Did you get a salary increase as well? And if so, would they decrease your salary if you go back to IC? If you keep your salary increase, that's a good deal.
If there was no salary increase -> that wasn't a promotion!
If they decrease your pay -> find another job
I'm not defending fraud: if fraud is made, then you pay for it (either economically or via prison). On the other hand, having thousands of people on the internet call you everything because of a mistake. I don't know, I definitely wouldn't like to be judged by Twitter users if I make a mistake in my life (that's why I don't have Twitter/IG/etc. It's so scary to be judged in 0.5 seconds by thousands all over the world).
The best he could have done is to apologize, though, and handle it legally.
It's probably because Amazon has all the money in the world they need to develop their products, but I would expect to launch a new product with some minimal but strong features to attract customers. Q offers 40+ built-in connectors from day zero. Like I can imagine the engineers/managers working on connector number 25: "Man, we have implemented already 24 connectors and we don't even know if the product will be a success or not...".
> his year our team is hiring for 3 new people instead of 4
Na. We'll be able to do more with less... but the amount of work to be needed will increase, hence more people will be needed as well. Same old story. Compilers didn't get massive people fired.
> Outsourcing the work to a country with low wages. Even nowadays you can get highly skilled workers for like $50 a month in some African countries.
But this is not the norm. In order for company X to hire people from a different country, it is necessary that:
- company X hires contractors/freelancers. The vast majority of people out there in IT work as employees, not as contractors
- company X needs a branch in that country. This is rare
- company X hires in that country via an intermediary company. Not as rare, but usually it's not worth it
Not even in Europe countries hire people from other countries that easily. It's more common now after covid, yes, but it's definitely not "let's hire from country X developers 50% cheaper!"
What you say is true, but the amount of "grunt work" is not constant over the years. In fact, I think the amount of "grunt work" in teh tech industry is just growing and not shrinking; I think the following look is quite obvious:
- amount of current grunt work: X
- new tech Z appears that makes X be reduced to 0.1X
- at the same time Z enables new ways of doing things. Some things become grunt work because they are a byproduct of Z
- amount of current grunt work: Y (where Y ~= X)
- ...
If the technological progress had stopped in the 2000s, then all the grunt work (originated in the 90s) would be esentially zero today. New tech just brings automation and grunt work. I don't think we will live in a society where there's practically no grunt work.
The most recent example is AI: there are AI tools that generate sound, images, video and text... but if you want to create a differentiating product/experience, you need to combine (do the grunt work) all the available tools (chatgpt, stable difussion, etc.)
I'm not sure if reading the book would help. If the manager has a technical background (e.g., they have worked as developers before) then they already know the main point of the book. If the manager does not have a tech background, then there's little that the book can do for them.
I'm the only one NOT using autocorrect? I find useful the suggestions that popup above the keyboard but ultimately I decide whether or not to use them. I find autocorrection (on phones) annoying.
What always surprised me is not DNA, but how other non-living things can exist at all without DNA. It makes sense to me that I have green eyes since that's what my DNA says... but where is defined that a rock has a particular color or weight or texture?
Whenever I think of how planets move around a star, I always think "Ok. So, I imagine that at some point the universe should know the distance between planet X and star Y, and also, probably, maybe, it should know their masses... but that data is nowhere defined (that we know). So, is the data computed 'on the fly' every $minimal-unit-of-time?). Perhaps the universe doesn't need to know distances nor masses, though.
But how good is to say "Image generated by Bing AI" (or whatever)? Many of this generated images are a one-off (so, you don't get a URL you can copy). It's like saying "Image found in Google.com".
Obviously, we need to find contemporary analogies:
- the other day I opened (manually) a bunch of Linkedin profiles (each in one browser tab). Apparently, Linkedin thought it was a suspicious activity and blocked my account for some time (I don't remember, but in the range of hours). Luckily me, I still got my account... but it would be hard to find jobs and keep working connections without Linkedin. I dodged the sword
I'm sure one can find similar examples (or worse) for all the big companies out there (never heard of "google banned me. help!"?)
> The more organisational layers you have between you and the customers - architects, business analysts, and the like - the more disconnected your work will be from the business value.
In every company I have worked for in the last 10 years, the layer in between business experts and software engineers has been always: the manager (either product manager or eng. manager). It's a bottleneck. The flow usually goes like this:
business expert -> manager -> engineers -> manager -> business expert -> manager -> engineers -> ...
Whenever the manager comes with "requests" from the business side, we end up with tons of questions because everything is half-baked. Manager goes back to business with our questions and comes back with some answers, but usually that just generates even more questions. In this way managers feel empowered. There's no way they can let the engineers just talk with business (otherwise the managers would feel like they are not contributing in anything... which is kinda right if the engineers are more or less professionals).
> By Thursday, I began to worry about my own job security. I had been spinning on a feature I said I would ship 3 days ago.
Off-topic: is it really like that in the US? (I'm assuming he's from the US). Like, if you get stuck for a few days, you start to worry about being fired or reprimanded?