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Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

mattwynne.net

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Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

#71

Post by kdhamric »

ibejoeb wrote: post #52

I'm not suggesting that it is, but this sounds much more like a firing than a layoff. Pretty shitty way to do a layoff. This is the way you remove a potential problem, i.e., play it cool until the doors are locked, then full lock-out. That's very different from "Hey man sorry, but it's layoff season, as you know, so we're gonna pay you out for the next 4 weeks and you can keep your coursera subscription."

I know another person laid off from this same company last Friday. Pretty sure it was a layoff that impacted him.

Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

#76

Post by regularfry »

ludovicianul wrote: post #55
regularfry wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd completely disagree. Not necessarily for cats, which I wasn't previously aware of, but in my experience there's no benefit to having karate in the mix.

Why would you say that? Majority of code is repetitive. Why still focus on writing it for every project? I agree that you cannot have 100% of tests without actual code, but a significant percentage can just be feature files only.

Where I come from we do such revolutionary things as writing libraries and defining abstractions to avoid repetitive code. Why introducing a new tool with its own language for this seems like a good idea to anyone utterly baffles me.

Also, I should add, where I've seen karate used on teams it's deepened the division between devs and testers. So in addition to being questionable engineering, it's sociologically toxic.

Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

#77

Post by gregors »

Dayshine wrote: post #15

The American way of firing people with no notice and cutting off their logins instantly is so strange. Is saving a tiny bit of money that much more important than a smooth handover? Or are employees just not willing to work their notice periods? It sounds like in this case it's actively going to hurt the business.

In this particular case it looks like he was the co-founder of a business acquired by another company. Usually co-founders hang out for a time, but also usually not forever. How would you feel if you bought a house and the previous owners kept showing up to see the new decor? It's generally a short-lived relationship.

It's a bummer but a labor of love that's acquired by someone else....is no longer your baby. If it's not generating revenue by the new company they're going to kill it. Heck, even if it is generating revenue they still might mess it up. That's really the sad part of acquisitions. Hopefully he took away some cash at some point.

Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

#78

Post by bluGill »

pydry wrote: post #63
bluGill wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is great for removing ambiguity, but business executives don't want to think on that level any more than they have to. It is terrible for simplifying things. Most people really know "I want ta safe self driving car", they don't want to figure out when it is acceptable to hit a kid on the road (think gory video games were people throw babies in front of your car for one case where it would be acceptable).

Disambiguation is precisely what it's not great at, I think. I would often see stories like "Given a logged in user..." and the details of what kind of user it was would be buried in a step definition somewhere. The restricted nature of the language encouraged this "dumbing down" of the high level requirements to the point where you couldn't really have intelligible conversations about gherkin scenarios without refer…

Those should be I don't care about it now - it should work for anyone.

The idea is to get to what is different about this user. Security is important enough that you always want to specify a logged in user, but most details you don't care about and shouldn't ambiguous is good because it says I don't care.

Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

#79

Post by erik_seaberg »

lesuorac wrote: post #43
Dalewyn wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not exactly paranoia given there have been many examples of the fear becoming true.

I mean employees also leak/sabotage stuff while they're employed perhaps you should have a better system where 1 "rogue" employee can't trash it. Imagine being a Google cloud customer and hearing that they need to give employees no notice of a firing in order to protect your data. Like that implies employees have unrestricted access!

How would a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_duties system work where no one guy has sudo? Approve commands to run by digitally signing them? Missile silo keys?

Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

#80

Post by lesuorac »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #79
lesuorac wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean employees also leak/sabotage stuff while they're employed perhaps you should have a better system where 1 "rogue" employee can't trash it. Imagine being a Google cloud customer and hearing that they need to give employees no notice of a firing in order to protect your data. Like that implies employees have unrestricted access!

How would a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_duties system work where no one guy has sudo? Approve commands to run by digitally signing them? Missile silo keys?

Well, first take a step back and ask yourself what process do you have that prevents an employed rogue employee from doing something malicious? And then ask the obvious followup, what powers does a soon to be fired employee gain that lets them bypass those processes?

If the answer to both of them is nothing then you've got a problem.

---

Well, first your question has a frame-challenge problem. Most SWEs are like a factory creating tools that an end user can then use/consume. You don't want to be in a situation where if there's a power outage in the factory then all of your smart lights stop working. The amount of people that would need sudo to customer-related machines is extremely low and so trivially they wouldn't need to be fired with no notice.

Sticking with the frame-challenge problem. There are many non-sudo activities that an employee can do. Literally their sudo access could be revoked no-notice and then they're given time to do knowledge transfers / pass off their on-call rotations / etc. For most of these layoffs the individuals are still employees for the next 60 days (WARN Act has a 60d notice period, this is why all the severances are worded so weirdly in that the employees get 60d of pay and then a lump sum of X. The lump sum is severance, the 60d is salary by-law -- they can't be fired yet).

The `sudo` command itself posses a problem for separation of duties but an invocation of it could be blocked without a review from multiple other people (perhaps that list is filtered by not-to-be-fired employees). It could also be that the command is set by one person (i.e. copy data) and the parameters are set by another person (i.e. machine1, machine2) and this can be done ahead of time (i.e. a template workflow).

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