I have a lot of family in France, and based on what I've heard from them, the flip-side of those kinds of employment protections is that employers become much more reluctant to hire people (especially young people and people considered higher risk based on background, skills, etc.)
Possible that this attitude (along with many other factors) contributes to the far less developed startup cultures of many Western European countries.
Spain has a 15-days notice for termination and Luxembourg 1-month, France 3 months for IT jobs (I'm French) and I guess employee protection laws are proportional to those figures. So I wonder whether it's essntially France which is considers the employment contract as a blood pact.
I am French. The 3 month notice is when employees want to terminate a contract.
The way the usual contract in IT (CDI) works is: you can have a 4-month trial period, which you can renew once. Then the employer cannot fire you without "serious cause" (and "bad performance" does not qualify).
Some side-effects of that are:
- Employers are afraid to hire, leading to long-term unemployment.
- IT is dominated by huge consultancies (because companies prefer to contract out than hire).
- As an employee, it is almost impossible to rent a flat in Paris during a trial period (because we also have laws that make it impossible to expell people who don't pay their rent).
- Acquisitions are complicated because the acquirer needs to keep the whole team. An exception is companies that go broke (in which case they can fire part of the team and then be acquired).
I understand why we have those laws, they are useful to protect some categories of people. But for higher revenue professions, we would be better off with a contract that is more flexible. More and more people are trying to work around this by creating single-person companies instead of being employed directly, but it is a mess (and the state is doing all it can to make it illegal...).
Collecting miles isn't necessarily focused on earning free flights. The tiered statuses offered by most airlines include a variety of other perks that can make them attractive, and that couldn't readily be achieved via lowest-bidder flying: dedicated lines at airport security, advance boarding, free upgrades, free bags, waived fees, greater flexibility to change a ticket, dedicated customer support numbers, etc.
While some of these can be purchased as one-offs, the cost of doing so would probably offset the "cheapest flight" approach, and the convenience of receiving them automatically has some value on its own.
The cost/benefit might still not be there, but it's not as straightforward as the ticket savings vs. free flight savings question you put forward. You have to also bear in mind that many miles hunters are logging some (or most) of their travel on an employer's dime.
Those "benefits" basically amount to an easing up of the legacy airlines' prison-camp style. Why would one want to reward that instead of simply choosing the airlines that treat you more like a person to begin with?
you did. Thanks for answering! I'm definitely the one leading the (small) group of devs who test here. Your article was great motivation for our cause.
Still not disabled! Although at this point we're so habituated to PRs as a team that in practice it never happens. We did finally disable force pushes to master, though. Don't miss those one bit.
Yes, we're absolutely doing code reviews for each PR. Should have mentioned it in the post. Our general policy is to have engineers merge their own PRs, but only after at least 1-2 people have reviewed them (and obviously more for sensitive changes). The dialog that takes place in PRs helps enforce (and sometimes define) our style standards, teach engineers the idioms of a languages they may be new to, and ensure that we're always moving our codebase in the right direction. (They're also a great place to teach people how to write cleaner and less brittle tests!)
Like testing, PRs are one of those things that seems like it will slow you down, but once you learn how to use them they can actually increase velocity (among many other benefits). It's been awesome to watch how good people have gotten at collaborating/communicating via PRs at Airbnb.
Really appreciate this perspective. Reminds me of this quote from Steve Jobs:
"I'm trying to think of a good analogy. When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this transformation is going to make some people uneasy... because the PC has taken us a long way. They were amazing. But it changes. Vested interests are going to change. And, I think we've embarked on that change. Is it the iPad? Who knows? Will it be next year or five years? ... We like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, it's uncomfortable."
It's uncomfortable because it's wrong and there is big resistance. I am part of that resistance.
The transition from the fragmented computer market in the 80's brought relief via standardisation into the clone PC and the rise of the Internet. Now it's fragmenting again into separate walled gardens.
The post-PC era that everyone keeps rabbiting on about is a battle between the big players. We'll all lose and be back to separate non-connected ecosystems, just like the 80's when you had a BBC micro and everyone else had C64's so you couldn't play last ninja...
Its already happened in the mobile space which consists of three ecosystems and some "promoted as ridiculous and unfashionable" old fashioned telephones.
How is more choice and innovation a bad thing? What actual cross-system limitations are you worried about?
I switch from iOS to Android seamlessly, as my digital life is platform agnostic. I am more invested in Google's ecosystem in terms of where my data lives, but until they remove the ability to export/sync that data (e.g. I can download all Drive files at once, and simultaneously convert them to Office or PDF format), I don't feel all that "walled".
It's not more choice, as the only outcome is choosing which garden you are slowly walled into. Gaining market share is the desired outcome only as the shareholders need to see growth.
The innovation stops when you are captive. We all learned this in the 90's with Microsoft. People are quite young or have a short memory I'm sure.
I have no problem with limitations. I have a problem investing time and money in something that cannot be used under my terms. The computer is my minion, not my taskmaster not a convenient pipe to shove content down my throat (I already have a television thank you).
Witness the rise of "web services" that will only work when used with proprietary browsers run on a trusted OS on trusted hardware. Netflix on the Chromebook is a harbinger of things to come.
It's not a harbinger, it's a remnant. Netflix can keep imposing device limitations, but those devices are converging in capabilities and the transition between them is becoming more fluid.
It's in the best interest of companies like Netflix – or a disruptor – to design a service/business model that is in-line w/ the reality of device usage, not to try to change it.
> those devices are converging in capabilities and the transition between them is becoming more fluid.
Transition between authorized/trusted devices is fluid. A concept that did not exist in the recent past (or if it existed, existed only in very obscure niches, like custom test-taking software used in only a few niches of education). That is the point I am making.
This is so great. I submitted a ton of stuff despite having to type my username and email every time. Might be hard to scale, but there's definitely a lot of potential joy in this. Many of the winning words at the moment genuinely made me giggle.
Possible that this attitude (along with many other factors) contributes to the far less developed startup cultures of many Western European countries.