It's basically a decentralized, censorship-resistant P2P internet. The philosophy has merit, but the performance sucks and it is currently mostly a venture capitalist funded scam.
65 karma · joined July 21, 2014
I am young, in my mid-twenties. I like new. I like Slack too. But I honestly couldn't see any reason why we moved to it. We pay slack probably more than what we needed to maintain our own old tiny IRC box. But money aside, there are real issues with Slack that are just not there with hosting your own IRC.
The major one being privacy. For a field that is almost religiously against abuse of privacy, we sure as heck don't seem to have an issue with all of our work conversations being stored on another company's server.
Another quip I noticed was archiving. While my IRC allowed archiving without any limits, there are limits imposed on how much archives you can have access to on Slack. Of course, its customizable, but for that first time you're looking for something said 6 months ago by an ex-employee, you realize that there is no way to go back. You set your preference and learn to move on, cause well, its a different company after all. And you're paying for it.
All I am saying is there is a wrong way and a right way of maintaining open offices. Bashing all open offices for being cheap and unproductive is naive.
Not that I have a lot of money saved up. I just have a couple of thousand bucks. Nothing fancy. But to me it is a seed money to try out new things, at an age where making huge mistakes wouldn't result in me being 70 and penniless. There will still be enough time to return back to IT once (if) I fail miserably. And it will also be an extended break in the worst case.
I want to explore the world, jobs, hobbies, people. I have realized the 8 hours everyday I spend on my desk is the best time to be out and about. The sunshine is literally gone by the time I get off work. If this is what hundreds of years of progress and planning has led to, I think we have failed.
So yes, I support people who think about retiring early, and actually living their lives when they are still young. If youth is the best time of one's life, it shouldn't be wasted on the desk.
Fast forward to job hunting - unlike residents and citizens, you know you don't have the luxury of 'not having a job' for more than 2 months after completing your graduation - imagine the stress it puts on you. But you battle it out and land up in a company. If you are lucky, it so happens that you are doing what you love. But for a lot of foreigners, the deadline to have a job and stay here just so you can at the very least repay you loans in USD is far greater than the original dream they have, and so they accept whatever is offered.
Well, we say "I've completed a graduate degree, taken up a job and now I have to repay my loan before I can continue with the American dream." But then within a year you have yet another deadline - H1B. And unlike previous deadlines, this one is out of your hands - utterly and completely. You are a highly educated person working as a skilled worker in a respected position, and now your whole life is dependent only on one thing - a lottery. A random lottery will decide your fate. At that point it hits home - all your life you thought your hard work was an investment towards a better future, but now you know its no different than if you were buying lottery tickets for the past two decades.
Imagine the helplessness, the crushing sensation of all your dreams shattering. That's what its like to have your whole life dependent on a lottery. Want to limit foreign workers? Make interviews tougher, change laws to reject the possibility of working after a graduate US degree. I mean it - do anything but please do not let our lives and fate be decided by a random lottery. It is humiliating.
P.S. What's funny is to realize that unlike all other categories of immigrants, H1B skilled workers are here on their own merit. I am not married to someone with a green card and dependent on him. I am not here illegally after crossing borders at midnight. I am not here because I have a lot of family wealth. And yet, for a country that prides itself on hard work, it is somehow toughest for people in H1B category to get a visa. I cannot help but wonder if today I decide to get married to anyone with a permanent status here, I will immediately be out of this agony, and can choose to be totally dependent on another person's income, contribute nothing to the economy, and easily get permanent residence. Can't help but chuckle at the absurdity of laws.
It seems like lately science is getting more and more defensive to protect itself against religious forces. While understandable, such a change is not good for the progress of science. Science is a free-thinker's religion. Let's keep it that way. Nothing at all is above getting challenged or questioned. Neither god, nor evolution.
We are looking at space exploration in the wrong way. All space organizations seem to have entered this sort of competition where manned missions to just about anywhere currently reachable in limited time is the goal. Nobody is pausing to think that maybe we should look into better travelling options to be able to explore far off planets and objects. The probability increases with reachable area.
Also, at the end Barbie doesn't credit the guys for fixing the issue, and take all the credit in front of her sister.
While not all of it is against women, most of it is nonsensical, immoral and just something I wouldn't want to read to my girls if and when I have them.
On one hand the author feels she loses her cultural identity by trying to mingle with a while group. On the other she advocates diversity. And yes, she also feels comfortable when working in a predominantly black team.
I think the solution that she forgets to mention is having people of all groups equally represented (most or less) in any field. With that happening, I can see how nobody would feel like an outsider, and get to preserve their cultural prefernces and tastes, along with mingling with other cultures and races.
It doesn't have to be a black team, a white team and a brown team. All that is needed is people of all races in the workplace with diverse teams. That will balance things out.
As for "What can you do as a white person other than not being a racist and voicing your prejudices openly" .. I don't think there's much you can do. I guess those of you in recruiting positions can encourage people from all backgrounds to come up. Not saying give special treatment to minorities, but generally try to keep bias away from recruitment procedures. Same applies to promotions, relocations and the like.
| Don't fret the failures. Right. Instead of focusing on getting stressed and fretting, the right thing to do is fix whatever it was that resulted in failure. And when you redo it and its a success, that means you did something right.
People with substance don't need to flash their Ivy League emblem everywhere.
We don't have a choice in being born, and we don't have a choice in dying either. This very thought alone can make quite a lot of people want to kill themselves.
The fact that society loses money and investment when a person dies is not the responsibility of the person. Society works the way it does without asking us for a say in it. Its been this way since ages, and will continue for ages. I as an individual cannot do anything to make society see me as non-existent. Or if I do, then this should be laid out as a series of steps. In this article, its mentioned the medical area loses $1 million per suicide, as if when I am in a state to kill myself I should feel guilty that I am 'owned' by society and by killing myself i will be 'stealing' from it. Pathetic.
Seems ironic that a body that recognizes people for exceptional work in the sciences, it itself is based on highly subjective and debatable decisions.
I think it makes more sense to know who whom this is coming from, what she has suffered rather than someone who was never a victim writing about it.
India is a very tough place to make a good wage even if heavily skilled. There's a lot of demand, sure. But there's an overload of supply.