From the Tweet, "Was just on phone with someone who works for FB who described employees unable to enter buildings this morning to begin to evaluate extent of outage because their badges weren’t working to access doors."
Thank you for that well written article. As a curious techie, but someone unfamiliar with the subject, I found it approachable and easy to understand despite the complex topic. Not an easy task -- well done!
Thanks! The Chief Architect on the project messaged me this morning, saying he showed his wife my video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6u_oNIXFuU) on the topic last night and it sounds like she finally gets what he's been working on
I also own a Boox Air and I agree with everything you wrote. It is a device built for specific purposes. I get a ton of use from mine. It sits next to me all day for note taking, and I have my Kindle, Instapaper, and Safari Books apps for reading. I don't use it for anything else but that isn't the intent of the device. If you are looking for something all purpose, as you say, look for something other than eink.
I agree with you but you can't just throw around the phrase "sure it costs some $" as if that isn't a driving force in everything a big company does. My company is going hard into Azure and I'm making the same recommendations as you suggest, but it is a hard sell precisely because of the cost.
Yes, they more or less invented the concept of just in time delivery, but they also suffered supply chain issues after the Fukushima earth quake. After the latter incident they made the risk calculation that inventory of some parts was worth the expense.
Reminds me years ago my company used 16X2 LCD modules for a couple products. You could buy them from two dozen manufacturers. Then one day a Typhoon went over the only factory in the world that made the driver IC's.
We tried to order 100 and were told the lead time was 36 weeks. We got through it with existing stock, scrounging displays from dead boards. Buying different displays and replacing the backlights. Small orders of 10 here, 15 there. And pushing a few customers out a month or two.
Are you really intending to condone illegal activity? Just because their targeting "wealthy" companies? That is like condoning a mugger because he is working in a rich neighborhood and not targeting the impoverished.
I was looking for a solid argument, since I am not able to provide one. So far there are none presented here either.
Are we really going to justify this just by "it is against the law"? So many things are against the law, so many ancient laws demonstrate the inability of humans to create the absolute corpus of ethical behaviours™.
The Kantian categorical imperative goes something like, "act as if the basis of your actions would be made universal law." What happens if everyone conducts denial of service and ransom attacks against anyone they perceive as a legitimate target?
The fact is that these particular situations are much more complex than a false dichotomy of "good" and "evil" corporations, or "large" and "small" corporations.
Take any organization you think is "worthy" of being attacked in this manner, and consider all of the implications of such an attack. Think about the people inside the organization, and those outside of the organization that benefit from that its continued operations.
I think it's fair to say the public opinion of oil companies is fairly low; however, arguably the biggest impact of the Colonial Pipeline attack was not on the executives running the company, but on the end customers of gas stations unable to fuel their vehicles due to the shortage (whether truly real or created by panic). I would argue that everyday workers unable to get to work or to the store to buy food is more important than a few executives not getting their bonuses or having their shares lose value.
This isn't to say that these corporations are above all reproach and should be allowed to continued operating in whatever way they see fit simply because they have employees and customers are relying on them. But it's also the wrong mindset to think that it's OK to attack corporations in this way just because they "deserve it" in some way.
If I heard news that Jeff Bezos bank account was hacked and $50 million dollars were stolen, I don't think I would even bat an eye. When I hear of ransomware shutting down hospital computers I'm furious and want to see these clowns rot in jail. There's clearly a spectrum here of where it starts becoming a heinous act.
The global median household wealth is about $7,500. The median income is around $10,000. To much of the world (making some assumptions based on your presence here on HN), you have more in common with Jeff than you do with much of the world; they might take the same attitude to you.
It's possible the only reason we would disgree if the rest of the world took this attitude is our own greed.
To me what's more obviously wrong whether I'm rich or poor is leaking personal info on employees, HR correspondence etc. I don't know whether this group would since they say it hasn't got that far yet but other groups have.
Extortion, mugging, burglary etc are worse than the "perfect theft" where you move some numbers from one account to another.
I wonder if the people involved believe their own spin that "your boss is the one at fault, would rather you suffer than pay"
Bit of an advocatus diaboli, but… Crimes are crimes because they hurt people. Here we’re talking about just lowering company’s profits; same thing happens naturally due to market forces and nobody complains.
We can have a discussion about ethics and utility if it's a starving person stealing from Jeff Bezos, but these ransomware firms are large-scale organizations just like the companies they're stealing from.
Sure, but it still doesn’t mean the money somehow “loose their value”. It’s just a money transfer between companies; a financial transaction, just a one that’s unlawful.
No matter your technical proficiency, you are a lousy hire. I do not want a developer that is solely interested in work that improves their skills. These projects contribute to the success of the business in one way or another. If you are not invested in understanding why that project is funded and what it will accomplish you will not do the job as well as someone who is engaged and only has half your skills.
This is just a really silly way to think of craftsmanship. Whoever you pay to redo your bathroom doesn't care at all, literally at all, about your motivations behind wanting to redo your bathroom and how you think it'll change your whole morning and evening routines. They don't care. It's their craft. They will redo your bathroom to the best of their abilities and will take pleasure in new or interesting units of work you've included in your bathroom design that they haven't been able to try.
What you're suggesting is just hustle culture nonsense. If you want someone to be invested in your company, give them _equity_. If you won't (and you won't), accept that you're paying for a transactional relationship, not "investment".
This comment makes it seem like you've never worked with a contractor.
I come from a family of contractors (electricians and metalworkers mostly), and every experience I've ever had working with them tell me that they care about understanding. If you ask them to make you a bathroom without any waterproofing they'll ask you if you've gone mad and tell you that you NEED waterproofing, because they understand that you don't want your house to rot. If you say you want a metal frame and you have a drawing. The very first step they will take is to analyze your drawing to see if it makes any sense.
I have never worked with a contractor that just did whatever you told them to, without understanding what you're doing. If they chose to disengage with a problem, it's a conscious choice.
The big differentiator is the ease of understanding. Building a bathroom is relatable. You kinds of intuitively understand why you want a new bathroom, and people understand the sorts of issues a new bathroom can solve. People do NOT understand what new software can solve, and how it solves it. They think software is magic pixie dust that you sprinkle on problems to make them go away. That means we have to do more of the work of helping them map out the solution than a contractor would.
> If you ask them to make you a bathroom without any waterproofing they'll ask you if you've gone mad and tell you that you NEED waterproofing, because they understand that you don't want your house to rot.
Nowhere did I suggest otherwise.
> I've ever had working with them tell me that they care about understanding.
They care about understanding to complete the task at hand. I have never met a contractor that got emotionally invested in whether the cabinets you picked out were the cabinets of your dreams. I've met many contractors that were, in some ways, invested in the buyer being satisfied with their job, but that's not really the same thing.
> I don't care about the project, I care about writing code
this is like the contractor saying they only care about installing cabinets, not helping you model your bathroom.
The point is that you want someone that's going to look at the plan and say "that's going to rot in 2 years", not just do the exact thing requested by the customer and leave
I would disagree. If they knew I was redoing my bathroom to sell the house and know my sink design choice is less saleable than another sink design choice, I would absolutely want this person to tell me as such and would pay extra money to hire a contractor who would say things like that. And then tell everyone I know to hire this contractor, they are worth the money.
This isn't really true IME. The best contractors will understand the goals and motivations for your project, and make suggestions based on their vastly greater experience of ways to improve upon the project.
> This is just a really silly way to think of craftsmanship. Whoever you pay to redo your bathroom doesn't care at all, literally at all, about your motivations behind wanting to redo your bathroom and how you think it'll change your whole morning and evening routines.
This depends on who you hire. I recently built a home and dealt with lots of different contractors with different attitudes. Very often when they needed clarification they would come to me, and very often I would ask them "what would you do if it were your home?".
I worked with companies and workers who I would hire again in a heartbeat - they understood what I wanted from my home and how it would be used. They incorporated this into designs and decisions made on site (because I don't care how well you think you've planned, there are ALWAYS decisions to make one site).
The people I would never work with again were the ones who either never even asked for clarification and simply chose the easiest / cheapest solution to a problem (often surprising me - in a bad way) or when I asked them what they would do in their own home were not interested in engaging with that question - they would respond by asking me again what I wanted.
You may not care if your current employer considers you a bad hire or not, and that's fine. In our industry, in this market, you can get away with that. Some of us hold ourselves to a higher standard.
I remember hearing a story from a structural engineer who was disappointed with a builder on a commercial site. He took him around the site and showed him some of the sub-standard work and said to him, "This is not your best work, is it?" The builder responded with, "You should have told me you wanted my best."
I've seen this in software too. People push for cheaper and faster, but often that will only come at the cost of quality. There are good reasons to take on technical debt. For example, to get to market without the funds to avoid technical debt, in the hope you can pay down that debt with revenue flowing in. But there are seldom conversations with business people to negotiate on the quality, time, and cost trade-offs.
> You may not care if your current employer considers you a bad hire or not, and that's fine. In our industry, in this market, you can get away with that. Some of us hold ourselves to a higher standard.
This is just silly. Your argument is that you would care if your employer developed ridiculous and contrived metrics and then assessed your value based on them? I don't really think your holier-than-thou statement makes much sense in that capacity.
As I said, equity drives investment. If you don't own a percentage of the success, you're trading time for money. This is neither new nor controversial. Any suggestions otherwise are, again, hustle culture propaganda.
Yep, I do. But lots of employers don't offer any form of equity as compensation. The same employers that demand their employees to be "invested" in the company.
It’s not strange if you’ve worked out that people who are invested are easier to exploit.
There’s a fine line between having to cajole a bunch of disaffected developers into getting work done, and explaining that I can’t give you a raise because it would ruin the company and you really should think about what’s best for the team. Or could you just work late on Friday, or cancel your honeymoon.
A while back we replaced the windows in our house with new, more efficient windows. The workers who showed up were the usual contract construction labor folks; generic company truck, not a whole lot of enthusiasm. Every replacement window came in a box. Every window wasn't the same, but neither were they very much different. A fair amount of pessimistic banter when they thought the customer wasn't in earshot.
Then one of them suggested that we install a bay window instead of the boring thing we'd had planned, and when it costed out reasonably, they got right on it. The tools came out, the enthusiasm was turned on, and a couple of them spent half a day building an absolutely beautiful window that I and our pets value to this day.
Good workers doing stupid, boring jobs are likely a resource that companies are not taking advantage of. People are more capable, and sometimes you should let the reigns loose (maybe most of the time).
How many devs out there are just faking it? People have learned to answer the "Why do you want to work here with?" questions "I have a passion about X, because Y."
It is like med school interviews. Everyone knows the answer to "why do you want to be a doctor?" is "I like science and want to help people." along with an anecdote proving that when tons go to medicine as it is a well paid and stable career.
I think there's a bit of a spectrum between "I don't give a rat's ass about you or your project" and "This is my new life's passion".
From my own experience I find that yeah, job interview answers are mostly self-marketing BS. But I do also care about the quality of the end product beyond just having fun with the tech.
This is HN though. This is the same level of conversation at a trade show or over drinks. If you can’t lay out your dispassion bluntly (even if just for effect) here then where can you?
I would not encourage anyone to talk to their boss the way GP is talking. But these are peers talking, and if you don’t think convos like this happen, then you haven’t seen them or you’ve dismissed them. If you haven’t seen them, I can only assume nobody trusts you enough to vent.
I like to think most software engineers have at least some interest in what they're investing most of their waking hours in. Sounds miserable otherwise!
I like to think most software engineers don't work 56 hour weeks. Someone can take interest in their craft without taking interest in a product. And many people are happy enough working to live instead of living to work.
> These projects contribute to the success of the business in one way or another.
If you want your workers to care about the success of your business, then pay them with the success of business (e.g. shares). If you are only paying an hourly salary, you're not entitled to anything but their hour's output.
Having been on the receiving end of shares, devs are in an extremely bad position to estimate their valuation. It’s like being a passenger on a train and being asked to judge which direction it goes. And I’m a product-oriented dev who loved the business side and loved doing plenty of UX interviews.
Being now on the donating end of shares, employees know much better how to value the gross pay.
No, I think they're looking for people who are intrinsically motivated by the drive to do a professional job applying their craft, rather than to use a project as an opportunity to experiment with technology that they want to learn for their own curiosity or career trajectory.
In the same way, when you hire a contractor build you a garage, you look for someone who will use their experience to build a good garage with the best materials and techniques keeping in mind the priorities of the owner, like maintainance, cost, appearance, resalability, etc. You don't want someone showing up who just views your garage primarily as an opportunity to learn about this new construction material they've heard about that doesn't help you.
> No, I think they're looking for people who are intrinsically motivated by the drive to do a professional job applying their craft, rather than to use a project as an opportunity to experiment with technology that they want to learn for their own curiosity or career trajectory.
A desire to learn is not a desire to experiment.
> In the same way, when you hire a contractor build you a garage, you look for someone who will use their experience to build a good garage with the best materials and techniques keeping in mind the priorities of the owner, like maintainance, cost, appearance, resalability, etc.
Meatspace contractors try new techniques all the time. You're paying for the ability to accommodate a client, not the ability to do the exact same thing repeatedly.
Not the OP, but I'd like it if my contractor shows at least a bit of professional engagement.
I'm hiring them because they're the expert - and if they ask some questions about why I want the garage and what I plan to use it for, it'll help them deliver a final product that's a better fit for my needs.
For example, if I say "I want a garage that's 200 square feet and has an epoxy-covered floor", I'd like it if my contractor asked me some questions and came back with responses like "Since you want to do x in your garage, I'd avoid the epoxy floor and go with painted concrete. Also, I've has several clients who were interested in doing x and they ended up wanting a storage loft in the garage. You can add one later if you'd like, but it's much less expensive if you add it during initial construction."
So...maybe not passionate, exactly. But engaged and professional, absolutely.
There are buildings that have stood for hundreds of years, meanwhile you have to re-paint your own house every 10 year... new/modern is not always better.
How do you reconcile how bespoke and ever changing the requirements are for software products vs how stable the requirements are for garages?
I'm asking because I see the construction analogy pop up a lot and I just can't reconcile the two things.
To me the development of a new blueprint for a new kind of garage for a new kind of vehicle operated by a never before seen alien species is a bit closer to creating a software product.
I mean, who would ask a contractor to do what people regularly ask software engineering teams to do?
Construction isn't a bad analogy. Imagine you're a contractor getting called in to finish a house that some incompetent jabroni started, then got out of their depth and got fired midway. Meanwhile the homeowner has changed their mind and wants an open-concept kitchen, and the building inspector has come back with objections to the wiring plan that need to be rectified.
The physical dependencies of a house vs the abstract nature of software interdependencies really makes the analogy fail for me. Houses just don't don't regularly fall down 8 times a day because one framer is putting a nail in a new wall and that caused the fireplace to explode.
You should care about how much you pay the contractor and the quality of work you get in response. That's your only contract with them. Same for a developer.
> You don't want someone showing up who just views your garage primarily as an opportunity to learn about this new construction material they've heard about that doesn't help you.
That's a terrible analogy. Most of the time developers aren't writing greenfield projects, meaning they don't choose the stack. Devs have the leverage to choose by accepting jobs that use the stack we know (or want to know).
As to contractors, if you had already started building a garage with a new construction material, you probably would really want to hire people who were experienced in it. If you couldn't find them, you might want people who were interested in learning to use it.
If you want passion and motivation, consider hiring an actor or prostitute. I'm going to stick with my usual plan of "write good code in exchange for good money".
One gets more than just money from work. Or one can get more. Friendship, community (however fleeting), challange, growth. If you over index on comp you may miss out on more fuzzy aspects. You are there 6+ hours a day might as well optimize more broadly.
Very cool and healthy that people on this website instinctively imagine themselves as the boss of random commenters on a website whose motivations are incredibly relatable.
They sound like a great hire to me. If you needed an electrician to wire your house, would you rather hire someone who likes to get inspired and find creative ways to do electrical wiring, or someone who just wants to do the best and most documented practices while saving their creativity for personal projects
How about someone who cares about why you're trying to get a 200A circuit run to your garage and can provide feedback and point out things that they've seen before that could make your life easier. Or, like in my current situation, I really hope an electrician can come up with a creative solution to my current house wiring situation because it seems like it's going to be a huge hassle and the previous owner has painted us into a corner.
My own current situation is that I work with an electrician who found a hard-but-solved problem and wanted his own solution to it. He is now the only person who understands the wiring he did, and if he ever leaves the company we'll also need to find a creative person to work on it, or else throw it all out and start over.
EDIT: just be clear I'm still actually talking about software
Most businesses that pay salary operate like this:
Worker picks 5000 apples, coworkers picks 300. Business pays them each 1 apple. Both start picking 1 apple, business puts them on improvement plan. (China wants apple pickers to struggle.) Also, please write a 13-page paper detailing how your soul is mine, I'm your daddy, and any food you might try to grow on your own property is actually mine (Google).
There's a place for both- you need the devs who care more about adding business value quickly, and you need the devs that lean more towards perfectionism in how it's built.
Too little of the former, and nothing valuable gets done. Too little of the latter, and you end up drowning in technical debt, preventing the business from adapting as quickly as it needs to
Then the problem is that people who care about business don't want to learn to code. Blame them and tell them to learn to code rather than argue that people who like technical stuff must care about what you care about. In the end there are way more people out there who care about the business side so shouldn't be hard at all to make them the majority.
I disagree. I would love this hire. This person has clearly expressed what motivates them. I now know what type of work they prefer (and don’t), as well as the level of involvement they expect with outside stakeholders. It’s much easier to have a productive relationship with someone who can articulate this clearly.
What I see too much are teammates who say they want to be more involved with customers or prioritization but don’t show up for feedback sessions or high level discussions and then later complain about not being involved enough, causing even more headache. The more you accommodate, the more problems they come up with, and never actually get around to doing the actual work.
The project is your vision, all the decisions about the future of the project are being made by you (or your business people), how can you expect a developer to feel invested or engaged in the project? Are you willing to give the developer the same decision power as the business people?
The reason developers love to work on personal projects is not primarily because it is using some shiny new tech but because they own the vision, they own the decisions, they started the question and they want to build the answer.
Alternatively, and depending on the severity, they can recognize they've hired a bad (apple|fit) and separate, possibly update the hiring process, and move on.
While adding in new technologies isn't always a bad thing, having nothing but a desire to do so is classical Resume-Driven-Development. If your firm is in a business position such that having all the latest, greatest tools is a good thing (hard to imagine industries in which this is an unqualified good) then keep on trucking. Otherwise you may find yourself needing to have adult conversations with $RDD_DEV about just what it is that makes the business money, in light of technical decisions that cost additional time, have larger TCO, and so on.
They did get the "sciency" bits right, though. They just refer to the IPCC. Your guy's arguments are "here's a bit of data they haven't bothered to fit." I can't even make out if the presented data has any basis in fact.
And England was pretty fucking cold in the 17th century. And after a particularly grim winter in 1709, the thaw "brought widespread flooding. This was a major catastrophe for a largely agricultural economy. The crops were ruined, grain prices soared sixfold and many communities were faced with starvation. Per capita gross domestic product dropped by 23%, and did not fully recover for another 10 years, all from a single terrible winter." (quote from the Guardian).
So you are willing to eschew any principals of respecting credentials because you want to agree with a predetermined result? Doesn’t sound at all like science to me.
The IPCC report has scientific underpinnings; it's not a predetermined result, but the reflection of continuing research. It's about the best we can do. Of course it's an approximation with errors, such is the fate of all models.
But to just point at a few short-comings, and do so with blatant disrespect for the context, and then conclude everything it says must be false is what I'd call unscientific. The linked article on wattsupwiththat doesn't even try to provide an alternative explanation. There have been skeptics who came up with reasonable objections and alternatives, but that article isn't one of them. It does falsely represent the 1.5°C threshold issue, though, to the point of manipulative dishonesty.
