> I’ve been part of some projects where someone external to the team went on a crusade to shut our work down because they disagreed with it. When we pushed through, shipped it, and it worked well they lost a lot of credibility.
I went through this at a corporate job not too long ago for the first time. One of the more insane things I've dealt with so far in my career. I know life isn't always sunshine and rainbows, but up to that point I'd never seen that level of naked, antisocial self-interest in an org that was ostensibly created to allow people to cooperate toward solving some problem for our customers. Call me naive, but it was really disheartening.
> I work in manufacturing and spend a lot of time talking to the people on the factory floor.
Before the pandemic, I used to work doing software for a manufacturing startup and _loved_ that part of it.
I loved hacking something up for the folks on the floor that helped them automate some tedium. They were always so appreciative, not just of the result but also the attention we paid them.
Most of them came from "traditional" manufacturing backgrounds and the way they told it, it was like we were the first software people to ever pay attention to them and the issues they were experiencing.
We weren't even building crazy stuff for them. Most of it was pretty simple, but the bar was _so low_ they were always amazed whenever we were able to give them _anything_ that helped. It was awesome.
First, all of what you say is true. I'm going to try to add a little context as someone who is here on the ground, in the city in question.
There is the imminent threat of mass death, and no one here is under any illusions about it.
Every ICE agent is armed, and most have ready access to automatic weapons. These are not well-trained members of an elite organization with a storied, patriotic culture. ICE is a personalist paramilitary organization, and the president has indicated that these ICE agents are immune from consequences, even if they kill people. These are people who volunteered knowing they were going to go into American cities and do violence to people they perceive as their political enemies.
Most of these agents are inexperienced, jittery, poorly trained new recruits away from home. They aren't locals. Their nexus of power and governance isn't local. These are not our community members, they aren't from here, they don't know us or care about us, so they do not empathize with us.
In addition to this, the American citizenry is shockingly well armed. Because everyone involved is so well armed, everybody is slightly touchy about this descending into rioting, because there is a very short path from light rioting to what would essentially amount to civil war. The costs of such any such violence will overwhelmingly be borne by the innocent people who live here, and we know it.
So, people are trying to strike a balance of making sure these people know they aren't welcome here while trying to prevent the situation from spiraling into one in which some terrified agent mag-dumps a crowd of protestors and causes a chain reaction that results in truly catastrophic mass death.
It's also worth noting that one function of brownshirts and blackshirts is to provoke violence against themselves, seeking to retroactively justify their existence and to justify a further crackdown.
Say all you want about how any protest, no matter how peaceful will be vilified (it will) or about how the entire foundation is built on lies (it is), but we still have some real elections coming up, and the imagery of ICE brutalizing someone who's clearly not an immigrant, not violent, not obstructing is much more rhetorically effective than that of armed clashes between government and non-governmental forces.
And as you said, many of us are still convinced that this can be solved at least partially rhetorically and electorally.
It's the social media evolution of non-violent confrontation, with the similar goal of making it impossible for any visual image or recording of a confrontation to seem anything other than ridiculous to the average viewer and laying bare the "violence inherent in the system" (as it were).
There is no precedent for this. The executive lacks the authority. It would require Congress to enact a law, and this is easier said than done. The states run elections, and while the feds have some input on how elections for federal office are conducted, it is quite limited.
The vast majority of the population is relying on these protections holding.
> There is no precedent for this. The executive lacks the authority. It would require Congress to enact a law,
Does this actually matter in practice? It seems like the administration has done a bunch of things that normally requires Congress to do something, yet they were able to and I don't see anyone getting arrested. The executive have lacked the authority for lots of things, yet it doesn't seem to stop them.
I'm not saying you're wrong, in theory. But in practice it seems like those things aren't actually stopping anyone, at least not yet.
The executive lacks the authority to do more than 99% of the things done in 2025. Just about all of it is blatantly illegal or unconstitutional.
But, turns out, there is no enforcement mechanism against any of this. There is nobody that can put a stop to the illegal behavior. The legislative branch and the judicial branch can write sternly worded letters, but they have no army to enforce obedience.
Thank you a lot for taking the time to share what you see there, I really appreciate it. All we can hope for is that it gets better, and that there are genuine people out there who care about others in their community, who all help each other when needed. It's really sad to hear about the realization of how quickly it could spiral but considering the situation, it's real and make sense. Thank you and good luck!
What I feared would happen appears to be happening on Saturday: anti-immigrant anti-muslim folks from outside the city and outside the state are gathering to rally in the Minneapolis Cedar-Riverside neighborhood and cause trouble.
The federal administration will use this to ratchet up the violence against peaceful protesters like myself, who are simply trying to stand up for our neighbors and friends and our city and our state. We have whistles and cell phones. The federal government has guns and is killing us.
Last night a man was shot by ICE agents, who were (reportedly) attacked with shovel(s) while trying to capture the man, injuring one ICE agent.
BEFORE this began we had 7 million people protesting simultaneously nationwide—they are "out on the street". Minneapolis has organized hundreds into rapid response teams against ICE. The killings get more news than the protests, particularly as much of the media has been bought up by republican owners.
In Philadelphia, residents are being filmed patrolling with automatic weapons in advance of ICE supposedly heading there next. Read what @asa400, another local like myself, is saying in another comment to parent.
Many locals on social media are cheering on the shootings. America is incredibly polarized right now. It's not like all the public is against the government. Nearly half of those most likely to vote in past elections support this. “It wasn’t Hitler or Himmler who abducted me, beat me, and shot my family. It was the shoemaker, the milkman, the neighbor, who were given a uniform....” —Karl Stojka, Auschwitz survivor EDIT: added "(reportedly)" and rearranged sentence
>Last night ICE agents were attacked with shovels, injuring one. A man was shot.
We don't know if the shovel thing is true, video has emerged that doesn't show the shooting but does show the victim's family's 911 call in which they claim the agent shot through the door at the fleeing victim.
>Every ICE agent is armed, and most have ready access to automatic weapons. These are not well-trained members of an elite organization with a storied, patriotic culture. ICE is a personalist paramilitary organization, and the president has indicated that these ICE agents are immune from consequences, even if they kill people.
This is what terrified me: Not that the ICE officer shot the woman in the car. But what happened afterwards. That he muttered "fucking bitch" after shooting her, that he walked nonchalantly after shooting a person, and everybody was recording him. This person goes to his car and drives just like that ...
I think the difference with Europe is that many countries have been through a form of this authoritarianism before, Franco in Spain for example, and have fought wars over it. They never want to see it happen again. The US hasn't experienced war on its soil since the Civil War and has no idea what an authoritarian government is really like. So most Americans either 1) believe the propaganda of a "strong" America (just like the Germans who supported Hitler), 2) think it's not that bad so long as they still have their cheeseburgers (so to speak), 3) think that it's pretty bad but there's nothing they can really do or it's not worth risking life and limb over, or 4) are horrified by where we're going and willing to risk life and limb to stop it. The latter are a very small group, whereas in Europe they'd be much larger. Europe already has a history of nationwide worker strikes whereas that has never been done in the US (also much more difficult being such a large country, but even statewide general strikes haven't happened).
eh, it's mostly racism. White america doesn't have to take to the streets with guns.they just have to yell at their peckerwood gop reps to impeach. Not a peep out of the red states though. they all wanted this.
> Making GitHub actions runners more reliable, stable and economical would hurt Microsoft.
Can you explain this one a bit? I know some folks who would absolutely increase their spend if Actions runners were better. As it stands I've seen folks trying to move off of them.
This makes no sense. If they were better and cost less I would use them for even more work. I'd run more tests, more kinds of tests, more builds, etc. This is classic Jevons paradox territory.
Gh actions runners had a dubious implementation of sleep that would cause runners to hang on 100% usage for weeks/months. A simple fix was proposed and neglected for 10 years.
This discussion resurfaced recently with zig abandoning GitHub entirely and criticizing this specific issue.
A fix was them merged following an announcement that self hosted runners will now be charged by the minute. Of course this two facts are totally independent but yeah, yeah, sure.
How does this support your point? If we're saying "they fixed it because there was pressure to"... okay? That's the parents point - tons of people are going to move off over bad performance, and Github was incentivized to fix it when people started moving off.
If Github's incentive was to keep it slow... we wouldn't have seen exactly what you're describing.
The fix already existed and was neglected for a decade. It was a 3 lines of bash code.
The big would commonly make a runner hang forever unnoticed, on a platform that charged by the minute.
One minute hanging, was one minute charged.
The fix that would drop considerably the amount of total minutes charged was immediately followed by charging self hosted runners by the minute.
>GitHub incentive was to make it fast.
They charge by the minute. The faster it completes the action, less money. Runner go fast pocket go low
This is one of the consequences of outsourcing this (and other capabilities) to the private sector.
Many governments simply don’t have the skill and political will to invest in these kinds of capabilities, which puts them at the mercy of private actors that do. Not saying this is good or bad, just trying to describe it as I see it.
Governments just can't come to grips with how much money software engineers make.
Paying a contractor $x million? Yeah no problem, projects are projects, they cost what they cost. Does that $x million pay for 5x fewer people than it would in construction or road repair? We don't know, we don't care, this is the best bid we got for the requirements, and in line with what similar IT projects cost us before.
Paying a junior employee $100k? "We can't do that, the agency director has worked here for 40 years, and he doesn't make that much."
Variants of this story exist in practically every single country. You can make it work with lower salaries through patriotism, but software engineers in general are one of the less patriotic professions out there, so this isn't too easy to do.
> Paying a junior employee $100k? "We can't do that, the agency director has worked here for 40 years, and he doesn't make that much."
I can assure you that junior software engineers in Italy or anywhere else in the EU make nowhere near that amount of money. In fact, few of even the most senior software engineers make that amount of money anywhere in the EU (in Switzerland or the UK they might see such salaries, at the higher tiers).
Maybe not junior engineers, but it's quite common to make more than $100k in Denmark nowadays. According to the Danish Society of Engineers[0], the median salary for a CS Bachelor graduating in 2025 was 51 000 DKK / month, which is $95 000 USD / year. The average raise received by a privately employed Danish engineer was 5% last year[1], so you'd expect to reach $100k with two years experience.
And, to support miki123211's point, the Danish government has had continuing problems hiring software engineers for the past decade, leading to a number of IT scandals.
> in Switzerland they might see such salaries, at the higher tiers
Putting UK and Switzerland in the same pot is wrong, the pay scales are totally different. 100k$ is 80k CHF which is entry level salary for a SWE. The difference between Switzerland and US is at senior level (reaching 160k CHF is much more difficult than reaching 200k$).
The figures I gave were in-line with the US (as that's what most of this audience understands), but if you scale everything by a certain factor, the entire principle holds basically anywhere.
Not really. US programming salaries are much higher than most other engineering and specialist positions, which makes it harder for the government to hire good programmers.
However, programming salaries here in the EU are much more in line with other specialist salaries, which the government already hires many of. So there is no significant problem in hiring programmers at competitive rates for government work. The bigger problem, and the reason this doesn't usually happen, is just ideological opposition to state services, preferring to contract out this type of work instead of building IT infrastructure in-house.
And they get exactly what they pay for. There's zero reason for a competent professional to stick around with that kind of pay any longer than strictly necessary (aka until their own gig or freelancing takes off).
Not just governments, that same kind of greed exists in private companies too.
The only way to make good money while being an employee is to have your buddy spin up a "vendor" offering overpriced bullshit and shill it within your company. In exchange, you also spin up a "vendor" and your buddy shills it at his company.
This might explain why there are sooooooooo many vps providers/cloud providers, this might be one valid reason as to why.
I am sure that this might not be the only reason but still, its a valid reason for many. Do you know of companies/people which do this and how widespread this practise is?
To me it still feels like malicious compliance tho for what its worth.
I said this in jest as a reaction to what post-tax SWE salaries in Europe top out at, all while the same companies have no problem burning insane money on vendors. There is zero incentive to do good work as an employee as it won't be compensated anywhere near what even a shoddy vendor gets paid.
But given the rise of many SaaSes selling exactly the same thing every full-stack web framework used to provide for free - think Auth0, Okta, etc, it may very well be happening.
Do you have a specific use case you're curious about? It's the most widely deployed database software of all time. https://sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html
Also just a note: BEGIN CONCURRENT is not in mainline SQLite releases. You need to build your own from a branch. Not a huge deal but just something to note.
Additionally, they have built-in distribution and integration for their products. I don’t know how folks don’t see that as a massive advantage.
It’s like Microsoft and Internet Explorer in the 90s but on a much larger scale both in the breadth (number of distribution channels) and depth (market share of those channels in their respective verticals).
> Allegedly every dollar you spent on an engineer is potentially worth 10x(?) what it was a couple years ago. Meaning your profit per engineer could soar, but tech companies decided they don't want more profit?
Exactly, so many of these claims are complete nonsense. I'm supposed to believe that boards/investors would be fine with companies doing massive layoffs to maintain flat/minuscule growth, when they could keep or expand their current staffing and massively expand their market share and profits with all this increased productivity?
It's ridiculous. If this stuff had truly increased productivity at the levels claimed we would see firms pouring money into technical staff to capitalize on this newfound leverage.
> the unexpected overperformance of GDP isn’t directly attributed AI but it is very much in the “how did that happen?” conversation.
We spent an amount of money on data centers that was so large that it managed to overcome a self-imposed kick in the nuts from tariffs and then some. The amount of money involved rivals the creation of the railroad system in the United States. Of course GDP overperformed in that scenario.
Where did AI tool use show up in the productivity numbers?
Productivity increase is what showed in the numbers. AI is the partial attribution chair Powell gave for the reason. Quotes from December meeting:
"Reporter: ...do you believe that we’re experiencing a positive productivity
shock, whether from AI or policy factors or whatever?"
"Powell: So, yeah, I mean, I never thought I would see a time when we had, you know, five, six years of 2 percent productivity growth. This is higher. You know, this is definitely higher. And it was—before, it could be attributed to AI. I think you—I also think if you look at what AI can do and if you use it in your personal life, as I imagine many of us have, you can see the prospects for productivity. I think it makes people who use it more productive. It may make other people have to find other jobs, though. So it could have productivity implications"
And:
"Reporter: If I could just follow up on the SEP. You have a whole lot of—big increase in the growth numbers, but not a big decline in the unemployment numbers. And is that an AI factor in there?"
"Powell: So it is—the implication is obviously higher productivity. And some of that may be AI."
He also hedges in places, hesitant to say "Yes that's the reason". I'm not sure anything in the data sets they use could directly capture it as the reason so that's too high a bar for evidence- to require some line item in the reports with a direct attribution. He could be wrong, it might not be AI, but I don't have any reason to thing his sense of things is wrong either.
I went through this at a corporate job not too long ago for the first time. One of the more insane things I've dealt with so far in my career. I know life isn't always sunshine and rainbows, but up to that point I'd never seen that level of naked, antisocial self-interest in an org that was ostensibly created to allow people to cooperate toward solving some problem for our customers. Call me naive, but it was really disheartening.
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