frollo

Not only the steps do to this properly would probably kill most companies, but investors would avoid such company like the plague.

They'd basically need to lose all protection on their product, making it a de facto open source (note that there are companies operating on open source stuff, but they actually make money out of the things they don't open source - such as "pro version" or know how). Plus, investors value the pool of recurring customers far more than basic cash flow or such (because you can squeeze them more) and the next best thing is customers you can make recurring customers by moving your product to a subscription model.

Given Arduino's origin and first history this is especially depressing. Good old Adriano is now well and buried.

So you disapprove of the decision, but would have enforced it in the most asinine way at the expense of actual productivity.

I just hope to never work with you and, especially, never use anything you helped building.

I already agree with the DSA, there's no need to sell it to me

I you were a manager there and would approve that metric, no worries, I'd manage to fly it past you.

Any smart manager, having to deal with this kind of policy, would either push back or approve any way to game it and then get the work done. But I doubt that a company which allows this kind of BS can retain smart managers for more than a couple of months.

You need good quantitative measures, not just random numbers.

If you sell, say, water bottles, you probably want to know how many of them you can sell at any given moment, in order to not overbook and have to reimburse people. In this case, keeping track of how many water bottles you do have in stock probably helps, keeping track of how many labels with funny jokes you can stick on a shipping box in an hour doesn't. But if you start tracking the latter and handing down bonuses and layoffs based on it, people will max that metrics out - at the expense of your actual stock capacity.

Quantitative measures are dangerous, especially in the hands of people who believe they are better than qualitative ones because they're "objective" or whatever. Because not only they aren't, but they are also better than qualitative ones at hiding their biases and soothing your own.

Are you implying that management shouldn’t have any quantitative measures and should only be qualitative?

Many managers would do a lot better this way. They'd still make stuff up, but would at least be forced to admit it.

Even professionals have limits. I've worked in companies with the kind of management which kept adding this bad proxy metrics and pushing initiatives which had a totally expectable bad effects on the product quality. Most devs used to fight the management on this, but grew progressively tired of this continuous fight. At some point the experienced devs either left or just gave up and started giving the management what they asked. Us juniors followed suit. The management was happy, the actual workload diminished because we let go of "low priority" tasks and we even go a juicy bonus at the end of the year because of how good we were doing.

The company tanked six months after that, now it doesn't exist anymore.

There's only so much you can do when the management is hellbent on doing stupid things.

Malicious compliance is exactly what you get when people think your target is stupid and you put some automated, non-negotiable measurement in place.

If I was a developer there, I'd totally started adding those generated tests. I have a job to do (ship products) and you put in some stupid requirements which actually interfere with it (since my time is limited I can either work on tests or my daily tasks like developing new features or fixing bugs), but we both know that if my primary job suffers, I'll pay for it. So the best solution, from my point of view, is the one that takes that requirement away and lets me go on actually working.

When we had a similar problem in a previous company, we just created an epic, assigned a couple of people to it and have them churning out tickets for specific improvements, like "Class X has a coverage of Y on this method, add tests for the missing execution branches", which were clear, non-generic and fully integrated in our flow. If anybody complained about our velocity or whatever, we could show them the full trail which lead us to choose to work on that ticket and how much we spent on it. The coverage issue got solved in less than a month.

Are you seriously asking this question in 2023? Nobody makes web pages anymore, just make an app and require access to a ton of user data just to sell them for shady purposes.

Italian government and enshittification, name a more iconic duo, I'll wait.

They built (more correctly, paid) for the IO app for it to be the one touch point for interacting with the government, then started cutting off features from it in other apps. Now they want to aggregate everything again on CIE, which not everyone has yet. Then you have local governments (looking at you, Lombardia) which build random apps which technically support SPID (something like state-provided SSO) and CIE (SAME THING) but wrap them through their custom authentication system because what's better than multiple passwords for the same account? Which already has 2FA?

Man, I wonder if they ever use the crap they build.

In general, they tend to get snapped up by other corporate roles, either officially (which at least grants them the pay benefits associated with the role) or unofficially.

I know a lot of great coders who ended up doing anything but code because they were the technical people with communication skills.

I'll agree that publishers (especially of academic stuff) deserve even a cent for every book sold the moment they do something useful in the whole publication process. Because at this moment, their contribute is negative.

Until then (which probably means forever), I hope Sci-Hub and similar keep thriving.

That's true for basically all the "gig economy" apps, which are just enormous money sinks which fuck over (disrupt, according to their propaganda) whatever market they enter and then either collapse leaving a rotting corpse where a functional market used to exist or become monopolists and then proceed to level the market in order to milk it up as much as possible. And then they collapse anyway.

If we had any kind of sense, as a society, this shit would have been banned years ago.

This was simply the cattle waking up and realizing that they are the ones with the actual power. Any power a CEO claims to have is simply voodoo. The issue is employees still don't see this. Even without a union having enough people just walk out because the company doesnt respect them will crush the company. Rightly so.

This. While unionisation and labor organisation in general are a good thing for the workers, just people deciding they have had enough and finding a better employer (and maybe pulling out a couple of colleagues via referrals) is going to hurt companies.

Well, yes, until the stuff which has to be delivered by the people sucked in to do support stuff starts lagging and missing deadlines. Then, suddenly, lots of people start being really unhappy (usually at the expenses of the people who were helping).

If the oncalls don't have the knowledge to solve the issues they encounter, they need to escalate them and somebody needs to put more time in developing a more comprehensive knowledge base for them to reference, not just "steal" time from other company functions.

They've been doing it randomly for a while.

I have lots of complaints about this website, but seeing how quickly things get solved when you're getting a bad rep in the whole damned industry is always fun.

Yeah, if OP was getting popular (and getting money out of it), the account would have become a juicy target.

And LinkedIn had probably put it in some "extra checks" list for the same reason, thus triggering the ID check.

I've got a FP3 (so the older model) and I have had no problems with any app. I don't use Tinder, but Whatsapp works as good as on any phone I've ever owned.

As for the cheapness, I've been keeping a running tab of how much the repair is costing me vs how much it would have cost with a normal phone (ballpark estimate) and, considering the phone price, I'm currently saving about 200€, even factoring in the phone price. The biggest expense is shipping because I live in the middle of nowhere and I can easily get 10€ of shipping on a 15€ spare part (which is why I'm not replacing the protective cover even though it looks like shit).

But they aren't. As we see here, there was a pretty solid wall of consensus saying that the sub was a death trap. Heck, the reason why it was the only submarine built with carbon fiber is something an engineering undergrad can grasp at glance.

Not only that, but we have known how to reach ever lower depths for decades now. A human being has already reached the bottom of the Challenger Abyss. We know how to do this stuff and, while there's certainly room for improvements, ignoring the properties of the materials you're using and not doing proper testing is not how you get any improvement done. At best, all the advancement this tragedy will bring is a more comprehensive regulation of this kind of activities. Which is exactly what the original Titanic brought to the world.

I don't consider that space a competitor, it's just a fan-run forum for people to discuss some gaming stuff.

I still consider the growth of the forum as a net positive (because it's a cool space which has produced cool things in the past), but since it's running on spare time and money, our ability to absorb new users is limited. And won't scale really quickly, because we don't plan on making money out of it.

The most similar reddit alternatives (kbin, lemmy, specialized forums) have been growing as quickly as they possible could under the circumstances.

I'm a mod in a niche forum which suddenly got more popular due to Reddit's BS and trust me, it's a mess. We went from "not even I remembered to log in every month" to "multiple crashes due to excessive load".

We won't ever be a threat to Reddit, but the protest is definitely going to become a threat to my sanity...

Yeah, but they care about reading the stuff written by the API users.

Most of the monetizable users are passive readers of content written by power users. Lose the power users and the readers will follow. Maybe not immediately, but they will follow

I've been trying journaling in one form or another for about 15 years now and found it completely, utterly useless. I've lost count of the number of journals, either physical or digital, I've thrown away in the past. Be them partially filled or just turned into something to rip pieces of paper off whenever I needed to write on something.

I keep some track of stuff I'm working on in my day job, so I can reconstruct what I did the day before before the standup, instead of during it as I used to, but beyond that, I just forget stuff when I don't care about it anymore. No need to keep it around in a different format, if I don't care about it enough to keep it in my mind.

That's where Brussels is located. It makes sense to have your lobbying office near the offices of the institutions you want to lobby. Less time spent travelling.

It's still an extremely risky thing to do. These kind of letters have legal value, any formal error can open you up to getting your demands rejected (and there's no plan B, the moment they find a way to get out of paying you legally you're effed up), postpone the payments indefinitely or other issues.

Don't do a lawyer's job unless you're a lawyer, because the guy on the other side will definitely get the best lawyer he can afford to retain as much of his money as he can

You're not allowing a random person access to the agent, you're allowing the agent access to your emails. But since everybody can send you an email, your agent is going to be exposed to a lot of stuff.

It's just like regular emails: you can always get spam, malware and other trash and when they reach your system they can cause damage. The agent is just a new level on the stack (operating system, email client etc) that can now be compromised by a simple email.

And then people will start using that language to build bots which can understand human language and somebody else will have this exact conversation...

While this is a legitimate consideration, what EU regulators are doing right now is a step behind: they're trying to ensure that European data doesn't get syphoned out for shiny baubles again.

Anybody setting up an European chatGPT would be golden for the moment, even if it introduced back the same centralization of wealth.

I'm happy to see that even people on HN, a space supposedly for tech-oriented people, have exactly zero clue about the difference between chatGPT, GPT itself and a generic LLM. But here you are pretending you know stuff while you try to lecture Europeans on what's best for us.

This place has become a parody of itself.