Dystopian SaaS idea: Integrate facial recognition and Yelp reviews. If someone shows up who gave you a negative review, send a text to staff and/or deny sale at POS.
I left out a great deal of detail. We had documentation. We closely work with an HR lawyer, and consulted with her extensively about this individual long before firing him.
We didn’t get “scared” of his lawyer. Lawsuits are distracting and expensive for both sides even if the allegations are baseless, and we avoided one in this case by just offering a bit of a larger severance than we originally offered.
I had a junior engineer once, a few years back, who could not take criticism.
He would get flustered, angry, sarcastic. His work wasn’t good. I did my best to help him — and even though I was polite, he always seemed to take a kind of deep, personal offense at whatever criticism I had for him.
There were many problems I had with his work — he wasn’t great at testing his code (at a surface level, sure, but rarely thought deeply about the implications of his changes. E.g., once he got a ticket to clean up some code throwing lots of warnings, and solved it by making the code not work at all. He tested that it wasn’t throwing warnings, but didn’t realize that it had an early escape condition that was being triggered inappropriately every time.)
He surprised me with his lack of basic knowledge that I would’ve expected from a CS graduate who’d also made an app or two outside of school. He didn’t know what a database index was, for example, among other issues.
He was also not great at communicating. When talking about his work, he’d use technical jargon incorrectly. His emails to outside vendors were meandering and difficult to parse. I coached him on these points extensively.
In the end, after 6 months or so of trying to help him, I asked our CEO to fire him. We gave him a month’s severance.
A couple months later, his lawyer got in touch with his, alleging racial discrimination. The allegation was that we fired him because of his accent. He interpreted my problems with his communication as being a problem with his (slight, barely noticeable) accent.
Our CEO told me to work on how I levy criticism of others. I mean, he’s right I’m sure. I thought I was being precise and polite, but perhaps I did give the wrong idea.
Or, maybe this hire just wasn’t used to criticism. He didn’t understand how to take advice. He didn’t know how to internalize it and act on those suggestions. When fired, he blamed an immutable quality about himself rather than something he could change.
I just read The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovitz. It’s an incredible book and talks at length about the issue in the article.
A word about this:
“What technology and trade have done, however, is displace millions of Americans from their middle-class jobs, and send them hurtling down the income ladder into less remunerative occupations.”
It’s not that simple. It’s not just trade and technology.
The causes of the erosion of good middle-class jobs are extremely complex. I’ll talk about just one here, since I don’t have too much time:
Tax law works to advantage higher tier workers over middle class workers. It costs much less in payroll taxes to hire a single superskilled worker at extremely high compensation than it does to hire a bunch of mid skill workers at middle class comp.
Quoting from the book:
“A simple example illustrates the special burden that the payroll tax imposes specifically on middle-class labor. If a bank deploys midcentury financial technologies to issue home mortgages using twenty mid-skilled loan officers who each earn $100,000 per year, this costs the bank and the workers, taken together, $306,000 in payroll taxes. By contrast, if the bank were to switch to the current mode of production and displace the mid-skilled loan officers with a single Wall Street trader who earns $2 million, this would cost the bank and the trader only about $90,000.
“Where two technologies of production are economically equivalent, but one requires twenty mid-skilled workers while the other requires one super-skilled worker, the mid-skilled approach currently faces an average payroll tax rate over 10 percentage points higher than the meritocratic approach, which produces an aggregate payroll tax burden over three times as great.
“The payroll tax, in other words, substantially suppresses mid-skilled employment and wages and fosters super-skilled employment and wages. (Indeed, if the super-skilled worker can get capital gains treatment for her income, by styling it as founder’s shares or carried interest, the income tax adds a further bias, on the order of 20 percentage points.)”
In MySQL, discovering the UNION hack a couple years ago was like a revelation. It’s something that I’ve since been preaching to everyone who’ll listen.
It’s extremely common to want to OR a small set of items. It feels like the compiler would be smart enough to use an index (presuming one exists matching the searches fields), but it doesn’t. UNION makes it use the index.
I meant socialist in the same way that Bernie Sanders seems to use it, which I have trouble distinguishing from Warren’s states policies. (I do agree that the traditional definition of word applies to neither Warren’s or Sanders’ policies for the most part. Except for the health insurance industry, where the proposal is nationalization.)
I should have said social democrat. Indeed, now that I think about it, few engineers would label themselves socialist. I don’t, though I am a Warren/Sanders supporter.
I’ve seen a couple comments saying that it’s the non-SWE’s that are the liberal ones.
That’s a very different experience than my own, and that of my friends.
My experience: Designers tend to be pretty liberal. Product managers and other managers tend to be moderate (tend to be Biden and Buttigieg fans). Salespeople tend to be extremely conservative. Support is kind of all over the place. Engineers tend to be either diehard socialists or (and this is the minority) libertarian.
This discussion and the original post has been what the United States government’s trade policy ought to be, not the morality of an individual’s purchasing choice (say, to buy a Chinese-made sweater or a US-made one). I think the question you’ve asked is interesting, but I don’t see how it’s pertinent to the matter at hand.
In regards to swapping cell phone plans, sure: If a cell phone company were to die because too many of their customers switched to a better competitor, that would be difficult for the employees of that company.
But that's an entirely different situation than the matter at hand, where we're talking about the United States government's policies on trade and the impact on our entire labor class and their fate within our own borders.
The entire point of an economy is to serve humanity. We're all participating in this circus to put food on our tables, provide for our children, grow, and enjoy life. We cannot lose sight of that fact. We have an obligation to see labor not as just cogs in a machine, but rather as constituents whose well-being we have an obligation to protect.
(I have to say, and I'm sure you don't mean it, but you comparing a human being to a cell phone plan is among the more callous things I've read on these forums. It might behoove you to sprinkle a bit more empathy in your language, just a tiny bit.)
I'm sympathetic to that idea, to some extent. Foreign workers would indeed be happy to get a marginal increase in their income, even if those wages and working conditions are well below developed-country standards.
But, then, aren't we just making a trade at that point? I will fire 100 local blue collar workers, and hire 100 foreign workers who will do their job for less. I hurt 100 people, help 100 people, and along the way pocket some extra cash for myself. I think most moral systems would have a problem with this. It is generally thought of as immoral to rend one person in order to help one other.
(Yes, things get complicated when you hurt N people to help more than N people, depending on the number of extra people helped and the kind of hurt. For example, sacrificing soldiers in order to save an entire country. Generally speaking though, most moral systems have a problem with hurting people against their will except in extraordinary situations involving very large numbers. Does this trade situation qualify as that? I'm skeptical that is does.)
There has to be a better way. Some way where we aren't harming local blue collar workers, but are still helping foreign nations develop, while giving those foreign nations on the path of strong worker protections and wages that we have here.
The big question I’ve been struggling with in regards to the free trade debate is this:
Is cheap labor a legitimate source of comparative advantage?
I increasingly don’t think that it is. Yes, we get products more cheaply. But those products are made in countries with fewer labor restrictions, often in places that are not democratic, where workers cannot vote for changing laws. We’re effectively saying we want democracy where we live, for our own white collar professions, but we don’t want to be shackled by those restrictions for how we get rich, or how we enjoy our wealth. We’re effectively telling local blue collar workers that we’re okay with their level of work being taken over by people with less rights than themselves.
That increasingly doesn’t feel just. Comparative advantage makes sense for natural differences between countries, such as availability of natural resources or favorable weather for certain types of crops. But not for fundamental human rights.