That was clearly intended to permanently damage/destroy the equipment.
Coding a time bomb into the website would be illegal, but they can't force you back to work to fix a bug/outage that happens to occur during the strike.
Just saying, if it's built acceptably well, it shouldn't require engineers putting out fires constantly to not go down. But I'm sure you're right that I'm underestimating the complexity of the system as it's been constructed.
And I guess it's not the case that no one is touching anything, it's being updated constantly.
In particular, tomorrow night is going to have a lot of things needing rapid tweaking; some random county in Missouri is gonna somehow have an emoji in their election count CSV because someone hit the wrong key, some new microservice will choke under the once-every-four-years load, etc.
I think that saying this phenomenon is change "for the sake of tech" or for "progress" elides the fact that it is good for some people. Specifically, it is good for auto executives and their shareholders (in their capacity as executives and shareholders, though presumably many of them are drivers as well). It's a cost measure that makes customers' lives worse (and more dangerous) for the entire life of the car in exchange for pennies in their pocket now. This isn't technology getting its way or anything, but people using their power to further their own interests with indifference to the interests of others. That's not new, just the details are.
Personally I really love the combination of both. I want to use physical buttons for things like signalling, lights etc. And I want to use software on screens for things like navigation, music, analytics etc.
That's a marketing issue "look OUR car has this shiny big touchscreen now!" which car manufacturers think -- or thought -- users would prefer and buy (with Tesla leading the way). That may change if there is user blowback. (Just drove a new BMW Series 4 the other day and it had the big touch screen but retained the buttons/controls because they're better for settings you change often or while driving. Touchscreen is better for settings you change less frequently or while not driving (like charging).
I went remote a few years before Covid and I felt a bit isolated, but then I realized I had too much of my social life tied up in my job. Having hobbies and interests outside of work is so much better for my mental health and I wouldn’t swap it for anything, especially a 40 min commute.
I also wouldn’t force anyone to go back to office so I could see the humm of their work. If you need that there’s co working spaces for that reason, or places which have in office options.
Large companies mandating everyone work in office is purely a flex for control and probably to save their property investments.
As a layoff strategy, I would expect it to be counterproductive. The people most likely to quit skew toward high-performing individuals who feel confident in their ability to get a remote job elsewhere. And vice versa.
A lot of companies aren't trying to hire the "best" programmers. Places like Amazon won't let engineers use highly-skilled techniques anyway.
The high-profile RTO places tend to hire in bulk for programmers that will do as product tells them. Weeding out people who value quality over conformity is a goal.
I work with an Amazon engineer who has been working on storage systems since 1990 (NT kernel) and is an absolute wizard. He could probably write a durable concurrent B-tree in an afternoon.
That's not always true. Layoffs can spur growth if you are dropping dead weight, for example by eliminating under performing business units, consolidating redundant functionality, or simply correcting previous bad decisions that led to over-hiring.
If you are looking for freeing resources that you can redirect, firing your "resources" won't help redirecting them... unless you think you don't need the people that are working for a while at your company and can get better ones by hiring.
But if it's the second one, well, you'd be stupid and my best possible explanation up there doesn't apply anymore.
Firing 50 employees with skillsets you don't need to hire 50 employees with the skillsets you actually need will very much help redirect your resources. It's pretty tough to transmute an accountant into an engineer.
Those aren't layoffs - at least as they're commonly implemented - they're performance based firings. Layoffs are done in a mass manner and tend to be highly inaccurate - they're often based off of BS kpis.
Performance based firings are when you fire individuals for their performance. Every example I gave is a layoff where large numbers of positions are eliminated and the employees let go regardless of their performance.
You have a point: the best engineers do tend to have an underdeveloped social life. On the other hand, the ones that love to suck up are the ones with the great social skills.
Again, sample of one, so take with the grain of salt, do not draw generic conclusions, etc.
Oh, I'm certainly taking it with a giant pile of salt alright, because what you said was insulting nonsense pointed directly at remote workers. And you can't say don't draw generic conclusions when you tried to do exactly that.
The very first words of my initial message warned you I am talking strictly about my team.
I do know excellent engineers working solely remote. Not on my team though, and they are freelancing contractors. Different organizations, different dynamics.
They feel behind because they didn't have the smart guy with a new idea a few years back, and HE decided to work at a place which started as open.
Playing catch up and trying to attract talent from the hot-new-thing OpenAI requires incentives beyond lots of money. I contend actually being open helps.
I'm sure that's one reason Facebook has an open source model, scientists can care about ethics and could be attracted to openness.
> They feel behind because they didn't have the smart guy with a new idea a few years back, and HE decided to work at a place which started as open.
The "Attention Is All You Need" guys all worked at Google. Google is where they are despite having the smart guys with a new idea a few years back.
Of course, IMHO it wouldn't have have helped Google if they'd kept the transformer architecture secret. They'd have fumbled it because they didn't realise what they had.
What Google did was sit on their ass, not deigning to release anything. In the meantime, OpenAI became a $150 billion company. And Anthropic came out with Claude, and Facebook with Llama, and Mistral with their models.
Only then did Google realise there might be something to this LLM stuff - so they responded with Bard, a product so poorly received they later had to completely rebrand it. Looks like they didn't have a "sentient" model up their sleeve after all. Then the updated, rebranded model had a bunch of image generation embarrassments of its own.
Admittedly, they have recovered somewhat since then; they're second on some performance leaderboards, which is respectable.
But there was a real tortoise-and-hare situation where they thought they were so far ahead they had time for a nap, until they got overtaken. Any lead they had from inventing transformers and being the only people with TPUs has been squandered.
I have the impression they regarded generative AI as too dangerous. Before the success of ChatGPT, they never considered making PaLM or LaMDA or Chinchilla or Imagen publicly available until they saw themselves in a competitive disadvantage.
There were these ancient Ukranian mega cities 6-4k years ago that stood for thousands of years. They had gardens, and what appeared to be a complex social life. Notably, they had no walls, meaning there was nothing to protect themselves from. Peace.
So yeah, there sounds a lot better. No walls to stop friends from coming, or you from leaving if you happen to not like it.
Just because we lack imagination doesn't mean a better world can't exist and didn't exist somewhere in the past.
Ignoring whether or not that actually existed, that's as useful as saying "I'd rather be a lottery winner or a king".
The point is that the average person is better off today than they were any time in the past by many metrics, e.g. life expectancy, quality of life or access to healthcare.
Nobody said the status quo doesn't need to be changed, only that we should appreciate the pax americana despite its faults.
Sony & MS aided in the decline of discs by making a disc drive an expensive add on and having every game need an online connection or day one update to fix bugs.
I'm sure they had a marketing plan of making $90 bucks off a $10 buck disc drive and then go "oh wow, look, only 30% of people spent an extra $100 bucks!"
It also enables them to effectively kill the used game market when you have to buy all games new through their store (or a code). You can’t even share a game with a friend, unless you share their whole account, which is way more friction.
They were also following consumer trends, digital purchases were already getting very popular before they introduced diskless versions of the consoles.
If this happens enough/gets enough coverage you’ll have Tesla owners themselves asking to have their rights violated automatically without the need for towing!
We really don’t need innovation in every corner of our lives. It could have just stayed as normal landlines phones with a fix cost paid by the prisons.
I don’t think the free market has a ton to offer for basic services that should be guaranteed.
Look at American internet, plenty of supposed options but terrible rates and performances compared to Europe. Yes we’re more spread out but that doesn’t begin to explain service sucking in a city with limited options.
Has the Raspberry Pi tripled in price since launch? I was skeptical of all these threads of “this is better” but it doesn’t seem like it’s as ridiculously affordable as it once was.
I don’t think this is the outlook of an ally.
I think the answer to that is a strong union able to bring down the website and get management to the table.
This is why we all need unions.