spacelizard

Because it's free as in freedom, not free as in price. Most popular free software is written by employed developers working for companies.

This is exactly what I mean though. The term "open source" has become so incredibly politicized that it doesn't mean anything any more. I used to use the term in business contexts but I don't anymore because of this. The real issue is how they treat others. For me a good metric has been if a company is willing to focus on empowering the customer and giving them freedom and liberty.

I've noticed that hammering "why" only seems to work at mid-sized companies -- in the case of a fortune 500, then the whys are usually significantly disconnected from what most employees are doing, unless you're talking to the board or senior management, in which case you are probably being paid to determine the why. In the case of a startup, everyone seems to be running around like chickens with their heads cut off frantically trying to determine the "why" but no one is really sure of what it is.

You can tell a lot about a company by their attitude on this. The fact that "you should let your users have freedom" is still a controversial statement in those type of companies should tip you off as to how they treat their customers.

Also, the fact that we still often have to use "open source" as a euphemism for "free software" in these type of situations illustrates the point even further. Freedom or liberty does not matter to these companies. It's not even about money or greed to them as they often give away their software/services without charging. All they care about is establishing complete control and dominance of the market.

If we believe prisons are to act as a sort of operant conditioning for the inmates, then the punishment IS supposed the rehabilitation. However, as you probably know, many folks do not respond to this type of conditioning.

There is no malice, this is just what happens at big companies. When you have 10 layers of management, everyone is expected to fall in line because this is the only way it can work.

On the contrary, this was an obvious power play by the recruiter to get the candidate to agree and submit to whatever arbitrary KPI has been passed down by the HR manager, regardless of whether or not it's meaningful. I would not take anything away from this other than that the candidate was probably not a good fit for the position anyway, as they don't seem to gel well with the BS corporate politics. Some do, some don't.

I disagree, a good office culture extends beyond meatspace. I've worked at plenty of companies where the general atmosphere was... not good. These are places where the "hallway conversation" was either nonexistent or didn't extend beyond small talk about TV or the weather. If your employees aren't comfortable sending instant messages to each other, they definitely aren't going to be comfortable being in the same room together.

Why is Electron still such a memory hog? Wasn't the Chromium Content module supposed to dramatically reduce footprint by only providing the bare minimum to render a web page?

The real privilege that derives from this is being able to live without being bombarded with advertising. To be able to have a meaningful conversation with a business that isn't predicated on them trying to analyze your behavior as part of a demographic group. To not be bucketed into a predefined economic segment based on your life experiences.

It does, but it has a lot of the same problems as MS Office, some worse. The scripting/macro system is arcane, proprietary, and only works in the cloud. The files aren't in an easily parseable format. You can export them to OOXML/ODF, but then you're stuck with parsing some ridiculously complex markup. As far as I know the version history is not exportable either.

The problem with Soundcloud is that grew too big and as a result aren't building a site for their core customer: indie artists. Take a look at the front page, all it shows is tracks and artists that are already hugely popular. The features they are focusing on seem to be a hodgepodge of things taken from Spotify and Last.fm, but without any real value-adds for someone who's just uploading music. I recently made an account for a new project I'm working on and all the organic traffic I'm getting is just spam. Bandcamp is now the place for unsigned artists to go to promote/sell indie music.

Look at the incentives of the people who made Bonzi Buddy and Comet Cursor. That kind of crud and malware will continue to exist as long as spying and advertising are the prevalent business model, which they still are. This isn't going away with a walled garden, in fact the device manufacturers welcome it with open arms.

They also face considerable risk for sticking around when an employer has expressed interest in underpaying and overworking them or just outright firing them. If you're hiring people at 50% of their desired pay, then you're generally only going to get 50% of their skill. This is a double-edged sword. Employees also have an inherent need to accomplish things, and if you're not using them to their full capacity, that's also a risk of them leaving, or being completely checked out at work.

It's difficult when you don't have a lot of free time to spend doing random mundane interview questions. It's doubly frustrating when this is because you're spending a lot of time doing work on free (libre) software and technical recruiters can easily see tons of your code and communication style openly on Github and whatnot, but for various reasons this isn't adequate for them.