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This is my favorite high powered individual at a company trope.

Hey you, yeah you with no power to change or order people around, yeah, you go ahead and do my job with no new tools or authority.

I have had so many CTOs tell me that I should go tell an entire department to change their entire goal system because of something they want done, but do not want to deliver any thought process of how that's going to happen or are willing to put in any effort to idk, move the gigantic ship they have in motion.

And of course, the blame only goes one direction in such a bad org, tbqh the QA person probably is happier literally anywhere else.


Yes, Palantir folks have self selected for the first two over and over - anyone working there for many years now is completely blacklisted from anything I touch, when someone advertises ex-Palantir folks in the job description I know I can safely avoid that company forever.

I would never allow one of them to be hired via any hiring process I have influence over.

Same. I would never allow anyone who has Palantir on their resume to be hired in any company I have influence over. They are the brownshirts of the tech industry, worse even than the people poisoning children's minds at Meta.

The unfortunate converse is there are plenty of other software companies looking for that .gov money that would pick these less than scrupulous employees right up.

If you want to do that why not just do an EVA pattern or something else that can translate rows to columns?

Agree, as engineers we should be making the car easier to operate instead of making everyone a mechanic.

Focus on the simple iteration loop of "why is it so hard to understand things about our product?" maybe you cant fix it all today but climb that hill more instead of make your CEO spend some sleepless nights on a thing that you could probably build in 1/10th the time.

If you want to be a successful startup saas sw eng then engaging with the current and common business cases and being able to predict the standard cache of problems they're going to want solved turns you from "a guy" to "the guy".


Most engineers like being mechanics though.


How about comparing wage theft vs shrink - how much is everyone stealing from each other - almost 1 in 5 workers experience wage theft.


And its cold comfort to us all to basically say "let's all agree to slavery so nobody loses their jobs".


> And its cold comfort to us all to basically say "let's all agree to slavery so nobody loses their jobs".

Comparing software development jobs in the modern United States to slavery is quite fanciful.


Game development is a lot different than "normal" software development. Usually involves a lot more crunch/unpaid overtime. Though yes, the comparison is hyperbole.


Except unlike slaves, these software developers are free to quit and take a competing job offer.


The logical conclusion of the scenario being floated here is that if enough workers resist their own exploitation, the "job creators" will take their capital and go... somewhere. And then there will be no jobs.


(Obviously I'm being facetious. There will, of course, be jobs. And also, a lot of capital owners sitting on the sidelines, debt payments incoming with no income stream.)


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Until the companies start colluding to suppress your wages.


Still not even remotely comparable to owning human beings as property.

Regardless, the government cracked down on this behavior (which affected 8 companies) and it stopped in 20009 as per your link.


It's still going on now - they just use a third party to help them collude.


What third party is enforcing an anti-poaching agreement? Can you back up that claim with evidence?


What is a yacht but frivolous consumption? A supercar? A private jet? Designer clothes? The list goes on for miles.


what percentage of billionaires wealth goes into consumption? take a guess.


What absolute value does? Percentages are a very weird way to look at it when people are starving. (also, tax them more)


i'm willing to talk about absolute as well. lets try to understand how many lives can be saved if billionaires completely cut their frivolous spending. lets be clear that this has to be compared against how much wealth they brought for others and whether they could have done this if the incentive for personal spending did not exist.

assuming billionaires spend .1% of their wealth on frivolous purchases - you would net a one time amount of around 20 billion dollars. you can't do anything with this let alone save poverty. if you could then you can simply ask the government to move 20 billion around. they have tried it and it doesn't work.


Don't expect much of a response here, the "eat the rich" crowd is never happy with the math


I helped a company that is build averse move off of Fivetran to Debezium and some of their own internal tooling for the same workload they are paying 40k less a month (yeah they just raised their prices again).

Now, that's not exactly the same thing, but their paucity of skills made them terrified to do something like this before, they had little confidence they could pull it off and their exec team would just scoff and tell them to work on other revenue generating activities.

Now the confidence of Claude is hard to shake off of them which is not exactly the way I wanted the pendulum to swing, but its almost 500k yearly back in their pockets.


Pretty sure SQL Server won't acknowledge a write until its in the WAL (you can go the opposite way and turn on delayed durability though.)


Right, so people who would use their trauma to prevent themselves from thinking logically about the problem and helping those in the middle instead of some arbitrary line your mind made up?


Never underestimate how many good policies go nowhere because some median voter is irrationally mad at them due to something that happened decades ago.


Who would this policy be good for, and if it's not good for me, why should I care?


Because you live in a world where other people exist, and how they go about existing can impact you negatively, both directly and indirectly. The fewer people living in and dealing with poverty, the better off the everyone else is.


>so people who would use their trauma to prevent themselves from thinking logically

You're using your trauma here. You keep yearning for the kindergarten lessons to be true, that we're all the same people and we should all share and all the other nonsense that was only taught to you so that the elemntary school teachers didn't have a city-burning-down-riot on their hands every day.

Even if you insist that I'm the one being illogical here, it's wired pretty deeply into my brain, and I'm not going to change. Not only am I not going to change, I'm raising children to be like me, and one of the early and fundamental lessons is that fertility rates are top priority. Be fruitful and multiply. There will always be more like me than more like you, and it's only going to get worse (for you and those like you).


Well, that's a very interesting and aggressive take about me holding up a mirror to your own neurosis, I recommend therapy.


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