I imagine the GP was referring to the fact that Costco experiences that kind of growth while giving their employees excellent pay and benefits. Even low-level store employees typically make $20-30 an hour.
It’s because they don’t sell everything, and the things they do sell, they sell to the top 50%.
They also did have benevolent dictators who spent decades building up good will, but supposedly the new bosses as of a few years ago are not so benevolent anymore.
In my experience, it felt that way from the outside. I got solicited by five different Amazon recruiters in 2022 alone. The one time I engaged, they didn't even have a specific role in mind. It definitely gave me the impression of blanket hiring with the primary (if not sole) purpose of increasing headcount.
Some of that is easily explainable as just the ancient corporate mistake of seeing and paying recruiters as a commission-based sales force. They have vacations to pay for and sales quotas to meet and the easiest way to do that is volume over substance.
But yeah, anecdotally, I also came away with the impression that FAANG/GAFAM/whatever has certainly had some incredible years where their recruiters went above and beyond "this seems like a volume play in their personal rolodex" to "this company seems thirsty for headcount with no real idea what it needs the headcount for and no time to get to know the actual skills of the person being recruited".
> The one time I engaged, they didn't even have a specific role in mind.
Big Tech hiring often focuses on candidate abilities first and then the specific job later. It's actually more efficient to do it that way than to start interviewing someone for a specific job that you discover they're not qualified for because you can match the candidate to a role after understanding where they fit in.
At many Big Tech companies there's a separate team matching phase that comes after the interview.
It's also helpful in general for us candidates because you can get a job without having to satisfy someone's arbitrary checklist of experience at prior companies.
I can appreciate the desire to focus on abilities first, but this felt like a shotgun approach to the same old checklist strategy. Like a crawler found my resume somewhere on the web based on a few keywords, and the recruiter couldn't even tell me what the keywords were.
It's called pooled hiring, and it makes sense when a company is hiring lots of people for lots of teams. Most large companies do this when hiring rates are high. You end up with better employee-team match when you interview a candidate first and then match them based on their skills/interest, rather than contacting them for a specific role they may or may not be interested in.
Has nothing to do with whether hiring is for headcount or other reasons
Bartle also wrote Notes from the Dawn of Time, a great series of articles about MUD design and programming. The stuff about command parsing is especially interesting.
Safe spaces aren't really censorship. People are allowed to make fun of them. The hypocrisy comes into play when the ones who claim they're not allowed to speak their minds seem more like they really just want the entire world around them to be their safe space.
The safe spaces I’m familiar with were on American universities (specifically public universities) and typically prohibited debate or other forms of speech.
I see a lot of hypocrisy when it comes to people criticizing the idea of a private safe space while the critics themselves engage in their own private safe space (there’s a certain subreddit that loves to call others “snowflakes” while the subreddit itself aggressively and formally censors). I think hypocrisy with respect to public safety spaces (in which government censorship concerns are relevant) is rarer, but I’m sure it exists.
The disagreement here seems to be about what kind of data should be considered ephemeral. Traffic logs from a decade ago? A ten-year-old package lock? I'm sure I don't care anymore. Documents I wrote in the 90s? Yeah, I might still want them. I might not need them everyday, but I can say from experience that I've needed to track down files that are more than a decade old, and I'm glad I was able to find them.
We strictly talking documents? It's very unlikely they will suffer from any decay since they are so lightweight. And to the extent that it's important you probably accessed it or shared it sometime in that period.
A video from the 90s that you never read or accessed in that period? Yes, a candidate for deletion, or at least a decay. For example, if it was a video, the transcript might be saved, but the video might be lost. We may also get some written interpretation on the visual elements of the video.
I'm talking documents in a very general sense. It might be a text file, audio, video, a software installer, source code, or anything at all.
> A video from the 90s that you never read or accessed in that period? Yes, a candidate for deletion, or at least a decay. For example, if it was a video, the transcript might be saved, but the video might be lost. We may also get some written interpretation on the visual elements of the video.
My point is that the video shouldn't decay, either. It might not be playable in modern media software for a variety of reasons, but that doesn't automatically make it a candidate for deletion.
Oh yeah, taking screenshots would be a nice intermediate decay, instead of the whole video.
You have to think, in general, that we have finite resources, and the alternative is not remember everything in perfect detail, but forgetting things that you do not choose to forget.
After forty-ish years, the limit on personal storage is ever higher. The sum of every filesystem I ever owned will probably fit on two of today's very affordable hard drives. (I should get on that for pre-cloud stuff.)
And decayed versions wouldn't get the author much mercy from bereaved families.
1- moore's law will break eventually. Depending on storage growing is unsustainable. We will need to develop solutions that work when storage growth becomes linear.
2- even if you can save the bits and bytes, there's fidelity loss in soft and hard standards, namely video codecs and connector standards. Not sure how planned decay would fit here, but relevant considering that document from the 90s needs is probably on a weird codec in a pre pata drive. Or even worse an analog medium.
Even if you don't admit that it will happen in this generation, it will happen in the next. We have companies that offer free storage like google, the economics can't sustain that forever, youtube videos are already being purged, google drive limited.
The cost of storing forever is unsustainable over the decades.
If you're trying to upgrade or rebuild ten year old software, it's very important to know exactly what its dependencies were and where to find them, because there are too many other versions to choose from and most of them won't work. New software only needs a lockfile because it will eventually get old (if useful).
I feel like Netflix has been declining for years. A decade ago, their recommendation algorithm was phenomenal. Today, both their library and their recommendations are severely lacking. I'm not sure how much longer I'll bother to subscribe.
This is it for me. Maybe they have decent content but I can’t seem to find it easily anymore. Netflix was a necessity once upon a time, but now I am on the edge of canceling.
Heirs benefit because intellectual property is inheritable in the same way as any other property, such as real estate. If I owned a valuable copyright, I'd certainly want my children to get it in the event of my death. (Though I still agree that copyrights endure longer than they should.)
I can't imagine how many future developers were originally inspired to learn programming by playing your games. A text adventure was the first thing I wanted to make when I learned BASIC on a VIC-20. Even now, I maintain an interactive fiction SDK for Ruby (https://gamefic.com). Thanks, Scott!
