Great data for getting your insurance rates raised.
All it takes is for Snake Farm to pay to find out how many times your smoke detector goes off. Or even if it doesn't fully go off, how often it senses anything.
With your thermostat data, it's possible to build a profile of when you're home and away. Hmmm... he seems to work an overnight shift. Better jack up his premium!
If companies do start charging different amounts based on smart device data, it will most likely be discounts from an increased premium (which you wouldn't get without smart devices) rather than increases in fees due to usage behavior.
In this case, Progressive gives you a discount in exchange for monitoring you.
But I've seen articles where other insurance companies (often in the UK for some reason) raise rates for things as seemingly innocuous as posting the wrong thing, or being "friends" with the wrong people on social media.
They can, actually...the culture needs to learn to adopt them is all.
Having real talent and having to basically navigate terrain of those with less skill than you and yet, oddly enough, more power, is very frustrating. These people can knock orders of magnitude off development cycles, and make subtle decisions that affect your product years in to the future.
If anyone feels even remotely insecure because of your prowess you are shot down. I was pushed out of Microsoft just for accomplishing a task that was supposed to be impossible "because a senior engineer said so." In other words, I did my job (I wasn't aware it was supposedly impossible) and then a management chain became incredibly uncomfortable and dumped me.
You might say I'm the problem...I point to the stack of clowns that said it couldn't be done and go...yeah sure.
> These people can knock orders of magnitude off development cycles, and make subtle decisions that affect your product years in to the future.
These people can also introduce orders of magnitude into development cycles, and make subtle decisions that affect the product in negative ways years into the future. I seem to have made a career out of cleaning up after these people, and I have no sympathy for them. An amazing research project or tech demo isn't an amazing sustainable project.
> I was pushed out of Microsoft just for accomplishing a task that was supposed to be impossible "because a senior engineer said so." In other words, I did my job (I wasn't aware it was supposedly impossible) and then a management chain became incredibly uncomfortable and dumped me.
When I've seen this, it's usually because the task can be done 90% in a straightforward way but 100% is impossible, and the person doing the task thinks that doing it 90% counts, possibly because they're unaware of how important the the remaining 10% is, and no amount of explanation will convince them they're seeing the problem wrong. Then they should be let go, not because they did the task, but because they're unable to understand requirements and wasting both the time of others and their own time.
... all that said, there's a very good place for this type of person: small businesses. That seems to be where the author of this article is, right now. He's got some weird ideas about how computers work, that are probably not right, but maybe they are right and he's a genius and we're all years behind him. He's built a product around those ideas. If he can sell the product, more power to him. If he can't, and the product is meeting 90% but not 100% of his customers' requirements, they just don't buy and go to a competitor. No awkward conversations about firing, no wasted time trying to get their existing hire to perform instead of hiring people who can do the job, etc. And the burden of getting him to learn how to understand requirements is entirely on him and not on anyone else.
At some point an inflated sense of experience is necessary to succeed in starting your own company. You have to literally believe you are capable of having a real impact. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, etc. All were told at one point "you don't have the necessary experience for that." Or "are you fucking crazy?" Or something meant to challenge their experience. The hard realization is that none of them had the experience...but boy did they sure earn it.
Point is: arrogance isn't the curse you might think it is.
There are a handful of sociopathic people who reach those heights, while most of the rest do not. Mistaking arrogance for an active ingredient in success is probably a mistake likely to lead you down a bad road. Ruthlessness, arrogance, greed might be things you need to be a high level founder, banker, CEO or politician, but most people with those traits are abject failures. You need to be smart, and very lucky as well, and even without arrogance smart and lucky should pay off.
It has also been shown that alpha makes, in business, tend to lose money owing to short sighted thought processes.
In fact, the guy who originally coined the idea that humans have an alpha male concept pulled back on the notion, saying that he was mistaken in comparing human hierarchy to wolves.
Humans aren't actually hierarchical. We believe in equality and because of this can form many different kinds of social structures (which is where political struggle comes from, i.e. democracy, Communism, socialism, etc.)
It's nice when someone steps up and volunteers to do all of the work though.
As a problem solver, Facebook looks very attractive to me right now. Imagine the shit they're going through right now. Not just damage mitigation but they probably need to revamp their business strategy which will turn in to serious engineering work.
