I've been telling people, this is Uber in 2014, you're getting a benefit and it's being paid for with venture capital money, it's about as good as it's going to get.
I have yet to run a Java program that I haven't had to later kill due to RAM exhaustion. I don't know why. Yeah an Integer takes 160 bits and that's without the JVM overhead, but still. Somehow it feels like Java uses even more memory than Python. Logically you'd point the finger at whoever wrote the software rather than the language/runtime itself, but somehow it's always Java. It's like the Prius of languages.
Ok, just glanced at my corp workstation and some Java build analysis server is using 25GB RES, 50GB VIRT when I have no builds going. The hell is it doing.
GC usually only runs when the process wants to allocate an object but there's no space left on the heap. It's entirely possible that it did a bunch of work previously which created a bunch of garbage now waiting to be cleaned up. See the G1PeriodicGCInterval flag to enable idle collections (assuming G1).
Java is also fairly greedy with memory by default. It likes to grow the heap and then hold onto that memory unless 70% of the heap is free after a collection. The ratios used to grow and shrink the heap can be tuned with MinHeapFreeRatio and MaxHeapFreeRatio.
Before I even went on my rant, I was guessing there's just some confusing default like this but there's also some historical reason why it's like that.
> Ok, just glanced at my corp workstation and some Java build analysis server is using 25GB RES, 50GB VIRT when I have no builds going. The hell is it doing.
Allocating a heap of the size it was configured to use, probably.
Nothing broken about it. It's optimized for a particular situation, that situation being a long running process on a server. This is where the JVM typically runs. If you don't want that behaviour there are a myriad of GC options, which could be better documented but are not that hard to find.
It's not a big issue for a server deployment where if you got that memory from the OS and didn't get killed, there's probably nothing else running on the box and you might as well keep it for the next traffic spike. But yeah not ideal on the desktop/workstation.
Different processor and JVM. My understanding is that early versions of the Java card runtime didn't even support garbage collection. It was a very different environment to program, even if the language was "Java".
Java is fast for long-running server processes. Even HFT shops competing for milliseconds use it. But yeah every user-facing interactive Java application manages to feel clunky.
Learned from an NYC exchange 10 years ago that Java can be written so as to not use garbage collection. Fast and no pause for GC.
1. Resource and reuse objects that otherwise are garbage collected. Use `new` sparingly.
2. Avoid Java idioms that create garbage, e.g. for (String s : strings) {...},
substitute with (int i = 0, strings_len = strings.length(), i < strings_len) {
String s = strings[i]; ...}
I would also argue that software (and the people that write it) have a "correctness" bias that is not fully aligned with business goals.
Tech debt is real, but so is the downside of building a system that has constraints that do not actually align with the realities of the business: optimizing for too much scale, too much performance, or too much modularity. Those things are needed, but only sometimes. Walking that line well (which takes some luck!) is what separates good engineering leadership from great engineering leadership.
> I would also argue that software (and the people that write it) have a "correctness" bias that is not fully aligned with business goals.
Hey, I resemble that remark!
Yeah, I get where you're coming from but i do really feel that it's more of a communication issue, along with the abstract nature of software. I mostly do data related stuff, and have often had the experience of finding "wrong" data that doesn't have a large impact, and every time I need to remind myself that it might not matter.
You can also see this in the over-valuation of dashboards vs data engineering. Stakeholders lurve dashboards but value the engineering of pipelines much less highly, even though you can't have dashboards without data.
To be fair, this bias for "correctness" is both logical and necessary, and not something that stems from inability or unwillingness to understand business goals.
That tech debt you took on to meet the latest oh-so-important deadline? Prepare to live with it forever, because the next hare-brained initiative is right around the corner.
Frankly, the business's goals are not my goals, and unless I own the place, I'm not sacrificing good work for it.
Maybe but most endowments actually have "legally?" bound or otherwise contracted uses in universities. Thats why Harvard can't just tap it's endowment to fund research the current Admin has cut. So I'm doubting that endowments are being used in this way to pay coaches.
Sure, but if an endowment is paying for, say, the football coaching staff, then that leaves that much more money free in the general fund to pay for other things.
If the endowment is paying for something that otherwise wouldn't be paid for generally, that's a different story.
This isn't really fair I think. Academic money is actually not fungible - it can't be used to fund athletics, and vice versa. Just because both pots are relatively large doesn't mean that the money itself is fungible.
You pay for one or two people with real experience and 4 reasonably new hires whose job it is to answer questions posed by the senior team and to build documentation.
You want the senior people focusing on the problems, strategy, and comms and not data aggregation and power point formatting.
Half the time it doesn't actually matter who the consultant is, the business is just looking for an arbiter to provide a second opinion or justify a decision.
>Half the time it doesn't actually matter who the consultant is, the business is just looking for an arbiter to provide a second opinion or justify a decision.
It's much easier to feel good about a decision if you can get some McKinsey people to hold your hand and tell you it will be ok while making it.
How does this not vindicate their viewpoint? Do you really need a team of ivy grads to make power points or inexperienced people to give unqualified answers?
Modern consulting seems like one of the better deaths inflicted by GenAI. The entire industry is a means to commit corporate espionage legally.
They can do something more useful with that education.
I think the group of people that work on this should petition for their tax data to be the first to be used. Seems to align the incentives on internal controls of PPI.
Then those who vote for higher public services should be the ones to pay.
Which, if they did, would solve the left/right dichotomy. But no, those who want the public services want the money taken from the other half.
Here’s what I always remind myself about this current government: It is really the worst ideas conflated together, but it was that, or elect leftists in power.
At the thought of leftists in power, I think open data day at the IRS is really not bad.
Worse: I think the leftists are the firsts to be afraid of having the tax data spilled in public. We’d Trump’s records, but we’d also see the Dems’ records. And that’s something they’re afraid of.
> Here’s what I always remind myself about this current government: It is really the worst ideas conflated together, but it was that, or elect leftists in power.
"We destroyed the economy for a generation, but at least we stopped people from making us put pronouns in our bio."
It‘s the worst ideas together, but the alternative is even worse? That does not make any sense, logically. But I guess this summarizes the current situation quite nicely.
> Here’s what I always remind myself about this current government: It is really the worst ideas conflated together, but it was that, or elect leftists in power.
There were basically no leftists running under any major party banner for any federal office in the US, and the small number of arguable center-leftists doing so in the general election were mostly incumbents, and mostly reelected.
It was not, in fact, a choice between leftists and what we got, it was a choice between the center-right corporate capitalist wing of the Democratic Party and what is, at best, lawless kleptocracy and at worst outright fascism.
> At the thought of leftists in power, I think open data day at the IRS is really not bad.
LOL. You're not even an American. He's a tip: U.S. states with the highest GDP per capita are mostly run by Democrats[1] (who, by the way, aren't leftists).
I've never this at Google, but at my company, if you pass the technical screen you're offered to hiring managers. If they don't want you on your team because they want more leadership (or less leadership), or if there were 5 senior python roles and you were the 6th person to pass the interviews, you still won't get hired.
Unironically yes. Although it's arguably a win-win. Google constantly keeps its pipeline of candidates open which means that if you're looking for a job and you clear the resume bar, you'll get an interview. Meanwhile teams are constantly hiring so they'll want a steady stream of candidates.
The alternative would mean that unless your timing for a job search is perfect, you won't even get a foot in the door and teams within Google will also struggle to fill open positions since it would take a while to interview the candidate pool.
>
People still line up for their purported incentives, despite these stories.
The reason why nerds nevertheless apply at MAANG companies is thus the same reason why "ordinary" people buy lottery tickets - nerds are not that different. :-)
It's not the hiring people that's the problem. Assuming those people "cost" 300k a year all in (benefits/offices,etc) which is probably high, that's $24 billion. The government spent $6.8 trillion, cutting these jobs cuts spending by .3891%.
Cutting the people without cutting the programs won't do much and is (IMO) a problem in that you should be able to access government services in a way that the writers of the laws (house/senate) have clearly agreed to. When you're cutting this widely, it's hard to believe you're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
This is the thing that keeps making me so angry when I hear so called "budget hawks" get mad about the number of federal employees. Payroll is _not the problem_!! All of the federal payroll is something like 10-15% of the government's expenditure. Firing _everyone_ would only cut costs by 10-15%. There are plenty of programs (read: bloated defense contracts and corporate subsidies) that we could cut to save costs instead, and we wouldn't crater the federal workforce like we are now.
You can be mad about the government spending money on things you believe are unnecessary, and you can even want to fire the people related to that program! But across the board personnel cuts don't fix the appropriations issues and will waste money in inefficiency, waste and loss as the folks that are left have to pick up the pieces.
Does the federal government employ too many people? I dunno, maybe. Do we fund too many programs? Yeah, probably. But these cuts are _fucking insane_.
Part of the personal issue also. Notably, not especially Democrat or Republican related. Both administration groups for years.
The Defense part especially seems crazy. Per USASpending.gov [1], last year the federal government spent $9,700,000,000,000. Despite all the talk that Covid budgets were short term event, they never actually went back down. Dropped to $9T in 2022, and then started rising again. Post-Covid surge was $6.6T in 2019, then jumped to $9.1T in 2020. $10.1 in 2021.
At the same time, post-Covid, the Defense Department budget has been rising at about $100,000,000,000 / yr for the last three years. 2021: $1.1T 2022: $1.2T 2023: $1.3T 2024: $1.4T
(To be fair in comparison though, the largest other single items, Medicare / Social Security, have also been rising fast. 2021: 1.4 / 1.2, 2022: 1.5 / 1.3, 2023: 1.6 / 1.4, 2024: 1.6 / 1.5 )
However, with the DoD, what have we got from that much spending? Incredibly depressing slides from The War on the Rocks like this one about the incomprehensible gap in shipbuilding capacity? A factor of 232x? The US only has 100,000 tons of shipbuilding? That's a single neo-Panamax cargo ship. [1]
Or this one from Military.com, that the government does not know where $151 million of $225 million collected from soldiers for food supplies on garrisons was actually spent. [3] Fort Stewart, 87% of funds redirected. Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, 63% redirected. All but two bases left more than half of the money for food unspent. $225 million doesn't mean almost anything to the government, yet $460 of mandatory / month deduction in paycheck for a Basic Allowance for Subsistence that then goes "somewhere" matters quite a bit to individual soldiers. And the defense budget rose $100B every year for years.
I really hate this attitude. "$24 billion a year is nothing compared to the deficit so we should just ignore it and keep spending."
Spending cuts have to start SOMEWHERE. Saying $24 billion is ignorable is insane. We are in a critical debt situation and my children's future is at stake.
The attitude comes from a point of analysis, and the argument that follows is that we can save by cutting spending in specific areas that we overspend in (military) and we could rake in lots more in taxes by making the rich _pay their fare share_.
The current firing of government workers is about political alignment, not about cost. Cost is a pretext.
I believe we should gut military spending. That doesn't mean that hiring 82,000 employees in 5 years is justified. I'm happy to see spending cuts straight across the board.
No new headcount. Layoff the bottom 5% of the institution per year based on performance reviews and replace them with new hires. When someone leaves, replace every 3 people leaving with 1 new hire.
This is a good way to destroy productivity and morale, but if that’s not your goal you need to expect your managers to earn their pay.
Laying off the bottom 5% presumes that you’re measuring that accurately and that individual workers have control over their productivity, both of which are unlikely to be true - and if you get either wrong, you just incentivized playing political games and shying away from work which is hard, uncertain, or under-weighted by your metrics. Stack ranking almost destroyed the ability of Microsoft and Google to make anything people love, and you can see its cost in the unperformed maintenance work people know won’t juice their metrics.
Similarly, if people are leaving because you have too much work, poor working conditions, don't pay well enough, etc. capping rehiring is just going to make the situation worse.
If you’re not a PE guy looking to juice a company before dumping it, cost cutting has to be a process of understanding and identifying your true goals first. If you’ve truly over-hired, the first lesson to draw is that you have a management problem which you need to deal with first since it will make everything else likely to fail as well.
This is false. It's a great way to INCREASE productivity and morale. Good workers HATE working with lazy, dumb and inefficient workers. But constantly getting rid of the low performers and replacing them with better people, you are instilling confidence in the system.
If your entire org is filled with lazy low performers, then it doesn't matter if productivity and morale is destroyed, because they don't have high productivity or morale in the first place.
Again, the real world isn’t that simplistic. Look at the way that’s worked in the past, and remind yourself that all of those guys thought they were also smart and onto a brilliant move.
Here are the official spending numbers[0]. The largest categories are:
* Social Security
* Medicare
* National Defense
* Interest payments
* Health
* Income Security
* VA Benefits
Which of those categories are we overspending on? Which specific cuts do you want to make? It's impossible for one to claim they're serious about saving money without talking about slashing Social Security, Medicare, and the military, which together make 40% of the budgets, so... which are you in favor of reducing?
When you've cut your budget as far as you can and you're still losing money, the only solution is to make more money. Here, that means taxes, and specifically that we must start taxing the rich. I'm not saying that as some far-left "eat the rich" kind of thing, but as basic arithmetic and economics. We need more revenue, and it has to come from somewhere.
What gives you the impression we don't tax the rich?
The American middle and lower class are the least taxed individuals in the developed world. The upper classes, especially given a disproportionate percentage live in places like NYC and CA, are carrying EU-levels of tax burden already.
I'm certainly open to changing how things like dividend income are treated, but the rich don't have enough money to solve our budget problems.
I think your question about what spending to reduce was intended to be rhetorical, but the answer is: everything.
I honestly have no idea why you think information about aggregate tax revenue over time is relevant to your original claim. If you want to see the tax rate increased on the upper extremes (like the top 400 mentioned at that link), I would too but it's a drop in the bucket.
> Citation urgently needed. That doesn't jibe with literally any report I've read about such things, except from anti-tax extremist organizations.
The average statutory top personal income tax rate in the EU is 42.8%.
"For comparison, the average combined state and federal top income tax rate for the 50 US states and the District of Columbia lies at 42.14 percent as of January 2025, with rates ranging from 37 percent in states without a state income tax to 50.3 percent in California."
Feel free to call the Tax Foundation an "anti-tax extremist organization" if you'd like, but I wouldn't agree and they are just reporting facts here.
Could we stop talking about top marginal income tax rates as if graduated income taxation wasn't a thing? You will pay less taxes in California than Mississippi or Alabama if you are poor.
Even if you are a single person in California making $400k/year (which I would call pretty rich!), you are only paying 8.38% of your income in state tax (you don't even hit the 13.3% bracket until a million dollars or so?). In total, you are paying 39.22% of your income in taxes (including federal and payroll). As a baseline, if you are in Texas which doesn't have state income tax, you are paying around 31% for the same income.
The OP of this thread wants to keep spending the same and says that taxing the rich is the solution to our budget woes, so that's why the top marginal rates are relevant, and most state income taxes aren't as progressive as the ones in CA.
Your example of a CA resident who is making $400k is paying a marginal rate of 35% at the federal level and 10.30% at the state level (not 8.38%), which is above the EU average.
> and most state income taxes aren't as progressive as the ones in CA.
That's why poor wind up paying more in flat tax states, it is simply WAI.
Marginal rates don't matter as much as how much you actually pay. On paper, CA has a top rate of 12.3%...on income over 720k dollars. It exists, but it doesn't seem like a thing we should ponder too much.
States only have so much power in setting tax rates, given that people are somewhat mobile. California being overpopulated for so long gave them some latitude here, but honestly income inequality isn't going to be handled at any level below federal.
But the point about Europe is right, but only in the sense that Europeans don't pay nearly as much in income taxes as most Americans think they do.
Denmark is the highest at 45%, compared to America's 27%. Switzerland, the only European country I've lived in, is just a hair above the USA at 28/29%. UK is only a few points above that, while France is just below Denmark. So I guess it really depends?
Yes, it depends on the country. but the European average is well above the US.
Also, the US has a more progressive federal income tax code than Europe (or every other developed country), so the tax burden in the US is carried more by the upper class than it is in those other countries, resulting in the average middle class American paying significantly lower taxes than a peer in Europe.
Most of that difference disappears when you consider insurance premiums and retirement, however. I compared a few countries when a Danish mentioned that they weren’t really seeing a huge difference and you have to be in the top few percentiles for high American healthcare costs not to cancel out the tax savings, and by their account it was a far less stressful process to get care as well.
You've got to compute the entire package. One reason Switzerland comes in around the USA is that they require health insurance and retirement to be funded by the user (mandatory, this system is what Obama/RomneyCare was actually based off of). Denmark uses taxes instead, so their rate looks higher. You can't just make broad assumptions that taxation is for the same thing.
People do. Americans come out well ahead on disposable income.
You keep comparing the US to Switzerland, which is a giant outlier in Europe and probably the most like the US in many ways (as you pointed out), when you should be comparing it to France, Germany, and all the other larger EU states with a stagnant economy and populations that have gotten substantially poorer relative to the US over the last 20+ years.
Also, because healthcare in the US is such a disaster, we do pay about what many other countries pay for socialized medicine via taxes, and then basically everyone under 65 (aka the people who cost way less to insure) have to pay for it again in the private sector.
If we could get that under control, there would be no competition economically.
I've only ever lived in Switzerland and none of the other European countries. But I remember visiting France and Germany...things are so cheap there compared to Swiss! You could eat out and not pay 100CHF per person. I do have friends in other parts of Europe (e.g. NL, DE, DK, FR) and while they like our salaries, they don't really like our costs.
> If we could get that under control, there would be no competition economically.
I don't think America would be the same if it did, and I don't think Europeans are pining for "American success" even if you discount our broken healthcare system.
Yes, it's likely it was a coincidence given that many loopholes were closed at the same time and the effective rate wasn't changed much.
The US has the most progressive tax code in the developed world, and the average American has more disposable income than their peers anywhere else on Earth. Why is it that the upper class is the only one that needs to kick in more?
> The upper classes, especially given a disproportionate percentage live in places like NYC and CA, are carrying EU-levels of tax burden already.
And?
They can afford more, and taxation is a way to reintroduce actual risk of financial ruin for the wealthy. If financial ruin is a good motivator for the rest of us, it should be for them, too.
It's not about percentage, it's about the reality that taxation brings about for you. When you have a net worth that's equal to the entire economic output of a major American city, you can endure massive tax bills because you make enough off of your holdings to equal the average lifetime earnings of dozens of Americans.
It's very convenient to sign other people up to pay for your preferred government services and I'm sure your peers are willing to eagerly pat you on the back for your generosity, but ultimately even taxing the wealthy at 100% won't cover the deficit no matter how good it would make you feel. That's the "And".
There's a reason nearly every developed nation has a VAT.
>It's very convenient to sign other people up to pay for your preferred government services and I'm sure your peers are willing to eagerly pat you on the back for your generosity, but ultimately even taxing the wealthy at 100% won't cover the deficit no matter how good it would make you feel.
Other people sign me up to pay for their preferred government services all the time. It's called living in a civilization. And don't get me started on the retirees getting a slice of my labor because they have a piece of paper saying they own part of my company.
I'm under no illusion that taxing at 100% would cover the deficit. It'd probably mean a better financial picture for the government, though, and if this whole national debt thing is the existential threat that fiscal conservatives say it is, well, is any improvement not good?
> Other people sign me up to pay for their preferred government services all the time. It's called living in a civilization.
Unless you're one of the wealthy you're talking about (which would be odd to say the least), no one is asking you to pay for government services for somewhere between dozens to thousands of your fellow citizens who pay approximately $0 federal income tax on average, so it's not the same.
> And don't get me started on the retirees getting a slice of my labor because they have a piece of paper saying they own part of my company.
Hint: it's not actually your company. Those people actually employ you.
> I'm under no illusion that taxing at 100% would cover the deficit. It'd probably mean a better financial picture for the government, though, and if this whole national debt thing is the existential threat that fiscal conservatives say it is, well, is any improvement not good?
Confiscatory tax rates are counterproductive, other than making the envious far left feel better about themselves.
> Unless you're one of the wealthy you're talking about (which would be odd to say the least), no one is asking you to pay for government services for somewhere between dozens to thousands of your fellow citizens who pay approximately $0 federal income tax on average, so it's not the same.
Really? You think I don't pay for services I don't use?
> Hint: it's not actually your company. Those people actually employ you.
Do they? What do they know of the company? If I asked the beneficiary of a pension fund what the company does and where it was headquartered, would they know?
> Confiscatory tax rates are counterproductive, other than making the envious far left feel better about themselves.
It's not far left to want general stability in your society. People with too much money and a government with too much debt are destabilizing forces.
The world is literally filled with examples of how this works, if you'd stop pretending that the current system in the US is working.
It's an intentionally deceptive framing, so you should hate it. $24 Billion is $183 per taxpayer per year. I sure as hell think $180/year is a lot of money, and if the government is going to forcibly take 1/4 of my friggin' salary every year, they really ought to be at least as careful with my money as I am!
I don't think blindly saving $183/year is worth throwing a wrench into our economic engine that provides everyone else an ecocomy that allows us to have jobs and things. I think we we need more thoughtful cuts rather than just thoughtlessly making cuts. Speed doesn't kill, the sudden change in velocity is what kills. All these cuts so quickly is going to kill the economy. This desire for instant gratification/change is like slamming on the brakes, for a dog in the road a mile away, and we don't have seatbelts. People will suffer and die. Depression approaching.
How exactly is cutting VA headcount back to 2019 numbers "throwing a wrench into our economic engine"?
This is why we end up with indiscriminate and thoughtless cuts, because the alternative is people who seem to believe that every penny of government spending is absolutely essential the second after the line item is conceived, and the only way to fix any issues that exist is with more spending.
That’s 80k people suddenly, thoughtlessly forced to stop contributing to the economy. In some areas, stable federal jobs are the backbone of the local economy and surprise cuts like that mean that small businesses fold and home prices fall because people can’t make mortgage payments without jobs which aren’t there (this was brutal in San Diego in the early 90s because whole neighborhoods near the big defense contractors went from being full of highly-paid engineers to unemployed, and you’d see people with Ph.D’s applying for software QA jobs just to have some income and health insurance).
If you wanted to cut things responsibly, you’d plan it in advance and think about how to avoid shocking the economy into a recession.
> If you wanted to cut things responsibly, you’d plan it in advance and think about how to avoid shocking the economy into a recession.
Absolutely. I in no way support what DOGE is doing.
But when people think cuts are needed (and the majority of Americans seem to think that's the case), and the options are your position that the country would seemingly collapse if a single job was cut and someone who is going to take a figurative chainsaw to the federal budget, don't be surprised when the chainsaw wins due to your refusal to compromise on your unreasonable and largely unpopular position.
I don’t see anyone taking the position that you can’t cut a single job. Most of what I see is basically saying that should be a legal process and at the program level - like don’t randomly break GSA leases, say that next year you’re closing a particular program so you don’t tell people to go to the office which you closed or have an operating federal courthouse with no building staff (Phoenix, currently).
$0.50/day is well below most people’s discretionary threshold, and it isn’t just money being burnt but keeping a promise. If we want to lower the cost to the taxpayers, we should be shrinking the military first rather than cutting the benefits which were promised to people decades ago.
If you want to cancel it out, there are many easier ways to do it, including things like more IRS auditing for tax evasion. There’s roughly a 10:1 return rate for enforcement, with an estimated gap of over half a trillion dollars.
very fraction of a percent counts... small things add up quickly...
Idk why this is a political issue? As a progressive I also support firing people who aren't producing effective outcomes for veterans. With all we save that money SHOULD be used to actually help veterans.
Why do you think they aren't producing effective outcomes?
The administration's track record is that it cuts indiscriminately, without considering the impact, and then sometimes tries to backtrack and rehire people when critical things break.
But how much extra waste will be generated by losing the experts in these bureaucracies? Of course some of them are redundant, but some of them have the proverbial bathroom codes and are irreplaceable. These cuts are incredibly irresponsible; cutting _programs_, along with the staff associated with those programs, is IMO wrong but at least workable as a long term cost reduction strategy. Just slashing staff left and right is malpractice.
NOAA just fired hundreds of weather forecasters. World class ones, literally some of the best meteorologists in the world. And they knew how to interact with NOAA's systems to gather data and publish forecasts, issue realtime watches and warnings, and a thousand other things. Realtime forecasts are _vital_ to hundreds of different industries and save thousands of lives a year, and part of that is because they are able to quickly issue new forecasts when the situation changes. We get tornado warnings, fire forecasts, tsunami warnings, and a whole bunch else with enough time to get to safety because of these extremely talented folks.
These people are irreplaceable. And I know one of these forecasters very well, he's an old friend of mine. He is done with the federal government; even if they offer him his job back he's not going back, because his trust that his job as a meteorologist was safe is smashed to pieces. That's irreparable harm.
I worked in government. I know exactly what it looks like and how 33% of workers could be cut with no effect besides the rest being scared of losing their cushy jobs.
It's a very large organization, much much larger than a business. If business can't cut with a scalpel, it would be even less possible with government.
In a softly held defense of those words, they basically are an escalation level.
If someone asks you for something, it could be something with undefined scope or priority. An "ask" signals "this is official". Same thing with learnings: lesson is personal, learnings means ways things are changing.
Are there dumb business terms, absolutely, but these aren't bad IMO.
So you're saying that "an ask" is "an order" or "a demand", rather than "a request".
Why not use those words?
I don't understand what "an ask" means.
I don't know what the speaker intended with it, and I wouldn't know how a receiver would understand it.
It's just communicating badly, using words with no fixed shared meaning.
Or somebody too afraid to be confrontational to phrase a demand as actually demanded.
And "learnings" is just somebody too lazy to say "lessons learned".
If it actually is stronger than a simple request, I could see saying "an ask" as a way of demanding using softer language. If your boss were to say "I demand ...", everybody is going to say they're a demanding jerk, but if they come to you with "an ask", that could carry the weight of the demand without sounding...demanding.
That said, I've never considered "an ask" to have any stronger meaning than a request. If I hear "an ask", I'm assuming I can push back the same amount I would to any other request.
