chrisball91's comments

This article has an interesting angle to it but some of the points made are more opinion than actual objective issues.

Uber being the new and disruptive company that it is, is of course going to have some kinks and issues along the way. However like any unicorn tech company it's about establishing themselves in the market first and clearing up some things as they go along or at a later date. Name me a breakout tech company that hasn't had some sort of scandal or major issue at some point.

Some Of The authors points: "It requires you to let Big Brother track you, with a portable phone." Phones can be traced and pinpointed by big brother regardless of what apps are installed, as long as you've got signal you're not anonymous. Tracking is an integral part of the uber value proposition and experience.

"Uber requires you to identify yourself, both to order a cab and to pay." I can't speak for other cities but here in London people do taxi runs, dispute fares just to take the piss and drivers can face racism from passengers. Identification and thus accountability through Uber is refreshing.

"Uber also records where you get the cab and where you go with it." So if an Uber Driver was to take a lone women somewhere unrequested, the fact the journey is tracked could only help this women and the police. By law here in the UK cab drivers have to take the quickest route possible, again the tracking provides safety and security for the passenger from being over charged.

"Drivers are starting to complain that they’re left with little money for their work." Uber is not for all drivers. Here in London every Uber driver I talk too who has a hybrid electric car loves driving for the company. They make more money from Uber then they did driving for tradition cab companies. If it doesn't work for a driver with a petrol intensive engine, nothing is keeping them tied to the company.

"Its practice of identifying passengers enables drivers to find out who the passenger is. This makes some women scared to use Uber." It's practice of identifying cab drivers and their car registration details enables users to have an arsenal of information to hand to the police should a driver be rouge.

I cannot help but think that bot the tracking and identification that's so integral into Uber actually creates a safer and more enjoyable experience for users and for drivers. Uber drivers here in London tell me that the people who use Uber tend to be a higher quality and more pleasurable person to drive. I once left a driver with a 1 star rating and someone from uber got in touch with me right away, to say they don't really care about who's driving for them is nonsense.

The topic of immigration and jobs to foreign workers can be a contentious issue for many people with strong national pride and identity but the world is just moving at such a fast pace and technology at an even faster pace that fundamental fixes to many modern skills and labour challenges are on trans-generation timelines... time that the momentum of change doesn't have to wait. As this is the case we have to look beyond our borders and reach out anywhere we have to, to overcome the challenges. This is fundamental entrepreneurship and business.

I don't feel that Sonics counter arguments to Paul Graham hold much clout when we really think about it so I'll break a couple of his counter points down and give my thoughts on them. I've removed some of the original text for the point of being succinct.

1) 'why is this ‘exceptional’ thing suddenly the standard? No, we need to leave all those people (99% of normal americans) sitting at home and rewire all our immigration laws to ensure that some mythical ‘exceptional programmers’ can get here'

Fortunately these workers are not mythical and it's not a hope that these people exist. Factually they're out there. Exceptional coders are not just people who can write code, they are people who can self interpret challenges and visualise the solutions far beyond the spec and the stated requirements. Great programmers can marry the standard technology with new and unexpected solutions. You cannot teach this stuff, it requires individual initiative, passion and personality. This goes far beyond textbook college coding education.

2) 'we might just as well assert that 95% of ‘great’, oh, let’s say, construction workers, or librarians, or dental techs, are born outside the US. But so what? Does this mean we need to displace all the domestic construction workers/librarians/dental techs so that we can suck up only the ‘great’/’exceptional’ ones from elsewhere?'

These industries themselves rarely have innovation and deal with constants. Tech however transcends all industries and is thus driving the modern economy. Whether it's Banking & Investment, Social media & Communication, P2P Lending, Manufacturing or what ever you can imagine, coding is needed.

3) What’s so special about programming that it – and it alone – is the industry where the US has to wave everyone in?

Tech is the fabric of the modern world, little else can be held to the same stature. And as I wrote above, it transcends all industries. In the interconnected world that we live in, watching and reacting to competitors is nothing like it's ever been before. Small teams of great programmers can launch a competitors idea and get traction quicker then the good team of programmers originally working on the idea.

4) Who exactly are these ‘few thousand’ ‘great programmers’ – so great that they’re (uniformly) greater than any American – that we don’t let in, anyway? I actually don’t buy this.

They're people who are much hungrier than the comfortable consumer in the west. From societies and cultures that drive home discipline and education far beyond us in the west. They're from countries where being the best you can be is the only way to a proper life. Work ethic, skills and culture is superior to the comfortable and personal standards of average western individuals.

5) why doesn’t this hypothetical guy, if he’s so ‘great’ and ‘exceptional’, just do his own thing?" Where they're from the infrastructure and support networks perhaps are just not up to scratch. The cards are stacked against them even more than in the west. Not only this, the blog post author is assuming that exceptional coders, as a general rule of thumb, should want to run their own company.

I've read in the region of 250 books across 4 years and managed to develop some good habits for getting through books.

1) Aim for one book a month or one book every two weeks. Divide the number of pages by the days in your chosen time frame and commit at all costs to reading your set number of daily pages.

2) Take opportunities like going to the toilet, catching the train, being driven somewhere, waiting for food to cook and the 20 minutes before you sleep for the night to get some pages read. 3) Get an ebook version and listen to this while shopping, walking the dog, driving to work or any other redundant time where holding a book is not possible.

Getting a couple of pages in here and there every day adds up very quickly and before you know it, it's become a habit. I do stress though that you must be really interested in the content of the book or the motivation just dips and if your forcing yourself to read through it anyway, the information doesn't sink in.