jhowell

> very good at optimizing metrics... shoot themselves in the foot with some short-sighted action.

Their optimization strategy informed them to shoot their customers in the foot.

> When the options are either wake up in a shitty world and have no money or wake up in a shitty world and have a lot of money I don’t know why people choose the former.

I am not seeing how this is helpful to you or anyone really, but respect that we all have different experiences.

> I don't know why people get caught up in the "ethical and moral baggage"... You do however have the ability to control what your world looks like, when you are sitting on bags of money. Sail in the direction of the wind, not against it.

Make money, if people get hurt, it was a likely outcome, so why not benefit financially?

Opponent of the person, but not the policies. For those at either ends of the spectrum the difference is inconsequential.

I think they are referring to Peter Thiel. Thiel gave a speech at the 2016 RNC in support of their nominee, Donald Trump. At the time through the present, Thiel continues to have a net worth in excess of $1 billion.

Is it the adjective secretive that turned you away?

This is going on in Petaluma, CA right now. A mom claimed people of color attempted to kidnap her children. She describes the eyes of the "perpetrators" below. Fortunately, according to the police investigation, her children were not in danger, from the people who were reported to the police.

There is a lot of speculation about transpired given conflicting video, police statements and eyewitness accounts. Mrs. Sorensen has since deleted her social media accounts and stopped giving interviews. I saw her appeal to mother's to be more guarded with their children:

“There is no other explanation as to why they were doing that besides they were just building the courage,” Sorensen said. “The gentleman looked at me, and his eyes were huge. He saw what was going on, and I just yelled for help.”

https://www.intheknow.com/2020/12/17/alleged-kidnapping-kati...

The crimes we commit give insight to society as a whole. It tough to imagine that this is only about targeted advertising.

Use technology to protect users from walking down streets populated by people negatively impacted by socioeconomic conditions (poverty, mental health, food insecurity), or use technology to bring awareness and compassion to the most vulnerable.

Maybe changing the default settings based on user experience, or the implementation of a caching layer of some sort for infrequently changing blogs posts (seems that could be the majority) or making the importance of these settings more accessible to the people who use them and aren't developers in layman's terms. I don't use WordPress or blog personally.

I do imagine that this particular issue is causing the author of the post anxiety due to it's unforseen (to them) failure. I'd prefer the computer not discourage them.

> One possibility is to replace early employee (first ~10 employees) stock options with the same Restricted Stock Agreements (RSAs) as the founders.

I am sure RSA are and will always be available to those with the skilleset that commands this level of compensation. I am unclear what would motivate the founding team or investors in a start-up to act otherwise.

I think the problem is more related to the skilleset of the blog owner, which may not necessarily be in devops but instead economics or journalism or other (tough to say without being able to acess the content).

It's a feature not a bug that we all have different skills. I certainly do not want to discourage others from sharing their opinions due to technical issues that could be resolved more easily by developers (through their implementation and documentation) as much if not more than end users in a given situation.

At a time I'd purchase both JRebel and IntelliJ. JRebel had a really "aggressive" sales team that would call and email about renewals. Jetbrains has never had to call me, their product sells itself, for me. I no longer use JRebel.

> And who is going to come in and fix this water infrastructure, the British?

Seems like the Brits have done a lot, historically in Indian and China, but have their hands full at the moment with Brexit to reunite the "kingdom." My money is on the Chinese and their scientists in exchange for concessions that will further isolate the United States due to xenophobic thinking some people in the states perpetuate. How long before "their" water born illnesses become our airborne viruses?

> The idea that there is only one intelligence without considering people have a lot of individual foibles due to experience, temperament, predisposition, and any number of other factors is really dangerous. It's that type of thinking that led to presidents who were former movie stars or real estate developers.

Or it doesn't and we victimize people with smaller PR budgets to present their perspective.

It's clear all off the facts are not available, and likely never will be, experiences are subjective.

It's also clear that before learning of this event, we had 0% knowledge of the situation.

Between 0 and where we are now with both sides expressing their point of view to some degree, people on HN began making up their mind in the absence of complete information. There is no requirement or urgency that we come to some inconsequential conclusion of our own.

My bias is that it seems difficult to obtain the position the researcher held at Google. How can I be willing to believe the engineer has the ability to navigate the subject matter and its application without being able to navigate this employment scenario. It feels as though I am required to accept the engineers brilliance while calling them dumb at the same time. That feels like a larger handwave than considering the known actions of Google and questioning the few assertions they are willing, but not required truthfully or untruthfully to provide.

> Toxic is an inflammatory and unnecessary word to use when no-one is privy to the actual facts.

This response reflects an unwillingness to understand a situational nuance from multiple sides, show empathy to a person in distres and offers no workarounds, support or evidence. I've grown so tired of these factual tug of wars to justify callous.

> We’re engineers, not royalty. There’s nothing any one of us could do that would justify these wages, if it wasn’t for US immigration policies causing an artificial supply/demand issue.

Executives, CEOs and shareholders are all highly compensated for their risk in both time and money and are not "royalty." I would argue that being royal implies birth as an unjustifiably paid skill.

> One is over paid, the other under paid. If companies just created a sales team from their highest performing customer support reps and didn’t give them quotas or bonuses I think the model would still work as well from a revenue perspective

Overpaid in commissions from finding new business? Sounds like a happy SaaS.

For any future world's wealthiest, is having a non contentious relationship with employees a reasonable endeavor? The fact that this is about money while the person in charge has the most money of anyone living doesn't seem to be a desirable or targeted position given their fine tuned logistical approach to the world.

> I doubt it had any significant revenue.

We don't know, and what's significant? Return on investment regardless of size of investment is significant when running any business.

> At some point, fundamentals of the business matter.

I think the fundamental outlined in the article is "Narendra Modi government’s new foreign direct investment norms for digital media," and not described in relation to revenue.

I believe Rupert Murdoch, who is Australian became a US citizen to take ownership of US television stations. He seems to have a significant influence here (as well as Europe and Asia). So crazy enough for established procedures.

> Somehow it's fine for companies to be jerks.

Look at many of the products we make together. Why would we hide behind laws that protect bad practices and think those same companies take a moral high ground on this issue. It is, and always will be, due in part to fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, about the money.

When employers ask employees where they live, they may already know the answer and ask only to indirectly answer others questions.

I would think what is documented and certified when filing taxes will be important, perhaps retroactively. Jobs and new software tools may pop up to help companies better understand their geographically distributed workforce from an accounting perspective. Employees with legal challenges (past or present) have the potential to reduce productivity.

I believe Bill Joy lived in Colorado during his time at Sun Microsystems, working on Solaris and Java (if I recall correctly, I believe he worked with Gosling, perhaps it was other Sun projects). I would think he didn't suffer a COL adjustment. The most valued engineers have little to worry about and always have/will. There is rarely resistance to their interests. Everyone else is expendable. Your expendability increases porortionally to the problems you create versus solve.

This reminds me a little of the 2008 recession where a lot of analysts at investment banks that were making a lot of money without much experience were fired and those jobs didn't return after the economic recovery. I believe that brought about increased algorithmic trading. It's tough to find sympathetic people to this issue.

I imagine displaced tech workers, now living in lower COL areas will have trouble finding sympathetic ears as well. I would certainly prefer to be the employer versus the employee in this contest.

> Somehow completely ignoring the issue with how the homeless have made many areas of the city uninviting.

Perhaps a more solution oriented statement:

Somehow completely ignoring the issue with how tech has made the homeless in many areas of the city uninvited.

These people would easily prefer to be in DevOps, can learn to run other people's software and call it a job, as we all do, except maybe for issues encountered along the way (housing, direct or indirect mental health crises, food insecurity). Our indifference to, or what we considered not to be priority is coming to the surface.

> It also seems plausible that SF has a unique combination of factors that put it in a bad spot right now. It’s insanely expensive, quality of life has been on the decline for some time, and the types of companies that made real estate there so expensive in the first place are also likely to be the ones that adopt remote work quickly and wholeheartedly.

I imagine people at the fringes in the city (and region really), born and raised, with local family ties making it harder to leave, might feel that this "bad spot" appeared some time ago.

I think you're looking at the problem from your perspective and not theirs.

This to me says that assimilation doesn't work. The article states:

"boasting higher test scores, better grades, and stronger extracurricular resumes than applicants of any other racial group, Asian American applicants consistently received lower rankings on those personality traits"

The outcome was to move the bar to soft skills:

things like “likability,” “helpfulness,” “integrity,” and “courage”

This has happened to minority groups of all backgrounds in this country since its inception.

I don't think online lectures is the opportunity that plaintiffs in this case felt they were deprived of.

Do you think that "we simply need to publish all lectures online free of charge" is a good answer for the plaintiffs?

For me, access implies the right, opportunity reflects the demonstration of those rights.

There are a lot of examples of equal access to programs in this country, by the letter of the law, but in practice locally, folks were unable to access these opportunities.

The FHA most immediately comes to mind. The letter of the law of FHA versus local implementation by local banks, bank executives, realtors, mortgage brokers, even home sellers were able deny opportunity though technically these programs were accessible to all.