180 karma · joined July 11, 2016
I recently had to implement a js/jquery web application & datatables is golden : so many features, so many possibilities. Used for so long by so many => so few bugs left.
Harassing : the action of subjecting someone to aggressive pressure or intimidation.
Where do you see any harassment ?
Gitlab has no Chinese or Russian employee so far -> so nobody got pressure or intimidate, ffs.
China is harassing the rest of the world. China is systematically spying with state wide support. China is bullying with military, economic or soft power. China is a threat.
* Recently, in France, concerns were raised by the intelligence community about the outsized number of young Chinese students flirting / marrying with military & defence engineers. You don't even need to spy, really, just marrying people to stop any aggressive ideas toward China spreading. I mean, you would not push to war against your wife's birth place where you are now visiting every year, right ?
* Apple spotted 2 cases, how many are missed ? https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/30/18203718/apple-self-drivi...
* Lol, there is a whole wikipedia page on the topic, just for the USA : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_espionage_in_the_Unite...
* In the European Union, they buy big companies from small countries to get leverage on EU decision making process. https://www.ft.com/content/d7145792-4743-11e9-b168-96a37d002...
Gitlab is simply pragmatic and clear-minded, their teams works in transparency and trust, they can't handle potential threats without a deep rework. I think it's much more than just having permissions baked in their systems, it's the whole defence industries layering that they would need to acquire.
Western players are now actively reducing their Chinese exposure (buying less critical stuff from their factories, cf. Huawei's affairs, moving factories to others countries). I am afraid it's too little too late.
While western people, and even more highly educated western people, have low levels of nationalism, Chinese people are brain-washed into thinking it's the best country in the world, best ever. Helping China is very important and their authorities have lots of leeway to push this.
Currently using Gitlab, I am glad they are aware of the issue and of their limited capacity to stop it from inside. Putting the fox in charge of the hen house, am I right ?
> if you really wanted to change something :
It's not West mission to bring democracy in China, it's not our country, they are grown up already and will keep finding their own way. It's typically USA ego to think the whole world must be awoken to USA values. The rest of the world is fine, thank you very much. We witness South America's fate in the XX century and Middle East's fate in the XXI. China just want western technology : buying, trading or spying it.
The most idiotic course of action has been followed already by moving the whole factories chains to China and thinking we could keep the knowledge here while it is applied there.
Remote work --> good, better than commuting.
Telepresence Robots --> horrible, one more battery powered, electronic filled, 2 years life span manufactured thing.
We have to learn to use LESS material things.
France Telecom's bit :
Please note that the numbers of suicides at France Telecom was not even statistically so high :
https://www.atlantico.fr/decryptage/85841/suicides-a-france-... (yeah google translate)
> Analysons en effet avec objectivité les chiffres concernant ce sujet grave. Le nombre annuel de suicides parmi les employés du groupe France Telecom sur le territoire français a été de 28 en 2000, 23 en 2001, 23 en 2002, 22 en 2003, 13 en 2008, 19 en 2009, 25 en 2010.
> le « taux de suicide théorique » atteint alors près de 16,9 pour 100 000. Ainsi, le taux de suicide constaté chez France Télécom à 19 pour 100 000
Taking into account the age, male/female repartition and the industry average, these are the 2 numbers : 17/100000 vs 19/100000. You can check other countries suicides rates for these population to notice it's not abnormal - people got sick.
So what has happened : some people squarely laid the blame on the employer for their suicide in notes or letters (one such letter being written 2 years before the act - 2 years to react). The cases were hugely publicized.
I am pretty sure work(place) issues are a major cause of suicide, being the bread winning activity & so consuming so many hours and human interaction. Lack of work is a bigger factor too when you look at suicide frequency between active / inactive adults.
Hope this give a more open view than "bad management - no donut".
France bit :
It was really hard to fire people in France. The employee needs to messed up pretty big. It's next to impossible to fire public servants. The absolute opposite is the USA, where managers can fire their subordinates almost instantly (which brings in a bigger lot of issues and abuse).
So how do a team get rid of someone screwing up, not working, not team-playing, even actively hindering the team ? You don't. At best, you can put this employee to a new team or assign it a useless project (or more exactly, a project that the company accepts will never get finished). If the under performing employee does not want to be trained for new jobs, no consequences for him/her. Public service in France is ridden with such people, and government is paying twice for their work : once in their salary, once in the salary of someone actually doing it or a private contractor. I have work with&for such people and it's horrible.
So French management have these horrible & convoluted ways to make people leave the company. Giving them useless assignments, always poor performances reviews, etc.
French employees are very very well protected (thanks to decades of unions fighting) and it's much much better to be employed by French corporations than USA or British ones.
Nowadays, we might have reached a point where the downsides of this protection on economic performance are doubled by necessary hypocrisy in management. The social contract "work for the company, get paid for your work" is not holding. You can get paid without working. And you can work without getting paid enough (but I dare say it's the rarer of both in France).
It's changing under Macron's reforms which disgruntled privileged workers and which worried unprivileged ones. Now, there is a upper bound cost for firing someone & companies can plan on it. Remember, when fired, we got unemployment benefits + company's compensation. You also got the state's benefits when both you and the company agrees on you leaving the company.
Americans have no idea how amazing our social welfare is. And Frenches have no idea either.
Because it's a running gag nowadays.
Their (84k earners) children will be born into wealthy/high middle class and fare well, and earn the whole 100k once in the workforce while discriminating the new generational minority.
Hate as much as you want, it's life and it will never be perfect.
Seldom immigrants make it big, but their children or grand-children might.
> After Shimazu’s death in 1958, the Terukuni Shrine (also referred to as Shōkoku Shrine) was built in Kagoshima as a memorial to the late daimyo. He was enshrined there in 1863, and the photograph was placed there as an object of worship. However, it later went missing in the 1800s.
Our devs are not paid enough to save projects poorly down by half-competent team from big SSII that undercut everyone else.
And then the client is saying : "how can it takes so long ? I am only asking for this feature from Dropbox, that one from Google, a Facebook like feed and some Whatsapp notifications, all synchronised with these existing applications ! NOTHING HARD to do here !"
/rant
But first and third points are dispelled just by reading the Wikipedia article on China history.
I trust that science, research and ongoing work will end up providing interesting results, but many many startups will burn their cash before being able to provide real world usage services.
Like you said, there are LOTs of challenges here. Certainly not a "low hanging fruit", not that a profitable business either since most countries will squash costs anywhere they can because the health cost keeps growing, and a very difficult legal environment to deal with.
However, I am very thankful for your hard work and will to push toward a better future for health.
Personally, I port my Chrome extension to a Firefox addons without much trouble, except for the stringent review process by a human developer which raised a lot my opinion of the firefox community.
Also that gem :
> France: the local researcher preferred to remain anonymous
o m g
International star is technically correct since he is known both in the USA and Great-Britain.
But that's the first time ever I heard of him.
> But now almost 10 years later, it doesn't look like this will ever happen
Some Chinese are trying to do that already : Dasung-Ink-Paperlike-13-3-Monitor
There are reviews around the web about it and you can buy one on Amazon. I have not do it yet for the price is still high at 1200$
I also met with a great manager from the Taiwan Eink company. Eink technologies (for they have several similar ones) are mechanical based which implies many constraints.
For the stories the MIT guys who develop it spend around 20 years on it before passing the baby on to the Tawain based company.
Except Amazon, most big companies are not pushing it, I guess because pictures and videos are so prevalent nowadays.