Obviously it makes sense for some companies and not for others, and so you see some buying real estate and others leasing. The point isn't that no company should ever own property, it's that it makes sense for many to rent.
A strange thing to get hung up on. The purpose of rental is not to have someone to call to get things fixed, it's to avoid having to engage in the complex legal and financial considerations that come with property ownership. A company of any size is not going to have a problem hiring people to fix things. If they don't want to do that, they can rent spaces where those amenities are included. It's purely a matter of deciding how to manage the expenses.
Sometimes companies do buy offices. But very often they don't, either because they don't want to or can't afford to. Sometimes they buy offices, then rent out space to other companies. Sometimes they sign long term leases, but then change their plans and sublease to others. It's not at all clear to me what people are arguing for here. Companies rent office space because they've judged it the best use of their resources. They aren't being victimized by some landlord class, they're making resource allocation choices.
We'll see how far the whole working from home thing goes, but there are a number of types of business for which it is impractical (e.g. anything that requires expensive or bulky equipment) and many people prefer to work together in person. As for co-working spaces...co-working spaces I've seen have offered offices and suites in addition to shared space. I worked out of a private office in one for a while because I wanted to use my own equipment and didn't want to schlep it in and out every day. That same reasoning applies to larger companies.
A long term lease is beneficial for the renter in many circumstances. They don't want to have the conditions of the lease renegotiated every year because moving a company is a lot more disruptive than moving to a new apartment. They also often don't even want to own the property. I worked a place that paid a builder to build them an office complex, sold it to a management company, then rented it back from them. Why? Because the company did not want to tie up all it's assets in a piece of real estate, and wanted to focus on their actual business.
They provide rentable office space for companies that need office space. What alternative are you suggesting? Companies build their own offices? Builders retain ownership and become landlords? The banks become landlords? Companies just don't have offices?
I once worked at a place where we shifted some content from a two column layout to three columns. We had users telling us it was literally giving them headaches and making them feel ill. This despite the fact that it now looked basically like the rest of our content. You absolutely cannot take all user complaints seriously.
Seems to me like it does work, based on many successful projects using it. There's nothing that forces you to handle the error at the place of origin, you can pass it on like you do with exceptions. You just can't bubble it up multiple levels.
That's a feature not a bug. Go intentionally forgoes abstractions of that sort. I personally prefer well written Java exception handling, but often Java exception handling code is a bolted on afterthought. Go's approach is to make error handling something you have to think about for virtually every line of code, rather than a superstructure built around the code. This can feel slow and painful to write, but it guides the developer toward considering each error case individually, potentially resulting in more nuanced responses to errors. It also makes reading the code dead simple.
The younger generations of coders are indeed more susceptible to hype, but if you go around dismissing things that are hyped, you're going to miss out on a lot of good things. I've got 15+ years of Java experience, and I think Go is a nice language and has some real strengths. From what I can see, the primary difference with Java isn't the build system or the binaries, it's the decision to strongly favor simplicity and readability over expressiveness. The payoff for this is that you can jump into any Go codebase and figure out what's going on fairly quickly. You don't need to pull down the source, fire up an IDE and start drawing object diagrams, you can figure out what it's doing by skimming the source on Github. I find this very useful.
I dislike it because of the ultra-complex build system that over-ambitious devops engineers ended up building in my shop. Our build system was the hardest part of our code base to reason about, which is pretty screwed up.
How are they escaping scrutiny? They hardly seem interested in hiding what they believe seeing as how they are both very active on Twitter. And whose scrutiny do you consider them anxious to avoid? Their opponents know very well what they are saying. This whole framing reeks of the kind of censoriousness which they both spend a lot of time railing against.
Yeesh. Sad that people seem so determined to prove that you can't have nice things. Hopefully you don't get too discouraged. Happy though that you let my registration through. Kind of expected that my habit of using random usernames would get me flagged.
> I had friends who became Trump supporters, and I unfriended them. I believe in morals.
Ironically, the behavior you describe is immoral in my view. I also am a religious person, and I also don't believe in bending morals or that talk will heal all disagreements. However, with political opinions, the primary reason otherwise well intentioned people support bad things is that they don't understand that they are bad. Shunning someone actively makes that situation worse. Sure you can't win people over by arguments, but you can influence them gradually, and if they are your friends, you should want to do that for their own good.
The LSP stuff has actually unlocked a lot of fringe editor choices. Even new editors with tiny communities can provide a lot of IDE like features by just implementing the client side of the API.
The code is opensource, but not the ecosystem. Microsoft is maneuvering towards the same position as Android with respect to Google Play. Not technically mandatory, but so many conveniences are built on it that it may as well be for anyone not interested in investing a lot of time finding workarounds.
We don't hate the elderly, we just don't value family. We expect our kids to leave home as soon as they are able and we don't bat an eye when they move a few thousand miles away. Marriage rates have been declining for a few decades and something like half of marriages end in divorce. I have an aging mother and mother-in-law that both live alone because they "value their independence." Neither has the slightest interest in living with my wife and I, although we are fairly close. The norm is living independently and anything else is an imposition or a failure in our society.
edit: Wouldn't have thought any of that was terribly controversial. I'd be interested if those having a negative reaction would post some response so I know what makes that opinion problematic. No need to get into an argument, I'm just genuinely curious.
Ok, let me say it a different way. They don't have the power to demand more than they are worth, because the amount the employer offers reflects what the employer thinks they are worth. You may disagree about how much value they supply, but that's not really relevant. Wages aren't set by what some 3rd party thinks is fair, they're set like other prices - how much the employee's skills are needed and the available supply of people with those skills. Hierarchy is only incidentally involved, and not always. Consider, for example, the wages of actors or professional athletes for example.
I think you have the causality backwards. A person is able to demand higher pay not because they are in charge, but because the owners/upper management want them to be in charge. That is, they get hired with high pay because that's the value the employer puts on their labor. They determine that the same way the determine what they're willing to pay for other goods and services: how much do they want it, and how easy it is to get.
I agree with the spirit of your comment, but not with the particulars. Yes, employees and contractors both have to deal with job uncertainty, but not to the same degree. An employee is unlikely to be laid off with anywhere near the frequency that a contractor's gig ends and for a lot of people, the tradeoff of the extra stability is worth potentially less earnings. Similarly, while shares are often worth nothing, sometimes they aren't, and the payoff can be big. It depends on what risks you are willing to take. Maybe I've been lucky, but I've actually managed to get value from options/RSUs that exceeded what I'd likely have earned more often than not. Finally, I think it's a terrible idea to take a second job if you don't like your pay. Doing a shit job for two companies may make you some money but is no way to live. If you are being underpaid, go find a job that pays. If you can't find one that pays better, maybe you aren't being underpaid.
That said, I agree with your essential point that loyalty is not owed to your employer. It's a tool an employee can sometimes use for career purposes, but that's it. Your employment is a business arrangement and needs to be treated as such. Employers will talk as though they see it otherwise, but when times get tough, those pretenses are revealed for what they are. I really wish we could dispense with this "we're a big family with a mission" crap as it makes the whole thing more painful than it needs to be.
I've noticed a lot of times what appears to be procrastination is actually uncertainty as to how to proceed. The mind recoils from it's own inadequacy and just labels the whole thing "bad". An advantage of breaking it down as you say is that it pushes the uncertainty a step further away. You may not know what's required to do your taxes, but you know what's required to search your email. Many times, the way to perform the next step is produced by performing the current one (e.g. your accountant tells you what documents are needed) so the overall task is not nearly as painful as you anticipated.
Ah, but then you need to remember to make the checklist, and you need to remember to check it. If I get past the first step, I invariably fall afoul of the second.
Exactly! I didn't start getting anywhere with anything until I realized that I should ignore what other people told me about getting stuff done. For whatever reason, I don't respond to normal motivators. There are a few giant labels that get slapped onto people to try to make sense of how different peoples' brains work but for a lot of people just fall somewhere in between. I'm not ADHD, but I'm...something. And I think that situation is a lot more common than is commonly acknowledged.
My money is on the quiet failure mode. The demographic collapses we see happening around the world continue and spread as more people have the resources to live individually, without family. Through automation we overcome the economic issues caused by population inversion, leisure is the norm, ambitions are confined to personal goals, and the human species coasts comfortably down to nothing.