jpwatts

Decisio Health | Senior Engineer | Houston, Texas | Full-time | On site | https://www.decisiohealth.com/

Decisio is hiring a senior engineer to join the team responsible for building, validating, and operating the clinical data processing pipeline and API endpoints behind Decisio Insight. We need help right now with migrating our application to Kubernetes and scaling to meet the demands of larger and increasingly frequent deployments.

We're a Python 3 shop that makes heavy of use of technologies like Docker, Kafka, and PostgreSQL. We take devops seriously here, automating what we can and monitoring everything so we can make continuous improvements to our product. We're also active in the local Python community. We sponsor and host the monthly PyHou meetup group and are a past sponsor of the annual PyTexas conference.

More details and application at https://www.decisiohealth.com/sen-eng/

If you want to ensure that your new hire will stay with the company for four years, you put that in the contract. You then negotiate a compensation package that factors in the opportunity cost to the employee of granting you an exclusive right to their services for the next four years. This compensation will consist not of "maybe-someday-we'll-all-be-super-rich-won't-it-be-grand dollars", but instead "we're-a-startup-and-we-don't-have-many-of-these dollars". This will be expensive.

Fortunately for you, dear founder, there's an alternative (at least there was, until these guys ruined it for everyone). Instead of requiring the employee to commit up front to stay for four years, you structure the compensation package in such a way that the employee has an incentive to stay, but isn't required to do so. These packages are often called "golden handcuffs" because they bind an employee to an employer for a number of years, the result you're after, in a way that relies on a large signing bonus of "maybe-someday-we'll-all-be-super-rich-won't-it-be-grand dollars" that is to be disbursed annually over the life of the agreement.

You and the employee both hope those dollars will eventually be worth something, but right now all you know for sure is that you have a lot of them. It's a trade that works for both parties; you keep your employee if those dollars prove valuable enough to compensate for the opportunity cost incurred by the employee in continuing to work for your company, and the employee has the freedom to move on if they don't. It's the "golden" part that keeps the employee around, not the "handcuffs". And remember that it was you, the employer, that chose to do the deal this way. You would have preferred regular handcuffs, but didn't have enough "we're-a-startup-and-we-don't-have-many-of-these dollars" to afford them.

"Fair" enough.

There are two places where one might take a position: "are the laws being fairly applied in this case?" and "are the laws themselves fair?".

Clearly it would be unfair to treat Arrington differently than the law requires. I think the charitable interpretation of the above poster is that he thinks the laws themselves are unfair. You may disagree, but arguing that what Arrington did is legal is beside the point.

The State has the right to determine what is legal; I reserve for myself the right to determine what is fair.

I encourage you to do the same.

I'm not taking a position on Arrington. I just object to the idea that legality implies fairness, by definition.

You seem to be confusing what is "fair" with what is "legal."

What you're describing reminds me of the Mathic system in Neal Stephenson's book Anathem. The characters are sequestered in groups defined by the interval at which they interact with the outside world.

There's a good summary of Mathic life at http://anathem.wikia.com/wiki/Mathic_Society (the site contains spoilers, but that page looks safe to me).

Regarding your point #3: how would "scrub" work with interconnected user data? Comment threads like this one are a good example; my comment is dependent on yours for context. Should you be able to delete your data and leave my comment dangling? If so, should your deletion cascade to my related data? Shouldn't I have a say in that?

That's most definitely incorrect. And it's not just a technicality; copyright law is the legal foundation of free/open source software.

They claim to be generating the revenue, only to have it stolen by Google and others. If this was the case, /robots.txt could go a long way towards preventing billions of dollars from "leak[ing] onto the Internet" each year.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics.

That 97% only indicates that most people don't change the defaults; it says nothing about what Twitter users want.

In this case it's particularly misleading, since we're talking about an option to turn off silent data loss. What would make someone track down a setting related to a problem they don't know they have? A more honest representation would be: "A small number of our users were aware that we filter @replies by default, some were happy about it and a few (3% of total users) changed their settings to remove the filtering."