346 karma · joined April 3, 2009
The front line nurses who were heroes a year ago, are now hated... until they become homeless, and we'll feel sorry for them again.
Some may feel it's dismissive of the complaints. But 95% or more of the complaints in the letter are characterizations, not descriptions. Take for example the HR executive groping another employee. What does groping mean? Brushing? Back of the hand? Possibly accidental? Grabbing? Pinching? This is a pattern with activists, using characterizations. And the executive was fired after the groping incident, which means...the system works? He was fired in spite of being a high-level exec, in spite of his personal ties to Bezos.
Another example concerns a female manager I believe who was fired abruptly. This is presented as an example of a bias in favor of men. So... no man's ever been fired abruptly? No man's ever been escorted out of the building by security? It's not allowed to fire women abruptly?
Yet another example in the letter is a man saying to a group of women something like "you need to listen to me because I'm a man". But... isn't that what feminism is? Don't feminists go to groups of men and say "You have to listen to me for no other reason than I'm a woman".
It's difficult for me to see how any thinking person can read that letter and not see it as an example of fainting feminism. [Edited, spelling, sarcasm removed]
Chicago cops frisking you all the time -- wear skin tight pants.
Car accident -- use defensive driving techniques.
Being shot and killed for sleeping at a Wendy's -- don't resist arrest.
Wife divorced you, took your house and kids -- don't get married, OR, learn to discriminate.
Sexist manager won't promote you -- join a company run by females, OR, start your own company.
Pandemic -- move to the country.
On the other hand, if you prefer not to solve your problems yourself, you can say "Why should I change, when other people are the ones doing something wrong", fold your arms, and wait for a man to solve your problem for you.
You're trying to get managers to stop setting bug deadlines on the theory that they don't understand that it doesn't help the situation. My assumption would be that they don't care that it doesn't help, they want me to do my job.
I've worked for management that not only showed no signs of understanding the nature of making software, but also didn't understand the nature of making money. A much more serious problem in my opinion. Their job is to bring in the business and your job is to make the software work on time.
It wasn't clear to me earlier that you may be dealing with executives by proxy of a project manager. That's a worse situation because you can't level with a project manager, they are stuck in the middle. You may want to go over his head (if you report to the p.m.) but if you do that, do not complain about him or anything else, bring only solutions and charm.
See my other comment for some more constructive and specific suggestions.
You know your bosses better than I do, but all I can make from this example is a boss who wants to make fixing this bug top priority. Possibly the boss wanted to say, "Stop all other work until this bug is fixed" and then, thinking what that might bring -- after all, developers are lazy -- decided to set a false deadline. The intent seems to be to set priorities.
An executive once told us -- a small group of developers -- in a meeting that work must be finished by the deadline come hell or high water. We looked at each other and didn't know what he was trying to say. Obviously there are trade-offs here, so do we trade off quality? Features? What exactly was the executive thinking to sacrifice -- besides unpaid overtime of employees. That's a given.
Maybe the boss can remove obstacles or get help from other departments. These are things that bosses can do that you can't do. Maybe all the boss wants is to get you to say what the hold up is, for example "we need some more information from one of our partners", in order to assist you.
Maybe your boss gets colicky when bugs aren't fixed. You could suggest setting a zero defects policy, which more or less states that bugs are fixed before new features are added. This is one way to meet deadlines that trades off features in return for being able to ship more or less at any time.
It could be there's even a missing role here that you can fill over time. If you can be an expert at treating your boss as a customer, interviewing to discover what exactly is desired, and suggesting technical and management solutions, you'll be a great deal more valuable.
Even the Facebook app itself could refuse to work unless tracking is turned on.
It's still a positive change overall, and still affects Facebook but it appears to me the effect will be minor, even temporary.
I wonder how much of the stack manipulation problem could be solved with say four register words A, B, C, D (and A!, B!, C!, and D!) that access registers understood not to be trashed by primitives (CODE words) but might be trashed by definitions (COLON words).
Otherwise, once you start trying to fix these problems, you end up with Scheme.
Can a newspaper be serious without putting its published articles under source control with complete edit history?
Why is saying "men can't be women" considered hate speech, and "fuck you" is not. One conveys unreasoned aggression, while the other is a clumsy attempt to state objective truth.
Jordan Peterson remains cool, even with interviewers that treat him badly.
Dave Rubin says repeatedly he's willing to talk to people, and that people refuse him and don't invite him.
Tim Pool keeps his cool in the midst of online and real-world dust-ups.
Tarl Warwick is also calm cool and collected. He'll talk to anyone.
Any leftist who wants to engage others productively can look to Pool as a good example.
Jimmy Dore is on the left (according to himself at least), and he's civil.
My impression is that most anyone on the spectrum will talk to anyone else, except for Resisters, who seem to have a visceral dislike for Trump that clouds their reason; and the far left, who object more or less to the entire western way of life, or capitalism, or something that would require a large amount of dismantling. It takes a lot of dissatisfaction to want to start from scratch, and these persons seem to be the most badly behaved. So my guess is they feel most of the contempt and also are the ones who receive the most contempt -- because of their abusive behavior. In fact, if the far left has any lasting principle at all it would appear to be that contempt is a wonderful club to use against anyone who isn't responding properly to their dogma.
Amazon seems determined to co-mingle its products, and to confront the problem of counterfeiting head on. One thing I would like to see is a feature that allows a buyer to "delete" or ignore a seller - I want Amazon to remember my "anti relationships" with sellers so I don't have to. Buying and selling is about relationships and reputations.
Another observation about marketplaces is that many buyers don't want quality. Some are extremely selfish. Not because they're bad but because they're desperate either emotionally or financially. We all enjoy getting a good value but some people are consumed by their selfish needs and are not interested in building a healthy balanced society or encouraging quality products. A successful attack on counterfeits has to filter [the behavior/reviews of] some buyers as well as some sellers, because some people can't see past their own selfish needs.
Finally, counterfeiting is an extreme form of re-implementing the designs of others. A large part of Free Software, for example, is historically rooted in re-implementing other people's designs (Linus & Unix, Stallman & LMI, Linus & Bitkeeper). It's not altogether destructive but if your only differentiator is that you're cheaper, then that's similar to Samsung's business. Making something that takes another's work and does something a little different with it, that's a lot better than a copy and also it's by definition not what we mean by "counterfeit". I think it's important to draw a distinction between someone who is competing with a possibly superior product and eroding a brand name (i.e. using a brand name as a descriptive word), versus someone who is making a product that is identical in appearance.
I would suggest that perhaps, part of what's happening is that the police are optimizing for a particular metric. We can hope that it's crime reduction, or some number or numbers very close to that.
When you optimize for one metric, other metrics fall.
The police, like most anyone, make errors based on superficial attributes. Even if statistically, arresting tall hobo beard man taking pictures of trees late at night is the best course of action for the police's metrics, you perceive it as a series of stupid errors. This leads to a perception of injustice and harassment.
I'm the kind of person who doesn't mind security check ups and even being stopped by police as long as they are cordial and professional, and, crucially, I understand their reasoning. I recall listening to one black man, I think he was talking to Sam Harris, relating how police would stop black men and grab them. Unprofessional treatment creates a perception of an uncivilized society, and that's unjust.
We have startups, Youtube, online university materials, and enthusiast groups that will assist a motivated, energetic, optimistic person to get ahead.
The second worst thing you can do to a person is tell them not to bother learning a subject because of their skin color.
The worst thing is to add 10 points to each of their test scores, and have them find out.
We've all had people [in grade school] make fun of us for learning computing or frankly being too good at anything. Below average people are always trying to drag us down. But once we get on the other side of a people-filter [such as college or a company] we realize the world is much more egalitarian and full of independent minded people.
[Edits added in brackets]
Social media has been around long enough that it's possible the crazy tech bosses you have seen may be an effect of the craziness of social media. But, then again it could just be crazy bosses.
I still agree with your first sentence. Plenty of room to improve. But I think the online world is the #1 component to focus on to make that happen.
In general it seems counterproductive to protect people since that can tend to make the protected people weaker. But advertising is as the parent says nothing but manipulation. It takes away choice from the users, and gives it to advertisers. It's used by businesses such as car dealers to buffer bad practices -- when word of mouth doesn't work, advertise a sale.
A market of free products seems to kill ecosystems like the app store, where so much low quality free stuff is available. But would a 50 cent limit be significantly better? If advertising were eliminated would the world be better or would it just adapt to some other equally ugly configuration. With users paying at least we have that choice & price information that currently isn't there (if the service is otherwise free).
The fact that corporations tend not to treat employees as multifaceted human beings does not strike me as a gender issue. In fact none of the feminist items that I've heard since the late 80s strike me as gender issues. Instead, it seems to me that in complaining, feminists ignore the fact that all the same things happen to men too. Most men are not in power. We get passed up for promotion. We get ignored in meetings. We don't get treated like multifaceted human beings and aren't payed what we're worth -- in our opinion.
Roughly 90% of mechanical engineers are men. Roughly 90% of the people in prison are men. If a feminist is going to insist that one is the result of sexism and the other is not, then feminism is going to have serious trust issues in the near future.
It's common these days for activists coming out of humanities departments to deconstruct some area of enterprise, like video games, according to the ontology of feminism. These people, feminists, have been giving themselves a bad reputation for nonsense for many years now. It's difficult to take much of what they say seriously anymore.
Of course Silicon Valley culture is toxic. People are driven to move here not because of a strange affinity for the soul of the machine; but to make money. It seems as if everyone talks the same way, and has the same bland ideas. I'm sure that it's not really that bad, but it seems that way from what we hear on line and off line. Some of the corporate world is invigorating, especially start ups, and I truly enjoyed PG's essays that talked about viaweb and fixing bugs with the customer on the phone. But much of corporate structure is so empty and even deceptive, it pisses me off.
Women are deliberate thinkers. They ruminate on important decisions. In my opinion women should stop blaming other people and take up their own agency, and show us how to do it better. Lead by example. Not as an employee: you'll have to start your own company. To be blunt I believe such an exercise will be humbling for the women who try it. But there's no reason companies can't be structured and run much better by being run by women. There must already be examples out there.