> Did Scala just start winning before Kotlin was around?
Scala has about 2% mind share on the JVM after ten years in existence, I would say that not only is it not winning but its time has passed.
Ceylon is one year old, Kotlin is not even out yet, there is plenty of time for either of these two to gain some solid mind share.
Or maybe not. Maybe Java is going to reign supreme for quite a while. Whatever the replacement of Java will eventually be, I'm pretty sure it won't be Scala.
Your advice is very humane and sensitive but it's definitely siding with the employees and not the employer. If you're an executive at that company in charge of doing the lay off, this is terrible advice.
Not trying to be heartless here, just trying to point out that there are two sides to all stories, including tragic ones.
> You don't want to force them into signing anything,
Actually, you do. The more you give the employee a chance to mull over the whole thing, the more likely they are to lawyer up and hit you with a wrongful termination lawsuit. As the employer, I'd go one step further and if the CFO has allowed for a severance package of n dollars, I would initially offer them 90% of n if they sign right away and if they don't, give them the full n. Anything to get things settled right here, right now, in the room.
This is very interesting to me. Does that mean that if I'm ever in the unfortunate position of being fired I should not sign anything and lawyer up?
Or if I feel like I don't mind signing right away, should I bargain very hard "I'll sign it here and we'll be done but you'll have to give me 150% of what you are offering"?
I think what he's saying goes along with not being a sucker and taking the first offer without first finding out your negotiating position. Hold out a little, or a lot, depending on your counterpart. If nothing else, it's probably good to say "I'm not sure I'm comfortable signing this on such short notice, can I have a few hours to think about it?" and gauge their response. You might immediately make a few extra bucks for just being aware of your options.
Most important is probably knowing the company and the individual you are dealing with. It's easy for people to misconstrue aggression as anger, which may or may not help your case.
Even if that's the case, they're a very visible component of Reddit's userbase, to the point that an outsider definitely might see them as representative.
If the default home page and /r/all can all be flooded with posts about her, it's not exactly a small group of extremists.
It only takes about a thousand (net) upvotes to get something to the front page.
So a very small (less than 1%) portion of the visitors can very much get things like "fire Ellen" posts onto the front page, especially when there's no opposing block of voters.
(In other words, there were no passionate defenders of Pao who were eagerly downvoting the posts that trashed her. There were only anti-Pao zealots, and a much larger userbase that simply didn't care much at all. Count me in the latter, FWIW.)
Scala has about 2% mind share on the JVM after ten years in existence, I would say that not only is it not winning but its time has passed.
Ceylon is one year old, Kotlin is not even out yet, there is plenty of time for either of these two to gain some solid mind share.
Or maybe not. Maybe Java is going to reign supreme for quite a while. Whatever the replacement of Java will eventually be, I'm pretty sure it won't be Scala.