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Resignation

andymills.work

91–100 of 113 posts

Re: Resignation

#91
post #90

The thing I find most notable here is the reason he's being forced out. I mean, this guy probably does deserve to be fired... But Callimachi deserves to be fired right along with him, and she isn't. They were terrible at their jobs. The reason here highlights two problems: First, that he might be being made the scapegoat, probably to distract from the huge failure of the organization as a whole that that podcast was.…

Who's "they"? What's "cancel culture mentality"?

I don't think you're asking those questions in good faith, but I'll try to answer hoping I'm wrong: "They" is the cancel culture mobs in twitter I mentioned in that same comment, and "cancel culture mentality" is the attitude that whenever someone made a mistake, they made it forever and using those past mistakes to destroy someone, under the belief that people cannot change.

Re: Resignation

#92
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's "they"? What's "cancel culture mentality"?

I don't think you're asking those questions in good faith, but I'll try to answer hoping I'm wrong: "They" is the cancel culture mobs in twitter I mentioned in that same comment, and "cancel culture mentality" is the attitude that whenever someone made a mistake, they made it forever and using those past mistakes to destroy someone, under the belief that people cannot change.

It was a genuine request for you to define your terms. I think it's a good idea in general, and it's vital for terms that seem to be fine-tuned to certain biases.

Remember back when the entire center-left press decided the word "bro" was sexist? I asked people doing it to define the word. So many genuinely had no idea it was short for brother. Their entire awareness and understanding of the term came from trashy think pieces about a west coast subculture. Knowing that meant I could choose to either dismiss them or make a probably-futile attempt to share the rest of the word with them.

Knowing what you, specifically, mean and what you think of those terms leaves me thinking of you what I initially assumed, but at least we're on the same page now. This saves so much time and energy, and avoids a tiresome demon thread.

Thank you.

Re: Resignation

#93
post #86
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is a "freedom" to not employ gay people a freedom? And why freedom of association? Why another person chooses to do with their genitals is generally no not your business. It is not a "freedom". It is prejudice and bigotry

I agree that it’s bigotry. Do we think people should be free to be bigoted?

People? sure. Businesses? Nope.

People can discriminate all they want to so long as they don’t infringe of the freedoms of others. Businesses should be required to not discriminate because it would impede the other party’s freedoms. I don’t have a choice for some things, I have to buy from a certain business. Should they discriminate against me I have no other option. If a person discriminated against me I can just punch them in the face (figuratively) and go elsewhere. Businesses should be required by law to abide by EEO/EOE laws for their customers as well as for their employees.

Re: Resignation

#94
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Businesses shouldn’t be allowed bigoted freedoms.

Who defines what counts as bigoted?

Not refusing service based on sex/age/race/sexual orientation/religion is a good start. It’s also good for business.

If a patron of a business comes to do business, that business should welcome the business and ignore the personal biases and their own bigoted beliefs.

Re: Resignation

#95
post #85
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scapegoating an individual is also an excellent way to ensure nothing gets fixed. Was it a cover-up of bad behavior when Amazon refused to release the name and/or fire the engineer whose error caused the 2017 S3 outage? We don't fire or shame those people, and they arguably do just as much damage to the credibility of the organization they work for. Instead, a retrospective is held, they determine how it was possible…

It’s not comparable. It’s both an institutional failure and an individual one. We know bugs and mistakes happen. If an organization has a QA or testing process and the code passed through the accepted processes and yet the still failed, we may not hold the engineer responsible. If an engineer on the other hand, ships code which has not been tested, when a testing process exists , then we might well hold them responsi…

My understanding is that this story was run through the New York Times fact checking department. Is that not the equivalent of testing?

Re: Resignation

#96
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you're asking those questions in good faith, but I'll try to answer hoping I'm wrong: "They" is the cancel culture mobs in twitter I mentioned in that same comment, and "cancel culture mentality" is the attitude that whenever someone made a mistake, they made it forever and using those past mistakes to destroy someone, under the belief that people cannot change.

It was a genuine request for you to define your terms. I think it's a good idea in general, and it's vital for terms that seem to be fine-tuned to certain biases. Remember back when the entire center-left press decided the word "bro" was sexist? I asked people doing it to define the word. So many genuinely had no idea it was short for brother. Their entire awareness and understanding of the term came from trashy thin…

> leaves me thinking of you what I initially assumed, but at least we're on the same page now.

Likewise. Have a good day.

Re: Resignation

#97
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that it’s bigotry. Do we think people should be free to be bigoted?

People? sure. Businesses? Nope. People can discriminate all they want to so long as they don’t infringe of the freedoms of others. Businesses should be required to not discriminate because it would impede the other party’s freedoms. I don’t have a choice for some things, I have to buy from a certain business. Should they discriminate against me I have no other option. If a person discriminated against me I can just p…

> “Businesses should be required to not discriminate because it would impede the other party’s freedoms.“

Being forced to do work they don’t want to do would impede the first party’s freedoms.

Re: Resignation

#98
post #95
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not comparable. It’s both an institutional failure and an individual one. We know bugs and mistakes happen. If an organization has a QA or testing process and the code passed through the accepted processes and yet the still failed, we may not hold the engineer responsible. If an engineer on the other hand, ships code which has not been tested, when a testing process exists , then we might well hold them responsi…

My understanding is that this story was run through the New York Times fact checking department. Is that not the equivalent of testing?

If that is what happened, then I agree. My understanding is that the fact checking department exists, and that Mills was told he didn’t need to do his own fact checking. But it wasn’t clear to me that the fact checking department did the fact checking.

In this situation, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect Mills to be responsible for making sure the fact checking has been done before considering his work ready for publication even if he wasn’t the one doing it. Just like a release engineer may be responsible for making sure the release has been through QA.

Re: Resignation

#99
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who defines what counts as bigoted?

Not refusing service based on sex/age/race/sexual orientation/religion is a good start. It’s also good for business. If a patron of a business comes to do business, that business should welcome the business and ignore the personal biases and their own bigoted beliefs.

You didn’t answer my question. I asked who gets to define what counts as bigoted, not what you count as bigoted.

Re: Resignation

#100
post #42

Perhaps failing is so normalized in tech that I'm naive to how the rest of the world thinks, but I don't think failures of the kind Caliphate made should cost someone their job no more than an outage should cost an engineer theirs. A blameless retrospective should occur with the appropriate updates to process so it can't happen again. This was an institutional failure, and I don't suddenly feel better about the accur…

Come on, are you advocating for corporate cover-ups of bad behavior? Because "institutional failure" is an excellent way to diffuse blame and get nothing fixed.

The two aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s always a process failure when something like this happens. Sometimes it’s also an individual failure.
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