"Tables are co-located, meters away from the news desk ‘the customers’, meaning it only takes minutes if something breaks for the communication between the developer and the user."
Meh, can you imagine sitting across from journalistic horrors like Melanie Phillips or Peter Hitchens, and being torn between fixing your shit quickly or doing the nation a favour and delaying publication of their right wing tripe from poisoning the weak minded for just a few minutes/hours longer.
> The Mail attracts writers, who ought to oppose it, because it pays them top rates on one condition only: they say exactly what the editor wants them to say. You can get at least £1,000 for a morning’s work, and Dacre will fill your pockets even if he decides not to use your piece. Writers will bark like a performing seal for money as easy as that.
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/nick-cohen/2013/10/who-is-the-g...
That + being able to offer people a greenfield project using Clojure and Node.JS probably attracted great engineers.
Were you asking me to explain my point because you find the existence of a rational explanation for intelligent people working for the company extremely offensive?
It's a common fallacy to assume that political beliefs are connected to intelligence.
You should always consider the possibility that there are smart people who hold different political/ethical positions to you.
The engineers that joined might not consider the publication evil, and they might not like the grossly-offensive insinuation by you that they are like western prostitutes in Saudi Arabia (?!).
Apparently they realised that there's zero chance of the two readerships ever intersecting, so they let their guard down. It's pretty shocking, even to someone who already reviles them.
Hm, I don't know. I sort of respect them, in a way. In some ways I think of them as the authentic voice of the impotent lower middle classes, lashing out at everything around them, greedy, cynical, childish and shallow, blaming others, ever seeking some outraged scandal to distract them from their otherwise mundane lives. Hate the Mail if you will, but you're basically hating their audience too.
I don't like the Mail, but at least they're independent, seemingly serving no-one's agenda but their own. Murdoch is much worse, in my opinion.
Being "greedy, cynical, childish and shallow, blaming others" are all vices at the end of the day (FYI despite the tone of my comment here, I'm actually not religious).
I agree totally that Murdoch is worse, but I think the Mail does hold more sway in a vocal area of the population with political power. The fact that they never acknowledge their hypocrisy or the damage they do I think is also offensive on an intellectual level that the Sun et al never quite reach as they're so cartoon-like.
I mean it's easy to come up with a plan to "fix" Murdoch. Simply tighten media ownership rules, so that one family or organisation can't own more than a certain small percentage of media. And I take your point that the Sun is pretty clownish in the UK, but in Australia they're far more insidious. (¶)
But how do you fix the Mail? They're like this perfect endgame of free press. There's no big conspiracy; they're simply the answer to the question: "what does the angry disenfranchised demographic want to read about?". And while I lament the means by which said class seeks to assuage its anger, I do sympathise that they have a lot to be angry about.
All this is why I find it hard to wrestle with the question of the Mail. I want to hate them, but some part of me holds back, because I feel that's too close to simple class discrimination, and because I can't shake the feeling that they're the symptom, not the cause, of society's ills.
(¶) Check out the Murdoch press's outrageous bias in the recent Australian election: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/05/daily-t...
>I think of them as the authentic voice of the impotent lower middle classes, lashing out at everything around them, greedy, cynical, childish and shallow, blaming others...
Which is another reason I have a kind of grudging respect for them. You'll never read a word against the 1-percenters in the Murdoch press.
Maybe the core audience of the daily mail IS lower middle class, but only the segment of the lower middle class that is intolerant and reactionary.
I'm going to leave what I wrote as is and reap what I sow, but regret putting it in such a nasty tone now. Sorry!
Technical recruiters I know talk about it too, how they describe this very cool roll their trying to fill, deliberately obfuscating who it's for, before eventually having to reveal it and usually loosing most of their potentials.