia”) tried to do this, with some success - they receive a lot of credit for improvements in the F-15 and F-16. And relatedly, a member of the Fighter Mafia was an important mind behind the A-10, a close air support plane still beloved by A-10 pilots and the ground troops they support. (a google search of “A-10 memes” supports this)
Boyd retired as a Colonel and did what many former service members do - read a ton of military history. But it was not a leisure activity - it consumed him. He was looking for an EM-level insight into ground war generally. This research led to “Patterns of Conflict” - a sprawling hours-long brief (Coram makes a lot of his briefing skills) that analyzes warfare from the Roman legions through the late twentieth century. Here’s a written copy - it is dense and hard to read but it lit some serious fires especially in the Marine Corps where its ideas on maneuver warfare (as opposed to attrition warfare) and people-first approach formed the basis of MCDP 1 - Warfighting. The Marine Corps still teaches Boyd’s ideas today (some directly credited, like OODA loop, but others, the doctrine of maneuver warfare generally, less so) and his ideas are everywhere. If you’ve seen “Generation Kill”, you’ve seen a Marine channeling Boyd - “tempo, tempo, tempo”. “Patterns of Conflict” got a mixed reception in the Army. The Air Force did not care for it at all.
Boyd’s mentees in the Pentagon also shook things up. Franklin Spinney made the cover of Time magazine for his reports on military budget overruns. Jim Burton was the subject of an HBO movie for his work in reforming weapons testing procedures. Did you know the Army tried to field their new Bradley fighting vehicle, an armored personnel carrier, without ever shooting enemy weapons at it to test it out? And then when Burton insisted they do it, they used weaker-than-Soviet Rumanian weapons and filled the Bradley’s fuel tanks with water? And, per Coram, “When early tests detected large amounts of toxic gases inside the Bradley, the Army simply stopped measuring the gas.” Generally unimpressive and anathema to Boyd’s ideas about making machines that serve the warfighter, instead of the other way around.
Coram calls Boyd the greatest military theorist since Sun Tzu and in my underinformed opinion he’s probably right. But the title of this book is a little misleading - Boyd didn’t change the art of war - he rediscovered it. It had been buried by the atom bomb, the Strategic Air Command, interdiction bombing, and Pentagon bureaucracy.
If you’ve read enough news about killing a general, you might enjoy Patrick Leigh Fermor’s first-hand account of a very different tactic. During WWII, Leigh Fermor was a British special operations officer on Nazi-occupied Crete. His work with Cretans to resist German occupation included the kidnapping of General Kreipe, the commanding officer of German forces on Crete, whom they smuggled off the island, into a boat and to Egypt. But “Abducting a General” is less of a war memoir and more, like Leigh Fermor’s other works, a travel book. His descriptions of Crete - its people (their culture, language, tenacity etc) and the geography - are spectacular and his range of references/allusions are good fodder for wikipedia deep-dives. Here for instance, is a passage about Crete’s Mount Ida:
It is the island’s crown and the impartial sanctuary of everyone in flight from justice or injustice and its mythological aura is deepened by the Himalayan remoteness and by the awe that hovers over Mount Sinai on Cretan icons. All my sojourns have been strange; none, though, as strange as these, huddling with the General and a volume of Baudelaire or Xenophon between us in the mountain’s heart, while below us in a ring his army prowled like the troops of Midian.
Interesting guy, interesting story. Worth checking out, I think.
(None of this is legal advice and I’m not a lawyer though I spent a lot of time and money training to be one)
In NYC, it is illegal for employers and employment Agencies to ask about about salary history
But does that mean an applicant can’t bring it up?
No! Because “where an applicant voluntarily and without prompting discloses salary history to an employer, employment agency, or employee or agent thereof, such employer, employment agency, or employee or agent thereof may consider salary history in determining salary, benefits and other compensation for such applicant, and may verify such applicant’s salary history.” Cite - § 8-107 section 25(d) of NYC Administrative Code.
So the candidate has the right but not the obligation to share. That’s a good thing for the candidate to have given how asymmetric most candidate/employer negotiations are. When should a candidate share? It depends! But the typical case where it’s helpful to share is where a candidate is currently making a way-above-market salary.
Yesterday Tesla announced a new pickup truck that tows 14,000 pounds, has a 500 mile range, and Porsch-like acceleration.
It “looks like it was designed by people who give things names starting with ‘cyber.’”
It’s supposed to be very tough but the results of the demo were mixed… It included a sledgehammer smash (no dent), a metal ball thrown at a window (it broke), and another ball thrown at another window (it broke too).
Musk says it should withstand a 9mm round. Was that the next test? Did that get canceled after the window smashing?
MOST IMPORTANTLY - how does this effect ME? We are car-less in Manhattan and back in the day I was a truck guy. As we consider a move to the burbs, the timing here seems perfect.
Here, enjoy Ben Thompson laying out some justifications for WeWork’s sky high valuation!
While we’re on the subject of modern office space, I’d like to point out that open floor plans are a management tool to prevent you from having a nice private phone call with a recruiter like me.
When we talk to candidates, they are either on the street (“CAN YOU HEAR ME?” “Kind of!!”), they are working from home, or they are whispering while hiding in a conference room or stairwell. These last ones are the best because I feel like I’m in the CIA talking to a secret informant. Cool stuff.
[not legal advice and not accounting advice!]
The first question on most people’s mind when evaluating an options package is how much the value of their employer is going to increase. This is a good question. And it’s fun to think about. You can do some pretty straight forward option math (good summary in this post by Katie Siegel) and see just how much you’ll make. Of course, the IRS wants a piece of that. But who cares, you still made money, life is good.
If, however, you’re concerned about whether the value of your employer will increase, things can be trickier. Not only can the value of your options package go down, but the IRS may still get a piece! Income tax, after all, applies to all gross income, and gross income “means all income from whatever source derived”. It doesn’t matter that the options granted to you are not cash - they are taxable income the instant you receive them. The IRS can issue regulations that postpone taxation on income until there’s a liquidity-producing transaction - and that’s kind of what it did in the case of employee granted stock options. For a good summary of these rules, read this from the National Center for Employee Ownership (thanks to that Siegel post for the link).
It’s only kind of because if you exercise ISOs, you can end up paying a lot in AMT even though you haven’t sold the stock (as in the case of John, at that link). And if you were to hold on to that stock while it goes down (and in the case of privately held stocks, you might have no choice), you’d be in trouble. It happens! And if you were an uber employee who went into debt to exercise your options, this rocky IPO could be extra troubling.
Long story short, keep taxes in mind when thinking about an option package.
New tech (at least in my case) makes it easier to pay for things and kinda lose track of what you’re paying for. Recently someone stole my credit card and purchased a monthly netflix subscription. I reported the fraud to the credit card company — they refunded the purchase and sent me a new card. And then the bank sent netflix the new card number so that the subscription continued uninterrupted! I was charged again this month. Turns out you have to call netflix too and get the card blacklisted. Maybe you knew that already. Anyway, enough about my $15.99/month fraud issue and check out a guy from Lithuania was recently indicted for stealing over $100 million from Facebook and Google. He sent the bills for products/services he never delivered and they just paid them. Wild stuff.
A recent Wired magazine story revealed that NATO ran a “catfishing” operation on its own soldiers to determine how much they could learn from and influence soldiers conducting a field exercise. The results are generally disturbing (they were able to track troop movements and learn soldier’s sensitive personal info) and the conclusions are familiar (blame Facebook!!).
I’ve been bothered by this story since I read it earlier today. At first I thought about it as the next iteration of a trend reported by the NYT last year (here) where bad actors spread fake and manipulative stories to civilians living near NATO operations to undermine faith and trust with those NATO operations. But this seems to be of a different kind that’s much worse - it’s one thing to disrupt some civilian/military relations and it’s another to undermine a soldier’s willingness to follow orders (and likely, ultimately, a soldier’s willingness to fight). The researchers “compelled service members to engage in ‘undesirable behavior,’ including leaving their positions against orders.”
This gets right to the heart of what warfare is, at least according to MCDP 1. MCDP 1 outlines the US Marine Corps’ philosophy of warfare - a more modern, shorter “On War”. Technology has always been an important dimension of war - it has a close relationship with a fighting force’s capability to destroy people and equipment. But this NATO operation revealed something new - a technology that, instead of physical destruction, destroys a soldier’s will to fight - per MCDP 1, the “ultimate” driver of the conduct of war.
So we can blame Facebook. But maintaining a soldier’s will to fight is the responsibility of the military (its most important one, perhaps!), not social media companies. The expression “weapon, gear, body” is supposed to instruct service members their priority of maintenance in the field (don’t eat food with a dirty weapon). Maybe it should be changed “get the heck off your phone, weapon, gear, body”.
“‘Eurisko was exposing the fact that any finite set of rules is going to be a very incomplete approximation of reality,’ Lenat explained. ‘What the other entrants were doing was filling in the holes in the rules with real-world, realistic answers. But Eurisko didn’t have that kind of preconception, partly because it didn’t know enough about the world.’ So it found solutions that were, as Lenat freely admits, ‘socially horrifying’: send a thousand defenseless and immobile ships into battle; sink your own ships the moment they get damaged.”
This is from Malcolm Gladwell calls the “insurgent’s creed” in “How David Beats Goliath” and it’s a good way to look at Bird and the crazy year the company has had.
