"over 50% of the country i live in are irredeemably terrible people" is obviously hyperbole -- if it were true, the onus would be on you to start taking action against those terrible people. but my guess is you don't actually think they're so terrible, because you're still working your 9-5 for your terrible-person boss, getting paid like every other schmuck, and you're happy to let those irredeemably terrible people deliver your DoorDash, teach your children at public school, and keep your electricity and water running.
"over 50% of the country i live in are irredeemably terrible people"
A large majority of the people did not vote for Donald Trump.
but my guess is you don't actually think they're so terrible,
People who support Donald Trump are, in general, terrible people. They aren’t evil people doing evil things so why would I have an obligation to take action against them?
It is a fact of life that we all must live amongst people who we think are terrible human beings. Of course I haven’t the slightest idea what a person’s views are for almost everyone I interact with. I give everyone the assumption that they deserve respect until proven otherwise.
Given the context of the thread it’s ironic that you don’t seem to understand what it means to give the assumption of respect to people. I think you edited your disparaging remarks to me. It was hilarious to read those remarks given the context of the discussion at hand. Feel free to put them back. I don’t mind them.
> People who support Donald Trump are, in general, terrible people
This is not true, and that shows your narrow mindset. To give you the benefits of the doubt, can you explain why Trump supporters are not only wrong, but generally "terrible people"?
I have no desire to change anyone’s mind about their political views. Anyone who supports a known rapist and felon and who openly takes bribes can not be convinced of anything. I don’t engage in political discussions with such people. There is no consistency in their beliefs so no meaningful discusion can be had.
> But if the person in front of you has done or advocated for things that cause harm or is themself a horrible person then I disagree.
the current conflict in the middle east shows why this doesn't work in the long run.
despite what a generation that grew up consuming Marvel films was led to believe, not every conflict is a clearly defined superhero-vs-supervillain, good-vs-evil affair. eventually, you will be the one who, according to some, is advocating for things that cause harm and is considered a horrible person.
I dunno man.. When someone advocates for treating another person as "not human" or wants to deny them basic human rights, that's universally wrong in my book.
I think talking about whether it is universally wrong or not is a distraction. It is sufficient to simply _not like it_ without having to get the universe (which almost certainly doesn't care, at least not enough to step in and do something about it) involved.
Personally, I am a moral skeptic - I don't really believe that moral truths exist in the same way that physical truths exist. For me, the only questions are what kind of world do I want to live and and what power do I have to make the world that way?
But if someone acts inhuman then it’s justified. Russia’s war crimes are well documented and they started the war. When you are the baddies then expect to be called so.
You're still in the goodies-vs-baddies mindset. Western media pushes people into that way of thinking but it's the Marvel level view and is wrong. Also, look at all the people who think Russia is the baddies for starting that war, but Israel is the baddies despite not starting its war. That's an arbitrary standard people invented to justify their simply goodie-baddie view. If you apply a different standard to every war, then it's not really a standard, is it?
It’s mostly about willful acts of violence against innocents. This might be a nuance that is too subtle though. Bad acts and bad actors should be called out. Russia is the bad actor in the Ukrainian invasion. Hamas and IDF are bad actors in their conflict.
But then everyone is a bad actor. All the countries supplying arms to Ukraine are perpetuating the war and causing more deaths, so they're bad actors. As is Ukraine itself of course. You can't actually define that in way that has any use. It's ultimately just whatever your cultural influences led you to believe.
People should just be honest and admit they're nationalists, other kinds of ideologists, or just trying to fit in when it comes to opinions about war, because that's really all it is. If it was really unambiguous who was a bad actor, it wouldn't be a war in the first place because everyone would agree.
I think it makes much more sense, and is more productive, to reason about good and bad acts, than people.
Especially with regard to conglomerates of people, like whole nations, or whole governments. Having said that, some people and some groups do fall heavily on one side or the other. But most groups are a dynamic mix of players and situations, not good or bad in any rational or stable way.
Ukraine has also bombed civilians and engages in random/statistical attacks against Russian cities - technically a war crime. We can even stretch out the definition of innocents to include Russians or North Koreans that are forced to fight and have no options. Should Ukraine surrender and let the Russians take over? Clearly the path of least violence against innocents on both sides? All I'm saying is things aren't as clear/simple as you try to present them.
Sometimes violence is unavoidable and often it will impact innocents as well.
I agree bad acts need to be called out but you're casting too wide of a net and that just leads to a loss of clarity/nuance. Is there any war action that doesn't fall under "willful acts of violence against innocents"? Are we talking about "collateral" damage? Are we talking about the Geneva Convention?
Why is Russia a bad actor? Because they invaded? They claim to have legitimate reasons, security concerns, treatment of ethnic Russians or separatists in Ukraine? What if we side with them on the legitimacy of starting the war, does that change anything?
Can you provide specific evidence that Ukraine is intentionally targeting civilians, and not (for instance) flying a drone that gets affected by GPS jamming and hits a building unintentionally?
Just to be clear I'm not claiming the Russians are the good guys and the Ukranians are the bad guys. I'm just pointing out it's not as simple as someone did something bad in a war. You need to look at the totality of evidence and circumstances, challenge your own viewpoints and listen to people arguing the opposite of what you think, reach some conclusions and always be open to adjust to new evidence. Be aware of who is trying to manipulate you and why, what are the biases of the various sources of information etc. Again not that I think Russia are the good guys but things are never black and white. The west did meddle in Ukraine which in my world view is a good thing but unsurprisingly Putin perceived as aggression/attack on Russia's sphere of influence. To me it boils down to Putin being a force against western values that I'm aligned with.
>If you know the Russians are jamming GPS then what's the difference at this point?
"Why even bother if the chance of success is less than 100%"
Ukrainian attacks are very frequently successful despite GPS jamming and air defense. And vice versa.
>Just to be clear I'm not claiming the Russians are the good guys and the Ukranians are the bad guys. I'm just pointing out it's not as simple as someone did something bad in a war.
I have yet to see any videos of Ukrainian soldiers filming themselves laughing while using a knife to slowly decapitate a live prisoner. Or cut their balls off. Or put their decapitated heads on spikes. Or execute a dozen Russian POWs at a time
Ukrainian TV channels don't expound on the need to kill "as many as 2 million civilians" to denazify their opponent the way that Russian TV does fairly regularly. I've not seen any Ukrainians wave around the skull of a Russian killed in Russia live on stage at a metal concert.
I haven't seen those videos which is probably a good thing. Russians are known for their brutality. Doubtless there is brutality on the Ukrainian side as well. Both side have exchanged many prisoners so clearly it's not a matter of policy to execute them. Many Russians have family in Ukraine and vice versa.
It's pretty much a bloody mess. It's also complicated. For me it boils down to the fight between freedom and democracy and oppression and totalitarianism. Putin wants the world to be a worse place for all of us and is willing to have hundreds of thousands of people die for that.
But that's still too simplistic. It's certainly not fair to say that every single Russian (or non-Russian!) soldier who is or has been in Ukraine is a "baddie". Some are trapped by their circumstances to fight in a war they don't believe in and don't agree with.
It's easy to say, "well then they should refuse to fight", but you are not that person, and you don't know their struggles or what they feel they are capable of doing.
I think it's reasonable to say that Putin and his war-mongering crones are baddies, but you just said "Russia" and "they started the war". Lumping all people together like that is how we dehumanize people and fail to find common ground that can improve everyone's situation.
OK, but in practice what sort of common ground do you think we can find here? Because it sure seems like the only possible solution is to give Ukraine enough advanced weapons to exterminate all the orcs. If you have a feasible alternative then I'm sure we'd all love to hear it. The real world is an ugly place and sometimes there is no win-win solution.
Are we solving the Russian-Ukraine war in this thread? ;)
- Realistically no amount of weapons the west supplies Ukraine is going to enable them to push the Russians out of Ukraine.
- Putin doesn't seem to care about the number of Russians lost in this war.
- Direct involvement by western armies could lead to a nuclear escalation. NATO could easily push Russia out of Ukraine in a conventional war. Too big of a gamble.
- This is just part of a larger geopolitical struggle between the different powers. Russia. China. India.
We don't really know what Putin wants here but if some sort of end to the war can be negotiated that includes territorial adjustments in Ukraine I think that's the best win the west can hope for right now. The cold war wasn't won on the battlefield, it was won mostly economically. Doubling down right now on a military solution in Ukraine doesn't feel like the right path forward. Stopping the hot war and switching to a colder war is probably the path of least pain for everyone. Even if it seems like a temporary win for Putin. If the west helped Ukraine more in the early days maybe we'd have a different outcome but the west made some bad choices and here we are.
That said if Putin wants to keep fighting then the war will continue. I don't think he does but who knows.
> Realistically no amount of weapons the west supplies Ukraine is going to enable them to push the Russians out of Ukraine.
OK, general. I wasn’t aware of your military credentials. Russia is about 12 months away from completely exhausting all of its Soviet stockpiles of (tens of thousands of) vehicles and artillery, and their war economy is already unable to sustain production at replacement rates.
Source? I thought it was the west that couldn't ramp up and is running out of stockpiles. I'll admit I'm an armchair general but I did serve so I have at least some minimal idea of what war looks like.
EDIT: Also not clear how long the US is going to keep supporting Ukraine now that Trump is in power so that's another factor.
>I thought it was the west that couldn't ramp up and is running out of stockpiles.
It's worth pointing out that Russia's "production" claims generally include refurbishment. When they say they produced 4 million artillery shells, that sometimes means they produced 400,000 artillery shells and refurbished 3.6 million artillery shells from deep storage.
I hope that the Trump administration will continue supporting Ukraine and not try to force them into an unfavorable temporary peace settlement, but the US isn't essential. Other NATO and EU countries are fully capable of keeping Ukraine in the fight, if they want to make it a priority. They might have to cut back some of their social spending and agricultural subsidies to afford it.
Russia will never completely run out of materiel, but they have already exhausted most of their stockpiles of good stuff. At this point they've been reduced to using refurbished armored vehicles built in the 1950s and modified civilian cars along parts of the front.
You can track Russia’s stockpiles through open source satellite imagery, here’s a recent video overview: https://youtu.be/TzR8BacYS6U
Ukraine benefits from being on defense, as the attrition rates are significantly in their favor. I’m not sure what will happen after Trump does whatever it is he’s going to do, but it is clear that Russia’s current trajectory is not sustainable beyond a year or so
I agree Ukraine benefits from being on the defense. The question is what are their chances of retaking their lost territory where they need to be on the offense? Russia has higher attrition rates but also has a larger population to recruit from.
I'm not seeing Russia just crumble away under Ukrainian assault. If that's the case how does Ukraine benefit from the continuation of the war?
I would love to see Ukraine kicking Russia out as an outcome but it seems incredibly unrealistic.
Ukraine can't achieve a battlefield victory but with foreign military aid they might be able to slow down the Russian advance long enough for the Russian economy to collapse. Russia is only able to keep their economy somewhat functional through fossil fuel exports. We can give Ukraine long-range missiles/drones and targeting assistance to wreck Russia's key export infrastructure (ports, pipelines, refineries, storage depots). And we can choke off much of Russia's shipping through sanctions and interference with their tanker "shadow fleet". There are also still billions in assets owned by Russian government entities, corporations, and citizens but held in Western countries so we can just straight up steal it all and hand everything over to Ukraine. There are no guarantees but as long as Ukraine is willing to keep fighting it's worth a try.
Ukraine doesn’t necessarily need to retake its lost territories by force. They only need to keep bleeding Russia out until the war becomes untenable for them. Russia loses like 1500+ soldiers and 100+ vehicles per day, just to move a line on a map a few meters. Their economy is hitting double digit inflation despite a 21% interest rate. Their recruitment efforts are running dry and they may have to resort to mobilization soon to continue to fill their ranks with more cannon fodder.
At a certain point they may have to come to the negotiating table, and the longer this drags out the less favorable their position will be.
> it is clear that Russia’s current trajectory is not sustainable beyond a year or so
Those cheering for Ukraine have been saying this from the start. They have been lying again, and again, about everything... The Russian MoD has been on point, again and again. Why should I trust anything camp NATO/Ukraine says?
The reality on the battlefield is that NATO/Ukraine loses badly, while spending much/much/much more money. Donated money.
Sorry bro: it's a lost cause. The russians will be victorious again, fixing Europe's nazi problem again.
Everyone who teaches their kid "Bandera is my papa, Ukraine is my momma" is a nazi to me. And according to my research, that's a lot of the Ukrainian speaking Ukrainians.
> The reality on the battlefield is that NATO/Ukraine loses badly,
NATO isn't even on the battlefield.
> while spending much/much/much more money.
Yes, western labor has more value per hour, so the $ value of the smaller share of western effort devoted to the support of Ukraine is much higher than the $ value of the much larger share of Russian effort.
> Donated money.
See, you have to decide on your narrative. If your narrative is that NATO is who your Russian buddies are fighting on the battlefield, then it isn't donated money. If your narrative is "donated money", then you have to drop the "NATO/Ukraine" description of the belligerent opposing Russia.
There is no evidence to suggest that NATO could push Russia out of Ukraine in conventional warfare. The Russians and their allies are WAY better prepared for that war, and it would immediately turn into the third world war, not remain “NATO vs Russia”.
Takes like yours are equally dangerous as the brainless “Ukraine is actually winning the war” ones, even though you appear slightly more neutral and informed.
The actual situation is way more complex still than you claim. You take this weird stance where the Russian heads of state are evil, Ukrainian/US/NATO heads of state are not, Russian soldiers might or might not be, and Ukrainian soldiers are not.
In reality, the invasion phase of the war is justified from the Russian point of view, so their heads of state and soldiers are in the right. Same goes for western heads of state and soldiers. Me and you both live in the west and therefore have our own perspective on the war. People in BRICS states have their own perspective (that I’m quite familiar with due to having actually spent the effort on reading, unlike 99% of western commentators on this war).
Besides, don’t feel bad for Russian soldiers for being victims of the circumstances. Ukraine has been snatching people off the streets against their will for the past months and dropping them on the frontlines. This is happening in the majority Russian speaking cities and towns, not majority Ukrainian ones.
I see lots of people getting hung up on the word "universally" so maybe that was the wrong choice (and also the least relevant part of my sentence but whatever).
I should have just said "wrong", plain and simple.
MAGA culture. Often frames people they don't like as "vermin", and it sets up a permission structure to cause violence against them by labeling them as diseased or inherently criminal.
There are legitimate arguments on both sides of these issues.
Couching the Outgroup's opinion on X as "erasing" or "killing" or "dehumanising" just precludes understanding.
Religious conservatives do this with abortion for instance. Is it constructive to say that Freedom of Choice advocates actually "support murdering babies"? Does it help, or is it just in-group signalling?
> Sure, but then you're handwaving away questions about why cultures align along similar axioms.
there's a lot of reasons, but it doesn't make someone with a different opinion due to their culture a horrible person and not worthy of respect.
as a concrete example, let's take gay marriage. on a site like HN, i expect people here to be supportive. on the other hand, the vast majority of Africa, the Muslim world, and Asia do not support support it. according to gedpeck, nearly everyone in Africa and Asia, and every single practicing Muslim, is a horrible person... which sounds pretty bad when it's phrased that way, doesn't it?
Care to point out where I said this or implied this? I’m opposed to gay marriage.
EDIT: I’m not really opposed to gay marriage. But I never said anything about my views on gay marriage or anything inconsistent with the view that gay marriage is wrong.
EDIT: I don’t consider people who oppose gay marriage to be bad people. I consider people who support and vote for a known felon, rapist, theif, and bribe taker to be terrible.
Do they? Different cultures have widely different axioms. E.g. compare Islam and Christianity. Not to begin with cultures far away geographically from each other.
It only “doesn’t work” if your goal is to appear morally impeccable to everyone.
If instead of this worrying you
> you will be the one who, according to some, is advocating for things that cause harm and is considered a horrible person.
you have a set of morals that centers something more or different than theoretical other people’s opinions, your example of the current “conflict in the Middle East” is still a good example just not for the reason you stated. It is a perfectly valid ethical position to think that genocide is bad and that people that advocate for genocide are also bad. To pivot to “actually the Really Bad Thing would be if you said that and someone somewhere disagreed with you” is weird and hollow.
“The truly wise know that everything is morally equivalent, except for the pursuit of unbounded approval which is Good for some reason, and believing otherwise is the same thing as getting your morals from comic book movies” isn’t a coherent or defensible moral position. The Marvel movie comparison is a thought terminating cliche.
yeah i know, you can't really think of a refutation because you have no original thoughts. any more stunning and brave controversial takes you want to share while you're here though? maybe "racism is bad" or "trans lives matter"?
You can't attack other users here, no matter how wrong they are or you feel they are.
You've been posting flamewar-style comments in other places too. That's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, and we end up having to ban this sort of account, so please stop.
Actually I did ban you, but I reversed that after posting a warning to the other user. It seemed fairer to either ban both of you or neither.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait, and being aggressive with other users? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
We've already had to ask you this several times. If you keep doing it, we're going to end up having to ban the account.
Genocide=bad is too simple. If some country kills 100% of a 10,000 population ethnic/cultural group, is that worse than killing 10% of a 10,000,000 population ethnic/cultural group? Are some people's lives worth more because of their ethnicity? What if that happened because the 10,000 fought to the death against the 10,000,000 and ended up losing? Is that genocide? Is that bad?
This is precisely the sort of gibberish I am talking about. There is no ethical requirement, upon seeing something happen in the real world, to entertain a series of hypotheticals so tedious and exhaustive that you have to throw your hands up and declare all things to be equally good and bad. That’s a weird habit!
You can simply have a moral or ethical stance on a topic! “Genocide is bad“ is a defensible moral position to have, full stop. “Oh yeah well What if the Rohirrim were contacted by Section 31 in contravention of the Prime directive?? What then??” is not a defensible moral position, it is just gobbledygook.
The other response to my post somehow managed to post, through a cirque du soleil-level amount of artistry and contortion, something along the lines of “there’s no difference between carpet bombing and being carpet bombed” as a sort of gotcha sandwiched among flailing insults. It is nonsense in the same way that “You said that genocide is bad but have you seen this spreadsheet that exists in my head?” is nonsense. This habit is not actual moral or ethical reasoning, it is simply behavior that emerges when someone fails to fully suppress their urge to tell an internet stranger to shut up.
> There is no ethical requirement, upon seeing something happen in the real world, to entertain a series of hypotheticals so tedious and exhaustive that you have to throw your hands up and declare all things to be equally good and bad. That’s a weird habit!
Yeah, and this is the crux of many philosophies, most notably small-l libertarianism, where it seems like the chief appeal is that it's a simple set of axioms that can be followed to their logical conclusions for any moral question with minimal thought and maximal aesthetic "symmetry" and therefore beauty. It's easy to reason about, and therefore it's good.
It extends quite trivially from that to the so-called effective altruism, which relies on a fundamental assumption that a unit of good done to strangers on the other side of the globe is morally equivalent to a unit of good done to your neighbors. It's beautiful and therefore it's good.
It's the moral equivalent of imagining a spherical cow.
Morality is what you do in practice, not what you invent in your head. Treating him only as a literary figure, the reason Jesus is appealing to so many is not because he said "do unto others" and stopped. It's because he actually fed the poor, advocated for social justice, lifted up the injured, spoke truth to power, and gave his life for others.
No it's because genocide is too simple and poorly defined a concept to apply appropriately to every situation. It's just the result of people trying to generalize from a few specific events that happened in the past which they already decided were bad for some other reason and ended up creating the label genocide to describe them.
Look at the disagreement people have over whether Israel or Hamas committed genocide in this current war. People can't even agree on the meaning of the word as it applies there. It's a novel situation that doesn't fit the mold of what this word was invented for. Are civilians really civilians if they're complicit in the fighting as in Gaza? Are they really civilians if they've done or are still doing compulsory military service as in Israel? It's just an attempt to draw a line in the sand so people will agree what's bad.
> People can't even agree on the meaning of the word as it applies there.
The fact that your average Joe can't explain it is as material as your average Joe being unable to write a Bash script is to computer science not being a real thing.
Essentially everyone on Earth except Israelis and religious sycophants agree what Israel has done is genocide. It is ludicrous to suggest Hamas has conducted a genocide against Israel because then you'd have to say that slaves in the US conducted a genocide against slave owners.
> Is your hiring process so flawed that you just accept that you screwed up hiring 5 percent of your people?
if you only messed up 5% of your hires you'd be a goddamn genius and every company in the world would want to put you in charge of their hiring process
the "standard" is more like 20% of hires end up being bad hires
The numbers are discussed by upper engineering management. They might change over time depending on the situation the company is in.
Think of a hypothetical organization with 10,000 software engineers. You're the head of engineering. You have ten divisions, each with a VP managing 1000 engineers. Each VP has ten directors, each managing 100 engineers, and each line manager has 10 engineers on the team.
The engineering team reviews the past year. You notice, overall we fired 500 people last year. Okay, so on average that was 5% of staff. Seems reasonable just as a sanity check. (You ask your buddies at other large tech companies, and the other heads of engineering are reporting similar numbers.)
Now you look through the individual teams. A lot of 10-person teams don't fire anyone. That makes sense. But would you expect a director to fire nobody from their org? From 100 people... well, maybe. I'd be a little suspicious. I'd ask some other directors, does this person have a reputation of a very high quality team, or is it more likely that this director is lax, and their org doesn't manage out its underperformers?
Now imagine a VP fired nobody. 1000 people and they all were high performers. Yeah, that doesn't seem right. That VP is probably letting their team get away with low standards. If you were the head of engineering meeting with your VPs, I think the group would be able to come to a consensus of, there's a problem here. It's based on the 5% target but it's not a hard and fast rule.
In the long run, having a high-performing team is better for morale than firing nobody. It's the difference between working at Meta and working at the DMV.
So: You have no measure of performance and go off vibes. You have no scientific basis and go off vibes. You pretend this is all logical and common sense but it's really all just vibes.
You could end up performing way better firing half of your teams. And what about your managers? How is an underperforming manager in the higher positions ever fired?
I get that measuring performance is incredibly difficult, but dressing it up as if 5-10% of people are underperformers anyway is just so tantamount to how baseless and incompetent most businesses are run these days. Especially in software.
^But let's say you messed up hiring 20% of your company, and then you corrected that (layoffs for the past 2 years). You haven't hired enough people to justify perma-cutting 5%. And the number of functioning employees who stop working in a role isn't going to be as high as 5%.
The reality is that most hires are probably fine in the role they're in. And you don't actually need to be this aggressive in cost-cutting.
This specific target being discussed was 5% of all headcount, not just new hires.
You shouldn't think of all firing as a "mistaken hire". Sometimes you hire someone, and they work effectively for years, and then they kind of "check out" and don't do much work any more. It can be a good decision to hire someone, and then later a good decision to fire them.
It's also not a cost-cutting measure per se. Typically when you fire someone you get to replace the headcount with another hire or internal transfer. The point of firing people is to get rid of low performers and replace them with high performers.
Sure. This is a great model to adopt if you believe corporations exist to destroy people.
If a construction site was sending formerly qualified people away no longer able to work we would definitely investigate their practices. Tech deserves the same scrutiny.
I don't think people are getting "destroyed", they are just bored and want to find something else, but there are factors keeping them in the same place. Interviewing is hard, they may have a lot of stock vesting, the economy is bad, or their life situation makes it inconvenient, etc.
> Sure. This is a great model to adopt if you believe corporations exist to destroy people.
corporations exist to make money, or maximize shareholder returns, depending on how you look at it. corporations don't exist to make people happy or solve the fundamental societal issues with capitalism. there's merit to discussing that as a separate topic, but in the context of "capitalism exists and you are operating a business within it", you want to fire low performers and replace them with high performers
Gosh, Okay, we can only criticize corporations in the very limited avenues where we discuss specifically how they're meant to make money. Not in any of the other ways those goals lead to questionable decisions.
it's not really a questionable decision though. in the absence of morals, which is what we have in a capitalist society, the way to maximize the success of a corporation is to remove low performers and replace them with high performers. that's common sense. criticizing a company for doing this because it "destroys people" is misplaced anger, as you should be criticizing the system the company operates in, which again, is a whole other discussion
We can't criticize corporations because we don't have morals as a society. And we can't criticize "the system that creates the lack of morals" because "that's a whole 'nother discussion"? This is such weird speech policing. I have no qualms saying "Companies should hold themselves to higher standards, and I won't economically support them while they make these changes."
But it feels like your take is: "Guess all there is to do is just sit and feel righteous indignation while companies have their way with us, and the world crumbles around us."
I understand that you made up your 20%, but at that point it feels like you are blaming bad team fit or environment as bad hires, and this fitting can change over time as bad politics or shifts to different goals happen.
bad hire doesn't necessarily mean bad/stupid/incompetent person, it just means bad hire. might not be a fit for the role, might not be a fit for the company. for example, i freely admit i was a bad hire at Google because i got demotivated by big corporate/political bullshit getting in my way, it just wasn't for me. then i went to a 20 startup and, in the words of the CEO, "saved the company" and scaled it to 200 people
and no i didn't make up 20%, Gartner did a study on it. and most people with management/hiring experience report the same.
But firing people for performance is framed as the person is bad/stupid/incompetent. The problem with the 5% quota is that it doesn’t necessarily mean you get rid of 5% bad fits. It often results in arbitrary top down push to fire x number of people in the org, which then translates to people with most political prowess keep their jobs and their headcounts while competent people get gaslighted, overworked and eventually fired because of moving goalposts. These people get put on PIP and eventually fired, often by telling them they are bad/incompetent and criticizing them excessively and pulling apart every single thing they do. Some people don’t care about this treatment, but others often face severe physical and mental health problems due to the excessive stress that is put on them.
Also since we are mentioning Google, they had some interesting to say in one of their books [0]:
"Ratings, although an important way to measure performance during a specific period, are not predictive of future performance and should not be used to gauge readiness for a future role or qualify an internal candidate for a different team. (They can, however, be used to evaluate whether an employee is properly or improperly slotted on their current team; therefore, they can provide an opportunity to evaluate how to better support an internal candidate moving forward.)"
Other than agreeing with "spacemadness", I wanted to point out a small correction. Original argument was about 5% of total employees, not only new hires.
last quote is the key point and tracks with the other Vibe Shift press releases Mark has been on about. i read this as, there was a fear that laying off underperformers without very long PIP processes would be dangerous to the company, now he thinks it's less likely given the political landscape, so let's fire them ASAP rather than drawing it out.
very true. love him or hate him, Trudeau deserves credit for surviving not just sexual assault allegations, but also the infamous blackface/brownface pictures[0], all during the height of #MeToo and leftist focus on identity politics. he wisely identified that the correct response was no response, except for notably stating that the sexual assault accuser simply "experienced their encounter differently"[1]. a lesser politician would have apologized, a tacit admission of guilt, and been forced to resign.
this isn't meant to be snippy or sarcastic, either. he was genuinely excellent at playing the political game and protecting his own career.
this really says all that needs to be said about your perspective. you have an engineer and OSS advocate's mindset. which is fine, but most business leaders (including technical leaders like CTOs) have a business mindset, and their goal is to build a business that makes money, not avoid contributing to the centralization of the internet
How many worked in America and Western Europe and were paid a living wage in their respective countries, and how many of those 430 million people currently work making textiles in America and Western Europe today, and how many are lower paid positions in poorer countries, under worse living conditions? (Like being locked into the sweatshop, and bathroom breaks being regulated?)
Computers aren't going anywhere, so the whole field of programming will continue to grow, but will there still be FAANG salaries to be had?
i heard the same shit when people were talking about outsourcing to India after the dotcom bubble burst. programmer salaries would cap out at $60k because of international competition.
if you're afraid of salaries shrinking due to LLMs, then i implore you, get out of software development. it'll help me a lot!
yes, this. the backlog of software that needs to be built is fucking enormous.
you know what i'd do if AI made it so i could replace 10 devs with 8? use the 2 newly-freed up developers to work on some of the other 100000 things i need done
Every company that builds software has dozens of things they want but can't prioritize because they're too busy building other things.
It's not about a discrete product or project, but continuous improvement upon that which already exists is what makes up most of the volume of "what would happen if we had more people".
A consumer-friendly front end to NOAA/NWS website, and adequate documentation for their APIs would be a nice start. Weather.com, accuweather and wunderground exist, but they're all buggy and choked with ads. If I want to track daily rainfall in my area vs local water reservoir levels vs local water table readings, I can do that, all the information exists but I can't conveniently link it together. The fed has a great website where you can build all sorts of tables and graphs about current and historical economic market data, but environmental/weather data is left out in the cold right now.
- a good LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System) that incorporates bioinformatics results. LIMS come from a pure lab, benchwork background, and rarely support the inclusion of bioinformatics analyses on samples included in the system. I have yet to see a lab that uses an off-the-shelf LIMS unmodified - they never do what they say they do. (And the amount of labs running on something built on age-old software still in use is... horrific. I know one US lab running some abomination built on Filemaker Pro)
- Software to manage grants. Who is being owed what, what are the milestones, who's looking after this, who are the contact persons, what are the milestones and when to remind, due diligence on potential partners etc. I worked for a grant-giving body and they came up with a weird mix of PowerBI and a pile of Excel sheets and PDFs.
- A thing that lets you catalogue Jupyter notebooks and Rstudio projects. I'm drowning in various projects from various data scientists and there's no nice way to centrally catalogue all those file lumps - 'there was this one function in this one project.... let's grep a bit' can be replaced by a central findable, searchable, taggable repository of data science projects.
> A thing that lets you catalogue Jupyter notebooks and Rstudio projects. I'm drowning in various projects from various data scientists and there's no nice way to centrally catalogue all those file lumps - 'there was this one function in this one project.... let's grep a bit' can be replaced by a central findable, searchable, taggable repository of data science projects.
Oh... oh my. This extends so far beyond data science for me and I am aching for this. I work in this weird intersection of agriculture/high-performance imaging/ML/aerospace. Among my colleagues we've got this huge volume of Excel sheets, Jupyter notebooks, random Python scripts and C++ micro-tools, and more I'm sure. The ones that "officially" became part of a project were assigned document numbers and archived appropriately (although they're still hard to find). The ones that were one-off analyses for all kinds of things are scattered among OneDrive folders, Zip files in OneDrive folders, random Git repos, and some, I'm sure, only exist on certain peoples' laptops.
Ha - I’m on the other side of the grant application process and used an LLM to make a tool to describe the project, track milestones, sub-contractors, generate a costed project plan and all generate the other responses that need to be self-consistent in the grant application process.
i can only assume software developers afraid of LLMs taking their jobs have not been doing this for long. being a software developer is about writing code in the same way that being a CEO is about sending emails. and i haven't seen any CEOs get replaced even thought chatgpt can write better emails than most of them
But the problem is that the majority of SWs are like that. You can blame them, or the industry, bust most engineers are writing code most of the time. For every Tech Lead who does "people stuff", there are 5-20 engineers who, mostly, write code and barely know that entire scope/context of the product they are working on.
> bust most engineers are writing code most of the time.
the physical act of writing code is different than the process of developing software. 80%+ of the time working on a feature is designing, reading existing code, thinking about the best way to implement your feature in the existing codebase, etc. not to mention debugging, resolving oncall issues, and other software-related tasks which are not writing code
GPT is awesome at spitting out unit tests, writing one-off standalone helper functions, and scaffolding brand new projects, but this is realistically 1-2% of a software developer's time
Everything you have described, apart from on-call, I think LLMs can/will be able to do. Explaining code, reviewing code, writing code, writing test, writing tech docs. I think we are approaching a point where all these will be done by LLMs.
You could argue about architecture/thinking about the correct/proper implementations, but I'd argue that for the past 7 decades of software engineering, we are not getting close to a perfect architecture singularity where code is maintainable and there is no more tech debt left. Therefor, arguments such as "but LLMs produce spaghetti code" can be easily thrown away by saying that humans do as well, except humans waste time by thinking about ways to avoid spaghetti code, but eventually end up writing it anyways.
people using GPT to write tech docs at real software companies get fired, full stop lol. good companies understand the value of concise & precise communication and slinging GPT-generated design docs at people is massively disrespectful to people's time, the same way that GPT-generated HN comments get downvoted to oblivion. if you're at a company where GPT-generated communication is the norm you're working for/with morons
as for everything else, no. GPT can explain a few thousand lines of code, sure, but it can't explain how every component in a 25-year-old legacy system with millions of lines and dozens/scores of services works together. "more context" doesn't help here
