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The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

ericlippert.com

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Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#461

Post by tasuki »

kalkin wrote: post #155
tasuki wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Facebook to keep in touch with old friends and sometimes people organize events and they invite me on Facebook and it works and makes my life a tiny bit better.

I used to try to do that and yet I found it was net negative for my mental health in practice, with infinite scroll etc.

I usually go to the chat directly. Having missed several event invitations in the past two months, I now try to check the notifications every couple of days.

Infinite scroll perhaps twice a month and ruthlessly block whatever I don't enjoy.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#462

Post by bckr »

knodi123 wrote: post #376
brazzledazzle wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a private non-manager group is pretty neat. What happens when an IC gets promoted to manager? Do they get the boot from the group?

Yeah, there's a ceremony where the manager puts a piece of paper with their username in a goblet and drops in a match, and then the non-managers all collectively intone "gone. gone. gone." and turn their backs. It's kind of sad, but the manager is allowed to keep their ceremonial robe as a memento, and there's usually a box of free cookies, so /shrug

I believed this for a minute and it made me so happy

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#463

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #401
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helping an advertiser trick kids into spending their time in a pupil dilation monitor/retinal scanner so that ads can be optimized for impact based on biometric markers isn't amoral, it's immoral.

I know it's an accepted sci-fi trope and people (including advertisers) genuinely believe it's the future, but advertising doesn't work that way. When you peel back the layers and figure out how this sausage is made, underneath it's just sociology and broad target audiences. (Age, sex, location, social status.) Retinal scans don't help solve this problem.

Ok, how about this: Helping an advertiser is immoral.

Creepy methods aside, you're trying to get people to do something other than what they wanted to do today.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#464

Post by yafbum »

ericlippert wrote: post #385
yafbum wrote: post #331

> We foolishly thought that we would naturally be protected from any layoffs, being a team that reduced costs of any team we partnered with. In retrospect, that was a little naive. A team that reduces costs of other teams is not on anyone’s critical path. > The whole Probability division was laid off as a cost-cutting measure. I have no explanation for how this was justified and I note that if the company were actual…

You have accurately re-stated the situation, yes. I know for a fact that there are teams like that! And what are they going to do now that the scientists who could have helped them make those decisions in a principled way are scattered to different teams or companies? This is the very definition of penny-wise and pound-foolish.

What are they going to do... make poorer decisions? How much poorer? Will it matter?

When a company undertakes cost cutting as a strategic priority, it is usually that they have made overeager long-term bets that turn out to be unsustainable and need correcting. It tends to be short termist.

Real estate analogy. Say I bought a house on a mortgage and I'm fixing it up to resell it. I'm hiring a roofer to fix leaks. That's important long term because it'll save on future repair costs. He gets to work. Then I suddenly have a need for funds for something urgent and unrelated, so I need to make a choice: do I stop paying the mortgage, or the roofer? Probably the roofer. It's still dumb not to fix the leaks. But it's more dumb to get the house repossessed.

When you hit the bottom of your capital reserve (for some definition of "bottom" - Meta is obviously not bankrupt but it cares about its stock price), you end up having to make choices that are really sucky. "Should I cut off your arm, or your leg, sir?" type of choices. Yet they must be made or you circle the drain for a long time before ending up like Yahoo.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#465

Post by yafbum »

yafbum wrote: post #464
ericlippert wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have accurately re-stated the situation, yes. I know for a fact that there are teams like that! And what are they going to do now that the scientists who could have helped them make those decisions in a principled way are scattered to different teams or companies? This is the very definition of penny-wise and pound-foolish.

What are they going to do... make poorer decisions? How much poorer? Will it matter? When a company undertakes cost cutting as a strategic priority, it is usually that they have made overeager long-term bets that turn out to be unsustainable and need correcting. It tends to be short termist. Real estate analogy. Say I bought a house on a mortgage and I'm fixing it up to resell it. I'm hiring a roofer to fix leaks. Th…

IOW I wouldn't see it as a judgement of value of your work. If you're the roofer that's been cut off, it's not because it's bad to fix leaks, or because you don't do a good job at it. It's only because your employer felt like they needed the cash for something else.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#466

Post by rekabis »

ericlippert wrote: post #311
kelnos wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Third, this opinion is indeed extremely common internally. It is intensely weird to me that people hold the opinion that their company is building something that is bad for the world, and yet they stay there and continue to help build it. I know that's easy to say as someone not in that situation, but not always easy to do for someone who is. I get that people don't always have a ton of choice about their employmen…

People are leaving. In droves. There has been a huge exodus of senior talent in the last year. Zuck mentioned that in an earnings call and rather than assigning himself any responsibility said that those people were unregretted attrition and lazy parasites who were just collecting a paycheck during the pandemic. (I am paraphrasing somewhat; you can look it up if you want his exact words.) Regarding change from within…

> Zuck mentioned that in an earnings call and rather than assigning himself any responsibility said that those people were unregretted attrition and lazy parasites who were just collecting a paycheck during the pandemic.

Wow. What an effective way of encouraging others to leave while discouraging others from applying.

Remember: toxic work environments are reinforced from the top, and the top _only._ Toxic leadership begets toxic work environments, and it looks like Zuck is a right peach in being insufferably toxic.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#467

Post by daveguy »

colineartheta wrote: post #307
daveguy wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> post-PhD

> I’ve never filed a patent, written a publication, nor given a talk. When written in a single sentence, it implies that you have never written a publication, post- or pre- or during- a PhD. I will rephrase my question: have you, or have you not, written a publication?

The whole sentence is:

> My work is trade secret so I’ve never filed a patent, written a publication, nor given a talk.

"My work is a trade secret so..." is an important part of the sentence, which I read as a qualifier/context to the "never".

It could be interpreted either way.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#468

Post by HDThoreaun »

kaashif wrote: post #403
pronlover723 wrote: post #386

> News flash: no one wants to wear VR goggles This to me sounds similar to "I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers" ( https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=164a442a-1b90... ). That was wrong or "people don’t want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours" ( https://qz.com/593329/choice-quotes-from-a-1985-new-york-tim... ). Looking around the beach and especiall…

> News flash: no one wants to wear VR goggles Cutting that sentence off there paints a slightly different picture from the full sentence: > News flash: no one wants to wear VR goggles to spend any time in a digital heaven where the role of God is played by Mark Zuckerberg and you can do anything you can imagine, including “work” and “shop”. Plenty of people want to wear VR goggles, but it's hard to see how the metave…

Plenty of people spend time on facebook which is basically one step away from "digital heaven where the role of God is played by Mark Zuckerberg and you can do anything you can imagine, including “work” and “shop”."

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#469

Post by jlokier »

midoridensha wrote: post #433
fleddr wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's accounting bias/culture. Say you have a 100 developers and you reason each should get a second monitor worth 300$, because this increases productivity by 20%. According to an accountant, you just added 30K in costs to the books, with nothing to show for it. You can't eat productivity nor is it a line item in the books. Who is to say that this 20% of freed up time is used productively? Or used on things that incr…

>Say you have a 100 developers and you reason each should get a second monitor worth 300$, because this increases productivity by 20%. >According to an accountant, you just added 30K in costs to the books, with nothing to show for it. You can't eat productivity nor is it a line item in the books. Right, this is why developers should NOT get 2nd monitors. Even better, the business can save another $30k by not getting…

You joke, but my current job sent me a Dell laptop with a tiny screen and a fancy 4-video port USB-C dock. Seem I'm expected to have my own monitors.

(Turns out I do have my own monitors, but they are for my own laptop, and are HDMI and Thunderbolt which the dock isn't, except one HDMI.)

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#470

Post by dang »

samiam_iam wrote: post #209

Boohoo

We've banned this account for posting unsubstantive comments.

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