The biggest problem with the legal system is availability; It takes significant amount of time to utilize our legal system and the majority of working folks have no capability to get enough time away from work to accomplish this. This is possibly the largest reason the rich have such legal powers that they do, simply because they are capable of financing their own time and therefore able to use their time towards whichever endeavors they need to for completion of personal responsibility. It is each persons personal responsibility to take fraudulent actors trying to take advantage of them to the courts, but when one will lose their livelihood for the few days a month for a few months it takes to accomplish such, there's simply no choice but to be taken advantage of.

No I start off with "let's protected citizens from corporations". When those corporations fail, the ultra rich running them are guess what? Still filthy rich, only the honest working people who relied on that corporation are harmed. How about we stop letting these corporations get so large that they can harm enormous amounts of the economy, aka normal citizens. Rich people weather this stuff like nothing, it's everybody else who get's totally screwed. You think the corporations will ever stop getting that big on purpose? Good luck. You think fear of failure will stop them? HAH fear of failure is what makes them get so big! Less chance of failing when you're so huge, but huge damage to working man if you do. Or you can just keep thinking "corporations will just figure it out and stop doing these things" good luck, so long as those things you think are so risky are actually ENORMOUSLY PROFITABLE, they will do them. Period. No two ways about it, they're like a monkey touching a lever that gives them crack, they'll push the lever until it kills them, every single time.

Humbug, many people have many times plausibly and truthfully denied knowledge of laws they broke, make it illegal to do what these asshats are doing and it won't matter whether they knew they were breaking the law of not, just throw them in jail. I suggest this in fact be the final destination for all MBA's, they hand them a degree and put them directly in jail for spending 6 years trying to become a professional arsehole.

Indeed. I never thought of such an idea but I sincerely like it and would like to subscribe to this fellow's newsletter.

Maybe investments to hold real risks *unless* they grow so large so fast, ever think about that? Companies strengthen their positions through market controlling investments such as the poster is talking about, and purposefully position themselves to *be* the market, knowing this is the most stable position for them. This is however the *least* stable position for everyone around them, but that's not their problem now is it?

Imagine if a bank saw a technique with which through hell and high water it could become the single bank owning every single penny anyone anywhere depositted? Would they be like "oh boy, we'd get too big, so risky!" hell no, they'd say SWEET WE WILL HAVE IT ALL! and trudge forth to doing it, the result being? If they happen to fail after that, well there goes *everyone's* money.

Companies become to big to fail on purpose because it's a bloody profitable affair, and they're not going to stop until we put laws on corporate sizes (and give money and AUTHORITY to regulators to freeging enforce those laws so we don't just have enforcers standing around pointing saying "Look! Look! The shit's about to hit! Look everybody! Here it goes! Now! *bam* Told you so! Wait what? You're firing me for not doing my job??" regulators getting canned for not enforcing laws the congress refused to give them power to enforce is the ultimate example of political grand standing wasting american tax dollars, give them the bloody authority!)

Go re-read why worse is better http://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html and realize any form of micro-architecture has long since been destroyed by the formidable drive of the monolithic design and it's ability to be simultaneously horrible and intractably irremovable from the minds of the vast majority of engineers, along with being faster to get out the door and therefore meeting all requirements of the business people who actually shove all this garbage down our throats.

I read a lot of summaries on slashdot on topics I know nothing about, but they usually give me some idea what's going on. This one is giving me no clues but sounds really interesting. I'm not stupid, I just know the software and not the physical medium for squat, please explain this down to relatively smart persons laymans terms someone?

I think possibly the biggest thing people ignore when they hear zuckerburgs story and get stars in their eyes if they're coders imagining their story the same or alternatively non-coders and think any frat kid can write code is that these guys were going to frigging Harvard. These guys were never just some college kids, to begin with they were A) raised well-off with every benefit you could have B) smart enough to be writing code before college C) smart enough to have been accepted to harvard D) smart enough to not even be struggling while they were there.

I'm sorry, but these dudes were all smarter than most everyone before they became rich, and they became rich because of that. Facebook hardly had anything to do with it, these dudes would have become rich one way or another because that's what happens to people who can meet all 4 of those circumstances, and I mean all people who can meet those 4 criteria. Period. So just stop comparing anything at all about the guys who started Facebook (or classically Bill Gates because he was a drop-out, sorry again; he went to fucking Harvard.) to the rest of anything. You're talking about 0.0001% of people and comparing them to everyone the hell else, just stop, it's stupid.

There's such a huge variety in the industry, I've seen it stuck to at multiple companies I worked at, and then absolutely not at all at others. It just depends, and what works varies just as much. At the end of the day, it's the people who've completed the "Learn to program in 10 years" book that get the job done well regardless of the bullshit surrounding them, so long as they completed the book that is, so many people seem to spend 10 years on chapter 1 and then proclaim "I finished the book!", wrong.

This is dead true. engineered software has very valuable place, but yeah this shit was all born of the free-form creativity of a bunch of math geniuses, continuously for decades until someone made money off of it, and an industry was born trying to formalize it so they could just put the magic in a bottle and sell it as a potion.

haha true that. I would say at the end of the day it's not the methodology screwing everyone up, it's everyone that's a screw up as in, up into management that's screwing everyone up. PM's.. pfleh, what a waste of space, but then when you don't have enough skilled engineers on your team to keep everyone organized in the same direction, a good pm can help. Finding a good PM though is way harder than finding a good engineer, at least most engineers got into it because they liked coding, PM's got into it because they "like people or something, really wasn't sure what I wanted but tried a bunch of different things and this one kind of seemed to fit" (translation I got a job doing it and it paid better than the other jobs I'd gotten, even though I have no idea what I'm doing and don't plan to study any history or industry results about the job to get better)

Thankyou. Honestly, proper agile takes a lot of discipline and skill, at the end of the day I think you can't do proper agile without at least 50% of the involved team having completed the "Learn programming in 10 years" book rather than the 21 days version. You have to have seen all the shit that doesn't work over and over again for so long before you can even begin to do any of the stuff that works, and catch people trying to do the same tired crap, getting stuck in design meetings that spin forever or the alternative of just jamming out a bunch of garbage without talking to anyone, wasting everyone's time asking every step of the way how you should do each little thing or structuring an entire module according to your own hair brained ideas and never looking at the rest of the systems structure to see how crap yours will integrate, spending a week fulfilling requirements nobody wrote but you thought were just important for your little piddly irrelevant piece of the puzzle or not being thorough enough in seeing the big picture so as to catch the shit that needs to be done but wasn't written down or even mentioned. So many ways to eff it all up, so many ways. So yeah, "Learn programming in 10 years" then help a team be agile properly and it'll work out far better than some wankers "learn daily standups in 2 days to solve all your problems" garbage or "waterfall because it's worked for everyone since the 70s!", or "agile, as in, just go get it all done without the requirements or any help whatsoever, better be good because I heard agile is good!".

I think honestly the biggest cause though hands down of all this type of just-get-it-done crap comes from MBA's being too good to actually do any work, more less any work *for* lowly developers, it's supposed to be the other way around! Therefore they never generate specs or requirements because they're supposed to be telling other people to do work, not doing work themselves, why else did they go to school to become SOOO smart?? Between those schmucks and the "programming is cool, I'm going to be the next zuckerburg!" weeners, the industry is rife with people utterly clueless. But I guess that just mirrors the real world...

Which is the same "NO" we get from management when we ask for reqs because "Just make it do what I said, you know, be social and friendly looking with some feeds or something". If we SE's weren't so smart to begin with, this industry would honestly come crashing to it's bloody knees or rather, just run completely differently, you know, where other people do their jobs rather than us doing everyone's.

You forget the other part of the equation, the corporotocracies where they have BA staffs that don't write requirements either, I guess MBA's are above all that work mumbo jumbo and just hang out while telling the devs to do something useful without giving us any bloody specs at all ever. It's not just startups that are running without requirements, it's the entire industry anymore. I don't know why, this used to be a given expectation of a dev's job that they would get requirements, but I guess somebody at some point decided we could just generate wealth for our masters without the slightest bit of input at all.

I guess it doesn't help that enough of us are smart enough to actually do just that, but still, it's bloody annoying!

Wrong.

You think the word "googling" entered common culture only for geeks?

Non-geeks know exactly what google does: Find whatever piece of information they want when they enter it into a little box thingy and hit that search button. Only geeks like you are so cut-off from the real world as to not be able to see google through normal-people eyes and only see the megalithic insano-tech company that normal people could never begin to grasp. What they can grasp that you didn't realize is that it finds them anything they want to find, and they don't even think anything other then that. They were trusted for this reason. Plus all the geek friends of normals wet themselves when they hear about google so the normals trust them that much more.