The sad part is that no one forces you to work that hard. You're free to say NO! and work less, even this will results being laid off. Only during 1:1s your manager may highlight that deadline is soon and would be great if the project would be delivered on time, and little hint about a promo. But you set goals and force yourself to do more, single night this less sleep doesn't hurt anyone. Then there are more such nights of coding and you feel barely alive. 90% work is done, only very little left to finish. And then bam!
Upd:
I didn’t mean that this is ok, I’m for workers rights.
>We really need a management class that doesn't insist on continuing the cycle of abuse on their underlings.
This won't happen. Your manager puts pressure on you, they get pressure from their manager and so on until it reaches the CEO who might be getting pressure from investors/board.
Only fix is regulations from the government which seems to be a curse word by many posters on this site.
History is filled with people saying “this won’t happen”, only for that thing to happen.
Culture evolves and changes. What is acceptable in a culture evolves and changes with it.
Be the change you want to see, apply steady pressure, speak up when the opportunity arises, debate people who see things differently, and with time, many things can happen.
This is like saying I can fix global warming by recycling better and going vegan. You are not wrong but it's also like trying to stop a flood with few sandbags.
I've had managers who tried. None of them lasted at these companies that did not care. They were politely told they were not meeting expectations and since they had mortgages and other stuff, they took a hint and moved on.
Again, this fight is political and not corporate. Make tech workers hourly and this will stop. There will also be plenty of tech workers who will fight against this tooth and nail.
> This is like saying I can fix global warming by recycling better and going vegan.
I can't agree. I don't think anyone who is diligent about recycling or making environmentally conscious food choices believes it will fix global warming. But doing the things that we can is still important for changing culture over time.
If you're a young person growing up in a home that thinks about these things responsibly, the hope is that more people reaching adult-hood will think about the world through that lens. Is it enough? No. Is it still critical? I think so.
> I've had managers who tried. None of them lasted at these companies that did not care.
I've worked at places where management did not behave in the way you describe. The point being that such places exist, and such an outcome is not so impossible.
One way to guarantee things will not change is to do nothing.
Problem is that government is the very same people you just spoke of. If they had the collective will to change things, they could just do it. But as they lack the collective will to see change, government can't change either. I believe they call this the stag hunt dilemma.
How about removing the hierarchical power structure entirely. The west claims people are all equal and then they happily slave for cents while their "bosses" make dollars.
Worker cooperatives are to corporations what democracies are to dictatorships.
> How about removing the hierarchical power structure entirely.
We, at least those of us in the software industry, tried that. If you look closely, that's what Agile was all about. The associated Twelve Principles of Agile Software outlines what needs to be considered by developers when there isn't a "boss" to oversee operations.
But I'm sure you know how that turned out in practice: The power structure quickly jumped on usurping the name and bastardized it into something that gave them even more power.
No you can’t, the system is setup to make you work that hard. Their compensation policy is based on rewarding disproportionally the top performers…
So if you can work 10% more than your peers, you get not 10% bonus but rather 30%-100% more. So it makes business sense to put the extra 10%, until everyone is working at 110% and then again, adding an extra 10% pays off, rinse release, death spiral.
Does it actually? I'd buy that it makes silly arbitrary emotion sense to bask in the nonsensical feelings about an even bigger number. The actual business case is much less clear. There is obviously an opportunity cost associated with that extra 10% and 30-100% is not necessarily the best opportunity. I suspect it is often not.
I think the parent emphasizes the wrong side of it, although I agree with them strongly that it is a damaging way to do things. Yes, you get slightly more upside on the top end, but it's more like 30% vs. 10% for an average performer, there's no 100% bonuses here unless you're in the "ruling class" (roughly VP and above).
The actual risk is that if you're on the downside of what they call "differentiation", if you're not the one who pushed above your peers, what used to be called meets expectation is now considered below expectations, and is a path towards pip and layoff. Lack of growth for non-terminal roles is also now identified as a path towards pip and layoff.
Microsoft is intentionally turning up the heat to thin the herd.
Or, you can just be happy getting the lower end of the bonus. It’s not like the pay and RSU is peanuts. Or work just enough to be in the middle of the bell curve. I put in the work to be in the top part earlier but it is absolutely not worth it, they will lay you off anyway.
> The sad part is that no one forces you to work that hard.
Maybe I've been farming for too long, but my brain, at least, is wired to push until completion and until things are done it will consume me. If you're going to be up all night ruminating about it, you may as well actually work on it.
Of course, in farming you get a nice long break after you've pushed yourself hard. I've never worked at Microsoft, but I suspect, given what I've seen elsewhere, that as soon as it is done it's already on to the next thing, never giving workers a chance to stop for a while.
Exactly! If you don't try to keep it simple, especially in bigtech, things get way too complex. I think choosing simplest solution in bigtech is in orders of magnitude more important than in a simple domains.
Yes, and that's why we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a 1935 Buick Century.
These "anything can be anything (if you try hard enough)" arguments are so tired and elementary.
Yes, you're technically right. But don't go bragging yet. That "if you try hard enough" tidbit is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Effort isn't free, nor is it infinite. Everything is a matter of scale.
That's why I can own a kitchen knife, and even a gun, but not a minigun. That's why even if I was granted a minigun, I surely wouldn't be granted a nuclear warhead. Would you trust Americans with a nuclear warhead? Second Amendment 2.5: everyone has the right to bear legs, and by legs we mean nuclear warheads. Sounds great.
There's a difference between doing something small, and doing something big. Doing something small and bad is bad, but it's less bad than doing something big and bad. If that sounds like goo goo ga ga level logic, that's because it is. I think children learn this pretty quickly.
Not true. We can be capitalists and have ethics. We don't have to be full throated supporters of the craziness of Palantir's founders (they are very open about their insanity) to be investors
"petty political disagreement" literally donated massive amounts of money to donald trump and supporting a genocide. the post discusses Thiel and Trumps misconduct and the ethical reasons the author is choosing not to invest, but sweet strawman.
So many people are obsessed with Web application size. But there are other important factors as well. First of all, the UI must be functional even it's slow and heavy. If it does the job then it's already a win. I don't actually care how long I'll wait while I'm downloading the JS bundles. I've been waiting 5-10 mins GTA to load back in 2008, waiting seconds is totally ok.
While Google advises to use abstractions, I like the left-hand side variant. It looks to me easier to understand and change. The right hand side is scattered and abstractions mutate the object, which may have side effects.
It's all about the right level of abstraction at the right time. The example given is too kind to the reader, I can imagine functions with 1000s of lines with the exact same structure of doing too much distinct sub-steps. Of course you don't want to create something like the indirection hell that frameworks like Spring in Java create but it's not hard to find a middle ground. For instance I find it specially easier to create code like the right-hand side when I'm using test driven development.
Agreed more readable, instead of searching/scanning. That's an issue I have with larger projects, more files and classes to jump to for not any gain really.
It definitely is. His first example is Assembly. That's like saying someone saying 'don't program in assembly' is being hypocritical because everything they program ends up in assembly.
You theoretically can but Clojure is not OS-level so you'd be working something like JVM->CLJ->Go and that would remove a lot of performance. Or Go->Clj->Go which is redundant. So yeah, I stand by my statement. And I could be your dad, how do you know 100%?
Go -> JVM bytecode with a Clojure-facing API and a Clojure-based compiler as a Clojure package wouldn’t be so bad. It’d just be another JVM frontend, hosted in Clojure. Clojure is also just a JVM frontend. I’m not quite understanding this “JVM->Clojure” bit of your equation; Clojure is a JVM frontend and stdlib API.
Upd:
I didn’t mean that this is ok, I’m for workers rights.
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