Rule of Acquisition 211: "Employees are rungs on the ladder of success. Don't hesitate to step on them."
When you're a "human resource", you will be exploited. The term is dehumanizing. The C-suite requires this abstraction lest they are caught treating their resources like humans.
Being tone-deaf would imply they're unable to understand other people's issues. Facebook actively seeks to track all of us for their financial gain, against the wishes of many of us.
It's been my understanding for 25 years that folks in "IT" think it's a meritocracy. They also seem to think they're smarter than average. This is just my experience, not some statement of fact.
The truth is that most of the people I've encountered don't know the first thing about their chosen career path other than "it pays well", and the bare minimum needed to not get fired.
At the other end of the spectrum, I've seen HN posts detailing how the FAANG hiring process is seemingly designed to optimize for new hires that will competently read a spec and produce the correct output -- and little to nothing else. This process combined with the business practices of FAANG themselves means that the idealists and true free thinkers self-select out of the group of people applying to FAANG.
For the sake of argument, assume these are actually true. Where would that leave us? With a large group of people at the top behaving like automatons, cranking out code without thinking about it. At the bottom, we have incompetence and fighting over scraps. Because everyone is convinced it's a meritocracy unionization is ruled out by default.
No collective action will be possible under these circumstances. It does enable a very small number of people at the tippy-top to take advantage of the people below them to make the most user-hostile software the world has seen, of course.
Those few at the tippy-top have names. But the names really don't matter when everyone else wants to be them. Because if they're replaced, someone else will fill the void. Because it is in fact a meritocracy of a sort. Except "merit" in this case means "most willing to do whatever it takes to make a buck".
Obviously I can't say if this is universally true, but it is most certainly true for me. I have CarPlay, and I do my damnedest to control it with Siri. It always feels incredibly dangerous to use the touchscreen.
Because of the problems I have with Siri, I end up using the touchscreen much more than I'd prefer. My latest defensive habit is to queue up enough audio for the trip and not touch it again until I arrive.
> "We've gone back to where we were three years ago after a mistake, sorry."
Yep this is the right move, and as someone else says, this would be worthy of respect.
I think we've all just about had it with corporate bullshit -- and to be sure that says more about this moment in time than anything else.
Apple is consistently guilty of blowing smoke up our collective asses. It would be nice if they could give it a rest and simply be honest. But here we are.
> Three year. Would you quit your job, and move somewhere cheaper if you knew the money will run out after three years, and you'll have a three year gap in your CV?
This might be news to you, but there are huge swaths of people on this planet with no CV, no career, and are just scraping by, for whom 3 years of money would be a literal gift from the gods.
> But, is it that turtle all the way down? I mean, the cops who broke the law to "get their hands on him" - why? The diplomatic backroom dealing - why? The politicians who should know better - what do they gain?
This is business-as-usual behavior. No one asks why when it has become _habit_.
How we positioned ourselves in the wake of WW2, and the resulting mythology that grew up around it, coupled with the fact that enough time passed that we now believe the myth as fact.
Isn't it also true that a huge % of people don't realize or understand what data they're giving away, because the specifics have never been articulated by the people selling the information?
It seems to always be buried in the fine print. Which no one really ever reads.
So, most of the public are party to a contract they don't understand nor really ever truly agreed to.
How is any of this in any way acceptable? How is such a contract even remotely valid?
> That code have conduct I linked tries to explain how evil is defined
You don't need to define evil for us. Small children know evil when they see it. People are quite capable of gleaning a person's or group of people's intent from their actions.
When you start needing to define what evil is, you've lost the debate entirely.
When you're a "human resource", you will be exploited. The term is dehumanizing. The C-suite requires this abstraction lest they are caught treating their resources like humans.