Andy Grove has died

>If employment is efficient, why are there things like Occupy Wall St? Not that Occupy is right or wrong, but why would it exist? Why wouldn't those companies, with policies people find socially toxic, fail to find enough applicants and be forced to change policies in response to the market?

Your assumption here is that the entire population agrees with OWS. They don't. The people who work at those companies are perfectly happy to work there, and are not the same people who were in OWS. OWS wasn't even about employment, it was about Wall Street doing things which wrecked the economy, and getting away with it, and with the economy as a whole not working for many sectors of the population.

The economy is working just fine for people on Wall Street. Why would they complain about it? People working on Wall Street are getting paid well. They're not complaining. The complainers at OWS were people who were not working on Wall Street, and they certainly weren't protesting work environments in Wall Street companies.

You do have good points about H1-B visa abuse and prevention of collective bargaining. But this is still orthogonal to open-plan offices. Right now, the employment market for software developers is very strong, probably one of the healthiest employment markets in the American economy right now. Companies are competing with each other to hire talented employees in this market. If a work environment were really that bad, they'd have a hard time keeping people around. This is, in fact, exactly what the US government is complaining about right now with IT workers; they can't keep good one around because the pay is so much better in industry and you don't have to wait around for months for a background check.

>The more disconcerting thing is the way that younger generations of programmers, basically my generation and younger, have been psychologically manipulated into believing that "dynamic" and "collaborative" are synonymous with open-plan

Now this is hitting the nail on the head. Younger people actually believe this kind of environment is better, more "fun", etc. So employees are willingly signing up to work in these places because they're drunk the Kool-Aid.

This is inaccurate. Most of the people I know who work in quant finance, for example, actively despise their employer but have extreme fear about ever expressing it. Some others even have expressed it and participated openly in OWS.

The trouble is really that there is no industry in which you can work where your labor accomplishes anything other than servicing some vertical scam to protect and enhance the lifestyle of certain executives. So while people are very right to point out the ethical problems of the finance industry, the choice to quit finance for something else doesn't make much sense either because everything else is equally as fucked with unethical behavior. Leaving finance generally just means dealing with exactly the same unethical side effects but receiving less pay for doing so.

> Right now, the employment market for software developers is very strong, probably one of the healthiest employment markets in the American economy right now. Companies are competing with each other to hire talented employees in this market. If a work environment were really that bad, they'd have a hard time keeping people around. This is, in fact, exactly what the US government is complaining about right now with IT workers; they can't keep good one around because the pay is so much better in industry and you don't have to wait around for months for a background check.

I disagree with this very much. On one hand, there are all sorts of puff pieces and seeded media articles about the so-called tech shortage. On the other hand, recruiters are resorting to bullshit like HackerRank and telling candidates that there is such a tsunami of qualified candidate applications pouring in, that they have to use dumb commodity shit like online quizzes about data structures to weed out 90% of applicants before they can even start assessing who to interview.

The tech job market is in a period right now where it is heavily focused on suppressing wages relative to the actual market value of these types of employees. There are a handful of boutique financial firms (certainly not the large banks) and the big 6 tech firms that still pay competitive market wages. Most of the rest of the industry, and especially the start-up world which far and away counts for the most job openings, deeply suppress wages and use all kinds of underhanded tactics to make sure they don't have to pay what developers are worth.

Most of all, they simply do not seek talented or productive people. Those people are expensive to hire and they know their way around negotiation. If you are one of these people, most often you get instantly rejected for not being cheap enough and/or for not agreeing to do silly things like immediately share your salary history in the very first HR phone screen. The company is absolutely happier to reject all such candidates and wait until they find someone who is plausibly talented enough to do the job, or looks good on paper, but who is a total dummy when it comes to salary negotiation or even just knowing what they are worth.

Companies hire developers for the purpose of office decoration. They build out some lifestyle-masturbation open-plan office with a cafe, a roofdeck, etc., and then they make the actual working space look like an Apple store had sex with a sweatshop. Because that's what investors want to look at when they walk through. They want to see rows and rows of hoodie-clad, hipster-glasses-wearing nerds with gourmet coffee typing on Macbooks with less than 2 lateral feet of personal space per person. That's what "software" looks like in their head, and they don't give a shit about productivity or about extracting value from the creative talent of these workers. Their value is likely for an acqui-hire, so on-paper credential + how you look in the sexy open-plan office are far more important than how much work you actually get done, apart from some extremely low, low bar of output necessary to keep the company going just long enough for the founders to get paid funding round bonuses and then peace out when the company fails.

> If a work environment were really that bad, they'd have a hard time keeping people around.

There are a lot of reasons why this is false. The visa leverage I mentioned before is an example. If you're scared about jeopardizing your visa and switching jobs, you won't grumble about frivolous extras, you know, like getting home before 7pm, or taking a vacation, or having adequate privacy. And so now if the non-visa workers try to complain, you can just point to the visa workers who are dealing with it, with the subtle implication being that if you demand better working conditions, we're just going to bring in someone over whom we hold more leverage and fire you.

A person can also be constrained by geography and unable to move to places where the likelihood of private office space is higher. For example, in the suburban midwest, there really aren't any acceptable jobs for machine learning. There are a few things in Akron, Madison, Ann Arbor, and Dayton. But nothing that is a "real machine learning job" as there are in SF, NY, Boston, and so on. Yet in the bigger cities, the pressure to have the fanciest looking office for social status effects and investor effects is far higher, so the likelihood of being given privacy there is close to zero. There's definitely a direct relationship between "proximity to abjectly horrible social status nonsense" and "job that won't torpedo your career."

Companies also collude all the time. Just look at the whole techtopus ordeal with collusion to keep wages lower. You don't think employers would do the same thing to collude so that they can guarantee no one is going to steal their employees by offering them healthier working conditions? If they are willing to collude to keep wages down, surely they are willing to collude to keep cost of floorplans down too. It would be naive to think that companies wouldn't collude like this and essentially create backdoor deals to keep workplaces on the cheap side.

> Younger people actually believe this kind of environment is better, more "fun", etc.

This is a bit of a mis-statement. It's not that they believe open-plan offices are better or more fun, or that they believe they are not better. It's more about the belief that to succeed, they must repress their feelings about aspects of the job that affect their basic human needs.

If the job markets the environment as "fun" -- well then, buddy, you'd better act like it's fun. You'd better be seen playing foosball, be seen staying late to get free dinner, be seen drinking alcohol at every alcohol-focused gathering, etc. If someone else at your same position in the firm has a family and needs to go home instead of attending Whisky Thursday on the roof deck, well that's your time to shine. You just passed him in political capital because you're willing to sacrifice any semblance of a healthy work/life balance to appear to be living it up on all the super awesome perks your oh-so-generous employer has given you.

Inside, you might hate this. But we are conditioned now to believe that this is how you advance in a company. You must be a loyal sycophant, sublimating away basic human needs, and competing with your colleagues to see who can outwardly appear as the most willing to sublimate away their humanity.

The reason I don't like your characterization is that you're still clinging to this wrong idea that it's a valid preference or a valid belief on the part of the employee. That they have weighed up their options and chosen to function this way in the workplace. And that companies are somehow constrained by employee preferences, and so the usage of open-plan represents some kind of game-theoretic equilibrium in which companies and employees are both happy with the properties of the work space.

That's just not even close to how these things develop and remain entrenched in reality though.

Generally, today ARM will sometimes break OS-level code between releases - something Intel would never do - and I think ARM does this because it sells an IP, not chips, and so in any case the only way to sell a CPU to a consumer is through a chip maker licensing ARM and then porting OSes to the new chip - and the chip maker can handle ARM-related breakage while they're at it. But it does not follow that ARM is to blame for most chips being closed and/or hard for an OS unsupported by the chip maker to work on the chip across its various generations; I'd guess that most of the difficulty comes from the chip-level breakage and lack of documentation, not CPU-level issues of this sort.

So IMO it's not that ARM or MIPS actively prevent(ed) the emergence of an open platform like the PC while Intel was pushing for open platforms; it's that Intel happens to have succeeded mainly selling chips for an open platform, while ARM and MIPS happen to have succeeded mainly selling CPU IP for various closed platforms.

Regarding the SPARC IP that you mentioned - I'd have to look at it more deeply to have an informed opinion. Generally for a chip vendor who wants source code, as opposed to wanting an open source IP, MIPS is just fine, they'll give you the source. Otherwise what you want from your CPU vendor varies (ARM for instance gives you not just the CPU but everything you need to build say a cellphone application processor - probably not the best one on the market, but a completely functional one. At the level of the CPU itself, you might want a bunch of things - like hardware virtualization support, or cache coherence with other processors, etc. etc. - that different vendors support differently, if at all.) So as I said, I don't think I have a serious opinion about the product you mention.