GNOME is my perfect DE. I love how it actively tries to stay out of my way.
I have no interest in KDE. It looks a little too much like Windows for me, and my time is limited, so I'm looking for out-of-the-box solutions and as little configuration as I can get away with.
PostgreSQL every time, unless you have a specific reason, or as already pointed out, you're sure you don't just need SQLite.
PSQL in my experience has vastly better tooling, community, and is ahead of the curve tech wise. Same with extensions availability. Or perhaps you need to move away from it to say CockroachDB, or similar which is much easier.
Meta point (pun unintended): the gravy times are over for us SW engineers, and I won’t be surprised if looking back many will see the past decade as a wasted opportunity for some sort of collective bargaining, or a greater seat at the table of businesses
It could well be that 50% of CEOs are always "considering" cutting jobs in the next 6 months. I mean, I suspect that this number is higher than usual because, well, it does look like we're heading into a recession. But if I'm interpreting this number based on my perception of the recession, then this number is useless at the main point of this article: informing me on whether we're heading into a recession or not.
I actually hate people disavowing themselves of responsibility here. While there is definitely some shady stuff in Crypto (particularly NFTs, which seem to be 99% scams), there's a certain level of personal responsibility required here.
People saw the meteoric rise of Bitcoin and got a serious case of FOMO. Everyone wanted to be on the next Bitcoin. This, ultimately, is the American Dream: to get rich by doing nothing other than getting lucky and being able to say how smart you are. Not by creating any kind of value.
People should be honest and admit (at least to themselves) that they didn't understand what they were investing in let alone believe in it fundamentally. They just wanted to get rich.
I think this is going to be one of those things where we learn that nobody actually cares about any of that outside these forums. MP3s were garbage, early camera phones were garbage, Snap picture quality generally is garbage, bluetooth headphones suck, all of these things were and are decried by the tech community, and it turns out that people just don't care, because even at garbage quality it's still cool to have a robot take your picture.
why not go further and call it "neo-feudalism"? The infrastructure providers are the territorial lords that control the arable land, the aristocracy of the digital world. Corporations that rent this infrastructure to build services on it are their vassals. They may claim to be freemen or nobility as they pay for their fief in money not in services and allegiance, but most of them are ministeriales that can't just move elsewhere without significant risk to business continuity (some can, like a oil mega-corp that just rents some IT infra). Lastly we have the cloud engineers, the serfs at the bottom of the pyramid, who work the land they don't own and have to give part of the profits of their work to the upper class in exchange for the opportunity to make a living on their infrastructure.
Aside from legitimate DMCAs what I'm worried about is losing backupped files of any sort because some rogue individual files a complaint on stuff they don't own or because of an ML error and an inexistent customer service by Google. Also I don't really like the service to sneak onto any files I upload. What alternatives do we have for cloud file backup? I already do full backups, need something to sync files between devices.
An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.
The Mexican replied, “only a little while.” The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.
The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?” The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.”
The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”
The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”
To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.” “But what then?” Asked the Mexican.
The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”
“Millions – then what?”
The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”
>If FOSS was broken, the internet as we know it today wouldn’t exist; the countless marvels of technology that we take for granted and techno-economies that thrive on them wouldn’t exist;
I guess I just vehemently disagree. Nearly all of the early open-source software that made the internet possible was produced in universities. The only reason it was sustainable was because it was professors being paid by the university, or students doing it for free. Implying that means it's viable for all these other projects that were created and maintained outside of a university setting is just not accurate. There's also this fallacy of: it worked this long so it will continue working forever.
For me the long and short of it is: the only way I can foresee open source working in the way the purists want is if there is a universal basic income. SOMEONE has to pay the bills, and as we've seen time and again, hoping to feed your family on donations is a fool's errand. With UBI, artists of all kinds (including developers) can pursue things that would otherwise be impossible. Without it, we're left with the constant push and pull of people either burning out maintaining stuff in their spare time, or hoping a given corporate maintainer wants the same features and functionality as the community.
I think it's worse than that, as some of the bags they are holding are full of junk.
Yet they can't just throw them away, because their peers are not confident enough to support the conclusion that there's nothing of value in there. A litany of "How can we be sure that XXXX" are thrown at the expert to clear, creating continuous inertia.
The choice becomes to keep holding the bags eternally, or go elsewhere they can start fresh.
I agree with you that most developers do their best work after 6-8 months and that developers get less productive after 24-36 months but for totally different reasons. Developers don't get 'lazy', 'bored' or 'comfortable', they get overburdened by the company.
It is common knowledge that the average developer leaves after the 2 year mark. When that happens, everyone else is left holding the bag and they become the new experts.
Companies are full of self created abandonware.
Another person leaves and it is now two extra things that the vet has to become the expert on. Then three, then four and on and on. Next thing you know, your vet isn't getting any work done because they are holding too many bags. As the expert, they are in too many meetings trying to keep other people productive. They are pulled into too many critical issues and they are trying to mentor new developers in your ever revolving door of new people.
But they are unproductive
No. They are keeping your company afloat and you aren't compensating them for it.
As far as I know... nobody at Amazon when I was there got taken off "Focus" (whatever it was called in the past). They only ended up leaving the company.
But that said, I think Amazon had a very long interview process. Too long. (But I hear it's gotten better.) And so to grow fast, they need an easy way to exit people... that's not a bad thing.
Interviews are never a great way to hire people. Working with them tells you a lot more about personality and work ethic and commitment.
From what I've seen, I don't disagree with any of the employees that had been on Focus. Like generally speaking, we showed the people the door who needed to be shown the door.
For the good of the team, some people just don't fit, or they distract... a lot of it was personality, but a lot of it was really they were lacking the Ownership quality we needed.
If you have someone waiting for 12-levels of approval, they just slow down the others. I don't know quite how to say it, but it was a common thing you'd get someone from a big company... and they had various processes in mind when doing anything. We need that "Bias for Action" instead of anyone just looking to do things the way they did them at past jobs.
Or we had a guy who thought, "We're Amazon, we print money... let's just solve all our problems by throwing money at them." Oof. Amazon is, silly as it sounds, a startup at scale. And their Leadership Principles really speak to this.
Anyway, my 2 cents, as a former Amazon employee... It's good for any company -- especially one that wants to grow fast -- to exit about 5-10% of their workforce every year. Find the ones that aren't doing what's needed... and encourage them to go work somewhere else where they can add value. I never saw anyone bullied, I never saw anyone put on "Focus" who shouldn't have been there.
Playing devil's advocate... given so few people get off "Focus" plans, what's the point of letting people know they are on it? Kind of just seems like a waste of everyone's time. Some conversations just burn hours, no?
Amazon is a strange company. After having spent 4 years there I am convinced that they hate their employees. They want you to burnout.
Just look at the stock vesting schedule, its 5, 15, 40, 40. First two years you barely get any stock, and I believe the average time someone stays at amazon is around 1.5 years (I don't have latest data so maybe this is wrong)
On top of that, you have the pathetic 401k match (50% upto 2% of paycheck). Amazon's contribution to 401k vests after 3 years in the job, so you leave within the first 2 and you don't get anything. Not to mention the base salary cap of $160k.
Add to that the horrible WLB, I knew teams who'd get 40 high severity tickets in a week (And there are teams with much worse WLB). You are constantly waking up at 2-3AM in the night, and fixing fires for no extra pay.
Many times, Upper Management would dictate a timeline for your project, doesn't matter if it takes 4 months, we need it in 2 so get it done. This obviously leads to bad code. But there is no incentive within the company to fix/improve codebase, every thing is taped together, and On Call is there to tape things up some more so that they stay fixed. Even if you take the time and fix some of the tech debt, the company is not going to care and its not going to reward you.
Speaking of rewards, if the company stock grows (which it has for the past several years), and because of this growth you stand to make more than your Amazon decided Target Compensation, then you won't get any base salary increase even if you were the best employee Amazon has ever seen. You might get additional stocks, but those will vest 2 year later. So basically, you did great work for the company in 2021, as a result the company stock grows enough that you are not out of range for your role's compensation, so they don't increase your salary, and they give you stocks that vest in 2024, 3 years after the you did the work.
More often than not, I felt that most amazon employees (current and past) hate amazon. I have never seen a company being hated by its own workers with such fervor.
Some here are being honest, so I'll be brutally honest: Covid has upset the master-slave relationship, and they're realizing they're giving up too much control. Yes, even the supposedly forward-thinking, progressive tech world.
It's so much easier to ignore the BS of "company culture," "a new family" and other such nonsense when working remote. Plenty of people here have outright stated they work as a way to fund their lives and they couldn't care less about "the mission," "changing the world" and other similar lies. When WFH you only need to put on a show (and sometimes pants!) when on a video call, then you can relax and get your work done and shut out the BS.
