Like Gmail is emails but not IMAP. It's fine. We have seen that these kinds of wrappers work pretty well most of the time considering the performance and simplicity they bring in building and managing these systems.
Grown in popularity is not really a metric. A normal tuesday and the day half the company's staffers got fired aren't going to be the same in popularity. Doesn't mean one is better. Twitter is definitely more popular for all the mess they've made, yes.
The "narrative" was right. There are actual outages now unlike earlier. It's not like twitter engineers were holding up the servers to the light for there to be outages the moment they're gone. Systems run on their own just fine, until something does go wrong. And if there's nobody there to fix it, something usually small blows up. Enough of these and users start to notice degraded performance and outages.
My ideal 1:1 is about once a month. Especially in high-ownership teams, you could go days without actually talking to people aside from a 10-15 min check in call.
So, it's sometimes nice to have periodic validation that you're keeping true to the course / indication that you need to make a few minor adjustments, etc. That's on your side.
From your manager's side, if they find something isn't working, they don't need to wait 3/6 months to bring it up at which point there isn't much you can do to get back the lost productivity.
Everyone who is a manager actively makes independent contributions for a not-insignificant portion of their work-week.
So, when we have 1-on-1s with them, we can actually discuss improvement avenues from the same vantage point. Not some spreadsheet pushing manager who has no clue how to measure engineer-productivity or performance.
When they do code reviews, their comments serve as an important learning opportunity, pointing out good practices/conventions, etc.
And finally, when you disagree, it's backed by the validity of your points as 2 engineers, rather than their authority as a manager vs you, their direct report.
10 years across all 3 major cloud providers (and some others like Rackspace, etc), I can tell, Google support has been the absolute worst of all. I don't say that lightly. I take pride in how I can deal with customer service the most peacefully in my org. But that's all out of the window when their CS is nonexistent.
I can't remember the number of times they've shut down someone's production workload without notice or warning, gave them no way to resolve/rectify any supposed infraction, and gave no way to contact them to appeal the decision.
I once had to resort to numbering my points and just referring the boilerplate responses (few and far inbetween as they were) back to the numbers over and over until I finally gave up, moved away and never looked back.
Alright. 2 can play this game. Why are Airbnb hosts allowed to operate, effectively hotels/resort style properties without the appropriate licenses required for one?
I know, they need to register in some jurisdictions but should be much more widespread.
You can operate like "Oh it's just someone's home, we're all just being civil to each other" in which case, have a conversation; permanent irrevocable ban is not it, or "Here's our 100 page T&Cs. We have all the control and can dump you whenever we see fit for whatever reason and we don't have to tell you" in which case, go through the legal process of getting each and every property properly registered and licensed and operate like a real business. Can't have it both ways.
Now I'm sure it's easy to see the above comment somewhat conflates the Airbnb hosts with the Airbnb corporation. And that's intentional.
Every time they do this, a few hundred ants decide, they may very well be next and move out. Supporting them through whatever they need may not be quite the net loss you claim it is.
What about those that felt discriminated? Where is their forum to talk about what happened to them?
Might I add, if you weren't a party to an experience, an off handed observation that those are just subjective experiences, is frankly not yours to make.