3,461 karma · joined July 19, 2013
In itself it has nothing to do with management, except you're now exposed to it, shielding your people from it.
Take it from someone who's been there: it's not worth sacrificing you're health over it.
You're devs will be fine, one way or the other. Invest your energy in a company that's worth it, and that will actually change due to your efforts.
Basically, he's an empathy deficient exploitative narcissistic a-hole, an laying people off fits that picture perfectly.
"The law has been in effect for over two years at this point, and the DPD, the European Data Protection Directive has been in effect for over two decades. So no, this law was not sprung on anybody, though it is very well possible that you only became aware of it a few weeks or months (or days?) ago. If that’s the case do not panic, you too will most likely be fine."
Nevermind the fact that the underlying privacy laws are much older, and so many practices were already essentially illegal but went unchallenged so far.
> The GDPR’s premise, that consumers should be in charge of their own personal data, is the right one
That's not just the GDPR's premise, that's the very foundation privacy as a civil right in Europe, and has been for a very long time.
The GDPR is just yet another attempt to force companies who have wilfully ignored the rights of millions of Europeans to start complying with laws we already had in place. It's not something new, just an iteration in enforcement.
America should make laws that suit America's values and principles, but as it stands, America has no deep concept of privacy. The GDPR is alien to American values.
(BTW, that quote is subtly wrong but illustrates the huge gap in perception: it should be "citizens", not "consumers"...)
Violating basic civil rights should not just result in the off chance of having to pay a fine. People like Zuckerberg belong in jail way more than the average drug dealer.
Not just on Facebook, and not just in the UK. This crosses a line all democratic nations in which SV companies have significant interests and even more significant influence will take note of.
SV and apparently large parts of HN are completely delusional if they think this won't have serious consequences.
It can't blow over in the UK or the EU, because it is seriously f-ing illegal in those places.
Yes, we "knew" it was happening before this (hence all the regulatory steps taken that were dismissed as anti-American protectionism), but we were lacking hard evidence, so all we could do was reinforce regulations and regulatory authorities.
Now that shit has leaked, it's simply not an option for those authorities to not act. Not to mention the fact that they really, really want to act.
So no, this will not blow over. Maybe in the US and/or the media, but not where it matters.
Guess which "favor" has the biggest impact...
That's the kind of "globalism" the tech elite supports. They love to hide behind closed borders when it protects their wealth and power.
Those "same class of people" have always supported true globalism for the people in terms of a complete removal of borders. Don't blame them because greedy neoliberals have hijacked the term globalism.
It starts with assuming country equals language. And even when they figure that out, they still use GeoIP. Try using various online services in the Brussels region for a laugh.
It's ridiculous that internally operating corporations like Google or Facebook still haven't figured that shit out.
The same applies to not respecting your language of choice.
But the absolute worst is American companies (it's always American services, and not just because of US dominance) manipulating content based on GeoIP and giving me a shitty localized version of their service for no legal or commercial reason.
It's infuriatingly patronizing.
The secret sauce of startups is that in the very early phase there is no management. But once management becomes a necessity (a conclusion that is usually drawn at least two years too late), the shit show most startups turn into makes corporate life look attractive. Usually a mix between founders trying to manage (most entrepreneurs make bad managers) or early employees falling upward.
One of the main issues is that people who are thrive in the early stages of a startup tend to lack the #1 quality of a good manager: the drive to make other people succeed.
If you want to work for a good manager, startups are the last place to look.
Plenty of bigots have degrees. There are nazis and muslim fundamentalists with degrees. Extremist ideology tends to override unwelcome facts.
The memo speaks for itself.
All workplaces are political. The politics of founder/owners/executives are in every fiber of he workplace. Denying it is highly disingenuous.
Moreover, said denial is one of the root causes why we are having these issues. The tech industry likes to project an image of being "liberal", when in fact the culture is highly conservative. Until recently, people like the author felt perfectly at home in most tech companies, including Google, because its politics quietly aligned with their politics.
And now that he's making it explicit he is suddenly the one politicising the workplace?
To be clear, I vehemently disagree with the author. But until about ten years ago, most of the industry quietly agreed with these views, which is why we have these problems in the first place.
It was political then and it is political now. It took political resistance to put diversity on the corporate agenda in the first place.
The workplace culture is and will always be a primary political arena. Especially with a company like Google, that is actively involved in politics and shaping our society in general.
What people who claim that the workplace is no place for politics are basically saying is that the workplace is no place for politics they disagree with. (Ironically, the position that the workplace is no place for politics is a traditionally conservative position. Worker bees should keep their ideology at home, whereas corporations are free to politically indoctrinate workers through euphemisms like "culture" and "values".)
I applaud the author for standing up for his political believes as much as I applaud Google for firing him.
Also, the production and distribution of food produces a lot a waste that is considerably more problematic than organic waste.
Not a big fan of pricing plans that mix volume with features, always makes me feel I'm being screwed when I only need one or the other. (Even though I might be perfectly fine with paying the same amount if the pricing structure was different.)
I strongly suspect these sites are being gamed. Either that, or the numbers are based on surveys that are mostly filled in by people that are worried about being underpaid (guess what, that means they probably are).
What makes me wonder about the author though is when they go off on the basic requirements. Those are not exceptional or excessive requirements.
Douchebags recruiting douchebags. It's only discriminatory in that it's unlikely to attract mentally stable grown-ups or women.
But since there are so many startups with the same attitude that aren't upfront about it (or, if you read between the lines, 50% of all job postings actually tell the same story), I welcome these clear warning signs.
1. Create a constant state of uncertainty. Make promises you don't keep, and never explain why. Announce stuff that never materializes.
2. Don't give people any chance to successfully complete anything they start. (Simplest way: keep moving the goalposts.)
In my experience, people can take any kind of abusive crap, but uncertainty plus the inability to do anything worthwhile will either get people to quit or put them on the shortest route to a burn-out.
And the worst part is, these two ways are often not applied by malicious douche bags, but simply incompetent management. In the start-up world these are often entrepreneurs with no idea of and a total lack of empathy with what it's like to be an employee.
The issue is that products like ExpanDrive make all online storage drives to which you have to copy first, and upstream is still relatively slow even in countries with cheap high bandwidth downstream. It's still just FTP with a nicely integrated interface.
The ideal would be something that keeps the files locally until they have been synced in the background, and then removes the local copies whilst still allowing you to access them in the same way as if they were local copies. I.e., placing them in your cloud drive is instant, even though it actually takes a while for them to be transferred.
No, that's not an easy problem to solve, but anyone who does solve it will get my money.
(Really awesome would be if it intelligently kept local copies available based on usage and available space. The bottom line is: not having to consciously worry about where to put the files.)
And none of that really amounts to much if you subtract the taxes, overhead and most of all the time spent between gigs.
If you do well you can make out considerably better than on a salary, but still, 490 per day for a .NET engineer (biggest shortage there is in IT in Europe) contractor is on the low end.
But still: tech salaries in Europe are low, and are being systematically depressed. The influx of relatively cheap engineers from Eastern EU countries is one influence, but not even such a big one, since most of them pretty quickly catch up (the tech culture means they're not easily isolated and exploited like other migrant workers).
The biggest depressing influence is simply social status: despite the scarcity, despite the value they add, there is an enormous resistance against awarding higher salaries to "nerds".
Now that I operate at management level, I experience this first hand. Everything adds up: our budget, the economics, the scarcity. We should easily be able to offer 30% higher salaries and still make out just fine, and it's the only way to compete with a handful of enlightened companies that pay well and the lure of self-employment (the only other way for engineers to break through the salary ceiling).
Nothing stands in the way of paying engineers better, except social status: paying a software engineer the same as (or more than) a manager is unthinkable. Despite the fact that those managers are less scarce, less skilled and add less value.
The valuations and burn rate may be too high and up for a big correction, but most of the start-ups these days at least have some logic behind it by which they may be seen as potential hits. 1999 was largely mass hysteria with no foundation in reality whatsoever.