Completely agree. We seem to have forgotten the word "spyware", I don't see it used anymore because it became the norm. But let's call things by what they are.
Y'know what's troubling to me, freedom as a struggle is indirectly related to other people/ social-political issue.
Like, the people if they decide, they want freedom, are almost guaranteed to get it. But nobody demands it in the truest sense and it feels like the govt. isn't controlled by the people but rather almost by lobbying and that social media etc. have made people complacent in the sense that either we think that others will fight for us or that social media has become a propaganda machine.
I almost broke last night realizing that nuclear can be completely green energy but it isn't the issue of technology but rather political. To me, it felt like a lot of really quality of life changes (like water access, clean cities, good air quality index, atleast where I live) are all almost political issues at this point.
But I am not hopeful towards people, I am hopeful towards tech though. It feels like people have free will, so they might actually pick a net negative option for everybody (trump?), so I am not an optimist because I feel like I have to trust people in the process and I feel like people can do both good and bad, so I wonder how much better our lives have been compared to our ancestors. Maybe trade-offs?
I genuinely felt so weird realizing this, its hard to explain. Like it felt like I can do nothing but watch. And to me I feel like I am being a pessimistic because a lot of people in power feel stupid/inefficient man.
We just don't have a choice. WE have a choice b/w 2 parties and call it freedom.
Of course, freedom will be a constant struggle. People have made it as such. Its on all of us, we all need to take accountability. I get it, accountability is hard, but its much better than waiting for a hero to save us all. We can do it if we realize this.
> To me, it felt like a lot of really quality of life changes (like water access, clean cities, good air quality index, atleast where I live) are all almost political issues at this point.
This is why I struggle when discussing anything on this website - these were always political issues. Everything that touches the way society functions is a political issue. Tech is just a vehicle of political agenda. Freedom is purely political notion, this is why different traditions have different concepts of it. And to obtain it, as well as other things, you need political action. Yet, most HN users, at least that is my impression, tend to think that it is about creating yet another software project or founding startup.
And this is why corpos and government are winning.
> Yet, most HN users, at least that is my impression, tend to think that it is about creating yet another software project or founding startup.
I don't think that a startup is sufficient, but it can be an important step in the right direction. I came to my bank, showed them my Librem 5 phone and asked where I can download an app for it. It was a much clearer message than "but Android isn't free!" (which is of course true). I do the same with governmental services.
Well, political action is hard to bring and you would need an average citizen to weigh his vote into action and not just use his vote for his own biases and as I also said, its really depressing when we think of this to be as a reality and I myself, would like to hide or somehow "prove" that this isn't the case if that makes sense.
So no wonder the majority of us techie/hn users feel this way, you aren't wrong for the impression, I also feel like that's true atleast in my opinion being in this community and there is nothing wrong with that but the reality is kinda bitter.
It's also not to only serve shareholders each quarter. It's none of those extremes: like everything in life, we must balance multiple stakeholders and responsibilities.
Which in turn, corporations including Google, lobby to make sure that taxes are as small as possible, and we aren't reasonably funding unemployment benefits. They haven't even kept up with inflation, let alone substitute a standard of living that's even approximately close to middle class. Unemployment is a hell hole of despair in the US. Its not some "blip" or something, like in other countries that have better safety nets, people lose their homes, get kicked out of their rentals and all other things. It can be really damaging for people, even FAANG engineers
Over half support higher taxes on corporations (particularly large ones)[0].
If the observational basis for this is simply that roughly half of the votes tallied in most elections are split between democrats and republicans, I posit to say that its a gross simplification of voters and their motivations.
In my study of US politics over the last 2 decades, a candidate that campaigns on higher taxes and lowering/simplifying barriers to receiving benefits will always lose to one that advertises benefits, but in reality it is debt underwritten by future federal taxpayers and/or they have numerous requirements to minimize the number of recipients.
As much as they might want to tax corporations, the voters (since they are older) don’t want their 401k/IRA/defined benefit pension plan balances to go down.
Another signal is there is never any mention of implementing a wealth tax (property tax). Politicians will keep knocking around increasing earned income taxes (which affects workers), but because the older people are the most important contingent of voters, touching property of wealthy people who do not need to earn income is off the table. In the most recent tax legislation, they even specifically left the 1031 real estate exchange intact, and got rid of other 1031 exchanges.
It should be very difficult to fire people, especially if you're making a massive profit. The idea that a company making that much money in pure profit needs to "trim the fat" is callous in the extreme, and probably deeply harmful to company morale. The employees of a company are absolutely entitled to a share of the profit they personally helped create.
> It should be very difficult to fire people, especially if you're making a massive profit.
What is the basis of this opinion, though? What gives you this entitlement that companies must employ people if they're well off (according to you)?
> The idea that a company making that much money in pure profit needs to "trim the fat" is callous in the extreme, and probably deeply harmful to company morale.
Who cares? You think business isn't callous or even cutthroat? You think businesses care about "morale" over the bottomline? You would be so wrong.
> The employees of a company are absolutely entitled to a share of the profit they personally helped create.
According to ... the petulant ranting of HN readers? Or do you have a more authoritative or objective reason to believe this?
I don't understand the point of this comment. Are Google employees not workers as well? Do they not experience suffering or what exactly is the point you are trying to make here?
Your insensitive comment is probably showcasing the fallacy of relative privation, but these are real people you're talking about, some are on work visas or are from single income families. Their lives have changed in an instant and instead of empathizing, your reaction is a sarcastic 'those poor ex-Google employees'? Shame on you.
Losing an at-will employment position is suffering? It's unfortunate, maybe, even a little sad. But to say this is "suffering" borders on entitled lunacy. Especially considering ex-Google employees can land virtually any job with it on their resume.
The risks of working at-will are well known, and one would be well served to understand them to avoid disappointment. Actually, the shame is on them for failing to adequately prepare for an obvious inevitability, especially if others are depending on them for support.
I've seen ex-Google employees passed on the resume pile based on assumptions about what that experience means and what sort of salary they may demand. There are no guarantees in this job market.
Google employees are just like any other tech sector employee. They are neither "lucky" nor "unlucky". There's not much difference, even if they managed to land a job at Google. After Google, their struggles are similar to other tech sector employees. At this point, many of them are uncertain about the future. Layoffs are demoralizing regardless of where one works.
I said they're not suffering, in the true sense of the word.
I am beginning to suspect the coddled and entitled readers of this forum are quite ignorant of what it really means to suffer. A trip to India or any other third-world country would quickly change that attitude.
Unfortunately, there is no originality in your comment, here or elsewhere in this thread. Just sad and meaningless self-flagellation (now also with weird condescension) with no actual regard for what suffering means to billions of other people.
I sincerely hope you find the maturity required to expand your worldview outside of the sheltered, entitled microcosm it presently is.
> A trip to India or any other third-world country would quickly change that attitude.
I don't suggest telling someone who just lost their job that they should keep a stiff upper lip. I certainly don't suggest you tell them that they should spend some time in a "third-world country" because, well, for one thing, that's rather crass.
But, also, I don't think you quite understand what "third-world" means. It's not based on economic status. It's based on NATO / Warsaw Pact neutrality. Any use beyond that is pejorative at best. Perhaps you mean a "developing nation" or an "economically disadvantaged" nation. Even then, it's complicated.
I love that you manage to insult an entire country by implying that it's a shit hole nobody would want to live in then use it as an excuse to tell us we shouldn't demand better conditions from our employers because you personally think we're "coddled".
> Losing an at-will employment position is suffering? It's unfortunate, maybe, even a little sad. But to say this is "suffering" borders on entitled lunacy.
How would you define "suffering?"
Merriam Webster includes "to endure death, pain, or distress" or "to sustain loss or damage" as part of the definition, which definitely seems to include getting laid off.
So suffering is a binary dichotomy? Or are there perhaps varying degrees of it?
If I stub my toe and claim I'm "suffering", any intelligent person would laugh at the proposition, because relative to a starving person, for example, it could not be considered a hardship or even mild distress.
I posit getting laid off from at-will employment at one of the most prestigious companies in the history of the world is not suffering, and characterizing it as such is tone-deaf and entitled.
The blog post mentions too many meetings. Its the 15m daily everyday, then a retro and a planning once per sprint. I understand it is too much for a one-week sprint (as stated in the post) but how is that too much otherwise? Seems exaggerated to have a four week sprint because of those two moments. In fact, I would argue that having longer sprints means longer meetings (if you're having a productive retro you'll have a lot more to talk about during four weeks than two)
And how is having meetings a negative thing for remote work? Remote shouldn't mean "no interaction". Remote should adapt for collaboration.
Because people lack discipline, will powder Scrum meetings on top of existing meetings, create more meetings from stand-ups because Scrum doesn't teach individuals to be disciplined, drag out the meetings, etc. Scrum's entire premise of "get everyone together and talk" is the very thing which encourages people to talk. A lot. Without providing any suggestions to counteract it beyond "draw the head of the owl, now draw the rest"-type of advice.
>And how is having meetings a negative thing for remote work?
Meetings imply synchronous communication. Author is conflating remote with asynchronous, but nothing about the story implies collaboration needs to be synchronous / meeting-heavy either.
I’ve rarely see stand ups end in 15 minutes. I’ve had stand ups that drag out for two and a half hours. When I say I need to go to get work done, I’m told this is work and you need to stay. So… many… meetings. And then I’m asked why I didn’t get my things done this sprint. Gee? I wonder why?
I've also seen these awful interminable standups. But i've also seen quick and effective standups, even on a big team. The difference is simply discipline.
If you ask a developer to talk about what they did yesterday, their instinct will be to waffle on, go into all sorts of interesting details, reflect on decisions they made, voice various concerns, etc. If you ask a whole team what they did, and they follow their instincts, you will have a long, boring, low-value meeting.
If the developers have a discipline of reporting only the most important things they can fit into two minutes - whether through self-discipline, or discipline imposed by a strict and heartless overlord - then you will have a short and effective meeting.
Discipline does not appear out of thin air! It has to be intentionally cultivated or imposed. Many teams don't do either. I think some just don't understand that this discipline is required; it simply doesn't occur to them that they should avoid waffling, because every standup they've ever seen is full of waffling. Others intellectually understand that they should follow that discipline, but their brain hasn't connected to their glands, so they don't actually do it, and they don't have a leader cruel enough to impose it.
The best example i have seen was at my first full-time programming job. We ended up with a team of about twenty developers, mostly senior. There was a tendency to waffling. Luckily, our team lead was an absolute bastard, who had no problem controlling it. First rule, stand in a circle. Second rule, stand next to the person you paired with yesterday. Third rule, if you are the first in your pair to speak, you have two minutes to say what you did and anything that others should know. The boss will have a timer running, and will cut you off without ceremony at the two minute mark. Fourth rule, if you are the second in your pair to speak, say "nothing to add", unless you do, in which case do it quickly. Fifth rule, if you have something you desperately want to say that will take you over two minutes, tell people you will send an email about it. Twenty people, ten pairs, twenty-minute standup, like clockwork.
So, if you are suffering from long and waffling standups, and if you also have retros, raise it at the retro. Ask people "do you think standups are too long?". Await the chorus of agreement. Tell them that the only solution is to strictly limit the amount of time people speak for. Some will complain that they have too many important things to say to be limited. Remind them that a limit is the only solution. Some will still complain. Bully them into submission or have them fired. Go on to enjoy fast and satisfying standups.
Yeah, and not every scrum implementation needs to have a ton of meetings. We do 1 week sprints with no 15m daily stand-ups and a monthly or so retrospective. If someone is blocked I don't need them to wait to the next day to bring it up in standup. That's why we have group chat collaborarion tools after all right??
> Its the 15m daily everyday, then a retro and a planning once per sprint. I understand it is too much for a one-week sprint (as stated in the post) but how is that too much otherwise?
One place I worked at had two week sprints. The entirety of one day every sprint was spent on demo, retro, planning, commitment. But because the scrum master had to "build" a sprint and couldn't do that without knowing the size of tickets, there were two morning meetings every week to "analyse" tickets.
So you had: Week 1, 1 full day Scrum day, 2 half days. Week 2: 2 half days. So 3 days out of the 10 day sprint, so 30% time spent on Scrum.
Plus standups, so the hour before the standup nobody did anything (as judged by the number of PRs and comments and Slack activity) so that's an hour plus the time for standup every single day.
Maybe that's insanity, I mean I certainly thought so, but these things do happen.
It's not so much time, it's more cognitive load. In scrum teams, it feels like you're always talking about the future. I think it just builds on the anxiety many people have frankly. It's just another attempt to unrealistically control the future.
The theory of a meeting is that the team will gather, go through a list of problems, solve those problems, which will keep the work moving forward.
Standup/scrum meetings should be about identifying the work that has stopped moving forward or is progressing slower than we’d like it to. The team might find a solution on the spot or a new ticket is created and assigned to someone to dig deeper for a solution. Probably that ticket is assigned to the Product Owner.
Most standups/scrum meetings are not about unsticking work. What they are about will vary depending on the particular dysfunction of the company, e.g. managers trying to make sure everyone is working.
I typically get our 15 minute daily done in 3-5 minutes. About once a week someone has a more complex problem and just those people who can help with that problem stay after for 10 more minutes while the rest of the team goes back to work. As the team lead I get regular (3x/week) checkins to make sure people are doing work and not stuck, but it doesn't take a lot of time while people talk about projects the rest of the team isn't on.
Glad your team is not ridiculous. My team treats the daily as a report up to our boss, and our boss treats the daily as a time to go on a long monologue
Not the OP, but personally, my phone is my map, music player, camera, and emergency contact. I often take it biking, hiking, swimming, kayaking, etc. It frequently gets wet, whether on accident (flipping the kayak, water bottle leaks) or on purpose (riding through rain, taking underwater photos) etc.
Back in the day they had special ruggedized phones for that use case (they still do) but it's nice just having a regular mass market phone with a good camera and not have to worry about it getting wet.
There are lots of situations where it’s nice to be able to have a phone with you, like going to the beach but still having transit maps to catch the bus back.
Also swimming pools, rivers, rain, snow… you can go lots of places where a phone would most likely or definitely get soaked or submerged, and it’s useful to have a phone with you for payment, maps, messages, everything you normally use it for. Water is the only thing that has killed/broken phones for me in years.
Why watertight is a benefit, I suppose there are other benefits of phone with none-replaceable battery:
1) Require fewer parts, so less expensive to make and more environment friendly
2) Last longer, so replacements come less often, thus more environment friendly
3) Higher recyclable battery rate, since Apple has incentive to recycle the used batteries, consumers less so.
The only benefit battery replaceable phone has is consumers having more control over their purchase and less likely to be screwed over by phone makers or sellers.
> The only benefit battery replaceable phone has is consumers having more control over their purchase and less likely to be screwed over by phone makers or sellers.
User replacable batteries are also user accessible controls to definitely power off the device. Usually devices without a replacable battery often have a secret handshake to power off, but it doesn't always work.
Are you serious? I’m never going back to not watertight. Being able to use my phone in rain or snow, don’t having to worry about something spilling on my pocket, being able to wash dirt off, use it for underwater pictures, don’t get cardiac arrest after jumping into a pool with my phone still in my pocket… it’s just a life with less worry.
I use it as a snorkeling camera. It’s in a ziplock bag, which is enough to keep the capacitive screen usable underwater, but not nearly enough to trust with a $1000 device with all my most important data and capabilities on. If it ruptured I’m fairly confident the phone will be fine, and it definitely gets quite wet in the dive boat.
LOL, HN is really California-centric :) Ever heard of rain? I want to be able to use my phone in a rain, to call a taxi for example. Also, I don't want to worry about accidentally spilling a coffee on it.
FWIW, I live in Palm Springs, California, and in the early years lost phones not from jumping in pools, but from much of the year being 100+ degrees and even a couple minutes holding a phone to my ear and normal sweating would trigger the excessive moisture sensor and kill the device.
I like to say I'm a "Developer", or "Software Developer", and then I can describe further what I do as "creating things" for people to use.
I agree 100% with you that programming is art and a vehicle for so much creativity and liberty (think net.art, code poetry, the hundred different ways to make the same function), but even then I feel that programming is just a part of the creation process. So I tend to prefer Developer
It's cumulative, every time you buy you get two checkmarks, and the more you buy (or get gifted) the more you get.
You get a lot of checkmarks next to your username.
