makeitsuckless

If you don't have a culture of such infantile frat-house behaviour, you don't distribute such memos.

It might surprise you, but this isn't how adults communicate, or want to be talked to. This is frat boys communicating to frat boys, making everyone else feel unsafe and unwelcome just by using this aggressively immature and tasteless tone.

Full disclosure: I've just been fired from a similar company partly because I didn't tolerate the CEO and fellow managers communicating to my team in such an offensive way. Which obviously made me a bad cultural fit, as a grown up over the age of 40.

LittleSnitch also makes you totally paranoid about how almost every piece of software is spying on you without explicit consent.

Also, Microsoft really needs to clean up their domain usage, because it takes 999 permission rules to run Office.

The CEO of a flat company probably has a need to see everything

And Slack does an excellent job at demonstrating why that is idealistic nonsense and simply bad management that doesn't work, simply by making it possible to actually see almost _everything_.

It's one of the great things about Slack, it's much like Scrum in that respect: it may not be the answer, but it sure as hell will confront you with what the actual questions are.

Unfortunately, people who don't want to face their problems will immediately turn around and blame the tool/method. So very typical.

Let's not kid ourselves. This is not about energy, creativity, flexibility and all that shit. It's about two things, young people are a) cheap and b) gullible and easy to manipulate.

The latter is probably the most important. I'm in a situation that is a typical example of how that gets abused: company needs to downsize (funding dried up), and wants most of the team to sign a piece of paper and go away. The salespitch is that it's for mutual benefit, but in reality it's 100% for the company's benefit. The employees would sign away their rights, including at least 2 months pay and in some cases get screwed on their visa. Also, be complicit in forgery, since the dates on the paperwork are false. The younger employees would probably have been railroaded and screwed hard if it wasn't for the more experienced members of the team.

Tech companies want young people as cheap guinea pigs, to try out all kinds of "entrepreneurial" ideas without having to pay the price. Pure and simple.

"You must like dealing with people to be great at management."

This is what I always assumed, and why, as an introverted programmer, I avoided the management track until my late 30s. Turns out, I'm a pretty great manager (at least that's what other people say, fellow managers have been taking cues from me, and my teams have been loyal to the point where it still stuns me when they say it out loud), despite being definitely not a people person. Of course it helps that I'm an (ex-)engineer leading mostly engineers, which is already a great improvement compared to what many are used to.

I do like working for people, I like watching my people thrive and be happy and productive, and I like taking on the challenges involved in making that happen. Which does involve working with people, but that is just what it is to me: hard work. I don't hate it, but I don't love it either. However, because it's hard work it is all the more satisfying when it's successful. More satisfying than coding has become at some point.

My highest goal is to make sure that everyone is happy and autonomous in their work and the results just keep flowing. Because that's when all those messy and complicated people will leave me the hell alone...

For fuck sake, how can you have such a blatantly anti-European headline and pad the article with anti-European propaganda phrasings like "Europe’s attempts to get access to encrypted data" when the same fucking article itself states that major sovereign nations that are both on the European continent and founding members of the EU support encryption as a fundamental right?

The straw man evil "Europe" portrayed in this article quite obviously doesn't exist.

Schneier is missing one major reason why companies keep data: regulation.

So many regulatory bodies and laws requiring companies to keep all kinds of data for all kinds of reasons for a wide variety of periods, so that simply having a policy to "store all the things" is way, way simpler to implement than to carefully study and adhere to each individual rule.

Nothing really new here, even before cheap storage and ubiquitous computers, companies kept boxes and boxes of all the paperwork ever, just in case some audit may require them to dig it up. Only physical limitations sometimes caused them to throw away stuff labeled "a decade ago", and today there simply is more data and zero incentive to destroy it.

It's not "perfectly fine online". In fact, much of it is already illegal in most civilized countries, and has been long before internet was a big thing.

However, any attempt to execute and finetune legislation and regulation to explicitly include the online is generally either ridiculed (example: the EU "cookie law", which is actually a "don't track without explicit permission" law) or portrayed as anti-American protectionism on forums like HN.

Feels like we're chasing our tails on this one. We went from "programmers" to "developers" to "engineers". Every time it started well, because only people with the right mindset referred to themselves and the people they looked for that way, but pretty soon the rest catches up and the term devalues.

We should just call ourselves codemonkeys and focus on doing the job well regardless.

It's stories like this that cause everyone in Europe except the blind SV worshippers and libertarian fundamentalists to just shrug and shake their heads every time a rant comes up about how the US is so much better for startups and entrepreneurs.

And this thread is just full of sociopaths blaming the victim. SV culture disgusts me.

The part that makes this kind of crap so infuriating is that there's usually a large group of people that, despite what the author casually claims, do care: the people on the payroll. The people about to lose their jobs.

But of course, in the Horowitz's world only investors and entrepreneurs matter, not the little people. They're not part of the game. They are literally nobody.

You realise millions of us happily and peacefully live in smaller countries that are the successful result of secession?

If only publishers had put that much thought and effort in sneaking in increasingly bloated advertising in with http requests for content until the ratio ads/content was a 100/1, or in massively violating their readers privacy and becoming complicit in a world wide greed driven surveillance system.

Any ethical policy with regards to ad blocking should start with the word "sorry", followed by a lengthy apology for two decades of utterly unethical business strategies.

Instead, we just get another aggressively anti-consumer move in the privacy arms race.

No tracking if you pay up amounts to blackmail. Publishers like these won't get a penny from me until they apologize and give up tracking altogether. (Of course the fact that Wired hasn't been relevant since the late 90s makes this particular decision a lot easier...)

It's not just you. I've been an Apple fan for a long time, but the only Apple app I regularly use is Keynote. For everything else I use alternatives, and that has never been any different.

With the occasional exception, Apple has never been very good at application software.

You start with being ethical. In the online business, that pretty much covers most things with the exception of VAT, the clusterfuck known as "intellectual property", and the fine line between freedom of speech and hate speech. (I'm ignoring doing business in repressive regimes, because there you've only got yourself to blame.)

The only reason why US companies are in trouble in Europe is because they use unethical practices that happen to still be legal in the US.

However, it was pretty obvious up front that those practices are unethical and illegal in most of the Western world.

So please, stop whining about the complexities of international businesses when the root cause is simply a lack of basic decency.

The lack of any kind of introspection is painful. Sure, new tech will be abused for anything, but no industry has so completely and totally unethically abused tech as the advertising industry.

The only other field that has been so utterly unencumbered by any ethical concerns has been state intelligence, and at least they have had enough sense of shame to do it in secret, and can claim they do it "for the greater good".

Ad tech has exposed the utter moral void of the advertising industry.

"Hire Doers vs Tellers". I agree with the statement, but I disagree with the method.

You can separate doers from tellers by how they talk about the work and how they (non-verbally) react to certain questions. However, separating them by creating a totally artificial and unrealistic "doing" situation, be it via role playing or coding tests, will result in a lot of false negatives.

Also, this callous attitude will run afoul of labour protection laws in most civilized countries that aren't the US.

the hostility that's constantly directed at him and Facebook

Methinks you are confusing cause and effect.

Because the lack of credibility of someone who gets his fortune from creating a severely ethically challenged corporation?

The benefit of the doubt only applies if there is no evidence either way. We're past that.

Sure, we can hope, but there is absolutely zero reason for such naivety to be the default.

I know this approach as simply "being Dutch". And it's a major source of culture shock for expats working in the Netherlands.

It's so weird. Everything I have by Apple still works and still looks good. But all my Apple data and power cables are held together with Sugru.

People who share a certain ideology aren't an "ethnic" group. We do exactly the same with nazis.

Whether those measures are effective or desirable is up for debate, but the constant attempt to shut down that debate by playing the ethnic/race card is extremely counterproductive.

I'll believe it when Google start acknowledging human being's desire for privacy as a real thing instead of a technical and commercial obstacle.

It's embarrassing that the tin foil hat suggestion that the European Court has a political agenda isn't downvoted into oblivion.

Not to mention the simple fact that through this ruling the court actually struck down a treaty supported by the EU politicians.

As far as I can tell, that still makes it harder to get into the UK than many other countries in the EU.

Of all the ratings, IMDB are the most useless of all. Especially for quality movies that have gathered enough of a reputation to be watched by the masses of tv or netflex, who then proceed to rate them low for being "boring".

Pretty much all of those converge on a rating of around 6.2, including some great classics, whilst lots of Hollywood lightweight entertainment has 7+ ratings.

The only good cinema to escape this faith are black & white and non-English speaking movies, because the unwashed masses of IMDB avoid those.

I'm sorry, but I think these recurring "we do everything remote" are cheap shots from the outliers that produce software that, with all due respect, is relatively simple, usually the "for developers, by developers" kind of stuff.

I work with a team that deals with a highly complex domain, and for us it is absolutely essential that we are close to and regularly interact with the rest of the business.

This can't be replaced by remote work unless I create an extra layer of analysts to tell the developers what to code, which is both highly inefficient, removes a lot of potential innovation that comes from the synergy between people looking at the challenges for different angles, and a lot less fun for everyone involved.

For me, what happens between developers and non-technical coworkers in the hallways and during lunch is an essential part of the process of making great products together that cannot be replaced by remote work.

(To be clear: within the dev teams we are completely set up for remote work, and any developer can work from home at any time without prior permission. It's certainly not a matter of lack of trust or facilities.)

Yes, violating a user's privacy is really ethical...

You have to put this in the context of it being almost two decades since Wired was relevant.