caskstrength (u/caskstrength)

caskstrength commented on How Japanese black companies oppress workers (2014) tofugu.com/japan/japanese... · Posted by u/rawgabbit

ElFitz · 9 months ago

In most of them there is an initial probationary trial period during which you can easily fire someone without providing any justification, and with a minimal mandatory notice.

It goes both ways: during that time, the employee too can quit with a reduced mandatory notice.

That only covers the "if that person ends up sucking" part though.

For the other "business falling apart", maybe they consider it’s part of the business owner’s responsibility to make sound business decisions when involving someone else’s livelihood. Just like when leasing a shop or taking on a loan.

caskstrength · 9 months ago

> For the other "business falling apart", maybe they consider it’s part of the business owner’s responsibility to make sound business decisions when involving someone else’s livelihood. Just like when leasing a shop or taking on a loan.

What about running a tech startup with high chance of failure? Ever considered why they seem to be few and far between in EU?

caskstrength commented on Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week theverge.com/2024/11/11/2... · Posted by u/doughnutstracks

karaterobot · 10 months ago

My hypothesis is still that the problem isn't Twitter per se, but that Twitter-like failure modes are built in to that structure. A communications platform that has certain qualities will tend to become Twitter-like: Many-to-many, short messages, reposting, etc. These are mechanics that will just create certain kinds of behaviors. So, that would predict Bluesky having many of the same problems as Twitter sooner or later.

caskstrength · 10 months ago

> These are mechanics that will just create certain kinds of behaviors.

Yes, but if platform API allows using customizable third-party clients it is not really a problem for me (e.g. I can just enable chronological timeline, filter out all the ads and noise).

caskstrength commented on QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image blackberry.qnx.com/en/pro... · Posted by u/JohnAtQNX

vbezhenar · 10 months ago

Who needs throughput? Server software, but Linux is already dominant there and everyone's happy. For everything else, including desktop and mobile operating systems realtime sounds like a good idea.

caskstrength · 10 months ago

> For everything else, including desktop and mobile operating systems realtime sounds like a good idea.

Why on earth would you need real time on desktop? Every time the topic is discussed on internet bunch of confused people chime in with this sentiment that doesn't make much sense. "RTOS" is not some magic that somehow makes everything on your desktop fast. All it would do in reality is make everything slower for 99% of your interaction but guarantee that "slowness" is uniform and you don't have any weird latency spikes in other 1%. Note that for cases that are not "nuclear reactor control system that requires Very Certified OS with audited and provable reaction times" RTLinux is already available, but distros are not inclined to leverage it on desktop for reason described above.

caskstrength commented on Trump wins presidency for second time thehill.com/homenews/camp... · Posted by u/koolba

PunchTornado · 10 months ago

the message is: we don't want immigrants, we don't want to help other countries at our short term cost (even if it is a long term gain for us). like it or not, this is what people want.

caskstrength · 10 months ago

> we don't want to help other countries at our short term cost (even if it is a long term gain for us)

It is not even that since what they basically propose is to dial down the war in Eastern Europe but get more involved in the war in Middle East and possibly soon in East Asia. That stance always seemed very confusing to me as a non-US person.

caskstrength commented on New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike washingtonpost.com/style/... · Posted by u/ChrisArchitect

jjmarr · 10 months ago

The gender pay gap disappears when you control for hours worked, job seniority, and experience.

So, why do women work less hours than men and have less experience? That's still an issue even if it's not directly sexist. If we read some bullet points from your post:

> Men are more likely than women to have more years of continuous experience in their current occupation.

What crawls on four legs and causes women to drop out of the labour force?

caskstrength · 10 months ago

> What crawls on four legs and causes women to drop out of the labour force?

"Women earn less due to sexist discrimination" and "women earn less due to bearing the brunt of raising children" are two distinct claims. The first one is contentious and widely disputed (disproved?).

caskstrength commented on A change of heart regarding employee metrics rachelbythebay.com/w/2024... · Posted by u/zdw

onion2k · 10 months ago

It's the job of a manager to know what their reports are up to, and whether they're doing a good job of it, and are generally effective.

That's true, but it's not what employee metrics tools tell you. If you're using metrics tools to measure productivity then you're not really being a good manager. Metrics tell you are the quantitative details (eg a count of how much output there is), but as a manager what you actually care about in your day to day work is the qualitative details (eg how good the output is), how happy the team is, where the conflict is, etc. Metrics won't tell you that.

But...

Being a manager is about more than just getting people to do their job well. You also need to plan things, you need to know what's changing over time, you need to test whether your processes are working. I use metrics to measure the aggregate impact of my influence on managing my teams, not that of any IC on any of my teams. Employee metrics are useful for a big picture view.

caskstrength · 10 months ago

> Being a manager is about more than just getting people to do their job well. You also need to plan things, you need to know what's changing over time, you need to test whether your processes are working. I use metrics to measure the aggregate impact of my influence on managing my teams, not that of any IC on any of my teams. Employee metrics are useful for a big picture view.

The point of the article is exactly that such metrics don't give you any kind of a good signal unless you are really into the fine details. And if you are, then you don't really need them in the first place.

> quantitative details (eg a count of how much output there is)

For example I recently spent a week producing several thousands of lines of tedious trivial code that parses some configuration out of JSON file in pure C. Then I spent a month writing less 1k lines of very dense low-level packet parsing code and the main loop also in C. So the metrics would show you the big picture of me slacking and my performance tanking which obviously wasn't the case. You can't substitute actually knowing and understanding of what your reports are doing with some tools providing you with trivia like number of commits, lines of code changed or tickets closed.

caskstrength commented on Touchscreens are out, and tactile controls are back spectrum.ieee.org/touchsc... · Posted by u/pseudolus

daniel_reetz · 10 months ago

It's a little deeper than this, software for each module is typically provided by a tier 1 or tier 2 supplier according to a spec provided by the OEM. Sometimes the tier 1 or tier 2 supplier is also subbing out the software or stuck with some system on chip that sucks.

So for a made-up example, GM wants to build a smart dash in the latest SUV, maybe Bosch or Continental has one with a SoC inside and their own software hell. OEM works with supplier to integrate, bugfix, skin, and customize. But they don't write it from scratch.

caskstrength · 10 months ago

Yes, and suppliers outsource the actual development and testing to cut costs even further.

caskstrength commented on Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction blog.dropbox.com/topics/c... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

Quothling · 10 months ago

When a CEO takes full responsibility for these things it doesn't mean that they submit themselves to the punishment that internet users might want. It's the CEO telling their impacted employees that, no matter how well you did as an employee, you would still have been impacted. It's the CEO showing you empathy for the hurt they cause you for having failed to steer the company in a viable direction.

These messages are obviously never going to be well received, but at least people can find comfort in the fact that it's because Dropbox is shifting direction and strategy and not because they were bad employees. Stuff like this happens in business. Maybe you've focused on private sales and want to shift to enterprise sales or fund investments at which point your company no longer needs it's sales and marketing departments because the company mission will be radically different. Changing course is a CEO taking responsibility for the company.

It is what it is.

caskstrength · 10 months ago

> Changing course is a CEO taking responsibility for the company.

Changing course and immediately resigning would be that.

caskstrength commented on A new book shows how the power of companies is destabilizing governance hai.stanford.edu/news/tec... · Posted by u/alexzeitler

miki123211 · 10 months ago

I think this "problem" stems directly from the fact that the geographic model of governments is extremely unsuited for governing on the internet.

In times past, Governments could e.g. regulate the quality of coke, control election misinformation or forbid burglaries on their own soil, because they had law enforcement who could imprison people doing these things against the law. What happened outside of their borders was mostly of no concern to them.

If Coca Cola wanted to sell their products in Germany, they needed people in Germany willing to sell it, and those people were directly vulnerable to imprisonment by German law enforcement, so they had to care about and follow German law. Even if the original corporation wasn't involved directly, there were always vendors, importers, store owners and such, and all of them could be targeted to some extend.

Tech companies are different, you can make a product on the internet that interacts with the data of the majority of German citizens, without ever stepping foot in Germany or even realizing that a country called Germany exists and has laws. If Germany doesn't like the fact that this product exists, there isn't much they can do.

For now, most countries still have some semblance of control, usually backed by the power of international treaties, DNS blocking and control over payment infrastructure, but I wouldn't be surprised if the prevalence of fast and affordable satellite internet on one hand and easier access to crypto on the other will make the situation even worse.

caskstrength · 10 months ago

> For now, most countries still have some semblance of control, usually backed by the power of international treaties, DNS blocking and control over payment infrastructure, but I wouldn't be surprised if the prevalence of fast and affordable satellite internet on one hand and easier access to crypto on the other will make the situation even worse.

What exact scenario are you envisioning here? Germany bans X (for example), but people smuggle Starlink terminals to continue reading it and advertisers continue advertising to them illegally by paying with crypto? Sounds extremely unrealistic to me TBH.

caskstrength commented on A new book shows how the power of companies is destabilizing governance hai.stanford.edu/news/tec... · Posted by u/alexzeitler

gruez · 10 months ago

>FAANG has actively replaced following with algorithmic feeds because they're more profitable.

Alternatively: it's what users want.

caskstrength · 10 months ago

> Alternatively: it's what users want.

So why are they so opposed to adding some toggle in the options to allow chronological feed then?