metajack

I expect you'll be seen as the problem for slowing an obviously productive person down. What a time to be alive :(

When I was at LinkedIn we definitely cared about this. It probably wouldn't be enough to knock you down a peg during your review if you had none during a particular half/quarter, but if you never did anything in this bucket it would be a red flag during promotion consideration.

We wanted leader to be empathetic and respectful.

This isn't that hard. There are various employee groups around identities (Women in Tech, Asian Pacific, Black, LGBTQ, etc). Membership is not exclusive to those groups but also open to allies. As an example, I used to participate in the Women in Tech one at both Mozilla and at LinkedIn. Often I just listened, but I also helped organize a few events with them, contributed ideas for those events, and when they started a structured mentoring program I was one of the mentors.

There are also optional and non-optional hiring trainings that address these kinds of topics which you can do. I was a hiring manager for a while so I also spent some time doing some of these optional things to improve my chances of building a diverse team. This mostly included helping with sourcing candidates and a few times meant speaking up when I could see that identity biases were being used in evaluations.

But often just simple things are all you need. For example, when picking a group dinner destination making sure various culinary requirements are accounted for (either cultural or dietary) or finding team building activities that are inclusive.

I never once had an issue finding some of this to put on these perf reviews. Most of this is just under the category of being a good human who respects and values others.

Many blogs are completely dynamic and grab content out of a database on every request. The static site generation style fell out of early fashion when wordpress took over from moveable type, and didn't really return much until jekyll. Even today I think most blogs you see are mostly dynamic with the platforms using caching to avoid hitting the database every time.

Most people don't do performance tuning of their blogs because the average traffic is miniscule. This means that any configuration issues rear their heads when load happens. For example, having your max connections to the web server be far more than the database can support. Perhaps the machine could handle the load if properly configured, but no one did so because there was no need.

Level 59 is the entry level software engineer position. Similar to E3 at Meta or L3 at Google.

Levels.fyi does a pretty good job at this kind of context at least for the big companies.

The money tends to be on one side of these things, and money amplifies the message substantially.

You can argue that the election was fair all you want, but who is going to pay to run all the ads to impress that message on everyone?

It's already the case that clickbait headlines and lies are naturally more engaging, so amplifying them with money seems to drown out any rational counter dialogue.

This is probably because of Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) rules, which prevent personal data from leaving the device for ads without consent. This means YouTube on AppleTV can't target you at an individual level, and thus the ad inventory is less valuable. Maybe now they have more demand side budgets and are finding ways to spend it even on Apple devices. Or maybe their privatization technology is finally mature enough to make that inventory valuable enough to sell.

This isn't even the first time this has happened. Remember when they renamed Libra? I think they just assume it doesn't matter, and if it does, the settlement will be a blip. It doesn't always work out that way for them.

You can’t control who buys your mortgage from whatever bank you originally got a mortgage with. Even if you refinance to another bank, they can just resell it again. I assume this is true of other kinds of debt. Not all their customers are people who don’t know any better.

Also, I think people probably have some systemic trust that really bad actors will be eventually removed, but unfortunately that seems not to ever happen to Wells Fargo despite what is at this point hundreds of years of bad behavior.

While I'm happy to hear you are leaving Reddit, please consider reinstalling Apollo until Christian is able to shut down the app. He is planning to ask folks to forgo the refund much like Twitterific and Tweetbot did[1]. He will give refunds to anyone who takes no action I believe, but if you'd like to support him you'll need to opt-in once he asks, after which you can delete the app.

[1] https://daringfireball.net/2023/03/tweetbot_and_twitterrific...

Christian Selig's post covers this in detail and includes references to other app developers with similar concerns.

https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...

I think some important takeaways are: the proposed pricing monetizes the users much higher than Reddit can general monetize them today. And the 30 day window apparently precludes any kind of orderly transition for the app developers who have been monetizing their apps on a yearly schedule.

That is only true when flying. When on the ground during boarding, it's pretty awful and stuffy.

How can you watch Ms Marvel and think this is copy paste or looks generic? The characters, culture, and art style are pretty unique and make the show quite enjoyable, and I am generally uninterested in the Marvel universe.

Loki was also very different and had a unique look.

Each one of these little series has been pretty enjoyable and different, and I found myself pleasantly surprised. The movies however are not my cup of tea and do seem repetitive and generic with some notable exceptions like Thor Ragnarok.

There is a long history of this including multi-protocol clients. You see this now for example as people want a single "chat" for the many places they publish live streams (twitch, youtube, discord, etc). Unfortunately, because you must ultimately support the lowest common denominator you end up with much of the nice features of particular platforms being unavailable or things like the youtube chat filled with comments like `@comment-copy-bot: James (Discord): That was a cool video!` and things like direct messages and emotes don't really work.

In 2005 Google added XMPP support to Google Talk/GMail Chat and they were federated, but nobody federated back and they closed off its successor (Hangouts).

I don't think "lack of federation back" was a big driver in this decision. Everyone who used XMPP was able to chat with gchat folks and despite some weird changes Google made to their integration, it worked reasonably well. You didn't need to do anything special to federate with another XMPP server. It just worked like email does.

I expect either product complexity (like having to support non-gchat addressing which then requires full JIDs instead of short names) or de-prioritizing features that weren't directly driving their growth thesis were probably more relevant. Ie, why spend two engineers to fix integration concerns and deal with federation everywhere, when you can just retask those headcount onto some new feature that will drive growth.

Didn't the metaverse always suck? It's the setting for dystopian science fiction.

I used oops to help someone I knew several months back. It still exists and worked amazingly well.

I am well aware (and have been for decades) that I've been the beneficiary of white male privilege

Excellent. Either you got this training at some point or you figured it out yourself. The point of such training is to make sure that all of us white men understand that benefits we've gotten from systemic racism.

This is not really different from other aspects of education. I spent plenty of time in computer science classes where I already understood the material. I had some exposure to this kind of education about systemic racism early in college, which I completely bounced off of and missed the point of. Future exposure eventually got the message through. Sometimes repetition is needed.

But aside from treating all humans equally, I'm not sure what else I can really do.

That's a big "aside from". There are many times in my career where I have decision making power or influence on a decision that involves other humans. Being aware of systemic racism and unconscious and conscious biases help me make more equitable decisions. If you are doing similar things, then congratulations, you are probably helping solve the problem. I don't think anyone is asking you to do more than that.

It's hard to separate gut feeling from unconscious bias.

Those times you remember not listening to your gut and regretting it are susceptible to confirmation bias.

Personally, I've had great gut feelings about people that turned out to be terrible hires. I've had bad feelings about people who turned out great. I've had direct work experience with folks that were amazing, and then at a future job they performed quite poorly.

There's no removing subjectivity from interviews probably, but I highly recommend you turn down your gut feelings if you have an interest in unbiased or at least less biased hiring decisions.

Music rights are split into two traditionally, the songwriting copyright and the mechanical reproduction right. Previous to the internet, media sales mostly went to the labels who held hte mechanical rights and songwriting copyright was earned directly to the artist. So if you bought a CD the label gets paid, if you play a song on the radio an artist gets paid.

The music industry lawyers were incredibly smart when they passed the DMCA back before online music was much at all, and got internet streaming defined as mechanical reproduction so they got dealt in on streaming.

ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC, et al, which give large blanket licenses to cover most copyrights for songs charged well known quantity for licenses, and early music streaming services paid those. Harry Fox (at least at the time) was the clearing house for mechanical rights and there was actually no set rate or anything. DMCA created a compulsory license that Harry FOx would have to give, but the rates were not known at the time, so everyone was getting VC funding without knowing what anything would cost.

That rate is probably much higher than the songwriting royalties, so the music industry has succeeding in getting ahold of most of the money in a new format that was poised to benefit the artists directly.

I guess we should just be glad it didn't happen like video streaming and there are actually rights clearing houses so companies like Spotify and others can make compelling streaming services with very large catalogs, unlike the city-state video steaming where you need 3-4 services combined to get access to most of the mainstream stuff.

But I also had one boss who did not want to hire one woman because " what happens when she gets pregnant"

This is perhaps an example where extending parental leave benefits to both parents solves both ends of the problem. Men also may leave if they choose to expand their family, and women aren't pressured into more child care than they prefer due to the men not having parental leave to help.

They are in avg more social

Careful with these generalizations. Women get placed in impossible behavioral expectations. Told to be more assertive, but then perceived differently than men when they are.

Some places I've even seen a "diversity quota" for tech recruiters that's tied to a bonus.

It makes sense if you want to increase diversity to have the beginning of the funnel get lots of diverse candidates in. The recruiter is not a decision maker in most places, so the hiring bar is not necessarily affected by whether the recruiter got more diversity candidates into the funnel or not.

As an example, in my experience there were not a lot of female candidate resumes coming in via normal channels. If the recruiter wants a bonus for increasing gender diversity, they are doing extra work to go and find female candidates and convincing them to apply. That is probably exactly what you want to be happening.

I can confirm that I personally advocated for namespaces before Cargo existed. I failed to convince the decision makers.

Meanwhile, just a few days ago some of my project's crates were freshly squatted. Sigh.

Maybe someday they'll come around.

Diane wrote an analysis of how many bugs would have been avoided had the Servo style system been in Gecko all along: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/02/rewriting-a-browser-compon...

"There’s a significant overlap between memory vulnerabilities and severe security problems. Of the 34 critical/high bugs, 32 were memory-related."

Rust doesn't fix everything, and this result won't hold for code that is itself security logic (ie, crypto implementation) as logic errors are also very bad. But fixing memory safety does address almost all the high and critical severity issues.

Microsoft published similar research: https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/18/we-need-a-safer-s...

Keep in mind that the Gecko style system has had two decades of work before the Rust code came along, and was written by some excellent programmers. It was extensively fuzzed for years. And still, Rust has enormous potential to solve these security issues.

Only time will tell if the next decade with Rust will pan out as the data seem to predict, but I am quite hopeful.

One reason to use Rust is speed. For example https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Facebook...

Of course, not all projects have this as a high order concern, but some do, and it can make sense to use Rust for those.

The CTO of FB is an ex-Mozillian. There are quite a few ex-Mozillians here, including myself. Despite Mozilla's public posture that FB is enemy #1, the internal technical culture is more similar than different.

At a certain point people will move to the bay area for the higher paycheck, so that keeps it adjusted pretty high. Companies are not competing against local-to-the-employee employers, they are competing with all employers globally.

Even with regional adjustments, the math usually works out in your favor to not be in the bay area.

When someone points out that someone did something bad, clarifying they only did it to 1% of one country's users isn't a super strong defense.

I don't think this was a good decision by Mozilla, especially as Germany is very privacy focused and its marketshare in Germany was quite good. The very next year I believe marketshare dropped in Germany substantially.

This was another Mozilla self-own, and it was painful to watch from inside while I worked there.

They added a new explanatory line to the 2018 form 990. It clarifies that the compensation comes from the subsidiary. That seems quite odd to me, but at least it isn't eating the foundation's budget.

If I recall correctly, that twitter post is not entirely accurate. The CEO was exercising their stock options.

Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit, and Mozilla Corp is private held wholly by Mozilla Foundation. No one is getting compensated in forms of equity. All compensation plans are salary and cash bonuses.

The data from the tweet matches the numbers from public IRS filings of Mozilla Foundation. See https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/ for the most recent report.