Amazon board: institutional knowledge is the real bottleneck, guys! Let's replace these entitled seniors and staff with juniors armed with kiro. Same difference, right?
First politics. Now businesses. This sounds like a wildly poorly written parody by teenagers.
"reduce Cloudflare’s workforce by more than 1,100 employees globally."
Are they 1) halting all the 1111 interns, 2) keeping the 1111 interns, now armed with AI, to replace mid-level/senior institutional knowledge or 3) a mix?
As a Polish IT worker I feel that we enjoy hardwork too much. I'm talking here about "kultura zapierdolu" [0] which is what we call the specific Polish version of culture of unhealthy work/life balance.
I feel like one uberhard worker has an unhealthy return.
But a group of uberhard workers have a healthy return - they compound each others hard work and build a prosperous _environment_.
My wife and I work very hard, as do our colleagues. But together we've built a pretty healthy routine, home, and (for now at least) financial situation. This has enabled us to have kids more easily than most, travel, etc.
The hardest workers /busiest folks I know are farmfolk relatives, and they also have a level of social connection and family connection that I envy all the time. It's mostly from them showing up to help with _everything_.
They have a strong reputation as hard-working. After the liberation of Eastern Europe, Polish crews were all over Eastern Europe doing everything from restoring historic town centers to quickly and reliably putting a fresh coat of paint on apartments.
I guess it's anecdata. Polish engineers I've worked with weren't that good at technical stuff nor communication (in English). They're overprotective with "their" code and in general we've had more luck with western/southern Europeans.
I'm from Poland, but I worked in multinational place in Europe and I would rank polish people on average in the middle of pack in terms of working ethic.
Behind Germans, or Scandinavians, but ahead of most Mediteraneans.
I'm Polish, working for globally remote companies. I second the communication issue. Most Polish devs are so ashamed of their english(even if it's perfectly communicative) that it makes it hard to discuss technical ideas with them. As for technical knowledge, I guess that's cognitive bias, most Polish devs I met were far better at tech stuff than most f.e. Germans I worked with.
12% for software development, 8.5% for design/management. The caveat being, you can't deduct anything from tax, only VAT(under some assumptions). If you have actual expenses it's 12/32% progressive or 19% linear tax. Of course all of those are assuming you own a one man company and work B2B. Most devs here do. Otherwise regular contract of employment is progressive 12/32% tax, plus Healthcare and employer payments. Much less beneficial to both sides hence why it's not preferred by most.
This misses the obligatory health tax and pension fund contributions.
The pension fund is usually not considered a tax formally, but most people I know assume with our demographics and pension system we are just paying for current retirees (and our 'savings' will be impacted by inflation when it becomes impossible to maintain), so practically it's a tax.
Than there is 23% VAT (ofc much less than 23% because both the IT company and the contractor pass it to client and subtract some cost; so only a piece of it affects the contractor; it's a convoluted thing and I don't really know if I should treat it as ~22.9% or 2.3% tax on a contractor and it's client).
Which, to be fair, laid the foundation for the well-educated part.
The Soviets really valued STEM. They also quite valued emancipating women.
Just for context, in the 60s, around 5% of chemistry PhDs in the US were women. In the Soviet Union, it was 40%! [0]
Of course, that doesn't excuse all the other things they did, but the amount of badass female engineers from Eastern Europe I had the honor of working with is a direct result of the pipeline the Soviets built.
They don't if you mean STEM and emancipation, quite the opposite, actually (compared to West Germany).
In addition to the points of sibling comments, their respective starting posititions were drastically different: West Germany got the marshal plan, which benefitted their economy, the East had to pay reparations to the USSR, which meant whole factories, trains, even railroad tracks, all in all amounting to about a third of industrial capacity, were transferred to the USSR.
Without having firm data, I can see a few factors that are different. After the collapse of the GDR, it was easier for eastern Germans to move to west Germany than for Polish to move to a different country in the west. Mostly younger and educated people would have made that move, hampering future generations. With the Reunification also came the whole Treuhand issue which essentially sold off a good chunk of eastern Germany for pennies to western investors, because eastern investors had no capital. That meant the east lost out on the profits from its economy as they would accumulate in the west instead. Even today a large part of east German rentals are owned by western landlords or corporations. Then the industrial base of west Germany was setup far more for competing on the open world market with automotive companies in the NW (VW), SW (Daimler) and SE (BMW) plus the big industrial area Ruhrgebiet. So you naturally got an economic focus even after Reunification on the old BRD with the previous GDR requiring decades to hopefully catch up to the rest of the new country.
Quite a few educated East Germans have become West Germans as soon as they had the opportunity (or moved elsewhere in the world), but East Germany actually has a couple of high-tech 'hotspots' and good universities.
An East German state (Saxony) also consistently has the best education system among German states.
One factor in this may also have been the way the privatization of East Germany was handled. Its often overlooked, but the vehicle for it was called Treuhand[1]. Regardless of whether it was necessary or not or right or wrong, it did basically shift out a large amount of capital assets into West Germany (and still carries this sentiment of "opportunistic theft" today).
The headline figure of the article is purchase power (PPP) adjusted. I couldn't find any numbers for east German states where the purchase power adjustment happens per state.
Since housing is the largest component and housing costs differ between east and west Germany using a nation wide PPP adjustment factor gives wrong results for individual states.
Yes. In most large companies the corporate administration does not have a career in the actual subject the company operates in, but more in finances and economy. This forum is also based in the USA, which maybe has another culture. But it is also routinely pointed out here, how corporations act more in the interests of shareholders, than in the improvement of the actual product and innovation.
The most popular way to own a company is also inheritance, instead of studying an engineering subject.
This comment was also an answer in the context of the peaceful revolution, where a lot of companies where bought by larger companies from the west, both to destroy their better competitor and get funds from the EU. Such actions are seldomly done by engineers.
Most educated and motivated Polish people were slaughtered by Germans and Russians in WW II then ones still alive working for or heavily oppressed by puppet soviet state.
We were. And “hard workers” is code for “easily exploited.”
Anyway the trick to explosive growth as a country is who you trade with and how you count things. We now sell things to Germany instead of USSR, of course there’s “growth.” There’s also some very real growth, quite a bit of it - but I wouldn’t put one bit of care in a “top 20 biggest economies” ranking. NL is one of the biggest food exporters in the world because it sells mediocre tomatoes to Germany instead of selling rice to Brazil and food exports are counted in euros, not calories.
I know that Ukraine takes Polish experiences into account and consults with Poles on what went well and what not during our post-communist transformation and later the EU membership. They are keen on not repeating our mistakes. There were many Ukrainians working in Poland long before the full scale work so naturally many Ukrainians were looking at Poland hoping that their country could eventually replicate polish success.
But I don't think our example has an effect on morale and spirit of resistance.
They weren’t occupied by Russia, but the USSR which was an authoritarian communist state. That entire economic system failed for a reason, and the Chinese were wise to pivot (and not try spreading its ideology by force).
Yeah, I really don't think this is why China doesn't try to spread its ideology by force. I don't think a passive authoritarian state exists, just ones that don't have the military power or background / weak enough targets to achieve this. The US very much keeps them in check from invading not "wisdom".
I get it, we are being gaslit and pyoped at a massive scale across all channels about China and their supposed intentions. But proof is in the pudding, China is cutting deals all over the world, building infrastructure - all without forced regime changes or ideological prerequisites nor bombs.
Irrelevant post, plenty of western spies working in China (and likely much better at it). Anyways, China never took a single dollar from my pocket nor bombed anyone in the last 30 years, so yeah - I’m going to push back on this idea of some inevitable clash with them that is being programmed into everyone.
You can't look at the evidence and just dismiss it as "irrelevant' because you feel like it or because "the west does it as well" when your whole argument is the lack of foreign interference from China due to "wisdom". We can extrapolate from their hostile actions (even the non-physical ones) and how they treat their own citizens how they would further treat other nations if they could get away with more.
China does behave in a very methodical way, but that does not mean it is not a hostile nation.
Oh let’s just ignore the times Poland/ Lithuanian empire occupied east Slavic lands and force converted a large number of Orthodox in the West to Catholicism. And the kingdom/regime before soviets was quite different than Soviets or modern Russian setup in terms of ideology.
Again, that economic difference from last round was due specially to the failure of communism. And don’t forget that the US poured money into west Germany intentionally to show off their system. Look, I get some people don’t like Russia right now, but you can’t judge history through a modern lens; only through the zeitgeist of the time it occurred in.
So to counter my argument about Russian occupation from up to 1914 being irrelevant you bring Polish Kingdom from the times of The Holy Roman Empire?
And I assume that polish literature from 18 hundreds was already deeply prescient anti-soviet? Because the russian occupant in 18 hundreds had exactly same flavours as those during the communism.
Also the German occupation was in many regards as bad as Russian one but they had absolutely different face. But that is not part of the discussion really.
And the fact that russian communist occupation of Poland had been absolutely awful was fully clear in Poland as soon as late 1940s (according to my old family members). In parcitular - some part of my family was ended war in some prisoner / working camps in western europe and had a choice of staying in the west or going back to Poland. How terrible idea to go back it was - became clear in the first few years after stayed so until the end in 1989.
I remember vividly an interview one of the russian soldiers was giving in polish television on the day when Soviet Army was leaving Poland.
"You don't even understand what you're losing. You will soon realize how big of a mistake it is and regret it deeply."
Guess what? We don't.
Adam Mickiewicz, Dziady, 1823
"Nie dziw, że nas tu przeklinają,
Wszak to już mija wiek,
Jak z Moskwy w Polskę nasyłają
Samych łajdaków stek."
I’m not arguing that occupation was a good thing, clearly not. Anyways, look at modern Russia - they have many issues but now operate a mixed market oriented economy and have achieved #4 GDP by PPP and that’s under sanctions from hell, getting cut off from Swift and no German investment. There’s actually more in common with Russias rebound and Poland amazing growth vs the economic situation in much of the rest of the EU, they really could/should be trading partners but the EU won’t allow it.
Yes, that is cool. it doesn't change the fact how the Russians treated us for centuries, and not just during the Soviet Era and what were the outcomes compared to as some like say "EU or USA occupation". So we will thank you very much - not interested in it again, but honestly good luck to Russia being a peaceful prosperous country.
Also have you noticed how and why the trade stopped?
No, they don’t claim that - but they do see it as a continuous thing (Russian civilization and the genocidal threat they overcame). Also, it’s not just them who celebrate.
Russians are always conveniently forgetting that they were the other major aggressor of the European WW2 theater. Heck, the so-called "Great Patriotic War" starts in 1941, skipping over their alliance with Nazi Germany and invasions of neighboring states.
Authoritarian has nothing to do with elections, it has everything to do with the ability of people without positions of power to influence those in power without retribution. Most countries have elections, these days, but there is no lack of authoritarian rulers staying in power for decades and jailing or murdering their opposition.
Honestly, a lot of issues was that we needed to build up the necessary infrastructure in the first place.
And the transformation to market economy involved at least two periods of suicidal decisions in name of ideology that regressed the economy (by the same person, even)
Yes, I agree. I believe cultural norms dictated their rate of expansion. Without so many people who enjoyed hard work they like would not have been able to expand their economy as much.
My sibling comment understates the critique. There is no such thing as "average IQ". Countries don't IQ test representative samples of their population, so hucksters like Richard Lynn just make shit up and pull samples from mental institutions (where IQ tests are used, as they should be, as diagnostics).
This is a pretty simple and obvious observation. Have you ever been asked to take a proctored IQ test to help establish the "average IQ" of your own country? Presumably not. So why do people keep getting took by this silly idea that "average IQ per country" is a thing?
Possible conscripts are usually IQ tested in some way. If you have national consciption, then it would be a pretty good sample of the 18 year old male population.
Some armed forces administer general cognitive tests (like the US does with the ASVAB --- of course, not a random sample in the US, since we don't conscript) but most of these are not in fact IQ tests. Additionally, some western countries have done cross-sectional IQ tests for scientific reasons. In most countries, neither applies. Richard Lynn, responsible for the most widely known and cited "national IQ score" numbers, really did rely on mental health hospitals, and really did impute made-up scores to countries where he found literally no data at all.
What you do see are attempts to synthesize IQ from aggregate economic and educational attainment data. But obviously these are really just proxies for economic development, which then begs the question.
Focusing on his critics is more illuminating and damaging to your presumed position:
Systematic review by Wicherts et al: "In light of all the available IQ data of over 37,000 African testtakers, only the use of unsystematic methods to exclude the vast majority of data could result in a mean IQ close to 70. On the basis of sound methods, the average IQ remains close to 80."
They of course follow it with the conjecture: "Although this mean IQ is clearly lower than 100, we view it as unsurprising in light of the potential of the Flynn effect in Africa (Wicherts, Borsboom, & Dolan, 2010) and common psychometric problems associated with the use of western IQ tests among Africans."
It's always curious how "common psychometric problems associated with the use of western IQ tests among Africans" don't carry over to economics and other things. Wouldn't you expect them to have similar problems with other western "ideas"? Also interesting how Easterners adapted to western IQ tests so well they are better at them than the West.
Part of the point of the Wicherts papers was to refute the Lynn data, observing that even taken on its own premises Lynn's team pretty clearly excluded data unfavorable to the conclusion they wanted to draw. But look at Wicherts 2009, at the samples they're talking about. One of the largest was 800 students in Nigerian high schools (a test arranged by IQ researchers to for a cross-cultural comparison, back in 1981). Lynn's data includes, and is materially influenced by, a sample of 59 Senagalese children who were tested while recovering from malaria. The malaria thing is just funny, but it's the numbers that stick out to me.
I'm not getting further into the details here because the easiest-to-understand point here is that there are not in fact programs to generate reliable "average IQ" numbers in different countries. I am struck by the fact that message board nerds from America believe these programs exist, when almost none of us have ever taken an IQ test.
The purpose of IQ tests is to derive a value that would predict other values. The inverse is also true.
Given a multitude of such values it would even be possible to get back to a precise IQ value.
IQ tests are just factor analysis artifacts. You can dream up 100 questions that you conjecture may have something to do with intelligence and not even know the answers and have 10,000 people answer them. Product of the factor analysis of the answers will yield a normal distribution which you can then center on 100. Calibration can be more complicated than that but you get the point.
The natural circumstances people find themselves in are also just noisy questions.
I can't reply to the original comment but it's interesting how tunes change, because even into my youth a very different stereotype persisted: https://achewood.com/2007/02/08/title.html
I suspect accuracy of any IQ test falls off the further you get from 100 in either direction, so I’m not married to any global IQ dataset in particular. But they all show the same trend.
All the politically and economically prosperous countries show as high and the basket cases show as low. And if you sit in on their political discourse it increasingly sounds like you’re in an open air mental institution. (Though regrettably that model has been losing a lot of predictive power in the democratic West lately).
Your whole argument is that low IQ leads to an undeveloped country rather than impoverishment leads to lower IQ. I don't think it is entirely one way.
IQ is also only one (mediocre) signal you are putting a lot of emphasis on. India does not score well, yet it is clearly emerging and has very successful individuals from mathematics to chess.
Someone mentioned malaria-afflicted test takers before. Of course better healthcare leads to lower disease load, which leads to higher IQ, but it’s only a weak link, simply not leaving old tires with water strewn about the place is free.
My fingers just love it. Every time I need to jump to a non-modal editor my muscle memory screams: "WTF?!"
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