batmaniam

That's true, and those laws are supposed to right decades of misappropriation of education, finance, basic rights back to those that were wronged. The intent is sound, but the execution of it? I'm not sure it's been done fairly. Consider this:

Asians have been discriminated in many cases in the past as well. Goes way back to the days of slavery:

> After slavery was abolished in the United States, Chinese laborers were imported to the South as cheap labor to replace freed Blacks on the plantations [...] Starting as early as 1865, Southern newspapers began printing editorials and letters calling for Chinese labor to be the new labor supply.[2] This interest was sparked in part by accounts boasting that the Chinese contract labor attributed to the increase in Cuban agricultural imports. The Chinese effectively became the new labor supply but were positioned societally at the same level as African Americans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Labor_in_the_Southern_...

Then you have the railroads era, WWII internments camp era, the Chinese Exclusion Act, 2021 Atlanta Spa shooting, and more. Then factor in all the other racist policies against Asians: minority roles in film, in white collar job sector, bamboo ceilings, violence/assaults against asians vs police response, US government witchhunt on Asian researchers during Covid, dealing with "Model Minority" myth...

Yet, Asians are constantly excluded when it comes to Affirmative action in these modern times, why is that? We can clearly see they've had an unpleasant history too, so why are institutions increasingly hostile against them? This isn't even restricted to Colleges, even though the lawsuit stemmed from it, we can see it affecting the workplace as well:

> "Asian Americans Are the Least Likely Group in the U.S. to Be Promoted to Management"

https://hbr.org/2018/05/asian-americans-are-the-least-likely...

> "Pfizer defends exclusion of Asian and white applicants in fellowship, says it’s ‘non-discriminatory’"

https://www.yahoo.com/video/pfizer-defends-exclusion-asian-w...

We should embrace Asians to be part of the diversity and Affirmative Action policies, not reject them, so I feel the current implementation of AA needs to be addressed, which I hope the ongoing college lawsuit will do.

How does one become a product manager?

Cool, congrats on the release! Can you tell us what game engine you used? I'm always impressed when someone releases a multiplayer game, let alone a co-op one. Was it hard to write all the networking/syncing code? Is your professional career in network programming? And did you do all the art yourself too, in addition to the marketing? If not, how did you go about picking an artist?

The CEO's stock is tied to that performance. The better the company is doing profit-wise, the more payout the CEO gets. That's why it doesn't make sense for us, the ground employees. But makes perfect sense when you look at it from who calls the shots. Always follow the money!

It sounds like a gas lighting attempt to paint employees as selfish and entitled children worried about losing their toys. Most people don't care about that stuff, it's all superficial anyway. Things like this usually means employees asking about why benefits are cut for them and not for executives.

Further down in in the article, if readers made it that far, it implies just that:

> Pichai dodged employee questions asking about cost-cutting executive compensation. Pichai brought in total pay last year of $6.3 million, while other top executives made more than $28 million.

The later on:

> Bret Hill, Google's vice president of "total rewards," fielded a question about raises, equity and bonuses and how they will be affected by the changes. He said the company doesn't plan to deviate from paying workers “at the top end of the market so we can be competitive.”

Which leads me to believe employees know what they're talking about, and the swag question near the top is just clickbait. Employees actually want real answers, and they got none.

Seriously, I've had my share of horror stories on government systems. Do they just not dogfood their own product? Where is their QA team? It's atrocious how basic tasks are so broken all the time.

People often say that if you make your boss shine, then your boss will in turn make you shine (ie, get promoted, etc). This may work for small development companies, but what I've found is that at most big companies, they'll use your work to get themselves a higher promotion or that bigger bonus, and then jump ship to another team or to another company. The project they stole credit from you was just a stepping stone to them to get into a better place.

Absolutely fight back and claim credit. If your director or senior manager (ie, your boss's boss) knows you built it in its entirety, it's easier to get promoted this way rather than through your direct boss. That's because at cross calibrations, when the managers all get together to rate their reports for that enticing bonus/promo, the senior managers have to be convinced as to who should get what. So if your senior manager or director knows your name, then it's much easier to get that promo, and your boss can't hide it from them for his own gain since your name is already so well known.

That's just office politics, and everyone has to play whether you like it or not, unfortunately. Claim your title, don't depend on others if you did the work. Make yourself known, it's the only way to win.

The DMCA has provisions that is supposed to protect against copyright false claims. But every article I read about false claims always ends with some kind of definition of copyright. Like in this article, 'What is Copyright?'.

It never goes beyond that ever. What about restitution to the people who were wrongly taken down? Why is false DMCA takedowns so prevalent if it's illegal per DMCA? Turns out NO ONE has ever been convicted of a false DMCA claim, and that's by design. In fact, the phenomenon has its own name: Copyfraud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyfraud

That's what happens when we let businessmen write our laws. A fix to how Google handles DMCA isn't enough, DMCA is fundamentally user hostile. We need to fix this at the political level.

But OP is saying they consistently do this. At that point, it's a pattern, and it's intentional.

And I do agree with OP: every company does this. They want to squeeze every bit of work out of you, and this comes in other forms, not just through 'agile estimates'. Communications across teams that emphasize 'work-hard play-hard' also fall under this, and the 'play-hard' never actually comes. It's just new time-crunched work that gets dumped onto you. Or 'move-fast teams', or 'OKRs', etc.

The entire corporate infrastructure and communications is designed around pressuring workers to work more and more. Sure, there might be some great managers that can push back, but how many of them have you encountered across all the jobs you've been at? Most of my experiences have been what OP has said, most teams are terrible.

It's not a coincidence that the Tech Burnout Index is almost 43% across all of tech. Which means any job you jump to will have a good chance to burn you out some way or another. Which means all the crap that developers experience that burns them out is nearly ubiquitous, including being constantly grilled on estimates.

Burnout Index: https://f.hubspotusercontent30.net/hubfs/7677235/The%20State...

> At what point do we simply ask if Amazon leaders have no sense of decency?

We don't need to ask, we already know. Actions speak louder than words anyway, and we've all seen how they treat all their workers: from warehouse to corporate. One would be a bit naive to think only their warehouse workers get treated badly, corporate workers are slapped around just as much in their own way.

Even in death, Amazon doesn't care and will lie through its teeth: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/17/amazon-wa...

> Billy had lain on the floor for 20 minutes before receiving treatment from Amazon’s internal safety responders.

> Bill was laying there for 20 minutes and nobody nearby saw until an Amnesty worker with a radio came by.

> A couple of days before, he put the wrong product in the wrong bin and within two minutes management saw it on camera and came down to talk to him about it

> “After the incident, everyone was forced to go back to work. No time to decompress. Basically watch a man pass away and then get told to go back to work, everyone, and act like it’s fine,”

> Amazon said it had responded to Foister’s collapse “within minutes”.

Amazon will just keep doing what it's doing because it can. Like you mentioned, online perception has gotten worse ever since that 2015 article, so clearly they just don't care about anything other than profit. Warehouse workers have had enough, they're pushing back by organizing their rights collectively. But so should corporate workers, we shouldn't have to keep watch over our shoulders every time we go to work in fear of PIP, or even at the interview stage where we have to suspect if we're getting "hired to be fired".

It's ridiculous. We should organize too.

Honest question: with all the talk about brain elasticity being super slow compared to a twenty year old, how the heck are 50+ year olds able to pass leetcoding? Interviewers expect answers within 30 min to 1 hr. I'd imagine older people would have better things to do with their limited free time than to waste efforts on the computer leetcoding.

To me, leetcoding is just another one of those gatekeeping tactics employed by the industry to keep old folks out.

Because of Dark patterns and Javascript. JS makes it hard to scrape unless you have enough processing power to run a browser headless for millions of product websites, and without bombing their sites too hard.

Then there's dark patterns where sites will literally tell you one price on the front page, but then at checkout tack on a ton of fees, and this is only AFTER you sign in, which means your price scraping bot has to have an account for millions of services that implement this pattern.

I don't believe this is something tech can solve, it's a people problem. The only way I can see this being a thing is if the government formalizes it in law or something, where each retailer has to submit the price to some centralized API where consumers can then pull from.

You already signed the letter, so technically the company doesn't have to pay you your verbal bonus. Definitely ask about it to HR because you don't lose anything by doing so, but don't expect them to correct the mistake. In their eyes, they just got an engineer on the cheap, which benefits them immensely.

If they don't correct it, look at your compensation and decide if it's still worth working there. If not, polish up that resume! Remember, business is business. If you're not being paid fairly, you have every right to leave for something better, and don't feel bad about it.

Even corporations do this kind of thing, not just state agents. There was an interesting case where Ebay harassed two old couple for running a blog that was critical of Ebay practices. Ebay went so far as to cause long-term psychological damage to the couple by mailing them bloody pig masks, signing them up to naughty magazines and sending them to their neighbors, van stalking them, and all other kinds of crazy stuff you wouldn't believe. Everything was directed by senior leadership at Ebay, and 'encouraged' by the CEO.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/26/technology/ebay-cockroach...

Really interesting read, if you guys wanna learn more. But basically anyone with money and power can initiate this kind of harassment activity.

I don't get it. Isn't the covid virus still out there? It only takes one infection to mutate into another strain, one infection to pass it onto many other members of a community, one infection to cause long-lasting damage to your body.

Why is policy to go back to the office? That's going to guarantee viral spread. Shouldn't we at the minimum avoid clustering until the last of the virus is killed? This policy makes no sense to me.

If the banks are tracking subscriptions, can we terminate the subscription from them instead of dealing with shady companies employing these dark patterns? Is this a recourse consumers have?

This seems pretty common in our field. There will always be people who put down others to try and make themselves look good because that's how every corporate culture is incentivized to run. I have not seen any serious attempts to address core issues like this at any company. HR only reacts to protecting the business, and that means retaliation for speaking up usually, especially if the bad coworker is a boss favorite.

Also, managers will blame you even if you bring up an issue, but it's not slated into the sprint. Then when the issue blows up in production, they'll say you should have worked faster to address it previously when it was noted, or that you should have placed more emphasis on it during the sprint planning when really, the final decision wasn't in your control in the first place. I've seen this happen on my teams in the past.

Tech is just all around toxic, and these things happen quiet frequently at larger companies.

Hey OP, I understand your dilemma. The good news is you don't have to give up on your dreams completely, but the rate at which you work to achieve them will have to slow down a lot.

You're thinking of starting a family. Unless you are financially well off already, it's best to get a job with a steady paycheck. You have to start saving for the baby, the health insurance for your family, the children's college fund, and many other random and spontaneous expenses that come with raising children. You might need to move to a larger house, or to a better neighborhood to get into a better school for your kids. Don't forget that insurance might not even cover your medical expenses from having a baby because of how hospitals does billing (ie, if you need a doctor right now, in-network vs out-of-network reasoning goes out the window, among other billing issues).

Having a steady and beefy paycheck will help you tone down stresses by a lot. Plus, if your company offers long paternity leave (and you can scope this out during interviews), you can take that time off to support your baby and also work on your personal project.

Don't give up on your dreams, but we are also the working class, and have to be realistic about finances down the road. There's always opportunity to work on your projects on the side, it just occurs less frequently than you'll be used to initially. But you won't regret it, having a supportive family and having kids is the best thing in the world.

This index seems to indicate that people across all of tech have a good chance of suffering from burnout. We have a 42.1% chance of burning out apparently, which is pretty huge. It would be interesting to see the breakdown by age as well, as life stage changes as people get older and can affect their rate of burnout.

That means even if we jump jobs to get out of a toxic work environment, there's still a good possibility to get burned out at the new job. And with the rate of exhaustion being over 55% for both men and women, that means we have slightly less than a 50-50 chance of finding a good job that won't overwork us. And that assumes your work environment doesn't change (ie, your boss leaving, re-orgs, etc).

Maybe it's time we get together and just stop putting up with toxic environments, because it's pretty much prevalent. The only way to do that is to form solidarity with one another, and push back against the toxicity through a collective group.

He considered it, but at his size it would have been kinda unhealthy to shed that many pounds in a short period of time:

> “I was trying to figure how I could drop 80 pounds in six months, which, I mean, it’s possible, but it’s not the most healthy thing in the world to do,” Hippchen said.

People aren't machines. Productivity in the workplace doesn't translate to productivity in life, but managers would like you to think so, and because jobs are directly tied to your livelihood (with medical insurance and money to pay for food and shelter), it's easy to buy into the premise that if "you suck at your job, it means you suck at life".

The author moved to a new city to start a new life and perspective, which was a personal choice to make themselves happy. That's great! But then small pressures began to happen:

> manager at the new job didn't work out

> power dynamics with the team lead forcing a 'special, one-time' transfer

> having to deal with a new manager due to a reorg

> OKRs that placed significant pressures to get optimistic deliveries, being on call with a secondary team

> Wanting to join the Google protest, and then being threatened by management with being fired for taking PTO to join the protest effort

> Raised concerns about manager's behavior with on-call stuff to HR, only for HR to sit everyone down and have the manager chide the author about the tone of voice, which is completely irrelevant.

> finding out later that the manager blocked the author's potential transfer to another team where the author could have been successful

> Low bonus and no stock refreshments due to only meeting expectations, with no hope of getting a better rating because manager hates the author

Going through all that, I can definitely emphasize with the author feeling down. All that artificial pressure for what? Everyone saying not to abandon job duties, or that the author took on too much... Isn't Agile supposed to solve that? You define units of work, then spread them out to sprints. And Google does do Agile, I looked it up. If we say it's because each manager does Agile different, well then we shouldn't be blaming the author, we should be blaming the manager for not assigning work properly. Yet the author feels responsible and overwhelmed, which is ridiculous.

All the mental and physical stress is directly sourced from the job itself, and needlessly too. Jobs don't have to be this way, but it is, and it's everywhere. And the worst part is, the end result was... nothing. The author tried to remedy the situation with HR, but ultimately was forced to change jobs, and the manager is still at Google bullying others. It's great that the author found their place at Meta, but how many others weren't so lucky? And, why do we, as engineers, even tolerate such a toxic environment in the first place? Everything listed above is toxic to the core, and can heavily affect mental health.

Jobs should enable you to live a life that you want to live, to experience the things you want to experience. Jobs shouldn't be able to bully you into thinking you're a worthless person because that's just your boss making you work harder to make the boss look better, and to make your employer richer at your expense. We should not tolerate bullies, we need to back each other up and help each other. It's the only way forward for any of us.

No, it can be one in the same. A modern day example is neighborhood gentrification. Increase the price until only a certain group of people can live there, and those that can't tough luck. So the end result is we get neighborhoods that consists of a majority of one group, and like super low percentage of other groups. ie, Mostly white neighborhoods vs ghettos dominated by black/hispanic groups.

Then looking back, there's IBM who profited by building systems to help Nazis process the Holocaust. And then later built a punch card system for Japanese internment camps in the US, during a time when asians, and Japanese people especially, were highly discriminated against in WW2. People were hurt here for no good reason, and all as an 'economic decision'. In my eyes, IBM is culpable for the atrocities they helped create, even if it was 'just for money'.

Bringing it back to Tinder, the question is why do we need this kind of price discrimination? How is it >consistently< determining that gays, lesbians, and over-30s should be charged more than their younger and hetero counter parts? The key word is consistently, because that feels like targeting. Why not have a flat fee structure, since we're all created equal in the pursuit of a romantic partner? If Tinder wanted to make more money, then just increase the base cost for everyone, not just for certain people in protected classes.

Can anyone imagine if Netflix said, hey we're gonna increase the price for gay and old people by 20%. Like Why? Everyone enjoys watching movies and shows, it's not like gay and older people have more fun watching them than heteros. It's equal enjoyment.

That's good news. Are you guys implementing the export feature right so we can export at any time, or only when the app is gonna be shut down?

If I spend a ton of time scanning receipts, updating my lists, it's a big time investment for me. Will I be able to export my data as CSV or something so that it won't be lost in case the company folds or the app stops being supported?

The article mentions aggressive delivery dates, conflicting goals between different departments that get in the way of career progression, and massive amounts of stress as being 'normal' at Amazon.

And we already know that Amazon exploits and over-exerts their employees in other divisions, like warehouse.

At what point do we say enough is enough? Amazon warehouse employees are already pushing for better working conditions through Unions. When will we finally realize that Amazon is equally over-working everyone and join that solidarity effort so that everyone's working environment becomes better? Quitting doesn't change anything, we can see they just rehire and perpetuate bad culture. Even the author of the article says just that; he was hired to replace someone.

If nothing changes, your friends and colleagues (and your future children if they do engineering) will all still suffer at the hands of Amazon. And believe me, their work culture will bleed out to other companies. I've seen it.

The irony here is that Amazon had unjustly fired Christian Smalls, now he's helping drive more workers to vote union. The dude is pissed off, and rightly so.

What? Where did you read that? The worker's union won, with full concessions from management, and with nearly all of the employees hired back.

The new employees Kellogg tried to hire to replace the striking workers failed miserably. They didn't have enough workers with domain knowledge to run the plants; the new workers caused the company more money than they saved:

> Small fire at Kellogg’s Plant in Lancaster, striking continues in week 11

https://www.abc27.com/news/local/small-fire-at-kelloggs-plan...

> UPDATE: Efforts to replace striking Kellogg's workers has been disastrous, workers tell us. Scabs wreaked havoc on the factory, most cereals are not being produced, and a delivery train went off the track yesterday.

https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1469417376231866375...

Management yields 100% to workers, all demands met:

> Highlights of the new five-year collective bargaining agreement:

• No take aways; No concessions

• No permanent two-tier system

• A clear path to regular full-time employment

• Plant closing moratorium: No plant shut downs through October 2026 • A significant increase in the pension multiplier

• Maintenance of cost of living raises

> https://bctgm.org/2021/12/21/kelloggs-strike-ends-bctgm-memb...

Please post your source that said the Union gave up. There's no way to misinterpret this outcome at all; they clearly won.

Do governments typically provide reimbursement to the household for holding their house hostage for over 27 years? Or did the government just declared they can't and forced the homeowners cooperation?

It's not clear from the article.

The same could be asked about upper management. They earn 10x our pay, so their output is 10x more value than our work, and they work 10x harder, right? In our normal 8 hour work day, they must work 80 hours. Except a full day is 24 hours.

Why is the onus always on the bottom workers to be honest? Why are we trying to feel guilty about our working hours vs how much we're paid? Because it's clear salary is not tied to better performers given how much upper management is compensated.

Just enjoy your life. Management probably lowballed you coming into the job anyway, but if they are happy with your work, then spend that extra time you're saving to enjoying other things in life.

What do you want to do, OP? The new year is coming up.

Yea, honestly. The most common answer I hear is always to quit and find a new job. And on HN especially, where we all dive into systems engineering to build reliable pipelines and fix bugs to ensure they don't happen ever again... it's so weird to see the same ppl just say quit. Because that literally solves nothing for anyone. The new job may not be better, or the manager at the new job may quit and be replaced by a really bad boss, the current job is still sucks for current and future employees, and like the above poster said, the boss won't learn a thing and continue to shit on any employee under their command at every job they're at.

Unions balance that power out, so that it can address exactly those core issues: the boss's attitude as an immediate solution for you as the affected employee, and the company's culture as a more permanent and systems-wide solution. This is a better patch than to just quit, at the very least.