There is an interesting startup that is about trying to turn cities into villages by trying to make neighbors help each other. You need to verify your address via a scanned document, a neighbor or a a code on a postcard they send you. I think the primary reason they find that verification important is that people are allowed to see the full name, picture and address of people in their own neighborhood. And probably they don’t want to share that with people who are not actually neighbors. This seems to be key selling point of this startup—this is how it differs from any basic neighboor based Facebook group, that you really get to see each others face, name and address and people outside your hood really don’t get to see it so you can be fairly comfortable about sharing it. Besides you can choose a few categories how you can help others e.g. babysitting, petsitting etc. and what kind of common activities you would be interested in.
Here is the bad news: the startup is currently only available in German and only in the city of Vienna, probably due to the postcard thing. They managed to find investors so it is likely they will have an English version and extend it all over the world, in that case they will probably change the name as well, currently the name is fragnebenan.com But I have no idea when will this happen.
Anyway, I was thinking primarily that Rationalists in Berlin may take an interest in this and help them extend fragnebenan.com to Berlin?
This seems quite absurd. Why would I give my data to an obscure startup (who’ll probably sell it sooner or later) and hope people in my neighborhood make the same choice, when I can probably have way better results simply inviting my neighbors for a BBQ?
Of the barbeques you have thrown, how many of those have led to mutually beneficial arrangements?
Of those that have led to mutually beneficial arrangments, how many per BBQ?
Now how much time have you put in to arranging those BBQ vs Value gotten from those BBQs?
I don’t know about your answer, but for me (substituting BBQ for dinner party) the answers respectively are probably about 10, 3, less than one, and WAYYY TO MUCH (if these types of arrangments were my only justification for throwing dinner parties.)
Now contrast this to how much time I’ve spent going through the free stuff offered on craigslist, vs the value I’ve gotten from it. The effort/value ratio is probably inverse. I think a startup that takes the “free services/free stuff” part of craigslist, but solves the unique problems of that segment (similar to what AirBNB has done for housing) could offer significant value.
I didn’t do mere BBQs but threw full-on parties with the neighbors (who I didn’t know at all) and other friends. Later two shared apartments in the same house combined held a huge party that spanned the house and included many of the neighbors. Many good friendships came out of that, and a couple of us moved in together later.
The BBQ idea is just a low-threshold variant of that which doesn’t require copious amounts of alcohol.
For free stuff, we just have a place in the staircase where people drop things that are still good but not needed by their previous owner (mostly books). This works with zero explicit coordination.
For free stuff, we just have a place in the staircase where people drop things that are still good but not needed by their previous owner (mostly books). This works with zero explicit coordination.
I’m kind of amazed/impressed that this works, based on my experience of communal spaces. Don’t people ever leave junk that they can’t be bothered to get rid of? Does anyone adopt responsibility for getting rid of items that have been there a long time and clearly no one wants?
BBQ would not be allowed in my third floor apartment’s balcony as it would stink up the place and it would be dangerous as well and I have no idea where could I store the equipment when not used as we have not much unused space, and my neighbors would be very creeped out if I would just ring on their door and invite them. We live in the same apartment since 2012 and never even talked to neighbors or had a chat. People tend to be very indifferent with each other in this apartment complex and I have no better experience with former ones either. These guys are trying to make a site that acts as an icebreaker—if you really need dog-sitting one day you can try to ask there and if someone helps you out then you have a form of connection and maybe will have a chat after it or something and maybe greet each other and stop for a chat the next time you see each other. The very idea is that the world is urbanizing, due to jobs and all that people who like the more communal village lifestyle are forced into cities where they suffer from the general indifference and impersonality so they try to change it and make cities more village like or suburbia like. They try to counter-act the negative psychological effects of urbanization with a “let’s open our doors to each other” theme.
As for selling data, they have the same data as my utility company. They can link a name with an address. Anyone who walks up to our house will see the name on the door anyway. And a photo, so OK that is more. But overally this is not secret data nor very sensitive.
So don’t have the BBQ on your balcony, but down in the yard. And don’t invite people by knocking, but via old-fashioned nice and friendly handwritten paper letters or a nice and friendly written note on the inside of the building’s door. Bring a grill, a little food and drink, and invite people to contribute their own. I don’t see how this could be easier. In the worst case only two or three people will come, but that’ll be more than this site is likely to do.
I trust my utility company way more than I trust a random startup. Even Facebook, who this obviously competes with, doesn’t ask for scanned identification documents just to access basic functionality.
And you didn’t adress the issue with this site only connecting you with other people who happen to also use it. This alone makes this project unable to compete with simple Facebook neighborhood groups.
But let’s assume they’re super trustworthy and there are people in my neighborhood who use this site. It still looks a lot like a “if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” situation. Whatever it is, throw a website and an app at it. Even if a little post-it on the inside of the apartment building’s door would do way more for way less.
We have hundreds of people in this complex. I suspect at least 50% is more extroverted than me as the the uni etc. the ratio was more like 90%. If they did not do the BBQ thing I think I would not have much chance with it…
On the trust. Facebook does not also give you your neighbors location nor a way to check if someone claiming to be in your neighborhood is genuine.
I sort of agree to the extent that showing the address to everybody in the hood is perhaps too much, people would tell each other when they need so, but verifying is IMHO a good idea because it efficiently keeps spammers out. Perhaps sharing the address with everybody in the hood is a way to enforce politeness.
As for the last issue, I have actually a way to test it, as I was looking for a babysitter putting up an ad with a maximal cuteness baby photo in all our 12 stairways. I got two applicants. Out of 12 stairways times 6 levels times dunno like 6 flats. I will put up ads advertising this site some of these days and then if we get like 50 people there try again. But that 2 applicants was for me disappointingly low. Of course it could be that it will be even lower on the site as well.
I though that relates to stuff like accidents or other emergencies. I made a quick google search and could not find anything that would not relate to people being in trouble and needing help. But I do see it can play a role, a certain kind of waiting for each other to start...
If people don’t care when it’s a poster on a stairwell, why are they going to start caring when it’s a message on a website?
I think “website for local area stuff” has a problem where people think they’d use it far more than they actually would. People don’t care about that sort of thing as much as they think they should, and this sort of thing is the digital equivalent of a home exercise machine that people buy, use once and then leave to moulder.
I trust my utility company way more than I trust a random startup. Even Facebook, who this obviously competes with, doesn’t ask for scanned identification documents just to access basic functionality.
But ebay does ask for verifying addresses with postcards. Banks ask for verification of addresses.
Even if a little post-it on the inside of the apartment building’s door would do way more for way less.
I don’t think that post-its in the apartment building’s door are an efficient way to communicate.
If I could reach all the people in my apartment digitally, I do think that would be great. The problem is rather that it’s unlikely that other people in my apartment building would sign up for such a service.
When I pack up packets for neighbors I sometimes would appreciate a digital way to contact the neighbor.
To effectively implement it in Berlin I think there are three choices: 1) Go to big landlords like degewo. Sell them on the idea that it’s an added benefit to have communities in their apartments. Then let them communicate information that’s currently communicated via hang-outs via the website. 2) Cooperate with government programs for neighborhood building in the Soziale Stadt category. 3) Focus on vibrant areas in Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg with a lot of young people who are eager to adopt new technology. Encourage new people who sign up to do hangouts in their houses.
From those 1) is likely the best strategy. It shouldn’t cost degewo much money. Having a digital channel to their rentees might even save them money. Degewo runs ads so they care about having the image about being different from other landlords.
It’s like not trying to pick up a girl who did not give you any indicator of interest, like a long look or a smile. Perhaps over-cautious, but avoids a lot of embarrassment.
I don’t fully understand what high leverage means here, I just think it is cool and helps people to help each other and extending it another 3.5M people would be rather neat. I think they want to do it anyway, it could be easier if they have local contacts who have learned some methods of efficiency here and tend to like startups.
No, I meant helping them in programming or other stuff such as the postcard stuff to be able to offer it elsewhere. Sorry if I did not detail it, I thought it is obvious: if you like the idea, consider joining them as bit later co-founders (the whole thing just comes from Nov 2014), as part owners, investors, investing sweat capital mostly, that sort of stuff, the usual startup story.
Or maybe that is not so usual, I have no idea, but I was just thinking if someone calls them and tell them I will help you expand your customer base by 150% if you give me 10% or some other arrangement, this is fairly common for startups?
Actually helping them in programming and stuff like that is investing time and energy.
I do focus programming time on things I consider high leverage.
You actually live in Vienna and there programming team is in Vienna and not Berlin. You frequently say that you don’t feel that your job has any meaning. You can program.
If they just managed to find investors they are likely not looking to raise more money at the moment. Even if they would looking for capital there nothing specific about the LW Berlin group when it comes to providing Angel funding for an Austrian company. In that case it also makes sense to argue why that investment better than various other possible investments.
All good points. Also you think there is not much location advantage in extending the service e.g. negotiating a low postcard price with the German Post and so on?
I will not leave a safe job for a startup (I would have considered that before we had a child, now it would be irresponsible) but I do consider contributing in the evenings, this is seriously something I could believe in.
Also you think there is not much location advantage in extending the service e.g. negotiating a low postcard price with the German Post and so on?
If there are meetings you buy a plane ticket. Vienna isn’t that far from Germany.
When it comes to negotiating the idea is to hire a good salesperson. Most of the people at our meetup are coders who’s aren’t highly skilled salespeople. If I would hire for that role, I wouldn’t pick a person from our LW group.
I will not leave a safe job for a startup (I would have considered that before we had a child, now it would be irresponsible)
Today there’s nothing like a real safe job. All companies lay off people from time to time. Working at a job that you like is very useful.
It’s beneficial for the child to be around a dad who likes his job instead of a dad who hates his job.
Today there’s nothing like a real safe job. All companies lay off people from time to time.
The difference between a job that pays a fixed salary already vs. a startup that may pay dividends or something i n the future if it does not fold is fairly big.
More in the direction of expertise than job. Do you know any SAP consultants? They can always find a job. I am not exactly that but in a similar industry. They cannot be outsourced to India because they need local knowledge like accounting rules and such software are so huge and the space of potential kinds of problems and industry practices and whatnots, also domain experiences is so big that in these types of industry experience never has a point of diminishing marginal returns. People who do it for 30 years are more valuable than people who do it for 15.
Abandoning that kind of investment to become yet another dreamy startup Ruby on Rails type of guy? They are a dime a dozen and young hotshots with 5 years of experience—because there is just not so much to learn—outdo the older ones. It is an up or out—you hit big and then become a Paul Graham and retire from programming into investorship or similar stuff, or you are sooner or later forced out. In that type of world there is no real equivalent of the 50 years old SAP logistics consultants who is seen as something sort of a doyen because he dealt with every kind of crap that happen in a project at a logistics company.
So it sounds really dangerous to abandon that kind of investment for a new start in something different.
But diversifying, using free time to contribute to a project, that could be smart—hedging bets, if the main industry (desktop business software based on domain knowledge and business process experience) somehow collapses then it makes easier to join a different one (cool hot modern web based stuff). That makes sense, getting a foot in in one’s free time in a different industry..
Working at a job that you like is very useful. It’s beneficial for the child to be around a dad who likes his job instead of a dad who hates his job.
That depends on how you think DeVliegendeHollander models the situation in his mind.
Modeling people in situations like this isn’t trivial. Given the priors I have about him, there’s learned helplessness that provides a bias towards simply staying in the status quo.
In general most decently skilled developers don’t stay unemployment for longer periods of time if they are in a startup that fails.
If you read his post closely then he says that he doesn’t even consider it. The act of considering it would be irresponsible. I don’t know enough to say that it would be the right choice for him to take that job, but I think he would profit from actually deeply considering it.
My experience is primarily not in the hands-on coding which in my business software world tends to be really primitive (read data, verify it, sum it up, write it somewhere, it is essentially primitive scripting), I don’t think I have even seen an algorithm since school that was as complex as a quicksort which is first year exam material, as it is simply not done. In fact we constantly try to make frameworks where no coding is needed, just configuration, and employ non-programmer domain expert consultants as implementation specialists, but it always fails because people don’t understand that properly that once your configuration gets that advanced that it loops over a set of data and makes if-then decisions, then it is coding again: just usually a poor coding framework. Example
Anyway it is more of a being a general troubleshooter. It is sort of difficult to explain (but actually this is the aspect that is likable about it, which is kind of balances the less likable aspects) that I lack a job description. A manager wants a certain kind of information in a regular report. To provide it, there needs to be software, bought or developed or both (customized), users trained, processes defined, and a bunch of potential other things and nobody really tells how to do it, nobody really tells what to do, it is just the need to achieve a result, an informational output just anyhow, with any sort of combination of technology, people and process. This is the good part of it, how open-ended it is but clearly far more than coding, and the coding part is usually primitive.
The bad part is coding the same bloody report the 100th time only slightly different… or answering the same stupid support call the 100th time because people keep making the same mistakes or forget the previous call. Of course both could be improved by reusable frameworks (often not supported by primitive technologies used), knowledge bases, or writing user manuals but that unfortunately does not depend on one guy, the obstacles to that tend to be organizational, usually short-sightedness.
BTW do you have any clue where to go on with this kind of skillset if I ever want to change things or what could be a good Plan B to get a foot in the door in? There are some professions that are really isolated and have little overlaps with anything else, such as doctors and lawyers and I have this impression all this business information management is like that, too. Outsiders know next to nothing about it and insiders tend to not know much about anything else, professionally at least. Ever knew a succesful SAP, Oracle, NAV, CRM, Baan or whatever consultant who is now good at doing something else? I know one guy who held out only for three years and, I sh.t you not, threw it all away and became an undocumented (illegal) snowboarding trainer in the US in the Rockies :) But that is probably not the typical trajectory esp. not after a dozen years.
Wouldn’t that mean focusing less on the reliable parts of the thing (software, process) and far more on the people? I would have to motivate people and suchlike and basically simulate someone who is an extrovert and likes to a talk and this type of normal personality?
That very much depends on the particulars of a managing job and on the company’s culture. Your skills as you described them aren’t really about programming—they are about making shit happen. Management is basically about that, except that the higher you go in ranks, the less you do yourself and the more you have other people do for you. It is perfectly possible to be an effective manager without being a pep-rally style extrovert.
No, I do not think that your fallacy depends on what DVH thinks.
If I’m saying something to have an effect in another person then the quality of my reasoning process depends on whether my model of the other person is correct.
It’s like debugging a phobia at a LW meetup. People complain that language isn’t logical, but in the end the phobia is gone. The fact that the language superficially pattern matches to fallacies is besides the point as long as it has the desired consequences.
You’re confusing risk aversion and learned helplessness.
No, I’m talking to a person who at least self-labels as schizoid and about whom I have more information beyond that.
If I would think the issue is risk aversion and I wanted to convince him, I would appeal to the value of courage. Risk aversion doesn’t prevent people from considering an option and seeing the act of considering an option as irresponsible.
What result did I achieve here? I got someone who hates his job to think about whether to learn a different skillset to switch to a more enjoyable job and ask for advice about what he could do. He shows more agentship about his situation.
If I’m saying something to have an effect in another person then the quality of my reasoning process depends on whether my model of the other person is correct.
LOL. Let me reformulate that: “If I’m trying to manipulate another person, I can lie and that’s “besides the point as long as it has the desired consequences”. Right? X-)
Saying “There’s no real safe job” is in no lie. It true on it’s surface. If my mental model of DVH is correct it leads to an update in a direction that more in line with reality and saying things to move other people to a more accurate way of seeing the world isn’t lying.
Ahem. So you are saying that if you believe that your lie is justified, it’s no lie.
saying things to move other people to a more accurate way of seeing the world isn’t lying.
Let’s try that on a example. Say, Alice is dating Bob, but you think that Bob is a dirtbag and not good for Alice. You want to move Alice “to a more accurate way of seeing the world” and so you invent a story about how Bob has a hobby of kicking kittens and is an active poster on revenge porn forums. You’re saying that this would not be lying because it will move Alice to a more accurate way of seeing Bob. Well...
No. There are two factors: 1) It’s true. There are really no 100% safe jobs. 2) The likely update by the audience is in the direction of a more accurate belief.
Getting Alice to believe that Bob is an active poster on revenge porn forums by saying it likely doesn’t fulfill either criteria 1) or criteria 2).
There is really no 100% safe anything, but I don’t think that when DVH said “I will not leave a safe job for a startup” by “safe” he meant “100% safe”.
That doesn’t prevent the statement from being true. The fact that there’s no 100% safe anything doesn’t turn the statement into a lie while the example that Lumifer provides happens to be clear lying.
meant
I didn’t focus on what he “meant” but on my idea of what I believed his mental model to be.
I don’t think DVH’s mental models have getting inaccurate in any way as a result of my communication.
He didn’t pick up the belief “Startups as as safe as my current job”. I didn’t intent to get him to pick up that belief either. I don’t believe that statement either.
My statement thus does fulfill the two criteria: 1) It’s true on it’s surface. 2) It didn’t lead to inaccurate beliefs in the person I’m talking with.
Statement that fulfill both of those criteria aren’t lies.
I have no problem with including intentions as a third category but in general “see that you intention aren’t to mislead” is very simply to “see that you reach an outcome where the audience isn’t mislead” so I don’t list it separately.
That doesn’t prevent the statement from being true.
It doesn’t (though it does mostly prevent it from being useful), but the statement you made upthread was not that one. It was “Today there’s nothing like a real safe job”, in which context “safe” would normally be taken to mean something like “reasonably safe”, not “exactly 100% safe”.
1) It’s true on it’s surface.
What do you mean by “on its surface”? What matters is if it’s true in its most likely reasonable interpretation in its context.
Meh. Enough with the wordplays and let’s get quantitative. What do you think the P(DVH will lose his current job before he wants to|he doesn’t leave it for a startup) is? What do you think he thinks it is?
in which context “safe” would normally be taken to mean something like “reasonably safe”, not “exactly 100% safe”.
I didn’t just say “safe” I added the qualifier “real” to it. I also started the sentence with “today” with makes it more like a general platitude.
I specifically didn’t say your job isn’t safe but made the general statement that no job is really safe.
It happens to be a general platitude commonly repeated in popular culture.
What do you think he thinks it is?
I think he didn’t have a probability estimate for that in his mind at the time I was writing those lines. When you assume he had such a thing you miss the point of the exercise.
There is an interesting startup that is about trying to turn cities into villages by trying to make neighbors help each other. You need to verify your address via a scanned document, a neighbor or a a code on a postcard they send you. I think the primary reason they find that verification important is that people are allowed to see the full name, picture and address of people in their own neighborhood. And probably they don’t want to share that with people who are not actually neighbors. This seems to be key selling point of this startup—this is how it differs from any basic neighboor based Facebook group, that you really get to see each others face, name and address and people outside your hood really don’t get to see it so you can be fairly comfortable about sharing it. Besides you can choose a few categories how you can help others e.g. babysitting, petsitting etc. and what kind of common activities you would be interested in.
Here is the bad news: the startup is currently only available in German and only in the city of Vienna, probably due to the postcard thing. They managed to find investors so it is likely they will have an English version and extend it all over the world, in that case they will probably change the name as well, currently the name is fragnebenan.com But I have no idea when will this happen.
Anyway, I was thinking primarily that Rationalists in Berlin may take an interest in this and help them extend fragnebenan.com to Berlin?
This seems quite absurd. Why would I give my data to an obscure startup (who’ll probably sell it sooner or later) and hope people in my neighborhood make the same choice, when I can probably have way better results simply inviting my neighbors for a BBQ?
How many barbeques have you actually thrown?
Of the barbeques you have thrown, how many of those have led to mutually beneficial arrangements?
Of those that have led to mutually beneficial arrangments, how many per BBQ?
Now how much time have you put in to arranging those BBQ vs Value gotten from those BBQs?
I don’t know about your answer, but for me (substituting BBQ for dinner party) the answers respectively are probably about 10, 3, less than one, and WAYYY TO MUCH (if these types of arrangments were my only justification for throwing dinner parties.)
Now contrast this to how much time I’ve spent going through the free stuff offered on craigslist, vs the value I’ve gotten from it. The effort/value ratio is probably inverse. I think a startup that takes the “free services/free stuff” part of craigslist, but solves the unique problems of that segment (similar to what AirBNB has done for housing) could offer significant value.
I didn’t do mere BBQs but threw full-on parties with the neighbors (who I didn’t know at all) and other friends. Later two shared apartments in the same house combined held a huge party that spanned the house and included many of the neighbors. Many good friendships came out of that, and a couple of us moved in together later.
The BBQ idea is just a low-threshold variant of that which doesn’t require copious amounts of alcohol.
For free stuff, we just have a place in the staircase where people drop things that are still good but not needed by their previous owner (mostly books). This works with zero explicit coordination.
I’m kind of amazed/impressed that this works, based on my experience of communal spaces. Don’t people ever leave junk that they can’t be bothered to get rid of? Does anyone adopt responsibility for getting rid of items that have been there a long time and clearly no one wants?
The bigger the party, the more investment—This does not scale the same way a website does. Same thing with putting out free stuff on the steps.
BBQ would not be allowed in my third floor apartment’s balcony as it would stink up the place and it would be dangerous as well and I have no idea where could I store the equipment when not used as we have not much unused space, and my neighbors would be very creeped out if I would just ring on their door and invite them. We live in the same apartment since 2012 and never even talked to neighbors or had a chat. People tend to be very indifferent with each other in this apartment complex and I have no better experience with former ones either. These guys are trying to make a site that acts as an icebreaker—if you really need dog-sitting one day you can try to ask there and if someone helps you out then you have a form of connection and maybe will have a chat after it or something and maybe greet each other and stop for a chat the next time you see each other. The very idea is that the world is urbanizing, due to jobs and all that people who like the more communal village lifestyle are forced into cities where they suffer from the general indifference and impersonality so they try to change it and make cities more village like or suburbia like. They try to counter-act the negative psychological effects of urbanization with a “let’s open our doors to each other” theme.
As for selling data, they have the same data as my utility company. They can link a name with an address. Anyone who walks up to our house will see the name on the door anyway. And a photo, so OK that is more. But overally this is not secret data nor very sensitive.
So don’t have the BBQ on your balcony, but down in the yard. And don’t invite people by knocking, but via old-fashioned nice and friendly handwritten paper letters or a nice and friendly written note on the inside of the building’s door. Bring a grill, a little food and drink, and invite people to contribute their own. I don’t see how this could be easier. In the worst case only two or three people will come, but that’ll be more than this site is likely to do.
I trust my utility company way more than I trust a random startup. Even Facebook, who this obviously competes with, doesn’t ask for scanned identification documents just to access basic functionality.
And you didn’t adress the issue with this site only connecting you with other people who happen to also use it. This alone makes this project unable to compete with simple Facebook neighborhood groups.
But let’s assume they’re super trustworthy and there are people in my neighborhood who use this site. It still looks a lot like a “if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” situation. Whatever it is, throw a website and an app at it. Even if a little post-it on the inside of the apartment building’s door would do way more for way less.
We have hundreds of people in this complex. I suspect at least 50% is more extroverted than me as the the uni etc. the ratio was more like 90%. If they did not do the BBQ thing I think I would not have much chance with it…
On the trust. Facebook does not also give you your neighbors location nor a way to check if someone claiming to be in your neighborhood is genuine.
I sort of agree to the extent that showing the address to everybody in the hood is perhaps too much, people would tell each other when they need so, but verifying is IMHO a good idea because it efficiently keeps spammers out. Perhaps sharing the address with everybody in the hood is a way to enforce politeness.
As for the last issue, I have actually a way to test it, as I was looking for a babysitter putting up an ad with a maximal cuteness baby photo in all our 12 stairways. I got two applicants. Out of 12 stairways times 6 levels times dunno like 6 flats. I will put up ads advertising this site some of these days and then if we get like 50 people there try again. But that 2 applicants was for me disappointingly low. Of course it could be that it will be even lower on the site as well.
Bystander Effect? The more people there are that could throw a party the less likely it is any particular does. Be the exception.
I though that relates to stuff like accidents or other emergencies. I made a quick google search and could not find anything that would not relate to people being in trouble and needing help. But I do see it can play a role, a certain kind of waiting for each other to start...
If people don’t care when it’s a poster on a stairwell, why are they going to start caring when it’s a message on a website?
I think “website for local area stuff” has a problem where people think they’d use it far more than they actually would. People don’t care about that sort of thing as much as they think they should, and this sort of thing is the digital equivalent of a home exercise machine that people buy, use once and then leave to moulder.
But ebay does ask for verifying addresses with postcards. Banks ask for verification of addresses.
I don’t think that post-its in the apartment building’s door are an efficient way to communicate. If I could reach all the people in my apartment digitally, I do think that would be great. The problem is rather that it’s unlikely that other people in my apartment building would sign up for such a service.
When I pack up packets for neighbors I sometimes would appreciate a digital way to contact the neighbor.
To effectively implement it in Berlin I think there are three choices:
1) Go to big landlords like degewo. Sell them on the idea that it’s an added benefit to have communities in their apartments. Then let them communicate information that’s currently communicated via hang-outs via the website.
2) Cooperate with government programs for neighborhood building in the Soziale Stadt category.
3) Focus on vibrant areas in Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg with a lot of young people who are eager to adopt new technology. Encourage new people who sign up to do hangouts in their houses.
From those 1) is likely the best strategy. It shouldn’t cost degewo much money. Having a digital channel to their rentees might even save them money. Degewo runs ads so they care about having the image about being different from other landlords.
How do you know?
It’s like not trying to pick up a girl who did not give you any indicator of interest, like a long look or a smile. Perhaps over-cautious, but avoids a lot of embarrassment.
Why do you consider that to be a high leverage action?
I don’t fully understand what high leverage means here, I just think it is cool and helps people to help each other and extending it another 3.5M people would be rather neat. I think they want to do it anyway, it could be easier if they have local contacts who have learned some methods of efficiency here and tend to like startups.
“Help them expand” suggests that you propose to spend time on energy on promoting it.
It seems to me like the website only accepts people from Austria anyway.
No, I meant helping them in programming or other stuff such as the postcard stuff to be able to offer it elsewhere. Sorry if I did not detail it, I thought it is obvious: if you like the idea, consider joining them as bit later co-founders (the whole thing just comes from Nov 2014), as part owners, investors, investing sweat capital mostly, that sort of stuff, the usual startup story.
Or maybe that is not so usual, I have no idea, but I was just thinking if someone calls them and tell them I will help you expand your customer base by 150% if you give me 10% or some other arrangement, this is fairly common for startups?
Actually helping them in programming and stuff like that is investing time and energy. I do focus programming time on things I consider high leverage.
You actually live in Vienna and there programming team is in Vienna and not Berlin. You frequently say that you don’t feel that your job has any meaning. You can program.
If they just managed to find investors they are likely not looking to raise more money at the moment. Even if they would looking for capital there nothing specific about the LW Berlin group when it comes to providing Angel funding for an Austrian company. In that case it also makes sense to argue why that investment better than various other possible investments.
All good points. Also you think there is not much location advantage in extending the service e.g. negotiating a low postcard price with the German Post and so on?
I will not leave a safe job for a startup (I would have considered that before we had a child, now it would be irresponsible) but I do consider contributing in the evenings, this is seriously something I could believe in.
If there are meetings you buy a plane ticket. Vienna isn’t that far from Germany.
When it comes to negotiating the idea is to hire a good salesperson. Most of the people at our meetup are coders who’s aren’t highly skilled salespeople. If I would hire for that role, I wouldn’t pick a person from our LW group.
Today there’s nothing like a real safe job. All companies lay off people from time to time. Working at a job that you like is very useful. It’s beneficial for the child to be around a dad who likes his job instead of a dad who hates his job.
The difference between a job that pays a fixed salary already vs. a startup that may pay dividends or something i n the future if it does not fold is fairly big.
More in the direction of expertise than job. Do you know any SAP consultants? They can always find a job. I am not exactly that but in a similar industry. They cannot be outsourced to India because they need local knowledge like accounting rules and such software are so huge and the space of potential kinds of problems and industry practices and whatnots, also domain experiences is so big that in these types of industry experience never has a point of diminishing marginal returns. People who do it for 30 years are more valuable than people who do it for 15.
Abandoning that kind of investment to become yet another dreamy startup Ruby on Rails type of guy? They are a dime a dozen and young hotshots with 5 years of experience—because there is just not so much to learn—outdo the older ones. It is an up or out—you hit big and then become a Paul Graham and retire from programming into investorship or similar stuff, or you are sooner or later forced out. In that type of world there is no real equivalent of the 50 years old SAP logistics consultants who is seen as something sort of a doyen because he dealt with every kind of crap that happen in a project at a logistics company.
So it sounds really dangerous to abandon that kind of investment for a new start in something different.
But diversifying, using free time to contribute to a project, that could be smart—hedging bets, if the main industry (desktop business software based on domain knowledge and business process experience) somehow collapses then it makes easier to join a different one (cool hot modern web based stuff). That makes sense, getting a foot in in one’s free time in a different industry..
Yes, if not for the risks.
This is an excellent example of the Fallacy of Gray, don’t you think? :-)
That depends on how you think DeVliegendeHollander models the situation in his mind. Modeling people in situations like this isn’t trivial. Given the priors I have about him, there’s learned helplessness that provides a bias towards simply staying in the status quo.
In general most decently skilled developers don’t stay unemployment for longer periods of time if they are in a startup that fails.
If you read his post closely then he says that he doesn’t even consider it. The act of considering it would be irresponsible. I don’t know enough to say that it would be the right choice for him to take that job, but I think he would profit from actually deeply considering it.
My experience is primarily not in the hands-on coding which in my business software world tends to be really primitive (read data, verify it, sum it up, write it somewhere, it is essentially primitive scripting), I don’t think I have even seen an algorithm since school that was as complex as a quicksort which is first year exam material, as it is simply not done. In fact we constantly try to make frameworks where no coding is needed, just configuration, and employ non-programmer domain expert consultants as implementation specialists, but it always fails because people don’t understand that properly that once your configuration gets that advanced that it loops over a set of data and makes if-then decisions, then it is coding again: just usually a poor coding framework. Example
Anyway it is more of a being a general troubleshooter. It is sort of difficult to explain (but actually this is the aspect that is likable about it, which is kind of balances the less likable aspects) that I lack a job description. A manager wants a certain kind of information in a regular report. To provide it, there needs to be software, bought or developed or both (customized), users trained, processes defined, and a bunch of potential other things and nobody really tells how to do it, nobody really tells what to do, it is just the need to achieve a result, an informational output just anyhow, with any sort of combination of technology, people and process. This is the good part of it, how open-ended it is but clearly far more than coding, and the coding part is usually primitive.
The bad part is coding the same bloody report the 100th time only slightly different… or answering the same stupid support call the 100th time because people keep making the same mistakes or forget the previous call. Of course both could be improved by reusable frameworks (often not supported by primitive technologies used), knowledge bases, or writing user manuals but that unfortunately does not depend on one guy, the obstacles to that tend to be organizational, usually short-sightedness.
Okay, then I likely underrated the skill difference between what you are currently doing and the work that exists in a startup like that.
BTW do you have any clue where to go on with this kind of skillset if I ever want to change things or what could be a good Plan B to get a foot in the door in? There are some professions that are really isolated and have little overlaps with anything else, such as doctors and lawyers and I have this impression all this business information management is like that, too. Outsiders know next to nothing about it and insiders tend to not know much about anything else, professionally at least. Ever knew a succesful SAP, Oracle, NAV, CRM, Baan or whatever consultant who is now good at doing something else? I know one guy who held out only for three years and, I sh.t you not, threw it all away and became an undocumented (illegal) snowboarding trainer in the US in the Rockies :) But that is probably not the typical trajectory esp. not after a dozen years.
You might want to think about moving into management.
Wouldn’t that mean focusing less on the reliable parts of the thing (software, process) and far more on the people? I would have to motivate people and suchlike and basically simulate someone who is an extrovert and likes to a talk and this type of normal personality?
That very much depends on the particulars of a managing job and on the company’s culture. Your skills as you described them aren’t really about programming—they are about making shit happen. Management is basically about that, except that the higher you go in ranks, the less you do yourself and the more you have other people do for you. It is perfectly possible to be an effective manager without being a pep-rally style extrovert.
No, I do not think that your fallacy depends on what DVH thinks.
You’re confusing risk aversion and learned helplessness.
Another English irregular verb.
“I can see that this won’t work. You are risk-averse. He exhibits learned helplessness.”
If I’m saying something to have an effect in another person then the quality of my reasoning process depends on whether my model of the other person is correct.
It’s like debugging a phobia at a LW meetup. People complain that language isn’t logical, but in the end the phobia is gone. The fact that the language superficially pattern matches to fallacies is besides the point as long as it has the desired consequences.
No, I’m talking to a person who at least self-labels as schizoid and about whom I have more information beyond that.
If I would think the issue is risk aversion and I wanted to convince him, I would appeal to the value of courage. Risk aversion doesn’t prevent people from considering an option and seeing the act of considering an option as irresponsible.
What result did I achieve here? I got someone who hates his job to think about whether to learn a different skillset to switch to a more enjoyable job and ask for advice about what he could do. He shows more agentship about his situation.
LOL. Let me reformulate that: “If I’m trying to manipulate another person, I can lie and that’s “besides the point as long as it has the desired consequences”. Right? X-)
Saying “There’s no real safe job” is in no lie. It true on it’s surface. If my mental model of DVH is correct it leads to an update in a direction that more in line with reality and saying things to move other people to a more accurate way of seeing the world isn’t lying.
Ahem. So you are saying that if you believe that your lie is justified, it’s no lie.
Let’s try that on a example. Say, Alice is dating Bob, but you think that Bob is a dirtbag and not good for Alice. You want to move Alice “to a more accurate way of seeing the world” and so you invent a story about how Bob has a hobby of kicking kittens and is an active poster on revenge porn forums. You’re saying that this would not be lying because it will move Alice to a more accurate way of seeing Bob. Well...
No. There are two factors:
1) It’s true. There are really no 100% safe jobs.
2) The likely update by the audience is in the direction of a more accurate belief.
Getting Alice to believe that Bob is an active poster on revenge porn forums by saying it likely doesn’t fulfill either criteria 1) or criteria 2).
There is really no 100% safe anything, but I don’t think that when DVH said “I will not leave a safe job for a startup” by “safe” he meant “100% safe”.
That doesn’t prevent the statement from being true. The fact that there’s no 100% safe anything doesn’t turn the statement into a lie while the example that Lumifer provides happens to be clear lying.
I didn’t focus on what he “meant” but on my idea of what I believed his mental model to be.
I don’t think DVH’s mental models have getting inaccurate in any way as a result of my communication. He didn’t pick up the belief “Startups as as safe as my current job”. I didn’t intent to get him to pick up that belief either. I don’t believe that statement either.
My statement thus does fulfill the two criteria:
1) It’s true on it’s surface.
2) It didn’t lead to inaccurate beliefs in the person I’m talking with.
Statement that fulfill both of those criteria aren’t lies.
That would mean that if you say something that is literally true but intended to mislead, and someone figures that out, it’s not a lie.
I have no problem with including intentions as a third category but in general “see that you intention aren’t to mislead” is very simply to “see that you reach an outcome where the audience isn’t mislead” so I don’t list it separately.
It doesn’t (though it does mostly prevent it from being useful), but the statement you made upthread was not that one. It was “Today there’s nothing like a real safe job”, in which context “safe” would normally be taken to mean something like “reasonably safe”, not “exactly 100% safe”.
What do you mean by “on its surface”? What matters is if it’s true in its most likely reasonable interpretation in its context.
Meh. Enough with the wordplays and let’s get quantitative. What do you think the P(DVH will lose his current job before he wants to|he doesn’t leave it for a startup) is? What do you think he thinks it is?
I didn’t just say “safe” I added the qualifier “real” to it. I also started the sentence with “today” with makes it more like a general platitude. I specifically didn’t say your job isn’t safe but made the general statement that no job is really safe.
It happens to be a general platitude commonly repeated in popular culture.
I think he didn’t have a probability estimate for that in his mind at the time I was writing those lines. When you assume he had such a thing you miss the point of the exercise.