It's categorically unfair, but everyone says it when the "teacher isn't looking": Tech companies are just riding the wave to get rid of low performers and troublemakers while they can. Signalling that you're part of that group (and I know it's unfair, I already said that) is unlikely to work to your advantage, in my view. It's a signal to the counterparty that they have leverage over you. It's going to attract people who want/need that leverage disproportionately. It probably will increase the raw number of contacts you make, but for the reasons above, I would avoid doing it until I crossed some threshold of "desperation".
Seems incredibly shortsighted, even in the limited examples provided; It says "the number of musicians required for a quartet is the same as in Beethoven's day" which is true, but even by 1960 recording technology provided those musicians the chance to be more "productive" by all but the most myopic of measures (i.e. "times they drew their bow across the strings").
With a bill in both the House and Senate, and the vocal support (and implicit support, given these "leaks") of the administration, I get the feeling that the average techie doesn't quite get how close we are to a TikTok ban... I would be shocked if TikTok exists in its current form 8 weeks from now.
Now they are going to see the light and give the employees the same "bailout" they got when times got tough in the form of "not getting laid off" right? .... Right? Because everyone deserves a break, right?
The comic genius behind that (which, for anyone who doesn't know is from Always Sunny in Philadelphia) is that Charlie, being illiterate, reads "Pennsylvania" as "Pepe Sylvia".
If you were an employee at a typical startup, would you be able to tell the difference? Because leadership is never _that_ transparent with the rank-and-file around these kinds of things. I've seen it happen (thankfully never to me) - over and over again they would say "whoops, it will be there next week". Two months later people - one by one - just stop showing up...
We are concerned with it precisely because when the concern is "how much more productive one person can be", the wealth created by that production is invariably captured by the global elite and used to inflict misery and ruin on everyone else. Rise up and be manipulated and crucified by people like Stalin. Stay your hand and have it chewed off by people like Musk, or have toxic chemicals dumped in your back yard like in East Palestine. It's been that way since the industrial revolution.
100 pct. They blew their powder on this, gave tech antitrust a bad name and let stuff 1000x worse go unchallenged for decades and now we are where we are.
Exactly. You wouldn't do "obvious fraud" with this setup: you would do "things that aren't obvious but a couple good researchers could prove". You don't even need to scare everyone out of the security, just do enough to make a few big players go "ooh, I didn't know _that_".
I think you have to be an "insider" to qualify as a whistleblower. NAL, but I think if you were gonna do this you'd have to be squeaky clean using only public data. Otherwise it's textbook insider trading.
IMO the demise of modern journalism presents an absolutely enormous opportunity for the few people with the right skills: If this is even close to true (66% of corp fraud undetected) imagine if you could get even a couple researchers to detect more of it using publicly available information. Set up a massive short position on that company and fire off press releases on a slow Newsday to share what you found with the public. I actually knew some professional researchers and talked to them about this once. I'm too lazy to actually put it together but pretty sure it's a viable idea.
Right. The _unspoken truth_ in all of these announcements is that _the CEO failed at their one job of keeping the company disciplined_ but it's the _rank and file_ who suffer the consequences of the "tough decision". It's a "not subtle at all" power check to calculated to intimidate the unfortunate people who remain. They've wanted to do this so bad for so long: it's why they kept feeding the media the weak "great resignation" narrative that they lapped up and regurgitated on HN and elsewhere.
Agile is a lot like Communism: there's a lot of people who swear it works great but everywhere it seems to have been tried it hasn't gone well... And the apologists just insist "those places didn't understand it and do it right".
"Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you accept"
I would cite Postels Law: Nagle's is the "conservative send" side. An ACK is a signal of acceptance, and should be issued more liberally (even though it's also sent, I guess).
My wife and I deliberated over this for a month. In the end, we decided that "cry it out" was really just gaming the infant's evolving worldview with a sense of "learned helplessness" - something both of us struggle with individually. So we knew it would be tougher on us - and it definitely was - but the alternative of teaching a baby that the only thing they could really do was "ineffective" was something we couldn't stomach.
At some point we all learn that we're helpless and we can't do shit to change the world... But we didn't want the baby to learn that from _us_.
Really sad to hear this. I attended one AEA a few months before the Pandemic and it was amazing - expensive, to be sure, but totally worth it. The one thing it did really well was "breadth"; presenting on both design and technical topics and finding a way for them to fit together.
I was hoping to go to another this year maybe. I think (?) they still do Smashing conf so maybe I'll try that.
Your piece addresses what you claim to be a basic "unfairness": You (if it's really you) say someone "didn't treat me as a friend".
Most of the comments are reflecting on whether it really was or wasn't unfair.
So I'd say it's also an interesting worldview that you make a claim about fairness and then dismissed any conversation about fairness (the topic _you brought up_) with a glib statement asserting that anyone who ponders this as being "blind to any emotional" concerns.
This belief seems to be especially pervasive amongst tech industry: That because justice/law works at a slower speed than social media, it doesn't work.
I've played it probably more than any other game over the last 10 years. I'm really just buying it out of a sense of decency to pay back the guys who made it. I know I should have donated before, but I just didn't have time to figure it out. I may not even play it, just buying it to help those guys out.
Many companies also do things that are a lot worse, like taking massive profits and then laying off the people that gave up time with their families and other opportunities to create those profits. I heard they also do things like give executives that don't do a great job millions while stiffing the individual contributors. Unions can help companies run better by forcing them to take a "longer than 2 year" view on decisions.
Lots of great answers as to the "how" and "what" here, but here's a real short one for you to answer "why?": Capabilities Security model. It's absolutely ludicrous that all software doesn't run this way. One of those "so obvious, it sounds dumb" things, but that's what all this stuff is bringing imo. And I was an "I hate WASM and I'll never use it" person in the past.
It's detrimental to all of our careers that this is the example being set for "how engineers should be treated". I'm not your enemy here: if you get hurt and taken for a ride, that effects me because we're in the same market. Knocking the bottom out of the market is bad for all of us. I wish you wouldn't throw yourself into the grinder and help it along, but I hope things work out for you either way.
Just as a thought exercise: What are you going to say 3 years from now when a hiring manager asks why you willingly chose to start working for someone who had just wantonly admitted that he intended to be abusive to his staff and force them to work nights and weekends for a venture that he was actively undermining? Is this representative of the judgment you use on a regular basis, and if it is why should that manager trust you near their area of responsibility?
Yeah, this is literally the only thing stopping me from taking a "hard judgement" position like "if you worked at Twitter after 2023 I have serious questions about your judgement and I probably won't hire you."
The way H1-B employees are treated is ignominious. It breaks my heart to think of the situation these poor people are in - and make no mistake: In their hearts they want to treat _you_ that way, too. Speak out about it while you can, because you're next.
It's such a powerful complement to the "no rules" JS when you layer it on top. You really get to have your cake and eat it, too. I feel like there's another huge step to take in "layering" invariant checking on top of TS for QA/test systems... Imagine like "in all 500 of my tests, make sure this variable is an integer greater than 10 at all times no matter what". I'm waiting for this to show up
The real genius of it is that it's really not a "type" system at all: it's a contract system. The nearest thing like it was Eiffel. The new "satisfies" feature in 4.9 makes this even more clear. Honestly there's so much space to cover here, I think it's just going to keep getting better and better.