Being dependent on imported gas seems like an inherent issue of the German energy system.
4,462 karma · joined February 20, 2007
It's fine, though. TFA goes into ways to improve the hiring process such that this sort of thing doesn't happen. But I don't mind it at all. I want to fail fast; if the company decides I'm not the right candidate, great, I'm glad it happened before we wasted time with more extensive interviews.
There are two possibilities. If they're right and I'm not a good fit, I don't want that job because I won't be successful there. If they're wrong, I don't want that job because the company isn't being successful at hiring me. The hiring process is looking for the wrong attributes, or the interviewer isn't properly trained, or... well, something, somewhere has gone wrong. There are no false negatives.
A company that's firing on all cylinders does a lot of hiring, and is good at it. They source solid candidates, and interview them thoroughly but quickly. If they're not hiring effectively, well, they're probably dysfunctional in other areas too.
It looks to me like the FSF takes the freedom to redistribute software fairly seriously. Yet the GPL explicitly forbids redistribution unless certain conditions are met. In other words, they limit freedoms 2 and 3. Given how seriously they take freedom, you'd think they have a good reason for limiting it. They do: to maximize the spread of freedom, even if it is limited. RMS, for example, wrote[1] "I make my code available for use in free software, and not for use in proprietary software, in order to encourage other people who write software to make it free as well."
RMS also wrote an article called Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software[2]. But I'm not missing the point of free software. I understand the point very well. I just have different values. I don't care if other people who write software make it free. I want to maximize the value and utility of the software I write, and restricting freedom gets in the way of that.
Here's the thing: the FSF is basically trying to make the world safe for coders. All software should come with source code, so that everyone can tinker to their heart's content. But most people can't do that. Being able to modify the source is useless to them. Heck, even downloading and installing it is difficult. I guarantee you that the number of people who could install bash—even a binary distribution—is dwarfed by the number that could use it to run command-line tools. They'll just use whatever shell comes with the system. And if the FSF won't let Apple ship bash, they'll ship something else. So yeah, the FSF is preventing people from using bash. They think it's justified. I don't.
[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html
[2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.htmlThis same dynamic would apply to Macs as well, of course. In fact, this very thing came this close to killing Apple in the 90s. They licensed MacOS to clone makers, who immediately took the high-end high-margin market, and left Apple to develop MacOS and sell low-margin, entry-level machines. It took the return of Steve Jobs to turn the company around. They were weeks away from bankrupcy. He immediately killed the clone makers, begged/threatened Microsoft into giving them bridge funding, and started work on the candy-colored iMac.
As for Android, well, it's nominally open source, but an awful lot of the stuff you need to ship a competitive OS is actually closed and closely guarded by Google. It's a bit more open than Darwin, but not much. If you stick to ASOP, you've basically got Froyo.
So, yeah, Chromium and is for real, and again it's a bit more open than WebKit in that it also includes the app chrome, and not just the web engine. But coincidentally, Google benefits from an open, standards-based web; it doesn't threaten their revenue at all. Go figure.
I get that the FSF sees it differently, but honestly I don't see how the GPL helped anyone in the case of Apple and bash. It's not like Apple was making significant changes to bash, refusing to contribute them back and making a fortune on the backs of the FSF. Are contributors to the zsh project being exploited by Apple's evil plan to put their work in the hands of many more users? If I find a bug in my Apple-supplied copy of zsh, am I prevented from fixing it like RMS and the printer driver? No.
It leads to exactly the sort of problem pointed out by the GGGGP comment - Apple shipping an ancient version of bash because of license incompatibility. Apple cannot open source all of their software. They'd go out of business. So instead we have GNU folks high-fiving because they stopped Apple from using their work without giving back, but millions of users are also prevented from using their work.
Skill is the difference between Picasso's scribbles and the dribbles of a random 8-year-old. Or between pg and Bellini. It's the ability to convey what you want to convey.
Vision is harder to pin down. It's deciding to convey something worthwhile. And that's the hard part. What's worthwhile? It's so dependent on context. Is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel meaningful to somebody that has never heard of Christianity? Is impressionism all that impressive without the photograph? For that matter, why aren't we impressed by new works of impressionism? How come some artists aren't celebrated in their own time?
So yeah, clearly there's such a thing as skillful art, and maybe being able to recognize that could be considered "good taste". But I'm not sure that there's such a thing as objectively meaningful art. If there is, it'd take more than a few paragraphs to prove it.
Apple's best bet is to double-down on TSMC and Foxconn, work with them to set up manufacturing elsewhere and lobby for the US to continue to protect Taiwan. I think that if they continue to ship updates to their existing products on schedule while they make the transition, that will be a tremendous accomplishment and a huge market advantage. They may find themselves competing with Samsung and... um, maybe just Samsung? I don't know the Android ecosystem well enough to guess.
This is really the sweet spot for digital advertising. The cost is low, both because you don't need that many new users to make a huge difference, and because the volume is so low that the targeting works really, really well, and conversion rates are really high. For a more established business, sure, you're getting people that would have bought anyway. But in this case, you're getting people that would have bought if they knew you existed, which they don't.
I've worked at two companies that have embraced remote work, and are hiring "anywhere", though still obviously limited by language, jurisdiction etc. The changes I've seen are mainly cultural: preference for asynchronous communication and preference for structured coordination over ad-hoc. So fewer meetings, and those that remain tend to be standing meetings on a regular schedule with a defined leader and consistent agenda, and they often get cancelled or ended quickly if possible. Slack tends to be more asynchronous; you're not expected to respond right away, and people turn off notifications when they need to concentrate. Waaaay less email, to the point where it's mainly meeting invitations. More writing and documentation, but even then, a preference for things like Jira, Notion, Coda or Team Retro over more unstructured tools like generic documents or spreadsheets.
Now obviously none of that is new or confined to remote-first organizations. But I do see deliberate thought about how to collaborate more effectively, and how to mitigate the downsides.
One of the things I've learned over the years on HN is that I don't appreciate comments that are generic expressions of identity. That is, if somebody posts a comment that contains nothing specific to the subject at hand, that boils down to "I am progressive" or "conservatism is good" or "X is evil" I downvote it. That sort of comment is the bread and butter of so much internet discussion; we don't need more of it, and it doesn't contribute to what I enjoy about HN.
Companies that are embracing remote work are changing the way they work. Becoming a true distributed organization isn't easy and we're not really sure what that looks like yet, but it's much easier to cope with than WFH in an organization where the executives say "we can't wait to be back in the office, and we know you can't either".
Edit: Of course, if you can't wait to be back in the office, maybe Amazon is just the right place for you in the long term. That's perfectly reasonable. I just doubt your experience is representative of the emerging industry trend toward permanent remote work.
I'm convinced, though, that when the pandemic fades away, we'll see a bifurcation of working styles. The office offers in-person relationships, high-bandwidth communication, and a well-understood management paradigm, at the cost of forcing everybody to live near the office and spend a lot of time commuting. Full-remote offers the ability to live anywhere and no commutes, but shallower relationships and not-very-well understood modes of communication and collaboration. Hybrid offers... not much, as far as I can tell. It's the downsides of in-office and remote. The best you can say about it is that you get to see people in person sometimes and can avoid commuting sometimes. :-/
So we'll see a grand sorting where people that want to be remote find the companies that will let them do that, and the people that want things to go back to normal find the companies that also want that. Then the remote companies spend the next 50 years learning how to really do distributed work, rather than just "like an office, but on Slack and Zoom".