johncena33

> These people (the genuine ones) lack context-awareness

No, they are very much aware of the context. Most of these people are just bullies, who have found a new way to mask their toxic behavior in the name of a good cause.

> Why hire an Ethics team if you won't let them interrogate unethical behavior?

There is a huge difference between balatantly violating company policy, name calling your manager and creating drama online to garner attention and doing your job in professional manner. She knew what she was doing and she staged martyrdom for her Twitter mob audience and activist news media.

It saddens me more is that so many people in this thread can't (or unwilling to) differentiate between doing your job in professional manner and creating drama online. Sigh, it will only get worse.

> According to Google.

You do understand that if Google is lying, they'd be get sued for libel and potentially millions of dollars in settlement and even more in PR damage.

Additionally, she can stage martyrdom in front of Twitter and vulture news media. If she quits and writes blog posts about her experience working at Google, she would no way get the same amount of attention she is getting now. This is called performative activism.

> Or speak out publicly. Always an option.

Or speak out publicly. Always an option without making any drama and being professional. [FTFY]

It scares me that so many people in this thread can't (or unwilling to) differentiate between creating drama and being proferssional.

Well, what she is doing is called performative acitvism. She is doing staged martyrdom in front of Twitter mob and activist media. She can try to do the job well, if she felt like she was being hired as a PR move and not for any actual impact, she should've quit and told her story. I guess she didn't feel she will get any media attention if she has taken the high road. Instead she created all these drama including blatantly violating company policy. I am not sure whether she has done all these things in good faith.

Unfortuantely the amount media attention (including this very thread) these people get, it will encourage more staged martyrdoms. Soon, we will have our own tech industry reality TV show. Sadly, that's the reality we are heading into right now.

I am not sure I necessarily buy your comparison. Do you have any records where the employees have done something similar, e.g., giving ultimatums to manager, sending inflammatory emails to a large group of employees, leaking internal documents to outsiders, in MSR, but didn't get fired?

Clear violation of company policy is not disagreement. The entitlement of people never ceases to amaze me.

Everytime I see cases like activist employees getting fired for violating company policy, the sentiment seems to be the company is the bad guy. At what point it becomes the fault of the activist employee? At what point we can have an introspective look that are we enabling toxic behavior of people suffering from Messiah Complex?

This is my personal anecdote. I had experienced working with an online activist co-worker. She was one of the people who are very popular online, but most of her co-workers hated her. She was extremely entitled, always bossed people (who are at the same level as her) around, did very little of her actual job because she was busy in more important online activism. She had a Messiah Complex, and we were all there just to support her in her worthy cause. That's why I am conflicted when I see activist employees getting fired.

The infamous internet argument that is "calling out negative things is a negative itself". "You just have to go meta, and you will see it's all the same." "Everything is relative/subjective"

These type of generic arguments bring nothing valuable to the discussion table. These arguments are used to shut down conversation in a very self-aggrandizing manner.

> I thought the New York Times was a decent newspaper until their "French police shoot and kill man after a fatal knife attack on the street" title, that replaced later by a not so much better "Man Beheads Teacher on the Street in France and Is Killed by Police".

That was so bizarre. As a minority, I am afraid to openly discuss about the racism I face. I don't want to participate in oppression olympics or let other people use my suffering as their own political agenda. I want to be treated as a human being. I want neither discrimination nor preferential treatment. I want my work to speak for myself, not my skin color. It just saddens me the amount of identity politics out there and lack of any nuanced discussion.

> "Embrace, extend, extinguish" has never been uttered in any conversation I've been part of at Amazon.

We are not talking about internal corporate PR. Enron also had great set of values [1] that were preached to the employees. It's about the actions, not the words uttered.

[1] https://hbr.org/2002/07/make-your-values-mean-something

This has become a huge problem on HN lately. Lots of discussions are nothing but complaining. Now the technical discussions are starting to get infested with off-topic whining. The mods don't do anything about off-topic rants. If you point it out you'll get downvoted [1][2][3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25839399 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25064636 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24699908

> Psychiatry does not know how to cure mental illness. At best it knows how to medicate it and alleviate symptoms while causing very serious or deadly side effects.

I whole-heartedly agree with this. I was on anti-depressants at some point of my life. At that time I did something very stupid that jeopardized my life. I was lucky enough to get out of it unscathed. Although I am still traumatized by the incident.

Please be very careful taking anti-depressants.

You also have to keep in mind that this work was interesting and it probably helped to keep few rockstart engineers from leaving.

The way I see MBA in business is like condiments in cooking. You need condiments to make delcious meals, but condiments are never the meals by themselves. The problem arises when you treat condiments as meals. In similar vein, when MBAs are seen as sole value creators and other professions are seen as some drones to execute their vision.

Yes, the "idea man" deserves all the credit and everyone else is just a drone there to execute their vision. Sounds like classic MBA culture to me.

How do you do two phase commit on a sqlite database file?

Sorry I hate to disagree. HN has lost its way last few years. The amount of FUD spread against Google on HN is mind-boggling. Every single day there is at least one anti-Google post on HN front page. Most of the content is the old broken record. I simple hide these posts from newsfeed. But the moderators have chosen to look other way.

On top of that, lots of discussion has become simply low-quality. The comments on technical posts turn into complaining about something not related to the technical content rather about the product. The amount of complaining and whining is through the roof. Mods should look into "Whine Wednesday" type threads to keep the off-topic whinings and complaining invading every single thread.

> How many products has Google killed over the years because they could figure out how to make them profitable (enough)?

HN never ceases to amaze me. This is a post on pattern of exploitative and anti-competitive behavior of AWS. Somehow HN crowd found a way to whine about Google. Every single day multiple anti-Google posts on HN front page was not enough.

> It _may_ be a side effect of the discussions that occur here occasionally.

Occasionally? HN is obssessed with Google. Everyday there is at least one hit piece on HN front page. Out of all the problems in this world and the tech industry, in HN logic Google is the utmost priority.

I am from Bangladesh. I know this for a fact that FB has been used (and still being used) to incite religious extremism and hatred against religious minorities in my country. Social media has been one of the biggest cause behind the rise of religious extremism in South Asia in general. For more reference please see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Ramu_violence.

Can someone provide context for this letter? I am out of loop.

HN content and discussion quality has gone down drastically over the last few years. And future also looks bleak. These days I spend more time on lesswrong.com community because articles and discussions quality are way better than HN.

I would encourage people to delete Twitter first, and then (probably) Instagram. You can absolutely use FB productively. I have been using FB just to use specific nature and fitness realted groups. But Twitter is probably the most toxic mainstream social media and almost impossible to use without lowering yourself into the Twitter cesspool. At least I was not able to use Twitter productively.

> Basically these individuals grow with the hand of the CCP on their back, and when it's time to collect they are stripped off and put on tight leash, and at any moment they can easily be muffled.

That's the reason I never got why all the fanfare for Jack Ma. I don't know how much of his success can be attributed to CCP's belssings.

Lot of traditional liberal media including NYT have resorted to yellow journalism. This is probably because of advent of internet. But that doesn't absolve them from the wrong-doings. Lot of published articles are "technically true", but intentionally misleading. Lot of articles are very clearly politically motivated, but packaged under the guise of some good cause. The identity politics born in universities and made mainstream by Twitter has essentially ended ethical journalism and gave birth to activist journalism.

Can we please take these off-topic rants somewhere else? Lately, it's hard to find any insightful comments in the disucssion section of engineering or technical articles. Because the whole conversation is derailed by something unrelated off-topic rants. There are a lot of social media, forums and even HN submissions where everyone can rant. Please keep the technical submissions clean.

> Others may feel camgirls are collecting undeserved money, they don't do actual noble valuable work, just cash in based on their genetics and immorality.

As someone who is a supporter of legal sex work and pornography. The "cashing on genetics" part bothers me the most. I don't know how to process when good looking people can earn thousands of dollars almost doing nothing (particularly on digital platform like OnlyFans), whereas regular people have to work day and night to earn a living. Right now, when sex-work is stigmatized, it seems fair because they are getting paid a lot while suffering the stigma. Similar to a lot high-risk job is also high paying because of the high risk. But once sex work gets accepted in the society, then why should they get paid so much without the work like rest of the society. Maybe if sex-work gets destigmatized it will not be very high paying profession.

> I'm sick of wasting time writing worthless tests. I'm sick of fixing more tests than bugs.

I think as an industry we need to look at tests, particularly unit tests, and Test Driven Development (TDD) through critical lens. Writing unit tests is seen as a virtue while in reality how much value an individual unit test adds given the cost of writing, running and maintaining unit tests.

What baffles me the most is TDD. I have seen front end teams of startups doing very simple apps following TDD. I have delivered complex data pipeline project without writing a single unit test. I wrote functional tests and lot of monitoring tools for the pipeline. But not a single unit test. It worked perfectly fine in production. For technically simple projects I just don't see any value in following TDD. And the value of unit tests for simple projects should be very carefully thought through.