pjbeam

Ellul is a mid-century French academic and it shows. That said once I got used to the writing I found it reasonable to get through.

The ideas are very interesting, strong second recommendation for Technological Society.

I always really wanted to get a trident of the red rooster and even with a guide was never able to do it. Maybe I'll give it another shot! Thanks for bringing back some lovely (frustrating) memories.

Won't the watcher model then need a watcher? And the watcher watcher model too? Etc.

My plan is to verify it is the same email at least through OP, although your point is valid.

Email me at my HN username at protonmail dot com for a referral to Dropbox's internship. Love the integrity and drive to get to the bottom of a strange situation.

This is my point--bad pay leads to icky places.

Making shameful normal things like breasts seems to go hand in hand with the kind of self loathing bullshit that shapes people into useful corporate or government drones.

Move at the sound of the bell. Punch in punch out. Be ashamed of your body. Loyalty to company/flag is supreme. etc etc

I could not afford my life on a senator's pay. Not even close. Couldn't take the job even if it was offered to me on a silver platter.

President's pay comes with housing so my family could probably make that work, would be belt tightening--especially because I'd be on the hook for the food in state dinners and such.

Not that I think anyone wants me to be a senator or the president but rather I couldn't afford to be. I'm too wealthy for it to be an upgrade and too poor to take the pay cuts in stride.

The bonuses where I am now are a % of the employee's base salary. A mid-level "meets" engineer can expect something like $20-25k during an average year for the company. Up to twice that for a strong year.

I sometimes find the things being advertised interesting. Not because I want to buy them but rather things being pushed and who pushes them can help stay abreast of what's happening in the world.

A specific example from a little while ago in my life--I saw an article advertisement for Microsoft's sovereign cloud offering. I thought this was interesting because I think the Internet is balkanizing over time and how megacorps try to play in that scenario interests me.

I still don't know that it qualifies as news, to your point, but Amazon involvement, however incidental, in Mullvad is a datapoint I'm glad to have.

Are you a parent? Part of a child growing up is developing independence in sometimes controlled, sometimes impromptu scenarios. Most 7 year olds are entirely capable of cruising around a couple houses where the adults all know each other.

If you put your child in a bubble you not only stunt their development you also rob them of so much joy.

This is a real shame, it's bad for your daughter and life in general. I have three kids and as much as I'd love to let them roam a bit like my wife and I did as kids, stories like yours scare the hell out of me.

I don't know how we arrived at kids walking around in their own neighborhoods is neglect but life sure is poorer for it.

Such as, say, the managing director of BlackRock? Is that what this means? I can't tell if this goes over my head or not.

Yes, N level managers manage ICs and managers to N level. There are occasional strange cases where there is a L5 manager with a L6 IC report because of a weird org structure (small engineering team assigned to a non-tech org), but that isn't normal.

Sometimes document provenance matters and you don't want a copy.

Because I didn't want someone to lose their livelihood for the crime of being introverted.

Further I would not rate anyone being an insufferable ass as "fine performing".

This is a super important distinction! Great way to phrase it too--thank you.

I had a digital art portrait done of my wife and had it printed at a local fine art framing kind of place. It turned out beautifully! No clue where you live but you might look into such a place near you--the staff at mine were super knowledgeable to the point they asked the artist to change the color encoding/scheme/whatever (sorry no clue about this stuff) to make the colors pop more on the canvas.

It wasn't cheap but the results were worth it!

That's an enormous topic that is hard for me to treat here. Knowing that it's a thing you should do is a great first step though. Find more experienced people in your context willing to mentor you and critically listen to what they say.

You're right--it's been a while. Not all LEs were meant to leave.

I believe so, at least through L7 (senior manager). I was L6 and only did a few manager calibrations before I left. Another commenter said they were an L7 SDM, they would know better than I. The sense I had was that things work differently for L8 (director/senior principal) and above but I have no first hand experience or knowledge of that.

I wouldn't say it's a "usual" thing at all, but more common the lower your level. L4 or SDE 1 has highest risk for negative personnel actions in general for 2 reasons: there are a ton of people in this level and many of them are early career and don't know how to protect themselves from corporate politics.

I missed SDM = software development manager and PIP = performance improvement plan. The rest I think are explicated above.

Edit: Had wrong % for LE.

Former Amazon SDM here. The actual rating process didn't strike me as something all that controversial. I had to do extensive write ups for all of my reports--this was standard stuff: what went well ("superpowers"), what didn't ("growth areas"), and some actionable ideas for improvement.

Then I had to pick numerical scores for "impact" and "potential" that were fed into a black box that resulted in an "overall value" score--this score is meant to be mysterious to the employees but it's the worst kept secret in Amazon at this point. OV ranged from LE (least effort/effective) at the low end, through HV 1,2,3 (high value) which is essentially "meets", and then TT ("top tier") at the high end.

~10-15% of a director org is supposed to be LE, up to 20% TT, and the rest of people distributed through the HV levels. I proposed these ratings to the bigger org that were then agreed to or adjusted by HR and higher management in a formal manager meeting.

The infamous URA quota of ~6% unregretted attrition (PIP) is meant to be met through managing out LE employees. The process starts with a PIP-lite called "Focus" and goes to the real PIP at the next stage, called "Pivot".

Many people got out of Focus, very few get out of Pivot. The part of the process I had trouble with, which contributed to me leaving, is the curve fitting of ratings for people. I had to do things like trade a HV3 down to an HV2 in order to keep an unpopular but otherwise fine performing engineer from getting an LE.

The stories people tell about hire to fire and unfair Pivot are overblown in my experience but not false. From what I've seen, the company will find pliant people and lean on them hard for more and more and more and then manage them out when then start to falter.

Lot of nuance to this--I have no love for Amazon and I'm happy to have moved on. It is definitely a meat grinder. That said articles like this are pretty low effort on my view.

I caught the end of your comment without thinking and now I fear I've succumbed to the same mind virus. If it doesn't dissipate by tomorrow I think it is here to stay.

So startups that convince VCs they aren't just "uber for x" or similar clones excite greater investments? Seems pretty intuitive.

I just emailed support asking about this, will post here the response when I get it.

Update: Flipper says they'll be back in stock for US, Canada, and Australia in September but did not provide a mechanism for getting alerted when this happens.

Plus airfare but yes.

Oh boy, this exactly. We just did Disney World for my oldest and a week of tickets + hotel (definitely not cheapest options) was about 10k. Food and drinks another 2k. Add ons almost 4k.

You have to pay bribes to Lightning Lane if you don't want to spend hours in line. And then of course there's so much demand for everything that you basically have to regiment the visit entirely with reservations for everything. Overall it was a good trip but I should have taken time off afterwards to recover from my "vacation".

This reminds me of that gambling strategy where you double your bet every time to make up for losses. This seems to reduce to timing the market.