Prioritization and escalation exists in most companies. I guarantee you that once an issue hits the HN front page, even engineers who might have totally different talks will get involved. (Never worked at GH or have talked to anyone there in years but this is how everything works pretty much everywhere)
> Prioritization and escalation exists in most companies.
Yes, indeed public awareness of a problem affects how an issue is reprioritized. Some companies even employ web scrapers to do sentiment analysis at each release, and visible issues do get bumped to high priority.
It's amusing how some people in this thread try to pretend this doesn't happen, and make these bold assertions with a straight face in replies to people who were in actual meetings where issues were escalated because of this.
The public shaming will continue until the internal incentives improve. Make sure to drop that HN thread link into the internal task tracker y'all. Don't forget to report to journalists if the severity warrants it (Brian Krebs, 404media, etc).
"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome."
> The preprint papers on arXiv are like 99% the same as the published versions, except they're free instead of locked behind a multi-thousand dollar/year paywall.
I don't think you fully understand the problem. It doesn't matter if you can find in arxiv a preprint of an article published on a reputable journal. What matters is that right besides that paper you will find a dozen other papers that can be utter nonsense generated by a poorly calibrated slop factory. You don't find those in papers published in respectable journals which enforce double blind peer review and were filtered for relevance and quality.
It's that peer review process that creates value and relevance. Otherwise all you have is a glorified file server.
> How is science to evolve if good research requires $49 a pop to view?
This kind of criticism is misplaced. The answer to reputable journals being held hostage by the likes of Elsevier is not dropping peer review and dump articles in a blog-like site such as Arxiv.
I'm confident the bulk of academia would love to move away from Elsevier et al and have free open journals as their discourse venue. However, the publish or perish situation created pressure to count only the papers published in reference publications in their productivity metrics, and those were hijacked by for-profit editorial companies which unscrupulously abuse their dominant entrenched position.
> My understanding is that increasingly “adversaries” who may or may not be Russia simply pay local gangs/thugs/idiots to do it.
Yes, and the playbook extends to some anti-war orgs throughout Europe who play the role of useful idiots by advocating things such as a) pressure your government to stop supporting Ukraine, b) force Ukraine to capitulate and agree to Russia's demands. They do so under the guise of "no to war, yes to peaceful negotiation" but the way they neglect Ukraine's best interests and push Russia's maximalist agenda is pretty telling.
And the West can and does return the favor. Perhaps Poland should fund the destruction of some Siberian pipeline pump stations? Article 5 against Russia is not going to get consensus anyway, so making it formal just increases the risk of escalation.
It’s easier than that. We’re helping Ukraine every day, and all Russia can do to retaliate against countries helping Ukraine is carry out acts of sabotage.
Frankly, "the West" doesn't care about Russia. They were a gas station masquerading as a country, but now they aren't even a gas station. Let's just fund Ukraine to the gills and in no time they won't even be good for petty vandalism.
I'm not necessarily referring to fringe organisations.
The best example of this that I can think of is the recent Die Linke electoral victory in Berlin. They have the same policy on European security as AfD.
It's a clear example of Horseshoe Theory. Pseudo-intellectuals in Germany may argue that the position is not the same because the motivations are not the same, but if you're sitting in Ukraine, feeling the walls shake, and seeing your pets tremble in terror, you really couldn't give a shit what some leftie in Germany thinks — the result is the same as the openly pro-Kremlin German far-right.
> stellen uns auch gegen die Waffenlieferungen an die Ukraine.
> Some common sense goes a long way. If the job listing is from a company with 10,000 people, you can assume that they're always hiring. Submit away.
Common sense would dictate that a company with 10,000 people has a need for a diverse set of roles, and it would be completely stupid to recycle the same template pretending the role was always the same. In fact, repeating a stale advert suggests the company does in fact not have positions opened and either forgot to pull an old advert or some recruiter is trawling for applications to pretend to be productive.
I don’t think common sense suggests that at all. It’s like saying that the US armed forces requires soldiers with many specialized skillsets (which is true) so clearly it should recruit to every individual role and post separately.
A large company may have a handful of actually-very-special-role positions open for every hundred generic "our tech stack is this and isn’t going to change" developer roles.
> Perhaps the armed forces are doing something right, and the tech industry is not.
This shows some ignorance on the history of work relations. The bad old days of industrial guilds and company towns are not renowned for quality of life and independence. Your life was tied to the company, and all you could aspire to do in your life would be to toil in the same low paying job while mixing up your corporate structure with your life's social structure. If god forbid you lost your job, you and your family would lose your whole life.
Tell me how this is doing things right.
For those in the US to understand, see how your access to healthcare is tied to your employer, and the impact this have on your life of you are forced out of your job. Now extrapolate this to every single aspect of your life.
The armed forces have a service commitment of several years (if I read this correctly, US Army is 8 years). People will sometimes change jobs within months.
They have the time to train someone into a role and typically don't have to worry about going to work for a competitor after they get out of AIT or A school.
While there's nothing wrong with those companies paying such, it drastically changes the incentives for the regular employee. Going to work in Big Tech can be like winning the lottery (in the dot com boom, I had about 6 million on paper... that I didn't sell before the crash).
That there is drastically different industries with correspondingly different levels of compensation has incentivized the person who can change jobs to move from a $60k job to a $120k job to a $250k job to do so.
There are companies out there where managers, mechanical engineers, marketing, and all the other non-technology roles work at for a decade or two. It's the software developers and IT people who switch jobs after two years working there.
What's the difference between those job types? It's that software development and IT have a multimodal salary with much greater discrepancy between the companies that fall into the distribution around the lowest mode and the highest mode.
If you switch from working at a local area company to Big Tech, you significantly increase your salary. For other careers, going from the local job to the national big company will likely give a much smaller boost.
Table 6 (last page) shows the median tenure by job classification. Computer and mathematical occupations are the ones that were going down between 2014 and 2020. The others were holding fairly constant.
Table 2 shows 21% of people 35 and older have 10 years or more of tenure at their employer. At 45 years old, it's 45%.
I still hold that software development is the outlier for shorter tenure and the largest factor driving that is that you can quit your job and get a new one that pays twice as much.
Do you have an alternate explanation for this data or published data that contradicts this?
> People used to spend their entire careers at a single company. Something changed, and it wasn't worker attitude.
The US-style neoliberal attitude towards decimating the workforce at a drop of a hat for PR purposes does have a chilling effect on any employee's trust.
But don't fool yourself: one of the most important tools anyone has to improve their life and wellbeing is the ability to switch jobs. It can create career opportunities you would otherwise not have, and even unblock career progression by sidestepping your current job's corporate constraints.
> unblock career progression by sidestepping your current job's corporate constraints
no shit I work with multiple people that dipped out of their old gig, did 2 years somewhere else, and came back at a much more senior level to their old job because HR limits how often you can get promoted or increases inside a bracket.
jumping matters, as does the potential threat of jumping.
> There's a reason 5 Why's Analysis is a thing. If you just say "here's a bunch of stuff we're changing," but you haven't said enough about the root cause, then no one will understand whether we're doing enough (or too much; or the wrong things).
No, that's not the point at all.
Root cause analysis and context and tradeoff analysis and plans are still critical requirements.
But not everyone needs to do root cause analysis and evaluate tradeoffs and review plans. Some stakeholders don't need any of that. They pay you to care, so that they don't need to.
What these stakeholders care about is whether you can fix things, how are you planning on how to fix things, how many resources you need to allocate to fix things, and when are things fixed.
Different audiences require different messages because they have different concerns and responsibilities.
Does a project manager need to know the failure rate of a DSL connection of a customer that reported an outage? You might, but does the project manager need to?
My thoughts too. It sounds like a minor feature being framed as a whole new business.
Then again, Dropbox and Docker are too.
reply