UK has managed to cheap skate on many different fronts. When money was cheap they went on a cost cutting spree for a decade when they should have been using all of that money to invest in services and infrastructure. Now everything is crumbling.
6,251 karma · joined August 30, 2012
Let me suggest more provocatively that what we often are witnessing is power dynamics. And these people being smart know how to let this play out using code. This is probably less applicable to OPs case than let’s say a large engineering organization in a large corp.
My pragmatic suggestion in such cases is to push back where it would affect your work or growth directly and let go of the rest. Smart people are scary good at lawyering their way out of situations or tying you down in endless litigation.
There’s no “solution” to this. Power dynamics are a part of life and code isn’t immune.
They need to build some sort of moat here to prevent this outcome.
Don’t need ads for something this useful.
This gives plenty of space for opportunists and tricksters to hide.
You don’t ever have to fear being beheaded by the people whose life savings you stole and you don’t have to face consequences if you have a good lawyer.
To do well in todays world learn all the rules and where the loop holes lie. Violating the spirit of the law is fine as long as you can lawyer around the letter of it.
Securing large amounts of cheap energy is non trivial as europe is beginning to find out.
In your first year you can hop after a year. Then you stay for 2 years at the next , 3 years at the next and so on.
Staying at a shitty job at the beginning of your career is a terrible idea. But only having short stints in the later half of your career is also a bad idea.
The fact that America buys Iraqi oil didn't prevent it from being bombed back by decades.
This seems to be people ruing that our project to dominate the entire world with an ideology that had us comfortably in charge is failing.
It has solved this problem over the years by borrowing and becoming a haven for investment to cover up the shortfall.
Now we have a bat shit government that says we need to lower taxes and borrow a boat load of money to tide over the energy crisis. The markets don’t see how this borrowing will improve the UKs ability to earn more dollars (or the govt to raise more taxes).
In essence the market realizes that the UK is going to repay its loans by printing money.
Hence the pound tanks in anticipation of it. One way to stop this is to raise interest rates and pull pounds out of circulation but the government is terrified of popping the real estate bubble.
TL;DR - The pound will keep falling and the UK will lose its social services but don’t take this as investment advice.
“Why are you still here ?”
Rachel Kroll explains it well here https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/12/29/age/
“ This particular example was about older folks in tech.
As I remember it, the story goes like this: you're supposed to get into this business, get your money, and get out, meaning retire. You sell all your stuff and travel the world and write posts on Medium. You know, the whole pyramid thing, right?
Therefore, if you are still here, and are visibly old, something must be going on. They seem to boil it down to two things.
The first possibility is that the person is a badass. They are one of those people who already made their fortune and only hangs around at the job because they feel like it. They don't have to be there.
The other possibility is that the person is the exact opposite of a badass, and has managed to not cash out despite being in the biz for a very long time. They've made no money, may be living paycheck to paycheck, and really need the job. Basically, the fact they're not "at the top" despite their age means they are crap.”
One of the most successful engineers I know in big tech told me this once -
“thewarrior you need to understand. In these companies everything happens mainly for one reason - does it get someone promoted or not ?”
I’ll wait to see if this was an accident or not. But I suspect there are systems in place to prevent changes like these from being shipped by accident.
This is one of those tragedy of the commons situations that has bedeviled the industry.
Every org , team , project and task is a pawn in an elaborate multiplayer game of promo chess. Career success is defined not only by technical excellence but also in how well you can align and deliver your projects within the chess game that is currently in play. Fail to learn this and you will burn out or be forced to quit.
What this does to the companies in the long term remains to be seen.