I worked at a very large Ruby shop where errors in production were very expensive. This meant that we spent many times more money on instances running the test suite for every build than we spent on all production servers combined.
Let's be realistic here: The US supreme court always tells us what the law is, every time, regardless of how clear the law's writing is, and how the court had rules in the past. The same can happen in lower courts, as federal circuits come back with head-scratching rulings whenever it suits the judge's aesthetic preferences. Judge shopping is quite popular in expensive cases for good reasons.
So we shouldn't be surprised when anything changes, ever, given how much activism we are seeing in courts today. So the question is, how much do the people that actually decide what a law means really like cryptocurrencies? I suspect the only good chance most of those companies have is rely on the court's dislike for government agencies, regardless of what laws say. But as far as I am aware, the good friends of the court tend to be very involved in old banking, and thus they aren't fond of crypto companies either.
So maybe those companies should start lobbying Harlan Crow and his circle of friends.
I worked with Ferrucci in BW. The internals of the employee rating system that preceded him were hilarious. In short:
Everyone is encouraged to rate anyone else in a variety of categories, as often as possible. Every rating is public. You know who is rating you, and how they did it. Those ratings are put together to get a score in every category, and can be seen by anyone. It's your Baseball Card.
The problem is that not everyone is equally 'credible' in their rating. If I am bad at underwater basketweaving, my opinions on the matter are useless. But if I become good, suddenly my opinion is very important. You can imagine how, as one accumulates ratings, the system becomes unstable: My high credibility makes someone else have bad credibility, which changes the rankings again. How many iterations do we run before we consider the results stable? Maybe there's two groups of people that massively disagree in a topic. One will be high credibility, and the other bad, and that determines final scores. Maybe the opinion of one other random employee just changes everyone else's scores massively.
So the first thing is that the way we know an iteration is good involves whether certain key people are rated highly or not, because anything that, say, said that Ray is bad at critical thinking is obviously faulty. So ultimately winners and losers on anything contentious are determined by fiat.
So then we have someone who is highly rated, and is 100% aware of who is rating them badly. Do you really think it's safe to do that? I don't. Therefore, if you don't have very significant clout, your rating of people should be simple: Go look at that person's baseball card, and rate something very similar in that category. Anything else is asking for trouble. You are supposed to be honest... but honestly, its better to just agree with those that are credible.
So what you get is a system where, if you are smart, you mostly agree with the bosses... but not too much, as to show that you are an independent thinker. But you better disagree in places that don't matter too much.
If there's anything surprising, is that more people involved into the initiative stayed on board that long, because it's clear that the stated goals and the actual goals are completely detached from each other. It's unsurprising that it's not a great place to work, although the pay is very good.
It's a turbulent time in games media: See how Yatzhee just quit The Escapist, taking with him most of the video team.
Either way we slice it, we'll all soon see what is what brings people to certain publications? The brand? Long form, high research articles that just take too much research? The wokeness/andti-wokeness posturing? Is it a matter of just a few extremely talented people, carrying a publication?
We all can make our guesses, but the market will say who is right.
I've been a part of a system like this (a financial system that happens to not be technically a bank). The system was constantly under attack by fraudsters: You could find subreddits with guides on how to try to outright rob us. So we had teams building detection systems that tied to detect said fraud as early as possible: Hopefully before we handed the fraudsters any money. Depending on how bad the score was, there might not even be a manual review step before we closed the account, because the numbers were that blatant.
As with any classification system though, 100% accuracy isn't going to happen. But there's always some customer service rep that can look at the details of the account, and see why in the world the system said what it did. But a detailed explanation of why we thought something was fraudulent could (and sometimes would!) just lead to another fun reddit post where someone describes how to hide the fraud a little better.
For any given system like this, how much harm is actually being done, vs how much is being prevented (as fraud just leads to raising prices to cover for it: financial companies are not charities)? I've read way too many CSR conversations where a blatant fraudster with world-class chutzpah would claim that we were destroying their family for no reason, when the data was damning. But this doesn't mean that everyone who isn't a fraudster really reaches out to the CSRs, and has the energy to prove there was no fraud. The actual levels of damage are just hard to measure.
We should have sensible, mandatory, available customer service access, which costs just enough to access to not be hammered by bots, but that is completely refunded in case of error. But what is really causing this is that many companies have lowered the barrier of interaction so much that we are letting a lot of fraud through the door. Remember how getting a merchant account in a real bank is a multi-day affair? How getting hired to become a delivery driver needed an interview, with a real person, and a manager checking between deliveries? The price of not having to interact with a human to sign in is fraud detection that isn't a boss you interact with every day, makes sure you are working, and is paid from the work you do. Companies with billions of customers and probably hundreds of millions of suppliers aren't exactly workable without automating a lot of those intermediate jobs away.
Maybe we made the wrong call across the board, and lower-productivity, but far higher trust commerce is the way to go... but a lot of that commerce is losing in the market, right now. So if we like it, we have to be willing to pay extra for it.
And it gets worse the smaller the market is: There is a chance that a youtuber with sufficiently large following could actually choose to buy said mac pro, because their revenue might be pretty large. But then you look at, say, boardgame reviews. Nobody, ever, buys a game. But the number of views isn't good enough to dedicate the time to it as anything other than a hobby. Thus, anyone posting enough that they make it their job is also getting sponsored on top of the free product, but nobody wants to tell you that. Thus, all you are seeing is 100% ad, just shaped as a review, or as entertainment.
It's a matter of letting things degrade so that the maintenance becomes outright firefighting. I am currently working on a project where a processing pipeline has a maximum practical throughput of 1x, and a median day's for said pipeline is... 0.95x. So any outage becomes unrecoverable. Getting that project approved 6 month from now would have been basically impossible. Right now, it's valued at a promotion-level difficulty instead.
At another job, at a financial firm I got a big bonus after I went live on November 28th with an upgrade that let a system 10x their max throughput, and scaled linearly instead of being completely stuck. at their 1x. Median number of requests per second received in dec 1st? 1.8x... the system would have failed under load, causing significant losses to the company.
Prevention is underrated, but firefighting heroics are so well regarded that sometimes it might even be worthwhile to be the arsonist
No modification is perfect: While all GMO modification tries to be as narrow as possible, it's not like things are ever so perfectly narrow as to only just express a bonus protein that you wanted.
The problem is assuming that any other change that happens is dangerous and untested. There's mutation all over the place in perfectly organic plants, just like with GMOs. There are also changes on gene expression from those changes, also like GMO. An overwhelming majority of changes either do nothing, or make the plant unviable at all. The practical risks of a change that does something, doesn't harm yields, and yet somehow makes the parts of the plant that a human eats somewhat toxic is a huge stretch. It's even less likely when one considers the actual regulatory processes that happen later. It might seem crazy, but people that work on GMOs tend to be uninterested in poisoning the public.
If I was afraid of poisoning due to mutation (which I am not), I'd be more afraid of what someone that has been crossing plans with some localized, ancestral wildtypes that have been planted just in some village for the last hundred years or something. They are more likely to be untested. But it's like the risk of getting hit by lighting for the 5th time this week.
I am far more likely to be poisoned by a detergent, or someone that has let bacteria run amok in their packing facility, and is somehow selling, say, premixed salads that land in my local supermarket.
There was an old patent about making generations completely infertile, but yes, never used. Bayer's corn seeds are optimized enough that, while the next generation grows just fine, the yield loss makes it not worthwhile over just buying new seed.
This tells me you don't know much about Monsanto / Bayer Crop Science.
Roundup Ready is a relatively good idea: Roundup applies easily, and after the first few generations, when the control of how to add the GMO genes was so bad yields were impacted, it's a very narrow change to plants that makes farmers a lot of money. The vast majority of soybeans in the world are running Roundup-ready genes for a reason.
Terminator seeds sounded like a scary patent, but it was mostly useless. In corn, for instance, you'd never want to run it at all, as the seeds that are sold are almost perfect hybrids of 2 inbreds, which lose a whole lot of yield in the next generation without anyone really trying. There's no need for a gene when the next generation yields worse naturally.
If you want a sick situation with Bayer, forget Roundup, and look at what's been happening with Dicamba, the next generation of pesticide that GMOs are protected from. It's not a new pesticide, but it's very aggressive and it drifts: You spray a field, and many other fields around it are going to get hit. Supposedly Bayer is telling everyone that, on tests, the new formulations of it, when applied properly under the right weather conditions, there's no drift... but reality disagrees. Therefore, a whole lot of fields that aren't planting seeds protected from dicamba are getting wrecked by not-so-close that haven't mastered the really difficult ways to spray dicamba in the calmest of days. We aren't talking a pesticide that drifts 50 feet here, or 100, but people relatively far away that have their crops ruined. This is happening often enough that we'll see bans, while more and more generations of roundup GMO are going out of patent.
I am pretty sure that this one is what is scaring Bayer's lawyers, not Roundup.
It often has to do with the size of the company: the larger you are, the weaker your decisionmaking.
I work for a very large corp. As part of a round of layoffs earlier this year, they cut an entire foreign office, to the man. The decision was made from very high up: VPs were informed after it occurred. For some departments, the losses were small. For others, they were crippling: It was a very important group, doing things nobody else did, and which we couldn't cut.
The end result? The VP realized that the cuts had been extremely unwise, and now almost everyone that worked on that group has US visas, and is working from a new office in the US, with American salaries instead of their far, far lower ones. Not a costs savings, not an improvement in capability... just more expensive, and with projects that got delayed for months, as everyone was out for about 6 months.
For US layoffs, the decisions were not made quite that high, but still high enough that people in the know of salaries and performance were extremely confused about who got cut. Some great, cheap people were cut. Some expensive people that are poor performers by any standard remained. But nobody that managed ICs was involved with the decision making.
A large organization either makes very slow decisions, or acts basically blind. Sometimes they really fail, and do both!
An unsung part of the economic disadvantages of supersonic is how often the value of speed in the connection of two cities is not anywhere near even in both directions. Say we are looking at London-NY. The flight takes 3 hours, and the time difference is 5 hours. If you are leaving London, this means you can leave at a reasonable time, and have plenty of useful business meetings in New York: Much better the subsonic flight. But what happens when you fly in the other direction? In practice, it's 8 hours. So leave NYC at 8 am in the morning, and by the time you are at an office in London, the workday is over: Far less valuable for an executive than the other direction. Thus, the price differential over the regular flight in one direction is very different than in the other.
A supersonic jet with concorde-like economics in supersonic routes would be usable if it could fly subsonic at a competitive price on the way back, but that's not how physics works.
It's a common problem in many large companies that have significant barriers to handing out promotions, like google's need to work on promotion packets, and passing past review processes. Often you will find that output and level have little to do with each other, including within a team.
Where I am working, my lowest level teammate is clearly among the most competent by most standards. The one person I'd delegate a task to and expect it to not just get marked as done, but actually get done. I have coworkers in the team multiple levels higher that might produce basically nothing in any 2 week sprint, and it's not because they are spending time in meetings and coordination: They just have minimal productivity. But getting rid of the worst is a major hassle, and the middling ones aren't worth getting a PIP. Other teams are in better positions to ask for uplevels, because they do more important things. Therefore, the only sensible approaches are to either take it very easy, lowering the performance curve, or changing teams/jobs to places where one can be upleveled properly.
It's not as if making it easy to fire and promote is a panacea: I've seen managers laying off their best workers because they were politically threatening, and teams getting little done that had everyone marked as a staff engineers. Ultimately performance is hard, and being bad at it, like keeping people underleveled for years, makes the organization degrade. Top paying companies like Google aren't immune.
Oh, I've seen a team get completely obliterated by moving back to in person, even though everyone really did live in the same city and with reasonable commutes.
This was a startup, that had one big problem: a CEO that believed he was better than any and all of his workers at what the workers did. He also believed that collaboration was important, as through discussion, everyone would agree that he was right all along. You can imagine how unhealthy someone like that can be.
In a remote world, dealing with problem people is easier. The amount of acting one has to perform lowers. The lower visibility also allows people to self organize: Ignore coworker A as much as necessary, yet pair all day with coworker B, who is useful. Is someone very loud, or getting into other people's business? Being far from each other can help!
It didn't take 8 weeks in-office for all the coping that people were doing to become clear to everyone in the company. A CEO that was manageable via short interactions became an unavoidable thorn into the company's side, as remoteness covered their weaknesses. An open office didn't help matters. Everyone that wasn't a founder knew this was all untenable and quit.
So a team can definitely be far more productive being remote, as remoteness mandates far less gelling. Local conflict often has explosive results. People you dislike become far more tolerable. And really, every company ends up getting people like that, and sometimes chooses them over those that are team builders: I've seen my fair share of horrible managers that cost a company money in supposedly high performance, well known companies, and I have yet to see one getting a Pip out of it.
That street's sin is not the lack of trees, but having 6 entire lanes for cars, which apparently all go in one direction. An uncrossable nightmare that only even has stores at one side!
Those nice trees take a few decades to grow, need serious pruning, will cause foundation problems next door, and increase building setbacks anyway. We also waste two entire lanes for street parking, have basically no businesses on either side anyway, and the street is still too wide. It might be urban, but it's still a car centric hellscape, just with some shade.
I think of the cities in Spain with the hottest climates, and I don't see a lot of crowds being protected by tree shade: Instead, the traditional design is narrower streets which aren't straight for very long, and even white cloth hanging across the street to provide the shade directly.
It's not that there's no trees, but you'll see them in parks and boulevards that might as well be narrow parks.
If anything, I see far more trees in the American midwest. Here the streets are very wide, with basically no foot traffic to speak of, and too much road for the number of cars that use the street in urban areas. You can definitely fit trees here, but that's because so much of that concrete is waste. The extra trees just mean more distances, and more distances means more parking lots and more concrete.
There's a little more to it: Make sure your manager, and maybe even your manager's manager, likes you. If your manager doesn't like you, change teams. If your manager's manager doesn't like your manager, you should also change teams.
The unfortunate reality of those high growth orgs is precisely that the growth leads to a lot of new managers, and as we all probably know by now, a new manager is a bad manager. Since they have no idea of what they are doing, having the best relationship with them as possible is the only thing that matters.
I've seen the best ICs, and the most effective managers, end up quitting/getting PIPed due to politics. I've seen low performance being rewarded by teams with good bonuses and no deliverable objectives in 2 years, and promotions before ever shipping anything. My evaluation of my performance, and resulting reviews and raises, have minimal correlation: But they absolutely correlate on how much my manager liked me. The more I've focused on this, the better the rewards, the product be damned.
This is extra-true in those rocket ship companies, precisely because things for the company are likely to go well regardless of short term performance: Only major failures, (like what Raylene describes in the article as avoiding being critical) can get you in trouble for actual company impact. In those cases your best bet is to be the firefighter who is also an arsonist, and find ways to sell your solutions to problems you yourself caused... but that involves far too much work.
For the same reason Monsanto sequences basically anything: Because we can tell what proteins are encoded in there, and what is near them, and we can have good ideas of what proteins are expressed together. When dealing with genetic modification, we get to see whether our modification went in, and where it landed: Having a protein in a genome isn't enough. Its expression might be having an effect on other things, depending on where it is.
When we have baselines, we can compare different individuals, and eventually make predictions of how they are going to be based solely on the genetic code. If I know that a certain polymorphism is tied to some trait I want, I might not have to even bother spending the time growing a plant: I know that it's not what I want, and discard it as a seed.
With humans we are probably not going to see much modification soon, but just being able to detect genetic diseases, risk factors for other diseases that have genetic omponents, or allow for selection of embryos in cases of artificial insemination is already quite valuable.
It's not source code that we are all that good at understanding just yet, but there's already some applications, and we have good reason to think there's a lot more to come
In what mature organization takes it more than a week? My current org is quite mature: You probably use it. It's also not a cloud provider: Our aws bill is in the high 8 figures a month. And yet launching a new service not directly pingable from the internet, and deployed in, say, 5 regions, is a matter of 3 PRs, adding the service to CI included. I've gone from having no repo at all to deployment in 4 days, because we were in a big hurry. All the infra-defining PRs will get eyes from an SRE or three, but the team that is writing the service is writing the PRs.
I bet we have far more instances under our name than the people that write this article, and yet we have nowhere near that level of complexity in our IaC definitions. And yet, somehow we manage. I guess we are immature?
Iger wasn't sure about the purchase of ESPN in the first place, and we can see why.
The story is really about how the internet has done a lot of damage to sports television, and sports media in general. Basically everyone covering sports has had to make significant cuts. When the value of ads drop, it doesn't take very long for gambling ads to be the most profitable. This isn't just an American story either: European sports media is also going all in on gambling.
If the pushes for ties with gambling get regulated to oblivion (and they might), ultimately what we'll see is that sports league's viewership rights will not keep going up forever, as they seem to have gone for decades. This is ultimately why this whole gambling deal happens: Today, it's really hard to make a good profit from the sports content, given the current subscription revenue, and how many ads you can really subject people to.
For those of us that wish for less gambling, I am not necessarily optimistic though: See also how the market of videogames that rely on gambling mechanics with real money pouring in for every roll are larger than the entire traditional videogame console market...and that includes sports games which are already relying on a whole lot of booster pack opening revenue.