The 'you are doing it wrong' argument cuts both ways. Having an office does not magically make you more productive. You also need to cultivate an adequate environment to allow makers enough focus time and not randomly interrupted any time.
I suppose I can only speak from my experience. I can see definitely how many corp onsite environments are awful. There are productivity killers both onsite and remote and there are no absolutes. If we assume a 'good' remote vs 'good' onsite environment, collaboration is easier and faster onsite. Yes, you need to be very careful, and in my case we are super conscious of 'maker's time' and respect it with discipline.
I'm not sure I follow. Endless meaningless meetings is an orthogonal problem. Regardless of remote vs on-site, I try to avoid meetings without a clear agenda, purpose and inviting only relevant parties. Not inviting people just to 'keep them in the loop', we have meeting summary/notes for that. I encourage team members to decline meetings they do not feel will be valuable, exercising their own judgement and with an explanation to the organizer.
> People keep on saying this but it's just not obviously true.
How is it obviously not true? I mean. I love remote work. I started working remotely way before it was mainstream and I'm advocate for it. I've managed remote teams for many years too. Even so, I can't claim there's no performance hit. I just think the performance hit is small enough that in most cases the benefits for people and businesses outweigh it.
> This is true. As a customer, depending on the good-will of leadership to counterbalance the influence of capital is depending on humans, and even really good ones are fallible and temporal.
Well, I dunno, you always are depending on the "good will" of leadership. They could decide to squeeze every cent and provide as little value as possible at any time, whether they have venture funding or not. If your alternative is a "non profit", look at Mozilla, plenty of people unhappy with a lot of their decisions and users feeling "betrayed". I don't think we can expect most services to run as non-profits regardless. It's an imperfect system, but is the best we've got so far.
> From a consumer's point of view, once an organization gets in the mindset of optimizing for value capture over value creation and openness, it's time to consider moving on.
I'd argue this comes after the IPO. When you have millions in venture capital, is easy to keep running the business at a loss and keep growing. When it's time to make a profit is when things start getting hard.
I suppose this is what some people don't like. They'd like founders/businesses that stay small and focused on a niche, make money but not too much and keep a good value product running. Without looking at 1Password finances though, even when it was a paid service, we don't know how profitable it was, if at all, and may be going after enterprise customers with this new funding is the only way to not only 'break even' and start making some good profits.
Yeah I get this, I'm a paying customer. Not overly worried, as long as I can export and move on to another service. I used to be a LastPass user until 2yrs ago. I was replying to the comment about LastPass starting to monetize users (e.g limiting the free tier functionality even more).
> For an adjacent example, LastPass never took a dime of VC money (afaict), but their structure as a for-profit company pushed them to lock down their product and charge rents, where they had not previously. If they had taken VC money or went public instead, it may have delayed the inevitable, but it only would have been a delay, not a solution.
I do not understand. It's a business. Why would anyone expect important services to be free? during ramp up there's a benefit of providing free or discounted services while you grow, learn what users want, estimate your own costs, etc; It was a free ride and you can enjoy it while it lasts. Why would anyone expect a free ride to also last forever?
In my opinion great products need a strong balance of capital and ideals. Capital incentives unchecked by a counter balance of leadership actually believing in the mission of the company can lead to bad outcomes. Pure idealism without adequate funding has another set of problems though.
> At a meeting with Khosla Ventures, Vinod Khosla asked if our whole team was the meeting. Around the table was myself, our COO, our CTO, the very famous head of the studio, our CFO, our head of cloud and a couple of engineers. Our COO proudly said "Why no, there are 35 more employees back in Los Angeles. Vinod told him that our head count was about 35 too many and went on to explain his reasoning.
> Moving to an another country isn't for everyone. If you move to a richer country, foreigners are usually automatically treated differently.
I'm sorry this was your experience. It sounds however like a very broad generalization. It is not my experience at all for me and other friends that have moved to richer and/or more developed countries.
That's a good point. However, it's arguably only hard to use to do modern software development which is a complex use case for a low level language. At least in all my time doing C (>10yrs) I can reduce most of my gdb usage to analyzing core dumps by doing a few simple things: print backtraces per thread, moving up/down the stack and printing variable values. The rare situations I've used it for 'stepping' through code, is also just a few commands. The code itself is where the complexity is at that point that gdb itself is the least of my concerns.
> I can wrap my head around how memory works, but gdb just feels... hard to use
I really like it. I find it simple in the same way I find C a simple language. There isn't that many commands that you use frequently and the names are quite intuitive and can be shortened to a single letter if there are no conflicts. Now, on Windows, WinDbg I never really groked. I found it hard to use.
> No new code should be using select(). Using it assumes the execution environment keeps all file descriptor values within FD_SETSIZE.
I'm with you here. I'm also guilty of using it still for some CLI tools or other small programs. Just to be clear you don't need to assume all fd values will stay within FD_SETSIZE. Just that the fds you will use with select will stay in that range. Even if there will be lots of fds (more than FD_SETSIZE) for other resources, it works for example to select on stdin if you're not doing funny business reopening it.
There's no much of an excuse to keep using it though other than laziness.
> The fact that select doesn't work on more than 1024 fds is terrible.
Pedantic clarification, but it's worse than that. It doesn't work on any fd with a value higher than FD_SETSIZE (default is 1024) - 1. You could be working with single fd with a value of 1024 and it would not work.
On the bright side you can extend this limit pretty easily, but it's certainly a good reason to avoid select whenever possible.
I agree. I think you made the right call. We live in Canada (Ontario). We wanted to move to SF to be closer to family (Mexico) but in the end, even with a FAANG job offer, it was too risky and the current political climate doesn't seem friendly to immigration (even legally). Quite more so for someone from Mexico.
As an immigrant in another country (thankfully more immigration-friendly), I completely understand the frustration. I think however we must see beyond the incompetence of some front-line workers and turn the frustration and complaints towards who's running the country and its policies, not providing training and overall setting a bad example on how to treat immigrants (legal or illegal). I've declined good offers to move to the US because of concerns with the immigration policies, which quite honestly are exacerbated by the current administration.
>>> Content hosting platforms I want them to merely do what's legal.
Well, one could argue that's what they're doing. Unless we make it illegal for them to make moral choices over content, they're merely doing what's legal and what they perceive in their best interest.
But, ok, I do kind of get your point and it seems you care just when it comes to content, as you still want them to make moral decisions in other areas (employee compensation). I guess that's what I find different from my expectations (I'm not from the USA btw). I am fine with them making moral decisions on the content hosted in their platforms, even if that means sometimes they may censor my own point of view, it's their platform after all and I can still host my content on my own. I know, is not where "everyone" is, but perhaps that's a good thing, if people is missing that content they can get it elsewhere. Perhaps is that I don't perceive Twitter or Cloudflare as essential as say, ISPs. I'd have an issue with an ISP snooping and making moral choices about what traffic to allow beyond what the law requires because is not like I can build my own internet as an alternative.
>>> So, in 2020, as opposed to 1920 where the public square might have been enough, having access to something like Google or YouTube should be enforced as a legal right unless explicitly cut off by court order (as opposed by corporate whim).
That's a good point and my view is somewhat swayed now, or at least I understand that point of view better. I usually don't pay attention to twitter or facebook which somewhat bias me to deem them as unimportant social noise.
>>> Even economically, if you think about it, think how Google search ranking for example (or lack thereof) could sink companies globally at the whim of Google operators.
Search (content discovery, not content hosting) I do find more inclined to believe should be pretty much impartial (beyond perhaps top results that are clearly marked as "sponsored"), but instead of expecting google doing the right thing, we should push clear legislation about it.