_skel

I have heard several stories like yours, and none of them ended well.

It has not happened to me, because I would have quit after even a single missing paycheck -- the job market for software developers is just too good for anyone to be willing to put up with this kind of abuse.

I really hope you are looking for another job rather than staying where you are and hoping to get a paycheck. And I also really hope you are talking to a qualified lawyer about this.

You get type safety in your API, you get autogenerated client code, and you get http2 out of the box.

Personally I find the autogenerated client code to be the biggest upside. Anyone who wants to use your API, in any language supported by the RPC, can start doing it with very little work. Gone are the days of maintaining officially-supported client libraries.

The people who work at failing startups are often successful people. They get other jobs.

I don't get it. I grew up in Silicon Valley and I work in tech, and so do many other people I know. They run the gamut from far-left socialists to libertarians to own a bunch of guns. They have all kinds of ethnic backgrounds and religious views.

Some of my most libertarian/pro-gun friends have not been shy about their political views and it hasn't hurt their tech careers at all. They are far more welcome here than liberals are in other parts of the country.

It seems to me, from personal experience, that the people who feel alienated are the ones who bring politics to work in an overbearing contrarian way, seeking to cause offense under the guise of "debate," and then pretend to be shocked when people don't want to put up with their shit. Work is for working; it's not a debating society, and especially not when the debating is done in bad faith.

Peter Thiel has been more politically vocal than most, and he is vocal about things he knows to be unpopular. He can't be surprised that people who disagree with him are also vocal. If he can't take the heat he should stay out of the kitchen.

These things are not just details. Things like scope, mutability, and operator precedence are core language design decisions.

The problems affecting high-speed rail in the US are the same problems that prevent low-speed rail, streetcars, subways, and buses from being more common -- people don't see themselves using such things and so they don't want to pay for them.

In the Bay Area, the Caltrain commuter train runs from San Jose to San Francisco, through the downtown areas of most major cities in between. It is currently so popular that it is significantly over capacity every day. Yet it is still a constant political battle to get funding to improve the system, even though the Bay Area is one of the most educated and politically liberal parts of the country, where support for public transit is higher than many other places.

Sometimes I think we would have much more transit funding overall if we set aside part of the transit budget to send Americans to other countries on vacation, so they will return knowing how good public transit can actually be.

This is true, but I should point out that an organization with foresight would not permit harassment of employees, because the long-term cost of the lawsuits and bad publicity will be bad for the organization.

> It takes about 2 years to save up $100K on a typical Bay Area engineer's salary, if you're fiscally prudent.

I'm not sure what you think an average salary is. If you think an average engineer can save $50k cash per year out of his/her net income, you're way above the average I had in mind.

Let's assume an average salary of $120k per year gross. That's about $6k per month net for a single person who takes the standard deduction, assuming no 401k contributions. That's a net income of $72k per year. If that engineer saves $50k, that leaves only $12k for everything else. Saving $100k in two years on that salary, which I think is pretty close to the average, is just not doable.

EDIT: Should have been $22k left over, not $12k. Still not enough to live on considering the cost of rent.

One of the nice things about being an Emacs user (hang in there, I have a real point about Vim to make) is that the concepts (especially non-modal editing) and the keyboard shortcuts map well to newer IDEs.

I switch between IntelliJ and Emacs all day, and all I had to do to become comfortable is choose the Emacs keyboard preset in the IntelliJ preferences. The same is true for Eclipse and Visual Studio.

The Emacs paradigm is a lot more similar to contemporary IDEs than the Vim paradigm, and that makes it a lot easier to switch back and forth.

While a better Vim is a nice goal, I don't see how it will bridge the gap between Vim and newer editors/IDEs unless it includes some fairly fundamental changes to the Vim paradigm. But then it wouldn't be a better Vim -- it would be something different enough that Vim users probably wouldn't like it. I suspect that Vim and modern editors/IDEs are doomed to remain divergent forever.

You can use whatever definition you want in your own head, but you cannot expect anyone else to accept it.

Furthermore, one of the most popular languages in use today is weakly typed: JavaScript!

The most frustrating thing for me, by far, is that Go won't let you import unused packages. When you are commenting stuff out to debug a program, or adding debug statements and removing them later, it constantly requires you to go back to the top of the file and comment out the unused libraries, only to uncomment them later when you've solved your problem.

The fact that there is not a compiler flag to disable this behavior, and that the core team is opposed to adding such a flag (https://golang.org/doc/faq#unused_variables_and_imports), is simply ridiculous and makes programming in Go a real pain in the ass.

I can't think of any other language that does this.