rubymancer

Cisco employee here, this is spot on.

I was at a startup they acquired ~4 years ago, by now it's just about milked completely dry.

Even though our product is close to industry-leading, they laid off our product manager, then another one, the QA team, and half of the devs. Unsurprisingly the product is falling apart.

It's not a company that attempts to produce value, as with so many others the product is the stock price.

The MBAs are showing some kind of savings on a spreadsheet somewhere though, so I suppose all the sacrifices are worth it.

Three times now I've argued strenuously against using MongoDB and Elasticache as the primary data store in an app, as they will inevitably turn into relational databases.

They did.

For Mongo going to postgres went great, but for complicated reasons we're stuck with Elasticache forever on our main product.

> Average wages in America’s poorest state, Mississippi, are higher than the averages in Britain, Canada and Germany.

This doesn't sound right.

Googling around, the median income (a much better metric than average) between Mississippi and Germany are about the same.

A huge difference: Britain, Canada and Germany don't have to pay for health care and education. I'm not sure how to factor that in, but something tells me if you do you'll find our Canadian and European friends are doing drastically better than those in Jackson, MS.

> I look at a "sort of" competitor in our industry, and their rate of feature development is ridiculously slow by comparison.

Seconded. At my org, Ruby/Rails is our competitive advantage.

Our 5-6 competitors are all Java/.NET shops -- we deliver fixes and new features dramatically faster and deploy them with ease. It gets noticed.

The main downside is rails doesn't scale well re: complexity so regular refactors are necessary (ours is a high-volume big data app).

For performance/cost, it took some doing but by strategically moving business logic to higher performance techs we've even managed to get to a great spot there.

I expected it to be even more of a tome, but surprisingly it's been cut in half!

2nd edition:

Paperback ‏ : ‎ 1312 pages

Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4.81 pounds

3rd edition:

Paperback ‏ : ‎ 656 pages

Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.71 pounds

You probably know all this as well, but for future googlers:

I used to use Libre + MiaoMiao + Nightscout, but these days I much prefer Dexcom G6 + xDrip + Nightscout.

Pros for the G6:

- No 3rd party transmitter (e.g. the MiaoMiao)

- It's smaller and can go on the stomach so it's less likely to get ripped off

- 1 less app involved -- xDrip integrates directly to Nightscout and there is no need for the Dexcom app

- Supposedly the glucose readings are a bit more accurate than the Libre

Cons:

- Sensors are more expensive than the Libre

- The transmitter is not rechargeable so you need to keep buying them every 90 days

I love it for admin pages.

If only 20 internals are ever going to see it, jquery is as light as can be, can be loaded right from a CDN, needs no kind of transpilation and handles basically all you need.

> Approximately 80% of the income of traditional capitalist conglomerates go to salaries and wages, according to Varoufakis, while Big Tech’s workers, in contrast, collect “less than 1% of their firms’ revenues”.

This doesn't sound right to me, but if it is Varoufakis has a point.

Our contract, such as it is, with traditional capitalists is they employ many, produce some sort of value and keep as much profit as they can manage after labor and expenses.

If the Amazons and Googles of the world can generate their enormous revenues (and profits) without dispensing much of it to labor, essentially just collecting large rents in perpetuity, both traditional capitalists and workers are in serious trouble. That is a big shift.

Techno Feudalism, indeed.

Agreed. I was also part of the Kenna acquisition after being there for 2 years and am still there.

My equity got paid out quickly, I have since gotten raises and bonuses, and the only shittiness has been all the mega-corp nonsense (omg the trainings) and worse health insurance.

Cisco is not a nightmare acquirer, that would be Amazon. If AMZN had acquired us I'd have left immediately.

Nothing yet. I'd imagine it will go through appeals for a few years before anything actually happens, and U.S. antitrust enforcement has not exactly been a powerful force for the last few decades.

There's not much to the article.

> KANSAS CITY, Mo.—A federal jury on Tuesday found the National Association of Realtors and large residential brokerages liable for about $1.8 billion in damages after determining they conspired to keep commissions for home sales artificially high.

> The verdict comes in the first of two major antitrust lawsuits that target decades-old industry practices and seek to drive down commissions and change the way agents are compensated. The two-week trial involved claims by home sellers in several Midwestern states. The jury issued its verdict after just hours of deliberations.

> Under antitrust rules, the presiding judge could triple the damages verdict, which would total more than $5 billion. The plaintiffs also have asked the judge to order changes to how the industry operates.

> For several years NAR has been fending off accusations by U.S. antitrust officials and private litigants that it has conspired to keep home-sale costs high in the face of major technological upheavals. This verdict is by far the group’s biggest setback yet.

> An NAR spokesman said, “This matter is not close to being final as we will appeal the jury’s verdict.”

I would love for there to be some sort of competition injected into real estate commissions. I've bought and sold twice now and you get the same rate from everyone (within 1%) regardless of what they end up doing.