My bet would be that "the standard" will be Heinlein Groups (company behind mailbox.org) OpenTalk (already better than Jitsy) and now they are doing OpenCloud as scaleable NextCloud alternative. The company behind the projects needs it for their own usecases, has stable business and they have decades of experience.
No. The reason top firms part ways with good workers is usually political. Either the manager doesn't like the person regardless of their work abilities, or the manager is not politely savvy enough to ensure their team is being recognized for work that grows or is valuable to the business. Or they get caught up in the endlessly popular reorgs (again management failure). It's a failure of management. Nothing more. Nothing less. A healthy market would encourage good workers to move around freely (through compensation, opportunity, benefits, location, etc..), not force their hand. And healthy organizations would recognize talent and retain/retrain as needed.
I think the other thing that's perhaps missing is that some companies have so much momentum (with thousands of people) that it probably doesn't matter when they lose people. The company will continue to thrive because there is demand for the product.
You're thinking of a different kind of company than the paper is talking about. (The headline, presumably written by the university's PR team, is a bit misleading about this.) The paper is about a certain kind of firm (e.g., the Big Four accounting firms, management consultancies like McKinsey, some elite law firms) that explicitly uses an "up or out" model, and explains why this kind of firm's business model (in particular, renting out the services of a particular employee to each customer) leads to this. The findings don't apply to other kinds of firms; e.g., in a typical big tech company, most engineers don't work primarily with a single customer, so the preconditions don't hold.
I don't think anyone here is actually reading the paper. The conversation is all about Tech workers and unions. At least thats the way I'm reading these comments as of now.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
We don't editorialise titles but this is a good case for renaming the post to that of the paper or something like it. “Why the top consulting firms fire consultants” is a very different topic.
>>the manager is not politely savvy enough to ensure their team is being recognized for work that grows or is valuable to the business.
Actually in most companies, no ones watching whats happening, no ones watching who performs, who slacks, or anything for that matter.
Companies are basically a kind of a loosely assembled random crowd, where no one cares a thing about anything. In this kind of a set up both hardwork and laziness go unnoticed, which is why a persistent level of mediocrity is all pervasive. People do the bare minimum needed to keep lights on.
Getting rewards, or not getting punished in this kind of set up, largely depends on who you know, how they view you and what they are willing to do for you.
The problem is that as you go further up in hierarchy, people by definition have less specialized, and more general knowledge. This means that there are things that lower-level employee understands but their manager doesn't. This in turn means that it's impossible for the manager to tell whether the employee is doing a good or a bad job because the manager simply doesn't understand the details of the job. This is open door for slackers and low-performers, because from certain perspectives, they're indistinguishable from hard workers.
I used to be a hard-working high-performer, but then I understood that because of numerous management problems that are beyond my control, the reward is very loosely correlated with my efforts, and given an existing job contract, the best way to maximize the reward/effort ratio is not to put more effort hoping for disproportionately higher rewards, but to put significantly less effort because the reward will drop just slightly. Do you want to up your hourly salary 5 times? Simply take 5 times as much time to deliver same feature. You might not get the 0.05x salary bump but that doesn't actually impact the calculation that much.
An intelligent manager with generalized expertise can be smart enough to figure out intuitively the performance of their directs in a specialized area they have less knowledge in. In fact I would argue it's a must for a tech manager, and it shows in the form of a mix of Socratic questioning, knowing when to step in and get out of the way, and stopping to deep dive if necessary without micromanaging. For a good manager, I think micromanaging is a punishment or a temporary condition.
A bad tech manager a) thinks he/she must know more than their directs (no organization would ever scale if the leader in the hierarchy above knew all of what was below), b) micromanages competent people instead of giving them high level directives and course correcting at a high level when necessary c) can't tell the difference between the high performers and the slackers.
In my experience, there's a slew of bad managers out there, and in my present reality the bad ones are highly technical people who should not be managing human beings or projects.
If I get kicked out from big tech I might search for such a place, but for the time being, I am in a position where I get paid to do nothing, it's literally free money. My plan A is to keep doing same nothing until retirement (about 15 years). Plan B is not to have plan B and just look at the job market when I need to switch, because it's utterly unpredictable long-term.
Sorry you've only worked in places like that. There are places where very smart people doing work that nobody in the company can do and they are well aware and rewarded for it.
Those workers can be counted on two hands at most for 99.99% of public companies.
What about the vast majority of workers that are doing the grudge work that keeps the company afloat? Do they not deserve a say in the direction of the company? Do workers not deserve democracy in the work place to decide their own fates? Why should this be left of to centralized communist dictatorships (boards + executives)?
>Either the manager doesn't like the person regardless of their work abilities, or the manager is not politely savvy enough to ensure their team is being recognized for work that grows or is valuable to the business. Or they get caught up in the endlessly popular reorgs (again management failure).
This strikes me as 1000% accurate from my work experience. I see people who do amazing work but get unrecognized and then move on while other people do mediocre work but put a huge effort into self-promotion and end up being promoted despite the work not being great... The reorgs also seem like a way to kneecap the employees and lower expectations.
That has never been the case in my career. Perhaps things are different in the C suite or a startup but at the director level and below of an established company it’s always about money and headcount.
I think specifically latest Pixels are often Google's beta testers. The enthusiasts owning them are happy to get features first and won't complain too much if it's rough around the edges. The phone is also not big enough revenue driver for them to be afraid that too many people would abandon it due to buggy new features
Also `we welcome the opportunity to work with Apple to enable “Contacts Only” mode in the future` doesn't make it sound like Apple actually helped implement this
That hardware is completely unrelated to such a simple feature. Something like AirDrop will only use fairly trivial crypto, which most likely ciphers with full acceleration available but even without it would work fine with plenty of performance headroom.
Neither Apple nor Google is doing anything revolutionary with their silicon for such a standard compute task. It's really mostly minor tuning to get a more optimal part instead of an off-the-shelf chip catering to other uses too, with die area and power consumption "wasted" in your setup.
No, not at all. Someone even implemented AirDrop in Python before[1]. In fact, nothing ever needs such special hardware. It's a decision of the implementer if they'd like to get fancy and rely on such hardware in their implementation to change its security profile, but the iPhone at the other end or any Apple infrastructure would be none the wiser - they just see that they're getting appropriately signed or encrypted, and neither knows nor cares how that came to be. Use of a hardware security module would just make the process more tamper resistant but would not otherwise change the outcome.
It requires WiFi active monitor mode, which is a standard chipset feature. Nothing related to custom silicon, secure enclave, hardware acceleration or other such shenanigans being brought up in the current conversation, and nothing that most android phones wouldn't fully support.
No, OWL only appears to have specific driver requirements, namely that they expose to userspace functionality that any remotely modern WiFi chip should already have.
Yeah, I saw that. I'm pretty sure that's a statement more about the drivers than the underlying hardware. Open-source drivers often have more limited feature support than the underlying hardware. I doubt anyone is producing WiFi chips that cannot transmit arbitrary software-constructed WiFi frames, or capture and relay to software all the frames they hear, and ACK frames as needed while doing so. But it's very easy to imagine that some of those capabilities would not be publicly documented, or not enabled with the default firmware provided to end users. Those limitations that hinder Linux end-users tinkering with their machines don't necessarily apply to an OS vendor with a deep partnership with the relevant hardware vendors.
We get the early worm. At the same time, as a screenreader user, I wished that I didn't miss the responsiveness and ease of use of my old Samsung Galaxy S9+. I fail to comprehend how Google managed to make a phone which is harder to use than something produced 7 generations ago.
We've reached the point where a program that simply links file selection dialog APIs with network identity broadcast and file transfer APIs is so difficult to get working, that you can't expect it to be functional without the exact specified hardware and software version it was written for.
Used Claude to negotiate a 50% bump in a car insurance payout citing laws I didn't know existed. Yeah you have to cross check things and direct the prompt for tone and angle, but what an incredible leveling mechanism.
The exact value of all 401k isn't really known, but the average account value is estimated at ~135k, if (let's say) 200 million Americans have a 401k, that comes out to 27 trillion.
In that chart, the 18T of IRA has portion in private equity, and the 15T of pension (defined benefit) has a portion in private equity. The 13T defined contribution plans (of which the vast majority is 401k) can't be placed in private equity right now.
Yeah, but I don't think anybody is expecting every single American to take out 100% of their savings from the stock market and put them in private equity.
It's not, but IRA plus 401k is about equal to GDP, yes (and if you add approximately equivalent defined contribution plans like 403b, tsp, etc, then it's more than GDP)
The counterpoint to this is that LLMs cannot only write code, they can comprehend it! They are incredibly useful for getting up to speed on a new code base and transferring comprehension from machine to human. This of course spans all job functions and is still immature in its accuracy but rapidly approaching a point where people with an aptitude for learning and asking the right questions can actually have a decent shot at completing tasks outside of their domain expertise.
This would be great if said comprehension is reliable. But I've seen tools designed to "understand" and document repos hallucinate many times, often coming up with a plausible but completely wrong explanation of how things actually work, or, even more subtly, of why they work the way they work.
And while I could catch that because I wrote the code in question and know the answers to those questions, others do not have that benefit. The notion that someone new to the codebase - especially a relatively unexperienced dev - would have AI "documentation" as a starting point is honestly quite terrifying, and I don't see how it could possibly end with anything other than garbage out.
I agree. Almost all of the value that I'm getting out of LLMs is when it helps me understand something, as opposed to when it helps me produce something.
I'm not sure how or why the conversation shifted from LLMs helping you "consume" vs helping you "produce". Maybe there's not as much money in having an Algolia-on-steroids as there is in convincing execs that it will replace people's jobs?
This is ridiculous. If anything it should now be easier for public companies to report earnings. Dare I say public companies should be reporting metrics publicly in realtime.
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