hoverkraft

I have a lot of family in France, and based on what I've heard from them, the flip-side of those kinds of employment protections is that employers become much more reluctant to hire people (especially young people and people considered higher risk based on background, skills, etc.)

Possible that this attitude (along with many other factors) contributes to the far less developed startup cultures of many Western European countries.

Collecting miles isn't necessarily focused on earning free flights. The tiered statuses offered by most airlines include a variety of other perks that can make them attractive, and that couldn't readily be achieved via lowest-bidder flying: dedicated lines at airport security, advance boarding, free upgrades, free bags, waived fees, greater flexibility to change a ticket, dedicated customer support numbers, etc.

While some of these can be purchased as one-offs, the cost of doing so would probably offset the "cheapest flight" approach, and the convenience of receiving them automatically has some value on its own.

The cost/benefit might still not be there, but it's not as straightforward as the ticket savings vs. free flight savings question you put forward. You have to also bear in mind that many miles hunters are logging some (or most) of their travel on an employer's dime.

Still not disabled! Although at this point we're so habituated to PRs as a team that in practice it never happens. We did finally disable force pushes to master, though. Don't miss those one bit.

Yes, we're absolutely doing code reviews for each PR. Should have mentioned it in the post. Our general policy is to have engineers merge their own PRs, but only after at least 1-2 people have reviewed them (and obviously more for sensitive changes). The dialog that takes place in PRs helps enforce (and sometimes define) our style standards, teach engineers the idioms of a languages they may be new to, and ensure that we're always moving our codebase in the right direction. (They're also a great place to teach people how to write cleaner and less brittle tests!)

Like testing, PRs are one of those things that seems like it will slow you down, but once you learn how to use them they can actually increase velocity (among many other benefits). It's been awesome to watch how good people have gotten at collaborating/communicating via PRs at Airbnb.

Really appreciate this perspective. Reminds me of this quote from Steve Jobs:

"I'm trying to think of a good analogy. When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this transformation is going to make some people uneasy... because the PC has taken us a long way. They were amazing. But it changes. Vested interests are going to change. And, I think we've embarked on that change. Is it the iPad? Who knows? Will it be next year or five years? ... We like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, it's uncomfortable."

Currently working with a Waterloo intern and I can personally attest that he is the bomb.

This is so great. I submitted a ton of stuff despite having to type my username and email every time. Might be hard to scale, but there's definitely a lot of potential joy in this. Many of the winning words at the moment genuinely made me giggle.