I chuckled at the implication that BAH's work has any value to begin with.
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AStellersSeaCow commented on Retro Computer Museum retrocomputermuseum.co.uk... · Posted by u/thorin
While this looks nice, I really loved https://livingcomputers.org/ when it was alive. Sadly it's in stasis now, I was lucky enough to visit while it was still open and I ran around to all these old machines punching in code and showing my wife all the old machines I've worked on in my 40yr+ career.
Came here to post about LCM too, amazing place.
Sadly "in stasis" is pretty generous. I know several people who were in that win of the Allen org and they've all said that Jody Allen viewed it as a waste of time and money and was delighted at the opportunity to close it and never reopen courtesy of the pandemic.
AStellersSeaCow commented on Pirated books thrive on Amazon nypost.com/2022/07/31/pir... · Posted by u/vanilla-almond
I worked in a part of Amazon that had a lot of ability to help detect and flag this sort of fraud. I had to fight hard to get even a proof of concept project greenlit.
There was exteme organizational disinterest - partly for a bad but predictable reason (we made a lot of money off these fraudsters) and partly for a reason so bad it still makes me cringe (money recovered from identified fraudsters went into the balance sheet of a different SVP's org, so our org viewed it as a waste of time).
I made the case that the longer we let the problem fester, the less people would trust Amazon to buy anything. Leadership didn't really care but got sick of me constantly making noise about this and eventually signed off. That said, at my project's peak I had four engineers and one data scientist. Compare to consumer fraud and vendor fraud, both of which negatively impact Amazon directly, which were fought by entire VP-level orgs of hundreds of people.
In the end we put together a system that detected blatant fraud easily and in worrying volume, but as soon as I left - which meant there wasn't anyone in leadership sponsoring it - it was quietly mothballed.
AStellersSeaCow commented on Iran discovers world’s second largest lithium reserve thecradle.co/article-view... · Posted by u/mardiyah
Maria Bamford is excited.
But not too excited.
AStellersSeaCow commented on Does your office have a library? jonpauluritis.com/article... · Posted by u/jppope
My answer is yes to all of the questions.
AStellersSeaCow commented on What is Google doing with its open source teams? theregister.com/2023/01/2... · Posted by u/elorant
I’m still stunned by how many Googlers think they are not in the “wealth class”. Half, even maybe a quarter, of a normal-length career is enough for a Googler to retire.
People making $250k on average getting laid off is admittedly less of a tragedy than people making $75k on average getting laid off. The former would have more opportunity to save and potentially less impact on their lifestyle and financial stability.
But the laid off workers have a lot more in common and a much closer standard of living with each other than with the billionaires whose wealth their layoffs are serving to marginally increase.
AStellersSeaCow commented on What is Google doing with its open source teams? theregister.com/2023/01/2... · Posted by u/elorant
I would take it a step further and deny that the layoffs were botched. How are you supposed to broadcast this information such that everyone learns at the same time and in the right way?
Of course badges stop working when you're let go. What possible good can come of leaving the badges on? All it takes is one in 12000 disgruntled ex-employees to make it not worth it.
Yeah, I hate the way they were conducted but can't think of a better way that wouldn't open the company up to a lot of risk.
I'm not convinced that announcing them in advance is actually better anyways. We have partner teams in Europe who get to spend a month or more after the announcement worrying about whether or not they still have a job. Morale on the teams in the US took a noticeable hit, but the teams in EU have seemed utterly miserable for the last week.
AStellersSeaCow commented on What is Google doing with its open source teams? theregister.com/2023/01/2... · Posted by u/elorant
Whatever the messaging may be, I can assure you, MS is using this as an opportunity to clean house of low performers and particularly low-revenue generating teams, see: HoloLens team.
Consider this: you have a high-performer and a low-performer. You have a mandate to reduce your team size by 1. Who do you choose?
No matter what language they use e.g., layoffs, the net result is still the same. People who aren't having as high impact or on high revenue generating services are going to get culled. I'm assuming the same is going to hold true for Google, Amazon, whatever... if they don't do that, they're at a competitive disadvantage.
> Consider this: you have a high-performer and a low-performer. You have a mandate to reduce your team size by 1. Who do you choose?
This isn't how layoffs work. They don't to go each manager and tell them to reduce their team by X - that does happen, but it happens by way of managing people out for performance reasons, and it's not called layoffs. It's firing/unregretted attrition.
What happened here (at least at Google and Amazon) is that a relative handful of upper management worked with a relative handful of people in HR to use some formula to identify thousands of people to lay off. They definitely targeted some projects more than others, and entire projects/orgs/divisions were scrapped as part of it.
> ... if they don't do that, they're at a competitive disadvantage.
There's general agreement within Google that this absolutely puts us at a competitive disadvantage. Googlers in good standing and with years of knowledge about our business and systems were let go. When (if?) the economy recovers, we'll hire new people to do the same job, but worse.
It isn't being driven by competitive factors, it's being driven by a combination of profit-seeking and workforce-cowing.
Team players, mentors, software architects; they tend to be tossed aside to make room for coders who can churn out large amounts of code, even as the company's capacity to deliver and maintain features declines over time due to tech debt. Managers always love a developer who can consistently write 5000+ lines per code per week, regardless of how many features they actually ship and how many bugs they introduce.
As a team lead and engineer who has managed some complex projects, the idea of someone writing over 2000 lines of code per week terrifies me... That's over 100K lines of code a year. Think of the unnecessary complexity. There is a very good chance that the same feature set could have been implemented with just 10K lines of code, less buggy and in half the time though that would only amount to 380 lines of code per week! Management won't like that.
I tend to think that the dev who can churn out thousands of lines isn't thinking deeply enough about the long term direction of the project; all the code they're writing is essentially throwaway code.
It doesn't always work as designed (ok, maybe rarely works as designed), and TLs can get too bogged down in cat herding, planning, and bike shedding to actually work as an engineer. But at least the spirit of the role is sound.