If you don't have a culture of such infantile frat-house behaviour, you don't distribute such memos.
It might surprise you, but this isn't how adults communicate, or want to be talked to. This is frat boys communicating to frat boys, making everyone else feel unsafe and unwelcome just by using this aggressively immature and tasteless tone.
Full disclosure: I've just been fired from a similar company partly because I didn't tolerate the CEO and fellow managers communicating to my team in such an offensive way. Which obviously made me a bad cultural fit, as a grown up over the age of 40.
Google staff have sex after TGIF all the time. So do people at any company where staff spend a lot of time together.
Making sure the company talks honestly and openly about these things, and does more than what is legally necessary to prevent harassment and rape is a good thing.
I'll bet any honest and open talk around Google probably sounds more like adults talking to each other respectfully, not already-half-drunk frat bro's going "Whoa, dude, hold up a sec!"
making everyone else feel unsafe and unwelcome just by using this aggressively immature and tasteless tone.
Hey, speak for yourself please, don't drag me into this. I don't have a particularly high opinion of the personality of this Uber CEO, and I agree that it isn't a serious memo, and that it reflects "frat boys communicating with frat boys". However, it doesn't make me "feel unsafe" or "unwelcome".
I find it genuinely perplexing how people can "feel unsafe" because of some random fools' mutterings. I am sure and confident of my own place in the universe. I would never allow someone like this guy to negatively affect my self-perception. Even though I don't agree with the tone, this language doesn't threaten me in any way.
So please, cut it out with the appeal to a large support base - I am no frat boy, and as per your definition am thus part of the "everyone" you refer to, and that memo would not have made me feel unsafe and unwelcome.
In a similar vein, installing uMatrix makes you (rightfully) paranoid about what web pages are collecting from you. "Wait I can disable 28 Javascript scripts and iframes and the page loads OK?"
> The CEO of a flat company probably has a need to see everything
And Slack does an excellent job at demonstrating why that is idealistic nonsense and simply bad management that doesn't work, simply by making it possible to actually see almost _everything_.
It's one of the great things about Slack, it's much like Scrum in that respect: it may not be the answer, but it sure as hell will confront you with what the actual questions are.
Unfortunately, people who don't want to face their problems will immediately turn around and blame the tool/method. So very typical.
This is exactly the issue. Slack will expose more issues than it will create. If people misuse a tool because of some underlying problems, switching tools will just hide the problems, not solve them.
Let's not kid ourselves. This is not about energy, creativity, flexibility and all that shit. It's about two things, young people are a) cheap and b) gullible and easy to manipulate.
The latter is probably the most important. I'm in a situation that is a typical example of how that gets abused: company needs to downsize (funding dried up), and wants most of the team to sign a piece of paper and go away. The salespitch is that it's for mutual benefit, but in reality it's 100% for the company's benefit. The employees would sign away their rights, including at least 2 months pay and in some cases get screwed on their visa. Also, be complicit in forgery, since the dates on the paperwork are false. The younger employees would probably have been railroaded and screwed hard if it wasn't for the more experienced members of the team.
Tech companies want young people as cheap guinea pigs, to try out all kinds of "entrepreneurial" ideas without having to pay the price. Pure and simple.
> "You must like dealing with people to be great at management."
This is what I always assumed, and why, as an introverted programmer, I avoided the management track until my late 30s. Turns out, I'm a pretty great manager (at least that's what other people say, fellow managers have been taking cues from me, and my teams have been loyal to the point where it still stuns me when they say it out loud), despite being definitely not a people person. Of course it helps that I'm an (ex-)engineer leading mostly engineers, which is already a great improvement compared to what many are used to.
I do like working for people, I like watching my people thrive and be happy and productive, and I like taking on the challenges involved in making that happen. Which does involve working with people, but that is just what it is to me: hard work. I don't hate it, but I don't love it either. However, because it's hard work it is all the more satisfying when it's successful. More satisfying than coding has become at some point.
My highest goal is to make sure that everyone is happy and autonomous in their work and the results just keep flowing. Because that's when all those messy and complicated people will leave me the hell alone...
For fuck sake, how can you have such a blatantly anti-European headline and pad the article with anti-European propaganda phrasings like "Europe’s attempts to get access to encrypted data" when the same fucking article itself states that major sovereign nations that are both on the European continent and founding members of the EU support encryption as a fundamental right?
The straw man evil "Europe" portrayed in this article quite obviously doesn't exist.
Schneier is missing one major reason why companies keep data: regulation.
So many regulatory bodies and laws requiring companies to keep all kinds of data for all kinds of reasons for a wide variety of periods, so that simply having a policy to "store all the things" is way, way simpler to implement than to carefully study and adhere to each individual rule.
Nothing really new here, even before cheap storage and ubiquitous computers, companies kept boxes and boxes of all the paperwork ever, just in case some audit may require them to dig it up. Only physical limitations sometimes caused them to throw away stuff labeled "a decade ago", and today there simply is more data and zero incentive to destroy it.
I think those stores take care of VAT and all the requirements around that, so the developer doesn't need to worry about it. That's what the 30% cut is for.
The laws are totally insane when it comes to data, one law says you can't store it and if you do you have to enable the user to remove it, change it and view it, the other says you should keep it secret and should keep it for many years.
Buy the concept of taking data offline or to another network applies to this.
For example, while banks are required to keep tons of data for legal reason, the ones I've worked with have procedures where, for example, tellers are required to shred everything and send it for incineration. Then, the digital copies, once they can only be required if theres legal compulsion going on (ie after x number of years), are transfered by batch jobs which encrypt everything with a key generated by a CA that is offline most of the time, to a tape library which is only online for batch writes and can only be brought online manually by physically going into the data center. Then, after a little more time, but still within legally required reporting periods, the tapes are moved into a warehouse which very much resembles a bank vault.
And as soon as theres a reason that the data isnt mandatorily kept, the tapes are destroyed.
Honestly the security around those tapes is higher than bricks of cash, and they're destroyed even more readily.
It's not "perfectly fine online". In fact, much of it is already illegal in most civilized countries, and has been long before internet was a big thing.
However, any attempt to execute and finetune legislation and regulation to explicitly include the online is generally either ridiculed (example: the EU "cookie law", which is actually a "don't track without explicit permission" law) or portrayed as anti-American protectionism on forums like HN.
I agree that there is plenty of whining by American companies about EU privacy protection laws, but the cookie law was still worthy of ridicule, even for an European like me who quite appreciates the Data Protection Directive. The intention was good, but the implementation was flawed, and predictably so.
Feels like we're chasing our tails on this one. We went from "programmers" to "developers" to "engineers". Every time it started well, because only people with the right mindset referred to themselves and the people they looked for that way, but pretty soon the rest catches up and the term devalues.
We should just call ourselves codemonkeys and focus on doing the job well regardless.
I still default to calling myself a programmer or a coder... I'm happy to ride the social status train of "Software Engineer", but I don't pretend it's anything else, and it could swiftly be taken away if some Congress Critters got it into their heads that because in general none of us are licensed PEs we don't deserve to call ourselves engineers. I sometimes think it might be good for that to happen so that some of us have less-inflated views of ourselves and our profession, but judging from other countries that have such restrictions, we'd probably get a significant salary cut to go along with it while the business people with MBAs reap even larger shares of whatever company's profits which are only made possible by code monkeys...
This is also how I refer to myself on things like tax forms, political campaign contribution statements, and in conversations with plebs. I'm a "computer programmer", regardless of what it says on the paperwork at the office.
If anything we should have a much higher view of ourselves and MBAs should have a much lower view as we are those who make something whereas MBAs contribute nothing.
It's stories like this that cause everyone in Europe except the blind SV worshippers and libertarian fundamentalists to just shrug and shake their heads every time a rant comes up about how the US is so much better for startups and entrepreneurs.
And this thread is just full of sociopaths blaming the victim. SV culture disgusts me.
>And this thread is just full of sociopaths blaming the victim.
It's better to not think of it as blaming the victim, but rather offering advice on how to avoid that problem in the future. Even if the tone of the advice is rather negative...
It might surprise you, but this isn't how adults communicate, or want to be talked to. This is frat boys communicating to frat boys, making everyone else feel unsafe and unwelcome just by using this aggressively immature and tasteless tone.
Full disclosure: I've just been fired from a similar company partly because I didn't tolerate the CEO and fellow managers communicating to my team in such an offensive way. Which obviously made me a bad cultural fit, as a grown up over the age of 40.