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Strictly speaking, forcing a worker out in these recent tech layoff cases is going to be difficult. I'd expect both in Japan and other countries there will be much more generous severance package offers for "voluntary" quitting. The majority of workers will way that against the reality of staying in a company they know doesn't really want them anymore.

Also, if so, do you really think that reducing force means reducing force were it's appropriate (triming true fat)?

All the companies are doing is to take the opportunity to save cost because everyone does, and because these companies can obviously survive.

They hired to keep in line with trends and now they fire for the same reason.

The company won't actually be able to identify these 10% you mention, or when it does they might keep them because they are cheaper than you.

In the end you are looking at good people or even yourself being affected by layoffs. I'd take the pay cut over the risk of losing my job or well performing coworkers.

I mean, I'm pretty sure they are giving some people unintentionally a bad time once in a while but I don't have evidence that they are "scummy". And really we shouldn't just swallow whatever people write here.

Like the current submission seems to be turning out to be fake (see other comments).

Why? What did they do to you?

...and it sucks as a replacement for genuine leather.

If you tried in earnest to go live in Japan and it didn't happen it's not because of racism. Yes there are some xenophobic tendencies, but they don't play into it. Money and "skills" on paper do.

If you don't tick the right boxes (e.g. graduated 4 years of university education, have demonstrable skills in a technical field, work experience, etc.) it's going to be difficult, of course. But that's the same anywhere.

I'm confused. The American examples don't really show any remarkable change in terms of overall design language either. Also, if we are talking about smartphones should we not look at smartphone layouts?

I mean, the answer is obviously yes, depending on what you consider integrators.

You said: "Not because I’m ambitious, but because things needed doing and I was the only one available to take care of them."

But this person doesn't always exist. Or that person might exist but might not want to "take care" of the team as they don't enjoy that or feel overwhelmed by it.

But in the end your team didn't self organize. You stepped up to organize it.

In many cases this only goes a certain distance, in many it doesn't and somebody needs to make the management decisions as a manager and understand what the team is struggling with.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/ur-

Now, to your original question. No idea which of the early Lisps qualify exactly as such, or until when.

Is it healthy? No. Is it needed? Not always/necessarily. But a company that's laying off members to save costs should likely try to retain those that do go the extra mile.

Also, I mean you can argue all you want that those people aren't productive but in my experience that's just not true. People who live and breathe the company tend to care a whole lot about quality and thinking through user experience. The typical "it's just a job, I can quit any time and find something better" folks just don't stick around long enough to suffer from their decision or care about the company's image / their coworkers.

I mean I've been there. A bunch of folks get hired because they were at Google or Meta before and they must know their stuff, and get elevated to somewhat high positions, but they never deliver on their promise and I cannot say they were particularly productive and they generally also do their "I only work as much as I need" or "Sorry I won't join this one time meeting that needs to happen at odd hours to accommodate time zone issues, it's 30 mins past my end of day" routine. Then after a year or so they leave for greener pastures, probably getting paid more.

Again, I think for a company where it's the norm that people protect their time it might not matter and I'm not saying it's an issue. But if you take a company full of heavily invested employees that see it as their family, and you add, simply because there's a bubble, equal the amount of people who just see it as another job and the company tanks in an economic downturn, retaining more of the latter portion (at all cost) does not seem wise.

The people who don't see the company that way / care are still likely to leave the sinking ship soon, but the damage to the laid off as well as remaining loyal employees has already been done.

And no, if companies were able to accurately identify low performers they could have dealt with them before. I've seen many good folks lose their jobs in the last few months and folks who never released a single thing or provide other tangible output (design docs) be retained.

I only have anecdotal data but from recent discussions with friends who got laid off, they all lost trust in their company's leadership and losing arbitrary team mates has made them unhappy and reduced morale. I don't know if it's something special this time but if great teammates you worked with since before the pandemic are cut off while ones joining after and never having achieved or released anything remained (paraphrasing) does that. These layoffs seem haphazard.

I guess the fear seems to be that it will lead to uncontrolled attrition of good people. But I would assume hiring freezes in the industry would still prevent this. Also, you will retain the truly "loyal" employees that are willing to suffer a bit for future growth.

It also addresses the wasteful folks in a fair way. I've definitely observed shifts in company cultures of new hires not being attached to the overall mission, demanding more and more benefits (e.g. business class flights) without "giving back" in equal amounts by working hard.

No, but what I'm saying was that usage of "just" is not the issue, a shitty environment is. If your boss / coworker / PM doesn't use "just" but still constantly makes it seem like a task should be easy to do in other ways (e.g. telling you your estimate is way too high for a task) and puts pressure on you not listening or accepting to your reasoning, is that better than them using the word "just", you explain why and they get that things aren't as simple as they thought? The underlying issue is not the particular choice of word.

You might say as advice "don't presume a task is easy, if you want to avoid people think/misunderstand it can help to avoid the following words:...". But the really important part would be the first part of this advice.

Though to be fair I don't even know if I'd agree with that advice either. Stuff is misunderstood or not well understood all the time. Expectations exist if you want them to or not. Maybe it's better to communicate those expectations.

> "Why so long? It's just a button that does stuff. Can't you just..."

a) The core aspect to address is not the word "just", but that the person asks you something they consider simple. Changing the wording (removing "just" or other such words) doesn't change the actual sentiment.

b) The "just" in the example does emphasize to the listener further that the speaker is underestimating the task at hand or doesn't yet grasp the full context. While I would see this as problematic usage, it precisely is what can help the listener in identifying that they might have to spend some time to address that misconception in their follow-up reply.

Whether it's ultimately super useful or not I don't know, but it does provide extra signal. I personally would rather have someone use "just" if they do in fact think the task is simple/trivial than beating around the bush. I then understand that there could be an issue of misalignment or even disagreement on difficulty. You really do want to get that out of the way instead of each party in silence, paralyzed, thinking "I still don't get why we cannot / need to do X / Y, but I don't want to sound like ...".

And that goes both ways. I have definitely gotten a good reset and ended up agreeing with the speaker that a solution can in fact be simpler albeit not perfect. And if the speaker and I then agree that it's sufficient, why not. I'm digressing. Important is that communication happens in good faith. Politeness likely doesn't fix this if that's not the case.

To be fair, it also indicates that the listener hasn't done a good enough job at explaining why their solution isn't "just" doing that.

It could also indicate that the speaker admits to maybe not getting the problem and "just" can sufficiently signal that the speaker thought the solution was simpler/smaller and needs more details on what's up (why not?). So there it serves as a crutch for the speaker's insecurity.

In the end it can be a useful word even if sometimes it isn't. In the end I'd suggest we don't always overanalyze and ask more additional questions, and adapt to each others use of words instead. I have coworkers who a) don't speak English well and b) have a very blunt way to point out things. Might be difficult the first few interactions to gauge their sentiment but I didn't jump to conclusions, and basically after a Zoom call to chat casually it became clear that's just how they communicate. I do suggest to them sometimes that using a different word might make them seem more approachable or nicer but ultimately I know they are nice and who is to say that my assumptions of how people should talk for me tp deem them polite are the right ones.

- I don't yet understand why steps x, y, z are necessary. To me it would seem simply/naively doing ... might work but I'm probably missing something.

- Would an (objectively) simpler (though possibly not perfect) solution (which I'm just putting on the table here) suffice here?

- I think we can do ... here and it'll be fine. Should we / let's see if that works, and revisit ? / .

Sure, "just do it" would often be bad, indicating a variety of things like "stop dwelling on this or arguing, do what I say". Or "can you just quickly do this (thing I find trivial but don't understand at all) for me", but in the end it's the context that matters.

Like, I can turn this around as well. The word "don't" is negative and should be avoided at all cost. Better: "could we try ... instead of ..." (see submission title).

Then conclude "don't worry about it" should not be said. Which to be fair is also true in some contexts but again, context!

EDIT: To be clear it is valuable for me to learn that usage of "just" could be problematic. That's important when not knowing the other party but among coworkers I also happen to have more of a relationship with than just one-off comments, these kind of word choices are not what make or break things. Especially in a diverse environment I assume everyone is acting in good faith and I would only let word choices affect me if the sum of my interactions with a coworker has been negative already and I "know" they are trying to incite an argument.

That's not the case. Engineers may not be as numerous but in each of the recent layoffs engineers were let go as well.

In many cases these systems only have SSO login. So how do you get that data onto your laptop when as mentioned earlier in the article you could be fired for cause when sending data is detected.

Yeah, but also the code shown above used native low level primitives like mmap which typically aren't available.

AOT, special behavior directives (@Uninterruptible), native memory access, making sure not to use new (?), at that point you are formally using Java, the language, but it's sort of its own thing.

So, that's still cool and likely no way around it but I wonder to what degree it's actually beneficial: Your program is much closer to a C++ program than a Java one except for syntax and the additional glue abstractions that typically exist in neither. In a (exaggerated) sense it's like it's written in a C++ DSL embedded in Java.

If you know how to write C++ it's possibly simpler to just write it in C++ as you know how memory management there works. If you know Java you need to get familiar to the extensions used here.

This is a bit different from the idea of self-hosting a compiler for instance where you can start writing your compiler now ideomatically in your own language instead of something different. For instance if your language & runtime has GC it's much simpler / safer to write a program in it, and so a compiler in it than pre-self-hosting (if the earlier compiler was written in C).

So what in particular is afforded by writing the GC in "Special Java" ? Is it just about being able to say "it's all in Java" or are there language features in "Special Java" that make live easier than C++? Or other benefits? For instance, I imagine use of the wider ecosystem / libraries isn't possible whereas in C++ it is (more so at least).

It would be nice if somehow you could write a GC itself in regular old Java without having to worry about aspects of how to do it in a special, restricted way. Say, the code you write and which runs the garbage collection creates objects, which subsequently get cleaned up by your very own GC program.

In the end you still have to work with low level abstractions / memory though and maybe that's still different to the self-hosted compiler example in a sense: There you translate code into a language that is more low level but you don't need to have these abstractions available in your own language / on your stage of computation / while running your compiler.