It seems to me that almost all upper management, and even many working as a manager inside the technology or I.T. departments, simply treat their tech workers and departments as arms of the finance department proper. Over time, every management decision is eventually made to only support the prime finance goals which is HIGHLY RISK AVERSE so decisions are made to avoid all risk at all costs -- at the expense of more "human-based" decisions like employee satisfaction, process improvements, experimentation or innovation. When this happens to highly-technical people like doctors or engineers, it tends to impact overall job satisfaction because training, experimentation, and innovation goes away usually because management starts saying "No" way too much.
"Hey boss, can I try this new process? It might make our department happy."
"No that costs too much."
"Hey boss, can I learn this new programming language? It might making our jobs easier and faster to do."
"Nope, there is no budget."
The language spoken from the manager to the team member is "finance speak" which the subordinate employee usually has absolutely no idea how to communicate to the boss.
So when a member of the team asks the boss for something interesting to do, the boss just starts saying "no". Every. Single. Time. This effectively trains their teams to never ask to do interesting work. So they stop asking... and the job becomes mundane and boring. And when the job is boring you start losing meaning in the job. And when you don't have meaningful (or fun) work to do, you just don't care anymore and eventually hit apathy. Then the mistakes start happening, and the employee turnover comes.
I do think we need to figure out better ways to run our companies. Profits (while important) _cannot_ be the ONLY goal because it just isn't sustainable for the long-term at all. We all know that balance is needed. Food for thought.
From a purely financial and management perspective, this is an EXCELLENT decision. It really is a _lazy_ method to handle layoffs with excellent perception from stock holders' viewpoint. We all know how bad it looks when management executes on a situation similar to Gavin Belson firing the Nucleus team. Perception is all that most management and financiers care about anyways as long as the money keeps flowing. The people do not matter, only the money does. It is acceptable to sacrifice your people, as well as the welfare and good will of your employees, in favor of shareholder primacy anyways. So instead of doing layoffs, instead you can make business decisions that negatively impact employees to _make them want to quit on their own_. Hell... that saves a lot of money in the long run as well as a lot of time on management's end ( time = money ). Then when top or even mid talent is lost, it still doesn't matter because the "left overs" that remain still keep the business running at a "good enough" level.
And that, my friends, is the key phrase on what is prioritized in all business right now ... "good enough". All that matters nowadays is the answer to the question of "good enough". For example:
- Are the quality/quantity of FT employees we currently have on payroll good enough to keep the business running?
- Does our invoicing/contracts/income look good enough?
- Are we doing good enough to keep our competitors at bay?
- Is there anything we can cut to stay good enough?
- Are there good enough incentives for our employees to stay with us?
- Are there good enough incentives for our CUSTOMERS to keep doing business with us?
It is my opinion that the days of "expecting excellence" or striving to "be the best" is totally over for the current generation. For the most part in the tech business environment, management and market forces are only interested in keeping money flowing at a "good enough" level. On top of that, western culture seems to have forgotten what "the best" even means right now. And without even having a definition of "the best", how is it possible to be "excellent"?
We are in the middle of an extremely boring time in our lives. There is a massive drop off of real talent and creativity. Top and mid talent are deciding to hold back because the incentives are few, if any exist at all. Honest improvements and true innovation will be stagnant for at least 5 more years. Boredom will be the norm for a while. Until something actually _exciting_ happens or something incredible is discovered (I have NO idea what that could be), this will be the norm for a long time.
"...The trick is that they're not promoting an ideology/cultural value domestically; they're bowing to local influence everywhere, including domestically."
I think that this is the main issue. It is my opinion that this problem stems from the business and finance minded dogma of pushing efficiency, regardless of the long-term damage done to a brand/product/service, simply because in the short term it is _cheaper_ to do so. The long term damage is traded for short term gains.... kicking the bucket down the road if you will but doing long term damage to the business or institution overall.
In this particular context, lets take the example of Disney cutting/splicing/editing certain scenes from their films and shows in order to gain release approval in China. Instead of having one film product with a certain edit in the US, then another for China, then another for India, and so on, it is just _cheaper_ to have a single version edit of the film to release "everywhere". So in order to do this Disney has to appease a variety of censors and overview boards and make all changes in order to make a single film product where every governmental review board is happy. The pros is that you have a single version of the film thus making overall production costs cheaper. However the main con is that you may have specific ideological influence added to the product where it should or shouldn't be, or the tone or message of the film product might fundamentally change which breaks the premise/lesson, or the story is watered down essentially making the product meaningless, or the entertainment product might not be entertaining! The only real benefit in this case is that Disney still gets to release the film in as many markets as possible (thus meeting the rule of numbers for possible profit) but the customer starts to feel less connected to the brand so they start to lose interest and eventually abandon it. There are better examples of course. This is just one.
Glad to see that a big US retailer like Target is using the same types of "de-facto" observability tools that I've been using for a while at all of my various employers over the last 5+ years - which are Grafana, Prometheus and Elastic Stack (specifically the Kibana UI for the logging analysis screenshot).
"Yeah, the US sounds rather hostile to raising children".... As a lifelong US citizen with three kids of my own, I do feel there there is some truth here. In my opinion most of the school systems across the USA have shifted to treating children as burdens instead of blessings. I would argue this has happened enmasse in the culture at large and getting worse over the last 20 years. Perhaps a big portion of the problem is that we don't take good care of our teachers first and foremost.
It is best to set your expectations extremely low for this type of acquisition. My personal opinion: Broadcom is _buying_ its way into the Enterprise technology space by hook or crook. When Broadcom acquires a company their M.O. is to immediately install finance-driven leadership and focus strictly on cost cutting measures coupled with accelerated profit-making endeavors. The only thing VMware employees have to look forward to in the near future are layoffs, all types of cost reductions, team consolidations (i.e. you do more work with less resources) and severely reduced R&D. And the only thing that VMware customers have to look forward to are increased VMware costs, more vendor lock-in, reduced satisfaction with support, and almost zero innovation.
Again, this is just my opinion so I could end up be wrong. Or maybe I am just in a bad mood today... meh
What are the opinions on moving a personal family domain on the GSuite Legacy free over to Proton?
It seems like the cost is reasonable, 9.99€/month for 15 email addresses and 3 custom domains. I have just one domain and 5 email addresses for my family so I don't need much. Curious to what everyone thinks about Proton or if there might be a better alternative. Side note: I know Proton is based in Switzerland but my family and I are based in the US. Not sure if that is something which would be a problem.
I had an extremely similar situation when we purchased our home last year.
The home had an estimated valuation of 320k but because of the ridiculousness of the US housing market bids were going for upwards of more than 20k higher than the asking prices. We put in our bid for 341,100 - and we got it. I found out later that the next highest bid was exactly 340,100. That extra 1k in our offer made the difference for us.
“…In exit surveys during the last two years, a majority said they would recommend working at Twitch but preferred to move on, the spokesperson said.”
Yeah right… Give me a friggin break. Exit interviews? You are telling me that they actually _believe_ that exit interviews are truthful or honest? It is crystal clear to me the B.S. being said here by the company rep. This is all corporate politics and it shows. The vast majority of the tech employment situation nowadays (in the U.S. at least) is that we are effectively “tech mercenaries” with loyalty only to our close colleagues and no loyalty to any company. Companies burned their employees’ loyalty away during the mass layoffs of 2020 and 2021. I know there is some nuance to the layoffs that occurred for some company circumstances - but not the vast majority of publicly traded enterprises on the stock market.
Exit interviews are an HR mandated necessity and are completely useless. The claim is that exit surveys are to help better understand _why_ an employee has decided to leave and then relay to management to help them with improving employee retention. This is a lie. In my personal experience, exit interviews are really just a final test by the company to determine if the exiting employee should be blacklisted, kept on lawsuit watch, and/or can be trusted to keep their mouth shut (I.e. will they honor their non-disclosure agreements? Can they keep our IP secret? Will they blab about other internal product ideas or customers to their new employer? Are they going to try to make others quit with them? Etc).
In almost all of the cases that I’m aware of where an ex-employee was honest about the long list of issues/abuses on their way out, it has always been a bridge burned and never turned out for the better.
My personal policy on exit surveys is this: on your way out, be a nice as possible and keep you mouth shut about the bad stuff. When asked why you are going, the only good answer is “I just know it is my time to move on.” And if asked if you would recommend others to work at the employer, you will respond with a yes because this is true (For example, yes you would absolutely recommend someone you don’t like to work at a place you don’t like). And after that, say NOTHING else. Be nice then run for the hills.
Edit:: one note on my personal policy on exit interviews, the example provided _implies_ the previous employment was a bad situation. Thankfully I haven’t had a great deal of negative ones. I still stick with my opinion of lying your ass off at exit interviews because it just isn’t worth the hassle otherwise.
There are two reasons why I continue to use a personal Windows machine - PC Gaming and Microsoft 365 Family. On the gaming topic, almost all of the games that I play are also on console which is where I spend most of my gaming time anyways. On Microsoft 365 Family, OneDrive backup and sync is the top reason why I have it. I use it to sync all of my family photos between my phones, PC, Macbook, and iPad for myself, my wife, and my kids. It is extremely convenient and hard to argue otherwise. Beyond data backups, the biggest reason why we have the subscription is because my wife really really wants to use the Office Apps because it is what she is used to the most (Word, Excel, Publisher). So to my family and I, Microsoft 365 = value and convenience.
For me, if a good OneDrive linux sync client was out there that would be a good reason for me to finally jump ship off of Windows. I suppose I'm just waiting for the right push to move away from Windows. Maybe this is that time. Hell, I already know that my personal PC (which I built early January 2021) "fails" the Windows 11 upgrade readiness check anyways so I already feel burned. All of the reasons why I used Windows for decades was because of its "value" for me. Lots of convenience, tons of community support and tons of software, etc. But not anymore. In my opinion, what Microsoft is doing with Windows is similar to what Disney is doing with their parks. "Value" is being removed while increasing prices and limiting "choice". Maybe I still do have _some_ "convenience" in using Windows. But I'm losing more and more reasons to stick with Windows over time as more of Microsoft's business decisions are impacting you and me, and not necessarily for the better.
I found myself in the same situation only a few months ago. I was one of the so-called “valuable employees” and was a primary go-to person at the time. In 2020 we lost around 60% of the total personnel count (40% from layoffs, then more and more over time from attrition) from our entire division so they decided to consolidate teams together meaning I wasn’t only doing the job I was hired to do, now I had to do the work that 4 different dedicated teams had to do at the same time. At the start of 2021, my previous employer decided to shift focus purely on cost saving measures in order to make up for the lost revenue in 2020 and slashed ALL planned work for 2021, was constantly told no on all of my requests to do interesting work and work I wanted to do, and was told not to expect any training budget for the foreseeable future and not to expect any merit raises for the year. I did warn them that they needed to throw me a bone … they needed to give me SOMETHING to stay… some glimmer of hope. And they still said no. That is what made my decision.
It was clear they didn’t care about keeping “top talent” anymore. They just wanted button pushers - and that is what they have now. I have heard of big issues going on now, but it is no longer my problem. Obviously I am no longer there and much happier where I am at now.
I found this when doing my research for the borrower to defense repayment act when submitting to the Department of Education. I included a copy of this exact PDF with the URL in my application.
I am personaly happy to see the hammer come down on these for-profit universities. I too feel for the students as I was one of the Corinthian Colleges students a few years ago at Everest University through one of the Florida campuses. My degree program was the A.S. in Computer Information Sciences -- such a waste. Look up the job placement rates for that program in 2010, just insane.
Thankfully I too have been able to take advantage of the Department of Education relief. But I have to go through the process of the “borrower defense to repayment”. It continues to be a tough process but at least it some form of relief for me.
I hope former ITT students are able to find a quick resoluton. This type of school shutdown is not easy on anyone.
On another note, I wonder if this is the start of the 'higher-ed debt bubble' that has been predicted for quite some time now...
There are a large amount of enterprises, businesses, universities, and other entities that are having serious issues with boot performance on their Windows 7 and Windows 8 computers. This article is at least a starting point to help out the I.T. technicians tasked to fix the problem.
"Hey boss, can I try this new process? It might make our department happy." "No that costs too much."
"Hey boss, can I learn this new programming language? It might making our jobs easier and faster to do." "Nope, there is no budget."
The language spoken from the manager to the team member is "finance speak" which the subordinate employee usually has absolutely no idea how to communicate to the boss. So when a member of the team asks the boss for something interesting to do, the boss just starts saying "no". Every. Single. Time. This effectively trains their teams to never ask to do interesting work. So they stop asking... and the job becomes mundane and boring. And when the job is boring you start losing meaning in the job. And when you don't have meaningful (or fun) work to do, you just don't care anymore and eventually hit apathy. Then the mistakes start happening, and the employee turnover comes.
I do think we need to figure out better ways to run our companies. Profits (while important) _cannot_ be the ONLY goal because it just isn't sustainable for the long-term at all. We all know that balance is needed. Food for thought.