Lol you idiots downvoting. I learned this fact from a law professor/attorney. You don't like it so you are downvoting? Lol. Go look it up on wikipedia, but I think maybe if your are getting this emotional about a fact I learned in a law class, then wikipedia may be too advanced.
I first suspected this fake interview stuff a few years ago at Microsoft. Let's just say everyone in the hiring event was one demographic and I was another. I asked one interviewer if he was going to take a picture of the whiteboard and he muttered under his breath "it's not going to matter." It was a good solution but it became clear the interview was horseshit. They were wasting my time to fix their EEOC numbers.
They are all going to be CTO's in the future, not future victims! I assume by saying hiring committee you work at Google. A whistleblower sued Google in March alleging overt age discrimination and illegal race quotas. They copied some damning information including screenshots of their quota tool. What kind of information do you know about it?
It's not a question of morality. The act doesn't cover people under 40 because there was no finding of age discrimination. Just like there is no discrimination against white people or men ;). Don't like it, run for Congress or Supreme court.
I would say 75-90% of hiring managers in the US are not even US citizens and couldn't give less of a shit about US laws. Execs are incredibly happy for people to break the law for them. If an expat gets in trouble, they just get sent home with a bag full of money. For jobs in India, "freshers" have to put their blood type and where their fathers were born on their resumes because discrimination is so bad.
"Obviously it's also true that if you can fire 10 black engineers on high salaries lots of managers will choose to do that simply because it means they don't need to fire 20 white engineers. It's the easy option."
WTF, Fifa? Correlation does not imply Causation. More likely lots of September students started a web dev class. But that also is not proof of causation.
I would take issue with your classification of companies as "the west" Companies like Google have a huge foreign national presence. There are thousands of Chinese employees, managers, and executives at Google.
It is an inside joke marking employees as stupid childish marks. As if to say that the person is someone management has identified who will at least pretend to be ignorant and naive as a child. That is the whole basis behind this infantilization shit.
Are you surprised? Google invented infantilism of their workers. They invented basic colors, office slides, and office ball pits. They make new employees wear propeller hats. They want a naive "ender's game" work force while their business of monitoring the web browsing and location of hundreds of millions of people is actually very serious.
A woman that joins a company in mountain view that only hires women is the same as a man that joins a company in Manhattan that only hires men. Can't really say you are neutral after that.
Once you accept and identify as a label then you are no longer part of the middle. That is one of the main arguments against race quotas and affirmative action. It taints the whole idea of equality and neutrality.
Google has definitely jumped the shark with their political leanings. They have been sued for implementing hiring quotas and discriminating on race, sex, and age. You can read the complaint here https://www.scribd.com/embeds/372792998/content While Sergey seems to care about immigrants like himself, lgbtq, and women, he does not give a flying fuck about age discrimination, which is a legally protected class in America. Ultimately nothing lasts forever, and unfortunately there is some truth in right wing characterizations of Google. People stuck in the middle of the political spectrum, everyday non-racist people who are not part of any particular "group", have no party or supporters on either side.
PM's and other charlatans who are trying to trade on the software engineer's profession will use every trick in the book. They will try to sell you a car and headlights, wipers, tires separately. The reason they slow down projects is they want to sell each tiny part to executives as a big accomplishment. They don't really care about moving the needle and the tiny parts have high chance of success on the software dev side. What you need to understand is they are focused on spoon feeding dumb executives "huge" accomplishments. If you want to disrupt this, focus on this communication. For instance, finish the project ahead of time and find out how to communicate this to executives around the PM. When the PM tries to take credit for only a tiny bit of what was delivered and unaware of the rest, they will look like fools. When they seek retribution against you, try to amplify the fact they are out of the loop and trying to slow things down. You will have to be devious to carry out this strategy successfully, but PM's are people trying to sell what you spent decades learning to do for yourself, so all is fair.
There is a dichotomy in tech between makers and takers. Some people try to be a maker or a few years and can't do it for a number of reasons. There is a common set of flawed thinking that causes them to decide that programming is dead. One, their world view is different because they might have more wealth and have decided that there is an infinite pool of makers to exploit. This is obviously flawed. Companies go for years without finding the right person. When they do find someone, the person they settle on is often a faker. Two, they think robots build the constituent components that go into systems. Those memory chips are made by actual people. Just because they are 300x cheaper does not mean that it is unimportant to know how they work. Three, the status quo is the end state of technology and now is the exploitation phase where we use tech instead of make tech. Fourth, they think everything is done for cash money instead of building capabilities.
This guy also seems to think programmers are so mentally deficient they are unable communicate with the 'open source community' and that this is in some way how programmers discover new technologies. He also thinks people did not contribute code in the 1990s. Where did all this software come from? Typical business view of open source. Originally b-schools actually lectured that open source was anti-business like a trade union. Now I guess they think it is sort of a crutch for too-dumb-to-breathe programmers?
There are tons of people like this guy in tech. Coded a year or two and found out the were a taker and not a maker. Still pretending to be a maker though. Their idealized programmer befits a corporation. Colors in the lines and writes "perfect code" which has no meaning other than has been annointed by CR's as to make it seem owned by the company rather than the individual. Their ideal programmer is someone who doesn't need to understand the details, works as a unit in a team, and gathers all of their knowledge by "getting help" from the company. It is absolutely blasphemy in the corporate world to suggest that anyone synthesize his or her own ideas. That's of course ridiculous but in a business setting, the takers absolutely must discount creative thought of employees 100% which literally the "product" up for grabs in tech companies. Obviously if people knew the value and how to exploit their own original ideas they wouldn't need the fucking company or takers.
As far as math and algorithms, those are more important than ever. The reason you don't see people working on those is that those people are hidden from public and private view, jealously guarded by the takers who think they control them. Natural sciences did not fucking change since the 90's. A surface to air missile or high frequency trading algorithm or advanced simulation is as costly and valuable as ever. It's the author perception of what is valuable that has changed. He's looking for code monkeys to exploit who will "get help" and write "clean code" whatever the hell that means.
There are academic studies of pair programming. If I remember, it does obviously decrease software defects, but almost everyone that wants pair programming ignores the fact that you are now paying twice as much for the same software. The software is not 2x better. Obviously a programmer's salary is so minuscule to the business managers don't even factor this into their thinking. Usually they want pair programming for political reasons, i.e. no single person can ask for a raise due to being the most knowledgeable.
What do you mean "in return." Sounds like they want something for nothing. Your equity and voting rights are already yours. You are negotiating to stop working as an employee? You could do that tomorrow for signing nothing.
Last time I listened to that it was a panicked pilot asking Miami Center for a new heading because they were sending us through a thunderstorm. Not really comforting.
Oh, and to answer OP's question, no microservices are absolute shit for startups. You want all your code in the same address space so there is zero communication overhead between different parts of the code. Hosting small services all over the fucking place was only due to small hardware in the past. Today, we can get 128 core machines with multi-terabytes of RAM if it is needed. It becomes a problem of how do we deploy code independently in small units. Well, any platform that can hot swap code does just that.
I thought managers would give up on talking about "microservices" about 2 years ago I thought they would latch onto "blockchain" and "crypto." The are still talking about "microservices" but just mean that they want each team to have their own hardware and communicate over the network. Look, this stuff is three decades old at least. When someone says "microservices" I know they are a clueless idiot manager. They can't explain what they are talking about in terms of build, deployment, versioning, networking, processes, etc. They try to enforce mistakes that explode performance. They say "monolith bad." The can't really say anything beyond that because they are faking it.
Don't like monoliths? here's a "microservice architecture" for you, Java servlet API, circa 1997. Everyone can package their micro-service into a WAR file and deploy it to a service environment. That's right, Companies were doing this shit in the 90's. It probably amazes these same people to know there were servers and computer networks in the 1980's as well. Http was not even the first popular protocol of its kind.
What I hate are these managers who pretend they know what they are talking about saying, "microservices", but they are fucking faking it every step of the way.
Nothing. You have no bargaining power since you already work there and depend on your job for your livelihood. If you want more than your 0-2.5% raise then just go find another job.
My point is Amazon has hired some managers that have really lowered the bar due to the environment they are from and people they are used to dealing with. Imagine someone from a place where you could tell a preposterous lie and 50% of people would believe you.
In addition to the shit that is not politically correct to say, Amazon relies heavily on interns for production code and ops. Bezos has this view that the unskilled can get him 80% of what he wants and then a few top people can smooth out the rest. In reality the few top people never even come in contact with the kid that is trying to keep amazon.com running overnight. Successive waves of interns and SDE 1's fuck up the same shit over and over. Bezos is stupidly applying this same strategy at his space company.
An Amazon manager, full of shit, once tried to tell a joke at a social gathering. He claimed that he and friends removed the engine from someone's car over lunch as a prank. This is the education level that some of them have. He literally didn't think people would know he was full of shit.
7x26 mill. I want metal parts. I guess gantry style router makes sense if you want to make cabinets or signs or something. I did not want to deal with sawdust and don't want to make anything out of plywood that I couldn't with a saw.
two devs and five months sounds like a waste of maybe $100k. Yes I would not touch perf if no one is complaining about it. On the other hand product "owners" routinely drive companies into bankruptcy.
Seriously fuck this stupid shit. When I was there this fucker in India bribed my manager for a ticket to the US on L1 Visa as our new manager. Once there his only goal was to sell as many US-based jobs to Indians in India as possible. He kept telling me I had to set up meetings with India, set up one on ones with his buddy in India. Fuck that guy. Now there is no way in hell I would subject myself to a "jury" that had assholes like that on it. Sometimes you just have to realize your manager, your team, or your company are just unfixable shit and leave.