iateanapple

> How do “woke politics” prevent you from doing your job well?

I’m a hiring manager and where I work we have an unwritten “understanding” that if your candidate recommendations don’t include any women you are a sexist.

I just make sure I include a few female candidates even if none in the recruitment pool are capable because it’s not worth the trouble.

However, I imagine that for many “by the book” hiring managers this causes significant anxiety and stress.

> They have zero avenue for support when they face abuse whether physical, sexual or emotional.

That is not true at all. Singapore is a country of law and order.

> visas in places like these ask you to leave immediately if you get quit or fired from a job.

They have been invited to a country as a temporary worker to do a specific job.

Saying you have to go home if you get fired is not inhuman.

I have worked offshore and had my contract canceled - it sucks but it’s not inhuman.

> The whole experience is bizarre and inhuman and I don’t quite understand how many of my friends do it.

Why is it bizarre and inhuman?

A maid working in Singapore will earn 3-4x what she will make in Indonesia with generally better working conditions.

In addition because expenses are minimal (food+accommodation provided) you can save in 3-5 years what a typical lower class family living in Indonesia will save over 20.

> You just only hire people who already agree with you. You don't even have to do this consciously, it's the default human behavior.

Exactly - our product uses angular because two of our core engineers loved angular, helped people who were having trouble with angular, and hired people who also liked angular.

Not because angular was the best tech choice. We didn’t even do a proper evaluation.

And this is for a hundred million+/year project......

> I don't know, I guess it's possible? Maybe you have a better idea for how it could be happening, but it just doesn't seem very likely at all.

I’ve seen this kind of thought pattern a few times and frankly the way you are thinking doesn’t match reality.

I work on a 1000+ person enterprise software project.

Less than 5% of those 1000+ understand our customers requirements and use cases in any real depth. This is despite trying for years to incentivise developers to have a broader understanding of our business.

Within that core 5% most decisions are driven by the 3-5 people who care about the particular area.

So for a 1000 person+ org you would need to corrupt 3-4 people to drive a hidden agenda.

This is for a project not trying to be secretive in any way.

To relate it back to Twitter you would probably need the right 3-4 people to push hard for content moderators to be hired in San Francisco instead of Bangalore in order to push hard left views.

> Why would you want to?

Because they catch more bugs than unit tests, are easier for our product team to understand, and rarely break when refactoring.

Even a simple business flow like registering a new user will touch half a dozen systems.

5 or 6 integration tests can cover this flow far better than 100 unit tests.

> and be smaller easier to understand/change tests

That’s not my experience at all.

Unit tests are generally much harder to understand and need to be changed much more frequently.

Where unit tests help in my experience is:

A) in pinpointing where in a complex bit of logic the bugs are.

B) for generic libraries and building blocks where you don’t know exactly how your users will actually use them.

> move somewhere else and have the significant monetary gain to compensate them for their trouble

People don’t want to leave their homes and move away from family and friends just so a city can grow.

Life isn’t just about money.

I don’t want my city to grow any larger - higher density means lower quality of life for the people who have lived here for decades - aka my actual community.

> Integration, E2E, and smoke tests are generally slow, flakey, hard to write.

This is not really true anymore in a modern system.

I can spin up an entire cluster to mirror prod - including databases and all - and run approx 10k integration tests all in under 5 minutes.

> which could prevent the vast majority of other crime.

Could it?

California is one of the richest places on earth and has an incredibly progressive population.

So “we” have the desire and the money - and have for at least 20 years - and yet we have more violent crime than much poorer places.

> “You just don't know how things used to be before the police", which I think really misses what people are asking for ie: redistribution of grossly overbudgeted police departments to preventative

Or more likely they don’t think preventative measures work as well as you think they do.

Edit: Once you have seen acts of senseless violence - real cruel stuff - it is hard to believe that some people can be reliably rehabilitated.

Maybe that cruelty could have been nipped in the bud if they had received better care in the past - but that’s not a risk I would take with my community.

> Does that mean white Americans and Black Americans were on economically equal after the civil war?

Where are you going with this line of questioning?

They aren’t economically equal now in 2020.

> Slaves built a huge part of the economy for free and americans benefit from that work for which they were not compensated

That’s almost certainly not the case.

Any economic gains from slavery were more than wiped out by the civil war.

> Covid primarily spreads through droplets, which are largely stopped by regular surgical masks.

Interestingly I don’t think that’s quite true.

Droplets don’t explain almost any of the super spreader events.

And it is the super spreader events that are so concerning.

Note: I have no idea if masks help with the clearly airborne super spreader events.

> What "virtue" is being signalled?

Care for others in your community?

> You have to explicitly optimise the city for public transit. Quite a lot of European cities do that.

Even in those cities very few enjoy taking public transport - and would drive if they had free parking, didn’t have to pay tolls, didn’t think it was terrible for the environment, etc