kareemsabri

I think it's a very Valley-centric opinion to think Microsoft doesn't have any consumer customers. Even putting aside all their other end user products consumers buy (XBox, the utterly dominant Office).

I certainly don't agree with your definition of a customer. People who buy a PC with a Windows OS on it know it's a Windows OS, and make that choice willingly. It's like pretending nobody is an Android customer because they buy their phones from Samsung not Google.

> Microsoft is in the same boat. Virtually no users of their products are actually their customers.

Apple has less than 10% of the PC market. What do you think the rest of them are running?

Canada has started to be competitive, mostly because of US companies coming in and bidding up wages, but when I left (~10 years ago) a top salary for a SWE was about $80k. I'm not sure it's because of some cultural appreciation of software as a value driver versus a cost center. The (self-proclaimed) branding as "Silicon Valley North" seems a bit excessive.

Can you explain how paying software engineers higher salaries means other people need to live "perilous lives". You could just lower your EBIDTA a bit. Software engineers in the US aren't rich because of janitors being underpaid or something.

Network effects.

IANAL

The main issue would be that Snap bought the IP, and the founders signed the irrevocable, interminable, exclusive rights to that IP in any universes known or unknown over to Snap. To replicate the application under a new name would be using IP now owned by Snap.

Yeah but the right to exit is critical. Emigration is very hard, or impossible, in totalitarian states.

From your own definition it seems like you admit it doesn't really fit.

- all-encompassing ideology

Maybe a lot of startups fit this bill, but most jobs people just come, do their work, and go home. They couldn't give two shits about the ideology. Startups are different cause you need people to work really hard / sacrifice and mission helps with that.

- a single party

you agree this doesn't work

- a terroristic police

sounds like you agree this is a stretch. HR can be annoying but it isn't really terroristic.

- a communications monopoly

this isn't even remotely accurate. there are so many backchannels and secret meetings and company gossip is everywhere. especially now that we have slack.

- a centrally directed economy

most mature organizations have teams run their own P&L. in some places (Amazon) they even compete with each other, and have a market-type internal economy.

It's just a bad analogy. There ARE companies that run like totalitarian dictatorships, but I don't think it's the norm and it's not inherent in the model. There are other, and in my opinion much better, critiques of the corporate relationship with employees I'd start with first (I could talk at length about stock based compensation).

Edit:

I think there's a bigger flaw in your argument though that misses the forest for the trees. You can break things down into their constituent characteristics (or the ones you can see) and try to argue that because they share a lot of traits, those two things are the same, which is kind of what you're doing here. The reality is there is a subjective experience of a thing that is different. If the experience of working in a job doesn't feel like a totalitarian dictatorship, it seems it'd be wrong to tell people "no you actually are living under totalitarian rule, you just don't know it". Unless you think people are so acclimatized to corporate rule like a frog in water that they don't notice (which you might).

So goes the argument. I don't think the author has really proven it, it was pretty theoretical. It's not clear the tiny minority won't just weaponize the powers that be to silence those that disagree with them even further.

That said, I don't think free speech is a utilitarian principle (greatest good for the greatest number) but rather a deontological one, that it is wrong to muzzle an individuals right to express themselves as a first order effect. The author's argument describes second or nth order effects.

Yeah, it was a bit tongue in cheek. I'm also Canadian.

I don't think that's what totalitarian means.

Fair enough. My defensiveness is based on the assumption prevalent in these sorts of discussions that if you don't share a viewpoint you are just suffering from insufficient education on it.

I'm picking extremes because the OP made a blanket statement about life in workplaces. They didn't say, life as an Amazon warehouse worker is exploitative for example. The statement was extreme to begin with. There are lots of different types of workplaces in America. You didn't really strike a nerve beyond I guess that I'm not a huge fan of hyperbole / sloppy language.

I don't really think you'll get kicked off the gravy train if you dissent at all. There's a good bit of anti-capitalism, "tear down the system" type talk in tech. That said, I agree with you that corporations are not democratic organizations.

My first corporate job was as a cashier at a grocery store. Yes, if I refused to wear the uniform, or ring up customers when they stood in my line, I'd probably be written up and after 3 write ups, fired. I guess you could call that authoritarian. I don't see how it gets you much though.

I've listened to enough Richard Wolfe debates to know the talking points. Dropping a book link isn't really helpful in the context of this discussion, I'm not going to go read your favorite book before I reply to you.

Yes I'm aware that corporations set up a legal hierarchy in which management has more power than labor within the corporation. I'm not going to go through your specific questions one by one, since they're largely rhetorical, though some of them don't have the answer you hope for. Some people seem to interpret the lack of formal, democratic processes with a totalitarian dictatorship. I've personally witnessed the firing of C-suite execs in response to employee revolts.

A totalitarian system requires complete subservience. Depending on your position in the labor market, your leverage may vary. My objection isn't to the notion that the employer-employee power balance is lopsided in many cases, to the point where some sectors of the economy are exploitative, but rather that an office by it's nature is akin to a totalitarian dictatorship. Maybe you're just using that phrase for effect, or maybe you genuinely think that working at Google and living in Egypt under President Mubarak is a good comparison. To me it comes off as a bit out of touch.

I don't think they're all that democratic. But there's a world of difference between democratic, which itself has degrees, and being totalitarian.

I don't.

I wouldn't consider most workplaces I've been in totalitarian - though maybe you've lived in some pretty nice totalitarian countries I'm not aware of. But I also don't see why customers shouldn't demand what they care about from companies.

> But platforms like Rumble which trumpet their free speech bonafides are missing the point: moderation is good, normal, and reinforces free speech principles. It is right for platform owners to decide the range of permissible posts.

This is a very Canadian take.

It just sounds like a lot of work trying to fit a round peg in a square hole. Point taken that the content (maybe) exists on the platform, but if I can't find it what good is it? As essentially a worldwide daily competition for virality, it seems like it'll trend to what is mass entertainment.

Fair enough. I thought I'd test it. I opened Tik Tok for pretty much the first time. I've installed it but not yet used it. It showed me a bunch of girls dancing, as expected. I thought I could swipe up / down to tell them what I like, but I can only swipe up, so I'm not sure how I train it.

I searched "Israel Palestine". I got an Irish guy named Freddy Quinne telling me it's like "coming home from work one day, only to find that someone else is now in your house". It appears to be mostly just guys talking / ranting. This hasn't really changed my mind that the medium shapes the content.

Then you're either being willfully naive or don't understand how media works. Marshall McLuhan described this phenomenon 60 years ago, the medium is the message.

Can I settle in on Tik Tok and spend an hour gaining a deep understanding of the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict?

Note that I don't much care about Tik Tok fear mongering, but pretending the platform doesn't shape the type of content on it is absurd. Why is Instagram different than Tik Tok different than Twitter different than HN?

I don't think I'd worry about the risk of them leaving (unless you have some highly lucrative IP, and as a fintech you probably don't). The thing with sharing potential deals is mostly just they will usually fall through / not happen, so do you want them to ride the ups and downs with you? I'd probably share while keeping their expectations realistic, cause otherwise it can feel like working in a vacuum.

Perhaps they care cause early stage startups are hard and it can feel like a Sisyphean task, so encouragement / interest from outside parties helps drive their motivation.

I don't think the public conscience thinks that, but maybe we are in different cultures.

First I heard of it. This is insane.

All I can give is my experience (been coding professionally for maybe 12-15 years) but I never looked at patterns like you are for a LONG time. I had no choice but to code in a "simple, straightforward" style because I didn't know anything fancy. I just did everything the normal, dumb way.

That said, things often become complicated because you don't have the skills to keep them simple (for example, you draw the boundaries between your modules wrong, or you fail to abstract the right things, leading to tight coupling and information leaking). So it's pretty normal for your software to be a mess for the first decade or so.

You should just keep writing your project, and as you find as the developer certain things on it are harder than they should be / frustrating / take too long, that will indicate a problem. Then you can keep trying to refactor until you get it right. Writing bad software is how you learn to write good software.

You asked for an example and I just gave you a bunch of philosophy, so I'll give you at least one. It depends on your language and what you're doing but I use Go a lot, and I think Stripe is pretty good at keeping things straightforward https://github.com/stripe/stripe-go

Teams is horrible, of course. Like I said, Microsoft won cause of enterprise market dominance.

Slack isn't dominant. They sold to Salesforce because they couldn't beat Microsoft on distribution in the enterprise, and saw the writing on the wall.

I am skeptical this is driven by "resource cost". What resources will be saved by this change?

Sure they will. They're the ones inventing Golang.

Surely they exist (10x lawyers, writers, chefs, photographers etc. also exist) but it's annoying to hear people who haven't written a line of code in decades pontificate about "how to spot one".

Concerning work hours.

I know many who got it with a bachelors degree. Advanced degrees are not even a part of the eligibility criteria.

https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-2-part-m-chapter-...