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What he means is that if you're completely ignorant about business, then reading a financial magazine will help you level up over time. (Related: I've worked w
by redis_mlc 6y ago
What he means is that if you're completely ignorant about business, then reading a financial magazine will help you level up over time.
(Related: I've worked with new managers in SV who couldn't define what the words "leadership", "responsibility", "planning" or "accountability" meant, since all they knew was PHP programming.)
It's a good post mortem read.
I gave the same advice about "use case" as in the post mortem to a YC database company a few years ago. The "founders" also thought they were building a better (technical) mousetrap, but I told them nobody was going to pay anything if it did the same as an existing database - it had to do something unique and be cloud-based, like Snowflake, or RDS. They were crestfallen, but still didn't listen to me. I even got hate mail from them before they went under - talk about being clueless to the bitter end.
What RethinkDB did wrong was what was in their post mortem, but also not having experienced DBAs to review the use cases. As a DBA, my default is to say no to new databases, and being the audience, that would have been valuable for them to know.
An example of how DBAs and devs think differently is the Jepsen database reports - devs fetishize those, but DBAs are like, "We already know corner cases aren't going to work most of the time. What's your point exactly?"
Source: experienced DBA.
- haolez 6y agoThanks for the reply. I liked the article and was confused just about this part. I've browsed the Economist's site and all I could see was political propaganda and drama.
- johnnycerberus 6y agoHard to believe that reading a financial magazine written by journalists will increase your knowledge rather than an authority in the domain or a classic book on the subject.
- redis_mlc 6y agoThose are all good resources, but: 1) current publications mention familiar company names and lines of business (aka the Internet). 2) reading bite-sized nuggets of information in the Economist and financial sections is more attainable for some people. I doubt if most people on HN have read a book in the past year. Personally I no longer read the Economist regularly because I'm beyond the material they publish, and I have no interest in anything European. (The US basically left Europe in its dust after WW2 - half of the EU member states are "sick men.") But if you haven't read about finance for decades, it's as useful as anything else. The only important things to know about Europe now is that the CCP bought Greece's largest port, and now Greece has to vote with the CCP in the UN or other tribumals, and the economic migration from Africa has ruined the social welfare programs that US leftists admired so much.