(2009-04-15) Yegge Complexity Credit Card Marijuana

Steve Yegge demonstrates the Complexity of Human System-s. First by trying to apply the idea of category-specific Credit Card limits (to help with Personal Finance, per Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational). Then by considering what it might take to legalize Marijuana. That kind of shit happened at Amazon pretty much every week I was there, for almost seven years. (And astonishingly, we actually managed to launch at least half those crazy ideas, by burning through people like little tea lights.)

VP-s (Management) have what my brother Mike refers to as "Shit's Easy Syndrome". You know. As in, shit's easy. If it's easy to imagine, then it's easy to implement. Programming is just turning imagination into reality. You can churn through shit as fast as the conscious mind can envision it. Any programmer who can't keep up is an underperformer who needs to be "topgraded" to make room for incredible new college hires who can make it happen, no matter what "it" happens to be, even if they have to work 27 hours a day, which of course they can because by virtue of being new college hires, they have no social lives and no spouses or significant others, and they probably smoke a lot of crack from being in the dorms so they can stay awake for weeks at a time.

There's a couple good comments.