Dr_tldr

I think you're confusing 'empathy' with 'virtue signaling.'

If all Poettering did was community outreach, you would have a much stronger case that he's bad in all aspects of his job and should be fired. Trying to pressure Red Hat by saying it 'reflects poorly on you' is basically saying 'you should get rid of this guy even if you think the good outweighs the bad, because I don't like him.'

I would consider reading the comments again, it seems like a lot more people are wanting a way to quickly fill out a variety of similar but non-standard forms than want either a job board or a job app tracker.

After sending out about a hundred applications, I found I had no control over the process, so there was no reason to track it. Instead, I spent that time working on my own projects and going to meetups to find out about live job openings and show off my stuff. The job application system at most places is badly broken and HR and recruiters don't seem to know or care enough to fix it, so it's better to circumvent through some kind of personal connection.

http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar...

So if people don't have access to legal representation below a certain income level, the solution is not to increase accessibility to courts or to allow them to represent themselves in court, but instead to set up binding arbitration where they also have no representation? Do you feel that in abstraction, a neutral observer would reach that conclusion?

"...even the more refined recent studies show that lower-paid employees still had quite respectable success rates in arbitration, ranging from about 21% to almost 40%. That compares very favorably with the 23% win rate of union-represented employees that I found in one of the oldest and most respected labor arbitration systems in the country."

The author is comparing arbitration and arbitration, not arbitration and courts. Is there any place in the article where he addresses the research in the other paper, or is he just saying "it's not that bad."

Also, I'm not sure what the existence of insurance against employee claims has to do with the claim that wages would be lowered? Do you have any evidence for a connection other than inductive reasoning?

In this case, I think sexism was as much a symptom as a cause, and the larger cultural problems were very destructive to women, men, and the US economy.

"Estimates of employee win rates and damage award amounts based on the AAA-CC filings data indicate that arbitration outcomes are generally less favorable to employees than those from employment litigation."

"These results suggest that, while a substantial minority of employees use self-representation, in the large majority of instances employees are retaining counsel to represent them in employment arbitration. The cases in which employees do have representation by counsel are on average those in which they have a greater chance of success and recover larger damage awards. Thus employment arbitration appears to be a dispute resolution system predominantly based on employee representation by counsel, as is the case with litigation."

So the takeaways here are the arbitration is worse for employees than litigation, and that employees usually need a lawyer for the arbitration process. The study notes that more research is needed, but it's far from clear than arbitration is a good idea for larger complaints, much less as the only option available.

I would love to see some citation that shows businesses without mandatory arbitration clauses have to buy insurance or otherwise have to offer lower wages. This sounds very similar to other unsubstantiated but oft-repeated arguments about unionization, torts, consumer protection laws, etc.

I don't disagree with you about the legal system, but how exactly will the court system become reformed through disuse?

And if the process is pure tedium and you learned nothing about yourself or the tools throughout it, you should try to create the tools that do inspire you to perform the tasks that don't. Manually creating a production build is boring and you rarely learn anything, but creating a good task runner can be incredibly satisfying.

Maybe it's just my own raging ego, but no matter how small my contribution is to the whole, I remain absurdly proud of whatever I did.

I certainly hope that the guys working on AAA games feel the same way to the point of annoying everyone they know: "You see that? You see the way the guard rubs his stubble in his idle animation? Look at how realistically his fingers make contact with his face! I did that, that was me! You're welcome!"

Javascript also has mountains of bad code and bad practices, but a lot of it's being accumulated in frameworks which are getting created, tested, found wanting, then dropped, with the good parts surviving on, either in new frameworks or as part of the standard.

I won't lie though, I'm as framework exhausted as everyone else right now and it can't go on like this for much longer. Using something like C# (which I see as "good Java") would be a nice change of pace. Definitely check out Ampersand and Webpack with React, they're kind of coalescing to provide a saner, "use only what you need" approach.

It's not like K-9s are uniquely to blame: the next generation of 4th-amendment violating technologies are already here, just waiting in the wings for judicial approval, or in some cases, to overturn previous rulings. And once they get even the most limited permission, these things (like infrared) will be used by the police as dousing rods to take them wherever they want to go.

But as it turns out, almost all of those peasants were capable of learning to read, doing algebra, engaging in abstract reasoning, labor coordination, and operating some fairly complex machinery. Many of them were even capable of becoming software engineers. We know this, because pretty much all of us came from them, and if we can do it, they could've done it, given the proper environment. Someone advancing your argument 1000, 100, or even 50 years ago would've wrong, what makes your argument different?

Of course we shouldn't expect equal outcomes from all people, but to suggest that we've now reached such a level of access and fairness in society that everyone still at the bottom can't possibly be elevated any further seems... unintelligent.

His point about faulty sniffers throwing useless warnings and blocking content that could load is rock-solid, but it's obscured but everything else he's saying.

On the other hand, if it's a small company and the CEO/CTO/Hiring Manager is <firstname>@<companyname>.com, then a meaningful cover letter that's not more than 2-3 paragraphs has a good chance of getting a response of some kind.

In my most recent job search, all followup came from going to events, meetups, or hackathons and gaining contacts that way. I figured out that spending 3 hours a day trying to compose meaningful cover letters could be better spent going to events talking with people, although this is only an option for people in certain cities.

In a game where "Bob" is continually offered one cent, if he burns the other player who is trying to get the other 99 cents, he's signaling that they'll have to cut him a better deal. The other player would be irrational to continue offering the 99/1 split after it had been previously rejected.

For the other player, even (especially!) if it's a computer, the rational choice is to keep upping Bob's percentage until it finds a number he'll accept. So you're right that 40% only speaks to a specific utility, but in any case, the only rational number is whatever number Bob (and the first player) will accept.

Even if I think that misleading-statement A stems from personal-interest/experience/bias B, bringing B into the discussion is a form of personal attack.

It's way too granular to be handled through the legal system or any kind of government regulation, so it's an unfortunate situation that's going to keep happening.

If I'm a PHP dev and I say (without any good evidence) that all security problems come from not using PHP, contradicting me is not a personal attack. Or is it, in your world?

Do you have any other sources for your belief?

And really, who decides a career social activist with good soft skills who can save the company 50 million in lawsuits and bad press has less merit than the engineer who may work for years on a project that ultimately gets canceled?

The problem with meritocracy is that it implicitly depends upon a heuristic, and heuristics can always be gamed or inadvertently biased, no matter the industry.

I think this was part of what the author was trying to say, but I agree with you, it's a poorly written and wishy-washy op-ed.

And that sense it was very successful: they certainly had the ability to stop countries from leaving the Warsaw Pact and republics from leaving the USSR but Gorbachev ordered them to stand down. Even the coup attempt at the very end of the Soviet Union, (which involved high-ranking elements of the CP, KGB, and the military, not just the military) collapsed almost immediately. And if the KGB and the party hardliners had not been involved, it never would've even been attempted.