insom

Delivery services charge ~30% and increasingly police the practice of charging different amounts for items in person vs. in app. So not only are you paying a delivery fee + tip but (until very recently) you were likely paying more for the food.

Now that menus are being 'audited' by the delivery companies, the use of UE or DD can lead to the _retail_ prices that people pay in person being raised (as it's the only way they restaurants can safely raise their delivery prices).

Bad for everyone except shareholders of delivery services, I guess.

> If it used to be better, why are you saying it used to be much worse? You cannot have it both ways unless AI already fried your brain.

I mean, you obviously can, if the past isn't a straight line to where we are today -- it's an arc where at x-10 it was worse, x-0 it was better and x+10 it's worse again?

Yeah. I think the death of "working with people in person" (for knowledge work) is going to be looked back at a turning point for a lot of reasons, same as the industrialization of manufacturing, probably.

I'm 43, but when I was your age I worked for a agency doing custom software development for non-software companies, in an office. I retrospectively think that could have been some of the most meaningful time that I spent in my career -- in terms of having impact on the real world that I can point to, and growth and social connections. Also, because the people who ran the company had little experience of the business world: almost no meetings, no product managers (we just talked directly to our customers). Just about 15 software devs, some UX folks and a minimum viable management layer (who was also sales).

It was mostly 1-2 people per project for the lifetime of the customer, so you had a lot of leeway over how you built software, as you were going to be probably maintaining it for the rest of your time at the company.

But at the time I hated it: meh pay, chaotic work environment, micro-management of your time, FILLING IN TIMESHEETS, an open-plan environment which was noisy and distracting, no structured knowledge sharing, CI, testing or other grown-up software practices. I was very unhappy there and don't want to over-romanticize it -- but I wouldn't be the person I am today without that experience.

The work required to keep IA infrastructure operating is full time: these are full-time positions. IIRC they were at ~70 racks of stuff just in the California locations and apart from on-call and emergency response there's growth to keep up with, future planning etc.

There's no reasonable world where this is a few hour's per week volunteering like your local boat club. It's a Top 200 website, around the size of the Guardian newspaper -- never mind that Wayback is only a small portion of what they do. (Book scanning, inter-library loans, paid services for other GLAM organizations and governments etc.)

Maybe some organizations do this but not IA.

I worked there (as a software developer) for 3 months and took a 75% pay-cut from my previous tech job. Luckily I don't live in SF! IIRC California employees were paid a little more, but not even remotely SV money.

I don’t understand your comment. Do you not know what a pipe-fitter is? What about the trade strikes you as a larp?

I’ve never been to lunch with one, although my son worked as a welder’s helper at a pipe-fitting company.

As someone who has worked in tech in the EU and Canada (and for US companies, and ran a small company in Europe) -- I agree. The extremely high bar for letting someone go in Europe is a significant problem. It does lead people to hire slowly and fire slowly, however.

But having a union doesn't mean "never do layoffs" either -- it just means that they are negotiated. Usually that means severance packages are standardized and the layoff process is transparent. It also often means you have to try and place suitable employees internally, rather than let people go while you are actually still hiring for roles that they could be doing.

In general, even with a union, the company has far more leverage anyway (they control the money) -- a union makes it a negotiation between two organizations (one of which, the company, has more power) vs. a negotiation between the HR & legal departments of a company and one individual employee.

Steel workers, pipe fitters, air-traffic controllers, electricians? There are LUs for each of these popping up all the time. Admittedly they are new chapters for existing large unions but also these jobs have existed for a lot longer, in larger numbers, than "software developer" and barista.

Honestly increasing the number of unions in otherwise un-unionized industries is a win for us all. The same goes for Starbucks.

I think that this fundamentally comes from thinking that unions are only there for the worst possible jobs in the worst conditions, or where outright abuse occurs. And also from the (imo incorrect) idea that you should have those bad conditions before organizing.

Unions even the balance of power between the executives and labour at an organization. Even if WMF conditions are perfect and there's never any abuse of power (which seems unlikely) -- you should want a union in place _before_ an org decides to do layoffs, or force a practice on its workers that they don't want.

I worked at a tech company a few years ago and the standard anti-union cliche from execs was "we already treat you well" but then about 20 months later they laid off 2000 people, including folks on parental leave. A bit late to try and organize a union at that point.

(edit: typo fix)

I worked at Shopify during this period and their Shop app (the one that helpfully tracks your packages arriving) was a victim of these emails becoming vague.

At the time it felt like a specific reaction to Shopify mining this information to compete. (I have no insider knowledge if they were or were not).

Of course, the answer can be many things -- now it's AI, back then it was 17track, Google, Shopify, etc.

Thanks for trying. I assumed that ia.ch was clearly shorthand for internetarchive.ch but maybe one can't assume anything.

Slack, Zoom and Google Apps (but not for email) - otherwise basically everything was internally ran.

The Slack has (had?) hundreds of guest accounts due to volunteers and allied organizations. It’s an interesting (and cool) institution!