In theory, the Internet should bring us all closer together and slowly eliminate our differences.
As hardware doubles its density every 18-24 months, courtesy of Moore's Law, and as software eats the world, technology will replace a broad swathe of jobs outright - from burger-flippers to diagnosticians - and atomize many others from full-time positions into gigs performed by many fungible workers. Tech, in short, will eat jobs.
I don't mind that Bill Gates is a mega zillionaire; he's done a lot of really interesting and innovative stuff. I do mind that a lot of unworthy people rode his coattails to minizillionaire status, e.g. the inventor of Hungarian notation, probably the dumbest widely-promulgated idea in the history of the field.
To succeed in the tech industry, you start businesses, make money, and make smart investments. But to succeed in the tech community, you do and build awesome things, are generous with your time and efforts, and make a point of making space for strangers - without any expectation of payback.
The tech industry used to be home to a disproportionate number of misfits and weirdos. Geeks. Nerds. People who needed to know how machines worked: needed to take them apart, make them better, and put them back together again.
I am very happily employed as a full-time software engineer; I travel a lot, and I write books along with this here weekly TechCrunch column; and I still find the time to work on my own software side projects.
It is probable that Facebook boasts the broadest, deepest, and most comprehensive dataset of human information, interests, and activity ever collected.
Governments are scared of software.
Every time you log in to Facebook, every time you click on your News Feed, every time you Like a photo, every time you send anything via Messenger, you add another data point to the galaxy they already have regarding you and your behavior.
I'm a victim of Developaralysis: the crippling sense that the software industry is evolving so fast that no one person can possibly keep up.
Traditional technical interviews are terrible for everyone. They're a bad way for companies to evaluate candidates. They're a bad way for candidates to evaluate companies. They waste time and generate stress on both sides.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, in the enlightened liberal semi-socialist California circles in which I often move, that Uber is evil.
A great coder can easily be 50 times more productive than a mediocre one, while bad ones ultimately have negative productivity.
I've been a software engineer, a novelist, a journalist, and a manager - and managing developers is easily the trickiest thing I've ever done.
The great irony of management is that the higher up you go, the less actual control you have. When you are but a humble coder, you make the computer do exactly what you want; when you're a manager, you only hope that people understand what you want, and then trust/pray that they do it both correctly and in a timely manner.
Basically, a manager's job is to make other people more productive. What's one really good way to do that? Do the work that is getting in their way. Which means find out what kind of important work your developers dislike the most, and do it for them.
