391–400 of 539 posts
https://iaindooley.com/post/57313703317/an-open-letter-and-a...
EDIT: actually I just remembered that around 2011 I repurposed SMS subscription software I had written to run a (basically) spam premium SMS service in Ireland. It wasn’t my service, it was for a client, but I knew it was shit and I did it anyway. What can I say I needed the cash.
Interesting that most posts here have to do with monitoring or surveillance of others. Privacy is important...
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> There may be consequences to quitting, perhaps disproportionately felt between you and the company This is why unions are so important, even in a field like software engineering. If you quit on your own, the company may not care. But using the threat of strikes, workers can demand better conditions for themselves and more ethical directions for their company.
Why are tech workers so resistant to organized action? Their owner employers sure are organizing adversarially in a multitude of ways in the open and behind closed doors
I am not actually so much resistant to unions, as I do not see what benefit I’ll get from them. What exactly in my life would have changed for better if I had been a part of a union? Just one thing, can you name?
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An ex-coworker asked me to do a 3-month contracting stint at his company where he was the head of IT. The task was to "clean up the environment" because the servers were crashing often and performance was poor. I quickly found the source of the crashes: misconfigured ethernet switch MAC address limits applied to VMware ESXi. I also cleansed the environment by finding the one working server in each cluster and then cl…
I'm so torn about stuff like this. On one hand, yeah, it absolutely sucks that people lost their job based on a thing you did. But on the other hand, their jobs existed only because things were broken that didn't need to be. Essentially, bullshit jobs: it sorta feels related to the trope of someone going around a neighborhood breaking people's windows to drum up business for the local window-installation company, wit…
I'm sure they got new jobs and whatnot, but I still feel bad about the whole thing.
Intellectually, I agree with you that bullshit jobs ought to be eliminated, but I suspect that this process will continue to be morally a gray area until we have something like universal basic income.
I worked in an Ad-tech start-up in Berlin run by two of the most evil f*kers I've ever encountered. I built out their principal ad auction algorithm and a lot of the back-end to support it, and all they did with it was target vulnerable groups of people at particular times of the week when they thought they were at their lowest ebb. One meeting in particular really stands out still, a social media giant that everyone…
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Glad you regret it. Not trying to rub it in as I don't think anything productive will come from self-flagellation, but this is truly awful and I think the US should have laws that make it a crime for any US corporation to participate in this sort of thing.
I was powerless to stop it. I was just a junior engineer, and it was decided by the CEO to do the project. So, actually, I feel I made the right choice -- I participated in the project but worked hard on making sure it was as limited as possible. I successfully advocated for several categories of logs to not be sent because they were not required by law. So, yes, I regret I couldn't do more, but I don't regret the ch…
You could have found a new job, driving up their costs or delaying them slightly.
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You can organize. Why shouldn't workers in a factory have a say over how their labour is used by those who appropriate it? Baffled by how obvious solutions appear to have fallen off the radar.
They do have a say. Their labour is being purchased from them, not appropriated. They can say no (individually or together) and ultimately they can walk away. As you say, collective bargaining is usually going to be more effective than individual.
It may be more effective in terms of salary and working conditions (though I doubt that in software engineering I would have been able to get better pay through collective).
But in terms of ethics?
Individually, it’s almost impossible to make me support surveillance and censorship. But a big collective is much more vulnerable to manipulation. Comes 9/11 and you’ll get “collective” support for Patriot act, comes 6/1 and you’ll get “collective” support for censorship.
Tons and tons of technical things! I've seen (and caused/fixed) so many horrific things that I feel compelled to improve my expression skills... so that I can write them up more formally. Most recently, I moved some of our Ubuntu systems away from network-scripts to systemd-networkd I didn't realize the gravity of this change. Be warned, systemd-networkd will significantly change how forwarding works. Due to things o…
Some replies over snipes would be nice, folks. Is systemd that upsetting, or is this not venture capitalist enough for the thread? Not that I care about votes, but I can see at least three people have disagreed but said nothing. I'm genuinely confused - this is a blunder I created/regret by implementation
Yes. And unkike the other confessions in this thread about surveillence here or there, it has a practical impact on many.
Of course, I'm now going to get down-voted by its fans.
It's a love or hate thing. And where something breaks, it's easily the latter.
there were 2 webproperties
a people search engine a travel social network a yelp clone
i was in charge of SEO
in it was a major success
the people search engine became part of the biggest websites of the western world, top 10 in europe
the travel social network became a travel guide with more traffic than tripadviser then
the yelp clone became bigger them qype, the then leading yelp clone in europe
all with technical SEO
felt like a superstar
all resources were shifted to SEO and monitization
all 3 webproperties dont exit anymore (sometimes the companies behind them still do)
we did scaleable SEO before we had a product that users wanted.
so by now, I don't touch projects before they are not (near) product market fit. SEO kills if done otherwise.
said that, the people search engine had a 100m exit i think, which was a lot at that time.