The issue wasn't sharing a database, it was not being clear about who owns what.
Having multiple teams with one code base that has one database is fine. Every every line of code, table and column needs to be owned by exactly ONE team.
Ownership is the most important part of making an organization effective.
The vast majority of people who write don't have a voice worth preserving. The rest can build out a voice document to make sure the AI doesn't strip it out.
With the gap between 1 and 2 being driven by the underlying quality of the writer and how well they use AI. A really good writer sees marginal improvements and a really poor one can see vast improvements.
>They lived in a house or apt with a third the sqft/person that was far more likely to catch fire and didn't have AC.
But at least they could afford a house, right? I think a lot of people would accept living in a house without AC and more likely to catch fire. Is a house like that cheap today? No, right? It's crazy expensive as well.
>If they had a car they most likely shared it. It was far less safe, didn't have AC, guzzled gas and polluted.
Car technology in the past was worse, we know that. Cars were more affordable though.
>Never ate out and spent a third of earnings on cheap grocery store staples.
Like today then.
>We're benefiting greatly from the increase in productivity. We just view our great-grandfather luxuries as our necessities.
Young people are rotting at home unable to go ahead with their lives because wages nowadays are not enough to pay for a house and a family. Why do people try to deny this obvious reality? Productivity didn't benefit everyone equally and people in the past had more opportunities to build a life inside a standard that was socially acceptable.
First, adjusted for inflation, new car prices really aren't that different than they were 10-30-50-70 years ago. You have to compare like for like, no cheating comparing a modern luxury car to Ford Pinto. For example the cheapest car in 1970 cost about $2000, with no frills like a radio, passenger wing mirror or floor matts. That's equivalent to about $17000 today. A base Nissan Versa today starts at $18000, yet includes power windows and an A/C.
Second, the maintenance requirements today are much, much lower than in the past. There's a whole list of expensive stuff you just don't have to think about with modern cars until long after those old cars would be at the junk yard (chassis lube, spark plugs, spark plug wires, carb and distributor, wheel bearings etc). That's a lot of labor you don't pay for, to say nothing of the parts!
Third, despite being heavier, more convenient and safer, modern cars have lower fuel consumption. Coming back to our Pinto vs Versa example, the Versa gets at least 50% better fuel economy.
Fourth, cars today just last longer. It used to be a minor miracle when a wasn't rusted out after 10 years or the engine still ran after 100k miles. Today, your car might be still under warranty at that point.
> Why do people try to deny this obvious reality?
Because it is not at all obvious that that is, in fact, reality. It doesn't help to complain about easily-disprovable things like the affordability of cars.
>Because it is not at all obvious that that is, in fact, reality. It doesn't help to complain about easily-disprovable things like the affordability of cars.
Well you can just search "why are cars so expensive" and then you will find dozens of articles like the one below. I'm not American but I have the impression that cars were a kind of milestone in the life of young people in the past and this disappeared due to affordability. How much does it cost to live in a van nowadays? Can a part time fast food worker afford it?
I don't like this hedonistic argument that you used, it sounds like cheating, you risk sounding like the GP saying that houses today that nobody can afford are in fact cheaper because they are less likely to catch fire.
If you compare similar widely sold cars across decades prices are fairly level in constant dollars in the US, at least in the low to maybe mid range. For example when I was buying a new car a little under a year ago I looked at 2025 models of some of my earlier cars.
A 2025 Nissan Sentra was pretty similar in constant dollars to my 1982 Datsun Sentra. A 2025 Honda Civic was pretty close to my 1989 Civic. A 2025 Honda CR-V was pretty close to my 2006 CR-V.
The average new car price now is quite a bit higher in constant dollars than the average new car price decades ago, but that is because preferences have shifted to cars that are at more expensive places in the lineup.
My 2006 CR-V for example was more than my 1989 Civic in constant dollars, but CR-Vs are at a higher price point that Civics. If I had gotten another Civic in 2006 it would have been about the same as my 1989 Civic.
The American media writes articles about what gets clicks not what is true.
If you don't believe the enormous amount of freely available data on the internet. I am American, I had grandparents who were American. Poverty was a whole different beast in the 1930's compared to today.
>But at least they could afford a house, right? I think a lot of people would accept living in a house without AC and more likely to catch fire. Is a house like that cheap today? No, right? It's crazy expensive as well.
I don't know many people who would rather live in a house without climate control than an apartment. A house from 1936 with no improvements is worth very little. When purchasing a house like that you're mostly buying the land.
> Car technology in the past was worse, we know that. Cars were more affordable though.
Car ownership in 1936 was far below what it is today.
> Like today then.
No, groceries were far more expensive. You can buy far more gallons of milks, eggs, lbs of ground beef, or potatoes at today's prices with todays median wage than you could in 1936 on the 1936 median wage. We have records of how much people made, and the cost of basic staples. This isn't something you need to guess about you can just google it.
> Young people are rotting at home unable to go ahead with their lives because wages nowadays are not enough to pay for a house and a family. Why do people try to deny this obvious reality? Productivity didn't benefit everyone equally and people in the past had more opportunities to build a life inside a standard that was socially acceptable.
Because 100 years of data says that this is a difference in expectations vs people being poorer. Yeah housing is more expensive than it should be due to regulation but despite that people are still much better off.
> I don't know many people who would rather live in a house without climate control than an apartment. A house from 1936 with no improvements is worth very little. When purchasing a house like that you're mostly buying the land.
>Because 100 years of data says that this is a difference in expectations vs people being poorer. Yeah housing is more expensive than it should be due to regulation but despite that people are still much better off.
People would raise a family on a single income. Boomers would work brain dead job and afford more than what a white collar worker can today, not to mention you could change careers when you wanted. Land was dirty cheap. People had multiple houses. You could find a job right out of highschool.
Nowadays people work dead end jobs to never be able to afford anything. Social security is being bankrupt by retirees who are collecting much more than they contributed and millennials and zoomers are repeatedly told they are not going to be able to retire. A degree became just a piece of paper. Any job interview has at least 3 stages. Childcare, education, etc ridiculously expensive. Houses and rent are ridiculously expensive.
>I don't know many people who would rather live in a house without climate control than an apartment. A house from 1936 with no improvements is worth very little. When purchasing a house like that you're mostly buying the land.
You're completely out of touch. Even apartments are super expensive nowadays. I would gladly live in a house without A/C.
This argument seems bit cheap. I'm not saying he is an expert, but you don't have to be diabetic to be expert of diabetes, for example. I would argue it might even make you biased about the subject.
If he was making an argument from data it would be cheap. But he's making an argument from lived experience against both data and someone who lives here.
Are you saying that the data is wrong and the only way to know what it's truly like to make it in America is to not live there? That's sounds insane.
>Is a house like that cheap today? No, right? It's crazy expensive as well.
I assume by catch fire GP means electrical wiring? Many houses on market today are literally not remodeled since the 1940s so retain that original wiring.
All you've done here is take the tired dishonest "kids these days and their darn avocado toast and smartphones" trope and used different goods/services to spin it in a way to appeal to the median commentor on HN.
You're ignoring the gorilla in the room. Why can't one live in a comparable manner today and bank the difference? Because those things aren't available? Why aren't those things available?
> You're ignoring the gorilla in the room. Why can't one live in a comparable manner today and bank the difference?
For two reasons.
1. They're illegal. You're not allowed to build a house to 1936 climate, safety, and fire codes with un-licensed labor. And boarding houses were effectively banned.
2. Market. Most people would rather live in a smaller apartment than 1936 style un-climate controlled death trap.
And the reasons are the same for cars. You legally can't sell a new 1936 car, and even if you could most people would rather drive an 10 year old civic.
> Why can't one live in a comparable manner today and bank the difference?
You can do this. Just move to a sparsely populated area and work remote. Rural and semi-rural areas are basically the "poor", lower productivity areas within any given country, if you can arbitrage the incomes difference via remote work you stand to gain quite a bit.
The most impactful censure is not the government coming in and trying to burn copies of studies. It's the the subtle social and professional pressures of an academia that has very strong priors. It's a bunch of studies that were never attempted, never funded, analysis that wasn't included, conclusions that were dropped, and studies sitting in file drawers.
See Roland G. Fryer Jr's, the youngest black professor to receive tenure, experience at Harvard.
Basically when his analysis found no evidence of racial bias in officer-involved shootings he went to his colleagues and he describe the advice they gave him as "Do not publish this if you care about your career or social life". I imagine it would have been worse if he wasn't black.
See "The Impact of Early Medical Treatment in Transgender Youth" where the lead investigator was not releasing the results for a long time because she didn't like the conclusions her study found.
And for every study where there is someone as brave or naive as Roland who publishes something like this, there are 10 where the professor or doctor decided not to study something, dropped an analysis, or just never published a problematic conclusion.
Again, it depends. Maybe they have more pride in their job or despise their company less, who knows.
And I don't mean productivity per hour. Lol. No, I mean absolute.
An employee working like a dog will get less work done than one just working normally, probably. Because most of the work is negative, so it doesn't add to the work done pile, it chips away at it.
Eventually, I would think, you reach a point where an employee is less productive than no employee at all. Seems impossible to be working 100 hours a week and be getting less than nothing done, but if you're actively making the product worse or creating debt, that's how I would classify that.
Compared to like a phase 3 clinical trial, sure. Compared to your average paper, and especially your average business paper I don't think that's the case.
At a minimum you'd expect a few more companies, more sources than just code review and code productivity metrics (this alone disqualifies the study because it centers on just one task: software development) etc.
I have not made up my mind either way so I'm not sure where you pulled that from. I even wrote in another comment upthread: "It is entirely possible that these conclusions (which by themselves are not all that shocking or novel) hold true over larger samples and across multiple types of company but that's not what they did. "
