I had a very similar experience at Google about a year ago, and the worst part of it was that they did it 2 weeks before I was set to receive a 6-figure retention bonus for sticking around for 2 years after an acquisition.
Several other members of my team got the boot at the same time. All of us had come in via that acquisition and were set to receive that bonus, and because of the layoffs, none of us did. Folks I talked to on the inside stopped just short of saying that was why we were chosen.
It was especially galling because years before at the company that eventually got acquired by Google, I survived a round of layoffs, and leadership issued stay bonuses for everyone who was left. Those bonuses explicitly stated that they were still valid in the event that we were laid off before their time period was up.
You should consult a lawyer about this. You might be SOL but if this happened to several people, you might be able to show the company didn't act in good faith because there's a pattern of people about to receive their bonus being laid off. Layoffs aren't meant to work that way.
Generally layoffs involve someone who doesn't know who you are picking names almost at random from a spreadsheet. Management may fight for certain people to stay. Then legal and HR get involved and look through the layoff list to see if the chosen employees are problematic. For example, if the layoffs include too many people from protected classes, which opens them up to being sued. For example, if your company is 20% women but the layoffs are 50% women, that's going to be an issue.
Avoiding paying substantial retention bonuses can work the same way, if a pattern can be shown.
A simple letter from a lawyer probably won't do anything. Large companies are prepared for that.
For anyone who does come across this, here's my best advice: if you are acquired and your new employment contract includes a retention bonus, you want that contract to say that the retention bonus is payable unless:
1. You leave voluntarily within that period; or
2. You are terminated with cause within that period.
Yes as a person who had such a retention bonus before (from Google even) to me this seems rather cut and dry. Usually such bonuses are a mix of cash and RSUs, and set over a 3-4 year period. And are often also based on a perception of what the employees existing options were in the startup that they came from.
IMHO they should absolutely be paid out the whole amount of the remaining retention bonus at layoff. On the principle of things alone. Can't speak to the legality of it.
It might be too late now, but I've successfully negotiated (before signing) retention deals like this to be pro-rated in the event of non-voluntary termination. It's perfectly reasonable for exactly this reason, and companies have no legitimate reason to deny it.
Agreed, this is/should always be the deal basically - "here's a bonus so you stay while we transition" is the only reason many folks stay post aquisition. It should not be revokable, especially last minute.
To me its a massive red flag that Google would promise a cash bonus 2 years in the future, they could have given stock with an appropriate vesting schedule for retention. All the retention deals I have seen were done like this, only for the very short term (less than 6 months) a cash bonus makes sense.
That's awful and the most amazing thing you could do now is get together with those ex-coworkers or similar people and compete with Google in whatever business domain it was that made them acquire your former employer.
Because, having been through the acquisition process at Google myself, my general cynical take is: Google acquires companies to get rid of them, to stop them from competing and not to "add your uniqueness to their collective."
Keeping employees on retention bonuses is a way, in aggregate, of stopping them from going off and inventing something that eats their bottom line.
You should look into legal action. And failing that, compete with them.
You guys should have a consultation with a lawyer. It's a little cheaper if you guys just use one lawyer to go after Google for the retention bonus if there is a case ;)
The only retention bonuses I ever seen were to be paid in immediately, in full on involuntary termination. There was a "for cause" clause where bonuses don't get paid for termination with a cause, but the causes were listed in writing.
Note that the two are chemically related: glycerol is propylene glycol with its end-chain carbon atom and bonded hydrogen atoms yeeted off and replaced with an oxygen + hydrogen pair.
(The process of actually manufacturing glycerol is more complicated than that, of course.)
Someone years ago “foisted” Trac on us. This is before CI/CD had reached the status of a default behavior.
I thought it was going to be a shitshow but it turned out to hit the Pareto Front for project management, especially if you were doing Kanban. It’s one of the first tools that auto-linked between wiki, tickets, commits and commit messages. You could put ticket numbers and Wikiwords into your commit messages and it just worked.
I’m trying to design a Trac but with CI now, but I’m working on a personal time management app instead, because I don’t build panipticons, so those features need to live where management cannot see.
I gotta say, switching to an Epson EcoTank printer was one of the best decisions I've ever made.
It has ink reservoirs rather than cartridges, and small, permanently plumbed tubes that go from the reservoirs to the print head.
Not only does that mean there's no way it can tell what kind of ink I'm putting in it, it also means the tanks are fucking massive. It's so nice being able to go O(years) without refilling.
It cost about twice what a comparable, cartridge-based printer cost at the time. To this day I still consider it one of the best purchases I've ever made.
With traditional cartridges the ink can dry out and clog the cartridge if you don't print regularly. My print work loads are very bursty, like I had to print 100 resumes to go to a career fair one time but this was after like 6 months of nothing. For this reason, I prefer laser printers. Furthermore, with permanently plumbed pipes, it sounds like it could ruin the whole printer instead of just a cartridge.
I had a really shitty customer support interaction for a $60 Brother scanner: they included the wrong calibration sheet, and proceeded to attempt gas lighting me about user error despite photos showing it didn't fit in the scanner under any orientation. Replacements were $20 shipped, but out of stock anyway. Needless to say, that changed my mind about which manufacturer to make an expensive purchase from.
It was Wikipedia that reminded me Xerox even existed. All my other research led to the usual shitlist: HP, Canon, Brother, etc. No problems on Linux and Mac (printing and scanning), which is seems par these days, but no problems on Windows either: the manufacturer app was completely optional (but was straight to the point, functional, and worth the install).
Xerox color lasers have my glowing recommendation.
When did you buy it? After a cursory search it seems that Xerox engages in the same scammy behavior with 3rd-party consumables: artificially degrading the quality (lower DPI, fake printhead jerks), region-locking, wasting ink so it drains faster, and DRMs that blank out refuse anything that didn't pad their bottom line.
Jerking print heads for laser? That's not how laser printers work. Either way, I'm using 3rd party toner in mine (6515) just fine. It looks like people who have issues purchased metered printers.
Laser heads can misalign though (not sure if Xerox does that). Your Xerox® WorkCentre 6515 printer was launched 9 years ago and is not sold anymore. It's very possible that they changed their practices since then and/or that the price point is high enough that they wouldn't do that (it's aimed at professional customers after all).
Either way after a quick Reddit search there seems to be irreplaceable parts on that printer too. For example the fuser which is allegedly not user-replaceable.
Not if it only happens on 3rd-party cartridges combined with the fact that Xerox claims that they are low-quality and compared to their high quality genuine original cartridges™
My workloads are similarly bursty. I've had no problems so far; the worst I've had to deal with is splotchy printing after it's been sitting for O(months), and a quick print head clean fixes that right up.
Laser printers are great if you're doing all or mostly documents though, I can't argue with that. About half of my printing is stickers and high quality photo prints, both of which benefit from inkjet printing.
(My specific model of printer is an Epson EcoTank ET-8550)
Clogged cartridges aren't the major issue. Clogged print heads means your printer is ruined and you can dispose of it.
Except for HP printers where the print head is in the cartridge itself.
I've had great successes undoing clogged head on Epson printers with just few drops of isopropyl alcohol on ink drawing port. Weirdly the clogs don't even reproduce thereafter, so it might be silently doing something horrible, but worked for me.
Where did you hear that? You can buy replacement print heads for all cartridge-less printers I've ever worked with, including my ET-8550.
The difference is that they're purchased separately from the ink, so as long as the original one works you can continue to use it no matter how much ink you go through.
My print workload is very bursty but also low volume at the best of times. When my printer died I decided not to replace it because document printing services cost on the order of 10 cents per page (non-bulk) for basic printing.
I'd have to print hundreds of pages to even match the cost of a very cheap printer. I may never reach that threshold ever.
Best of all I don't have to worry about storing a crappy printer somewhere or have it dry out or clog up or spend time and effort on it and blocking it from accessing the internet and probably end up throwing it out and having to get a new one when I pull it out once every 4 years.
5 year or more year old used HP enterprise workgroup printer only or mopier with low page count are ideal for personal use. In general, the more expensive the initial purchase price of laser printers, the more repairable and durable and lower cost per page they are. (I worked in a large university department in the 00's where they had zillions of network enterprise HP printers of all sizes.)
I have an HP LaserJet Pro M402dw because I don't have a particular need for color.
Something to keep in mind when selecting a printer with refillable
liquid ink tanks is that they all have an internal waste ink
repository, which is a sponge that soaks up unused ink that apparently
accrues slowly through normal use, or quicker any time you do an ink
purge [1]. On very high end photo printers it's replaceable, and might
be described as a maintenance cartridge in the specs. If it fills up
and can't be replaced, the printer is dead. When I was shopping
around, the only brand I could find that had replaceable waste ink
repositories even at the low end was Canon, and being too cheap even
to have a network interface also saved me the trouble of firewalling
it.
It's true that ink tank printers need to be used regularly or else the
print heads dry out like a felt tip pen. Since the ink costs next to
nothing per page, I print a full page family photo once a week and
hang it up somewhere around the house if I haven't used the printer
for anything else, which still works out cheaper than any
alternatives. The walls look like instagram, but being reminded of
loved ones might not be such a bad thing.
EcoTank printers are particularly hostile with this. Despite that the waste ink pass on most models are user-servicable behind 1-2 screws, and can be purchased on Amazon for $10, the printer displays a message that you must ship the printer to Epson for a full replacement.
In order to bypass the warning, you’ve traditionally needed to use a program like WIC[0], which costs $10 per use(!) - I recommend epson_print_conf[1], which is a little more tailored to the HN crowd, but does not extract a bribe every time you use it.
It cost about twice what a comparable, cartridge-based printer cost at the time.
CIS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_ink_system ) were around for a long time, and a popular mod amongst high-volume printers, especially Epsons, after the cartridge chip DRM was defeated[1]. They definitely cost less than the printer. I suppose Epson eventually found it profitable to do it themselves and sell with a warranty, that third-party CIS often didn't have.
While this is a good recommendation, inkjet is a poor technology for most people's needs.
You want inkjet if you print a lot, at least a few pages every two weeks.
If you only need to print once every three months, you are going to hate inkjet, even with refillable tanks. Especially with refillable tanks. Disuse clogs up the head, which takes a lot of ink to clear.
Inkjet is only worth it if you use the hell out of it. You should only get a tank printer if you expect to actually use that much ink in less than a year.
If you want a printer that does nothing other than print your resume and tax returns- and you want it to just work every time- you want laser. You can even refill the toner if you really want. You shouldn't but you can.
I’ve been pretty happy with my EcoTank, but my favorite is still the HP PageWide I have at work. (I typically have to print ~100 5-10 page exams twice a semester) I’m very sad they discontinued them.
Are you using wifi? I have the 4850 and the wifi would sporadically drop out after a few hours and I wouldn't be able to reconnect without a full factory reset. It was the most frustrating thing. I was about to return it then moved it to another location and connected it via ethernet. It's been fine since, but a $350 printer that doesn't have a reliable wifi module is terrible. After searching on reddit, it seems it's a common issue.
Is a picture of my passport machine-readable? Is a PDF machine-readable? How do you classify it? And what happens when ten years in the future once algorithms become more optimized? If an AI can read Shakespeare, and parse its paragraph for verbing a noun, is all human written stuff then machine-readable?
> You're being too strict with language and definitions.
Yeah, because the stricter the definition, the more useful it is. A "thing" has less informational value than a "yellow jacket" and that has less informational value than "white and yellow jacket, with Adidas logo".
> Yeah, because the stricter the definition, the more useful it is
Language is capable of expressing broad and narrow concepts. I don't think it can be said that either is inherently "more useful" - it just depends what you're intending to convey.
Moreover I suspect iinnPP may not have meant you're being too strict as in specific, but strict as in rigid and inflexible - seemingly needing to separate everything with a sharp objective binary line rather than being able to consider the context (something that is "big" in one context may not be in another) and varying degrees.
> A "thing" has less informational value than a "yellow jacket" and that has less informational value than "white and yellow jacket, with Adidas logo"
If the word "flavoste" came to commonly refer to yellow jackets in general, and someone used that word to refer to a yellow jacket, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to call them wrong because the jacket doesn't have an Adidas logo if that's not what the word flavoste is used to mean.
If you want a term to refer to things that are only readable by machines, such as to exclude JSON/CSV/XML/etc., something like "binary file" or "non-human-readable format" may be closer.
> but strict as in rigid and inflexible - seemingly needing to separate everything with a sharp objective binary line rather than being able to consider the context (something that is "big" in one context may not be in another) and varying degrees.
Rigid in as I like things to be concise and precise as possible. The more rigid the definition, the fewer things a word can be.
> Language is capable of expressing broad and narrow concepts. I don't think it can be said that either is inherently "more useful" - it just depends what you're intending to convey.
Sure, language isn't a perfect conveyor of meaning, that's for sure.
That said, I try to be concise and precise as possible, and vague, duplicated words just tick me off. Why say machine-readable if you can omit it (since everything appears to be machine-readable nowadays)? Just say something like THE text format on Linux or whatever.
I don't see inherent advantage to a term being narrow, nor to being broad. The more useful definition on this axis is just the one that best matches what you intend to refer to, which may well be the larger set. Sometimes you want to talk about all bovine, sometimes you want to talk about only cows. For this blog post I'd claim the more useful definition of "machine-readable format" is the common one, because it was being used to refer to a set including JSON/XML/etc., opposed to your narrower definition which only includes formats that are additionally not readable by humans.
A preference for sharper definitions could make more sense, depending on context - but I don't think your definition is really any sharper; whether something is "specialized" for instance still comes in varying degrees with no clear cut-off, with arguably every existant tool/program being "specialized" to some extent - in very much the same way as you argue against the common definition of machine-readable.
Ambiguity is probably the property I'd say is the least desirable. By pushing to give the term an alternate definition that to my knowledge is not otherwise in common use and does not align with the literal meaning, I'd argue you are increasing ambiguity. I don't personally think the idea that languages like HTML are not machine-readable formats will catch on.
> > Language is capable of expressing broad and narrow concepts. I don't think it can be said that either is inherently "more useful" - it just depends what you're intending to convey.
> Sure, language isn't a perfect conveyor of meaning, that's for sure.
The fact that language can convey both narrow and broad concepts is not a flaw; a language without the ability to refer to broad concepts would be distinctly less useful.
> Just say something like THE text format on Linux or whatever.
There are binary files in machine-readable formats. In fact, binary files are probably more in machine-readable formats than text files, on average.
> I don't see inherent advantage to a term being narrow, nor to being broad.
A narrow definition will appear less frequently and thus probably have higher informational content. It's why a word "a" has little informational content, but a very specific word like "vestibular" has more informational content.
The more you can apply your word to anything, the less information does it carries.
> There are binary files in machine-readable formats.
Sure, but text format, means a textual format, i.e. uses text (or more precisely, can be rendered as bytes). Or maybe plaintext.
> A narrow definition will appear less frequently and thus probably have higher informational content. It's why a word "a" has little informational content, but a very specific word like "vestibular" has more informational content.
I agree that "vestibular" refers to a more particular concept. I don't see how it follows that "vestibular" is a "more useful" word in the sense that implies we should be redefining other words to be likewise narrow in definition. If anything I'm pretty sure most would consider "a" to be the "more useful" word due to how applicable it is. But, really, language needs words for both narrow and broad concepts.
> Sure, but text format, means a textual format, i.e. uses text [...] Or maybe plaintext.
To my understanding, you suggested using the term "THE text format on Linux" as a replacement for "machine-readable" (as it is currently used). My objection was that those concepts are not the same and, in fact, binary files tend to be machine-readable moreso than text files. I'm confused how stating that text is textual addresses that.
> or more precisely, can be rendered as bytes
Many things (including, say, an 8-bit image) can be rendered as bytes. Would probably say it's instead about whether the data is in a UTF-8/ASCII/etc. encoding.
> I agree that "vestibular" refers to a more particular concept.
Not just that. A more surprising (i.e. less likely) result carries more information. In the informational theory sense. A word with broad scope will be more used, thus be more frequent in text, and thus, carry less information.
> To my understanding, you suggested using the term "THE text format on Linux" as a replacement for "machine-readable" (as it is currently used). My objection was that those concepts are not the same and, in fact, binary files tend to be machine-readable moreso than text files.
Ok, you have a point there.
But I don't think the author ever compared binary machine only readable formats, either. All the machine-readable formats that he looked into admin were human-readable too.
> Many things (including, say, an 8-bit image) can be rendered as bytes.
Sorry, I meant to say UTF8/UTF16/ASCII etc. Probably was messing around with UTF8 -> bytes conversion around that time.
> In the informational theory sense. A word with broad scope will be more used, thus be more frequent in text, and thus, carry less information.
A rare word carries more information when it is used, but by nature of being rare is infrequently used (99.99...% of sentences are the unsurprising case of not containing the word).
Words that occur frequently typically convey more information in total, and I'd claim that this (opposed to per occurrence) is what it'd make sense to look at when considering redefining a word - among many other factors.
More generally - you don't want the language to be unable to (or make it difficult to) convey common, frequently relevant, concepts.
> But I don't think the author ever compared binary machine only readable formats, either. All the machine-readable formats that he looked into admin were human-readable too.
The only other format the author explicitly names is XML, and it's as an example of a format with "similar virtues" to JSON. The bespoke machine-readable output formats the author is warning against using may very well be non-text formats, particularly with how they "require custom processing that goes well beyond basic grep and awk and other widely available Unix tools".
Depends on the jurisdiction, for example Germany is pretty strict.
If A marries B, then either both keep their names, both will be A or both will be B or one or both will be A-B or B-A. No other outcomes are possible, and if one of them was B-C before then the kids can't be A-B-C.
I'll counter that it does, allowing that it's perfectly fine to adjust the threshold of certainty about a particular thing's purpose to suit the circumstances.
If that fence is stopping the school bus from driving off the edge of a cliff, for example, I would absolutely not want to remove it - and you can bet I'll spare a modicum of thought to make sure that's not the case before I yank it out of the way.
got me. There's literally an HN rule about this: [0]
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I feel like the world would be a better place if people would tone down the ad-hominem in their day-to-day discourse just a little bit.
> I feel like the world would be a better place if people would tone down the ad-hominem in their day-to-day discourse just a little bit.
PRAGMA sarcasm = ON;
No, fuck you, I'm going to call you names and shit all over you over a mild disagreement!
PRAGMA sarcasm = OFF;
But yes, one of the refreshing things about HN is that even when conversations get heated, the participants tend to at least keep to the topic and respect one another / assume good faith. There will of course always be slip-ups on that (I'd be lying if I said I wasn't guilty of that on occasion), but they've managed to be pretty rare (and/or quickly caught by the admins) even as HN has grown in popularity.
The guides practically carry them up the mountain, make their beds, maybe put a little mint on their pillow. It's an absolute joke. They try to bring the mountain down to their level.
I had a very similar experience at Google about a year ago, and the worst part of it was that they did it 2 weeks before I was set to receive a 6-figure retention bonus for sticking around for 2 years after an acquisition.
Several other members of my team got the boot at the same time. All of us had come in via that acquisition and were set to receive that bonus, and because of the layoffs, none of us did. Folks I talked to on the inside stopped just short of saying that was why we were chosen.
It was especially galling because years before at the company that eventually got acquired by Google, I survived a round of layoffs, and leadership issued stay bonuses for everyone who was left. Those bonuses explicitly stated that they were still valid in the event that we were laid off before their time period was up.
Big companies are soulless.
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