sianemo

The further responses from Vlad may be ill advised, and maybe he should've realized those emails were going to be unproductive, but they aren't combative.

The email Lori sends explicitly asking him to stop emailing is then followed up with some last-wordism "for the record" nonsense. Only on the extremely online internet do people consider someone the aggrieved party after they write a screed against a product or business, then close the conversation with representatives of that business with essentially a don't @ me and some last-wordism. It's terrible journalistic practice. It's a net negative in social and community engagement. I don't see why doing it over online spaces gives the author a pass here.

That obelisk (we call it the monolith) effect is what led to the approval in my org to take a small team and start work on replacing our nearly 25 year old pile of enterprise Java with a new codebase. I agonized over doing this, tried to fix and refactor and guide effort to just having better code, but in the end the code base has become an inscrutable, angry monolith and it's impossible to know what code improvement appeases it or triggers a series of critical production bugs.

Joel Spolsky is a smarter man than I, but his examples here are table stakes stuff compared to two decades of poorly implemented Java enterprise MVC patterns. And we don't sell software, we sell a service, and that service will continue even if our rewrite team never delivers, so the rewrite can't be more than just an expensive financial boondoggle if I'm wrong.

What an aggressively myopic, narrow view of the situation. The reason "this VMware stuff" is a huge issue is because Broadcom are just absolutely fucking up relationships between every part of the VMWare ecosystem: the vendor relationship, the support relationship, the licensing system, the trust in a product reliability roadmap, just everything. This creates chaos in any org relying on them, at any size and efficiency. Chaos costs a fortune. The reasons that any org has for keeping their server operations on-prem and reliant on VMware are not as blithely dismissible as you are indicating. In fact, the reasons are frankly irrelevant anyway, as even the most impeccably managed migration plans to whichever big 3 cloud vendor you'd like are going to be thrown at least somewhat askew by the recent actions from Broadcom. The volume of clear, unambiguous discussion and media coverage that this is getting goes a long way to smooth over the pain of mitigation strategies with nontechnical leadership.

Pichai doesn't need to sincerely believe what he's relaying here to benefit from it, he needs only believe that by saying these things he can steer employee discontent to back within a manageable margin. Therein lies the ineptitude.

To my understanding a lot of these managers aren't sticking with the product too far after launch, they're often moving on internally to the next thing. So these managers get to say they were responsible for launching something new, and get to wash their hands of what happens after.

You'd think after all this time senior management, both internal and external, would see through this charade, but that is not apparently the case.

Outside of ads, and maybe LLM work, what projects are going on at Google that are interesting, to both the top brass and to line level engineers, that might lead people to feel differently? Google has been a rudderless ship cruising on ad dollars for years, with mid level managers launching one unimpressive product after another. Products that get canned by Google months later and only serve to benefit said managers resume. There's nothing apparent in the company to drive any high morale, unless morale is measured in RSUs.

The don't-bother-unless-it-hyperscales majority attitude of tech company funding and growth heavily limits the variety of new things that the tech world at large can offer. There are simply not that many types of tech business models that are capable of scaling fast and quickly without massive infusions of cash, but it turns out that data brokering, large dataset analysis, and profile building are a few of those things, and so the market success of these business looms large in the technology space.

I had hoped that rising interest rates and a tighter consumer market would change that dynamic somewhat but unfortunately for now it seems to be an incredibly well entrenched status quo that doesn't appear to have a clear path away from

Dynamics is Microsoft (somewhat poorly) making a Salesforce for people who are all-in on the Microsoft ecosystem. In terms of collective human suffering caused per year of existence I would say it's on par with the rest of the stuff you've mentioned.

It doesn't until there are negative externalities, you know, like labor retention rates, that cause those transport costs to go back up.

Tesla might be able to sell some of these to some companies for a while, because brand recognition and Elon stans in purchasing positions. That's not really a good strategy for long term growth, and Tesla can't just will an automotive niche into existence.

Do you honestly believe that a malicious actor who can access data storage can also necessarily access a silent mechanism to affect the security internals of a given iPhone? And also the theoretical hacker wouldn't be able to just push said theoretical silent update to your device to just exfil the data anyway?

Really having a hard time understanding the detailed security implications of your scenario beyond this vague notion you're presenting that a theoretical hacker can use theoretical tools to silently pwn any Apple device collected to the internet at any time.

You're correct about the testing not being a concern. Testing for psilocybin is very expensive and unreliable. Really only one major drug testing lab in the country will even try to test for psilocybin, and that's because you can, for the right price, try to get them to test for just about anything in a mass spec sample. I won't go so far as to say that nobody can ever successfully test you for psilocybin, but it's about as close to never as you can get.

I'm not going to try to justify how I would act, or how anyone else should act, were I to have a compensation package putting me easily in the top 0.1% of society, but we can collectively dispense with the notion that certain types of compensation (i.e. stocks) must necessarily be prohibitively harder for a CEO to give up than just money.

He's perfectly capable of giving stock to these employees as well.

Setting aside the hilarious disrespect of assuming that I'm a drug addict from single comment on the internet, you are capable of realizing that taking issue with people who use a drug only because of the mental and social association you have of people who use the drug is a super tight loop of circular logic, aren't you?