If you want to have an ad on your site you should take responsibility for it. That doesn't mean you can't have an advertising company supply you with ads, but I'm getting google supplied adds on LordLimecat.com you're not taking responsibility for what you're showing me, or how that information is being used to track me across sites.
Admittedly, it's an idealistic pipe dream. But I think that's the point he's trying to make.
The EU drug companies that were selling the stuff to the US that was being used for executions got in trouble for it. You are responsible for what you agree to let the other party do with what you sell them.
China made a big deal about buying their aircraft carrier as some sort of tourist attraction/scrap/whatever that wasn't really to be an aircraft carrier. And now its an aircraft carrier. They went to that stink precisely because the company selling to them wouldn't have been allowed to do so if it was to be used as an aircraft carrier.
Useful for educational purposes. You give people a chance to execute code on an actual distributed cluster setup without taking away CPU time from actual projects, and it's still going to be a lot more powerful than most people have access to.
This is a fairly common problem anyway. People tend to get stuck in their ways, the new guy comes in and knows all of the new stuff in the language, the new theories of software engineering etc. The last guy, what he learned 10 years ago or 20 years ago was good enough, and hasn't bothered to keep up.
Really it's not the job of another lower level person to level specific criticism. Your best bet is to talk either training sessions with bosses (everyone gets refresher courses), or just do it with new tech and show the person how it can be done.
If tax credits and rebates are what make wind profitable.
Lots of industries start with various forms of government subsidy. The mistake made in ontario was thinking that the price of wind turbines was going to remain as high as it was for a lot longer.
The government was trying to convince the public that wind generators weren't going to destroy property values, deafen children etc. They were willing to take a loss on this up front in the hopes that by the time generation came down in price people wouldn't put up a huge protest about it. Unfortunately for the government, the price came down far faster than anyone anticipated, which is good for basically everyone else.
Had they stayed hugely expensive the government would be basically subsidizing half a dozen wind turbines here and there to show off, which, on the scale of things costs basically nothing, and if it made it easier to convince people to install a few thousand of them 20 years from now so much the better. But the price came down much faster than they anticipated.
If you mean the case, then all cases would have to be changed to allow it. If you mean the mobo itself then you still have to open it. There is probably room on the back panel for suck a switch, but that's likely to have unknowning users messing with it.
HP paid 11 billion dollars for something. They are now claiming it is actually worth 2.2, and that difference is accounted for by fraud on the part of the seller (essentially lying in their books to hide what it was actually worth). It's like going on a date with a girl and telling her you make 100k a year when actually you make 70. Or, as the case may be, telling her you make 110k when actually you make 22.
Now the thing is, some of the 'asset' they were buying was a brand name and other intangibles, so those are always of questionable value (AMD wrote off a few billion dollars in their ATI acquisition for this reason). If autonomy presented its brand and existing sales relationships as worth 8.8 billion dollars when they weren't, that's fraud. If HP is now claiming that they really aren't worth 8.8 billion dollars anymore (when they are) they're essentially defrauding the government, potentially quite legally as HP can kill the Autonomy brand and make it worth less. And if it's actually worth 8.8 billion dollars less, then they just wasted a bunch of shareholder money.
With all acquisitions you're trying to find something you can buy for less than it's actually worth, or will be worth in the future with enough investment on your part. Lots of people were warning that HP was paying too much, but the whole idea is that they figured (rightly or wrongly) that there was something there worth paying that much for. If you spend 180 bucks a share on apple stock on dec 31 2007, and looked at the price of 85 a share in march of 2009 you would have been thinking that was a really bad investment. Until it hit 700 bucks a share in september of this year and is now down in the 510 range.
Probably because people may still want to update their MOBO firmware without opening the case, same with installing a new OS.
It's one thing to do it on your machine at home. It's another to deploy 500 machines where you have to change a jumper on each one, and then change it back.
Although one has to wonder how big the market for iPhones really is. It's not the like the vast majority of consumers aren't stuck paying one of the big carriers for a monthly sub anyway, and for them how much cheaper is a stolen iPhone than the carrier price anyway?
But then with phones it's a little easier. The EU has been working on this, stolen phones should be blacklisted from carriers. If you can't resell them, what is the point of stealing them? There is still the overseas market but it eliminates a lot of the casual disorganized piracy, and the EU and US databases should be able to talk to each other.
Sinofsky was there and in charge. He has since been removed, because whatever choices he made prevented the feedback of "do not release a product like this" from reaching him. And that is exactly what we're trying to avoid in linux.
Good people who have their head on their shoulders being dissuaded from speaking their mind by asshole managers is a recipe for disaster.
He cares more about the product being right than other peoples' opinion of him.
He cares more about the product right this second than creating a culture that will create a great product 5 years from now, 10 years from now, or 25 years from now.
old boss may have been widely regarded as an asshole, he was an effective asshole,
Yes, and that's the problem. Linus is setting a tone that relies on his celebrity to enforce. No one else will get away with behaving like that, and suddenly their effectiveness will fall off a cliff if anyone else tries to pull the same stunt.
Those who get butthurt about being dressed down are free to find something else to do with their time.
Already addressed. The military, and microsoft hold out carrots of fat paychecks, pensions, health benefits etc. Linux has no such carrot to hold out, especially not to the voluntary organizations and their employees who keep it going as a serious project, and who can go and make their own if they get sick of putting up with it.
That and you're in a fantasy land of coloured glasses about your time in the military. Militaries have become much 'softer' for want of a better phrase since the advent of professional armies. Sodomy and the whip are no longer core portions of the navy experience, nor is it appropriate to treat enlisted men like they're chattel to be used at the discretion of their betters (the officers, naturally), hell, we don't even have 12 year old drummers on deck anymore or running ammunition. Unless you think 6th graders should be manning up and learning to stand to their guns.
Don't get me wrong, this is a spectrum of behaviour. You do need *some* sort blunt truth, but you can't be a dick about it and drive away all of your potential volunteers either.
Step right up if you can do it better or know others who can.
I run my own software projects just fine thank you. Not everyone wants to spend their days squabbling over operating systems though.
Or it looks like someone (i.e., you) has never encountered anyone from another culture.
I'm a mix between 3, and I live in a 4th.
Culture is exactly what this is about. What is acceptable for an israeli to do to another israeli is not a chinese guy should treat an american. In a voluntary organization you're pushing your luck being a dick to people you don't know. And you're really pushing your luck setting that as the tone for everyone who wants to follow you.
Because highly skilled, charismatic, outspoken arseholes are so few and far between in the FOSS community.
But therein lies the problem, and what I was getting at with windows 9. Depending on what MS does to fix their UI issues for windows 9 we could be seeing these guys come hat in hand to us again in a year or two, and this money will have been wasted.
Everyone here, you, me, every single VLC developer, should be vigorously resisting anything to do with windows 8 until MS gets its shit together. I don't really want to find out I've donated money to a plan that is going to become like silverlight, and basically abandoned, or, god help us, replaced back with silverlight since the whole mess that is windows 8 is largely a result of the internal MS shitstorm that was the battle between silverlight and WPF, where thus far silverlight has lost, but the people in charge of that choice are now gone.
As I said in my post. How the fix it will be windows 9, and the technical future of that product is far too uncertain to be hoping windows 8 development will directly translate to windows 9.
Or it looks like someone had a temper tantrum because he's a celebrity and doesn't have to be decent to other people.
And the thing is, that happens. A lot. Even at microsoft. "That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard!" - Bill Gates. And that was in Paul Allens book, and apparently an oft used phrase.
Linux lives and breathes on its contributors, if you make too many public scenes you can end up with a lot of important people and companies saying it's not worth it to contribute to, or it's not worth it to contribute to under Torvalds, that would be a very ugly mess for the entire industry. Worse still is if this sort of behaviour sets the tone for everyone else trying to be the next Linus, and they try to copy his to behavior (and that definitely happened at microsoft) and you end up with an organization full of asshole managers who no one wants to work for. At least microsoft can hold out the carrot of a fat paycheck to put up with it, Linux relies on people volunteering to help.
Granted, it's not really a shock that Torvalds likes to... speak his mind. That's part of his thing. Still, it poses a lot of questions about the sort of person who's going to be around to succeed him if he gets hit by a bus so to speak. Certainly Tim Cook and Steve Ballmer have not been able to find the right magic replacing their more famous bosses, and one would hope Linux manages better than Apple and MS have, admittedly, those jobs are completely different.
We do student projects on this scale in 4 months with 5-6 kids. Doesn't seem like it's that big a deal.
It's just changing the UI to use the metro language, and performance optimization for ARM on windows RT and anything that crops up along the way. It's not trivial, but it's not like they have to write an entire media player, with codec support etc. from scratch, or at least, hopefully don't.
This was a stupid idea. Windows 8 is a trainwreck. No serious application should be aiming for microsoft app store approval. Turning windows into a walled garden is bad for windows and bad for the PC industry as a whole. If all you have is an app store (google play or iOS app store) app, fine whatever, porting it to windows walled garden isn't making it any worse. But taking a program from the open platform desktop into the walled garden of 'metro' is a monumentally bad idea.
Now the thing is, windows 8 isn't just bad because the store is a bad idea. It's bad because it glues two completely different interfaces together in a confusing manner. And how they fix that, with windows 9, may mean a completely rewrite of 'apps' or programs, or both. And until we know what that is going to require we shouldn't be throwing money at windows 8 projects.
Those are two very separate problems, one philosophical and industry related, and the other a very open ended technical question.
throw the whole "right tool for the job" bit out the window because one dude doesn't like it?
Imagine a conversation goes like this. (Imagine that this is a shop that does C development right now).
New guy: This project that needs doing. I could do it in C++, I could do it a lot faster than in C.
Old manager guy: If we do it in C++ it means we have to keep C++ capable people on around. Even if you stick around 10 years from now you might be out of practice coding.
New guy: Ok, but if we don't do it in C++ we're probably not going to get it done at all, because we don't have the resources to do it in C at all.
Old manager guy: If it means we lock ourselves into a future of more skills than we have, it's not worth doing, because we can't guarantee being able to support it, and I don't want our name on abandonware.
They'd both be right. And that would be why GNU still doesn't consider itself to have a stable release. If you demand everything be done exactly perfectly you'll never even finish one thing, and if you accept 'good enough' you can easily end up with bits of code clinging to life that you will eventually have to just rewrite.
I just was on a project where one of the other software guys took all of the function names of a MS windows package, and completely rewrote how quite a lot of them behaved (not just implemented the same API differently, he actually completely changed what the functions do), but that was about 10 years ago. Now, to try and update that code and use the new version of the actual MS api we had a nightmare of a time, trying to figure out what he changed, and why was actually really hard and wasted a lot of money. And yet, it meant he had a working piece of software out the door 10 years ago that kept him in business for 10 years.
Some of this is cultural too. A bunch of my friends work for a company that is owned by israelis (we're not in israel) and when the israelis come here they occasionally yell at customers and complain to customers that they're not behaving properly. And these are big corporate customers, cable companies and ISPs and that sort of thing. You just don't do that here. Ever. But that's the way they do business in Israel. Here if a customer asks for something you cannot do, you politely tell him that you don't think it's reasonable for the budget available, or that you can't do it. You don't complain that he's being impossible to deal with.
Surely the difficult thing is figuring out whether the complaints are valid?
Yes and no, the person making a complain is a large part of this. If everything they ever do is complain then it becomes a signal to noise problem. If the person is particularly stupid it may just be them not knowing how to do something (which itself may reflect a training issue, or not). If the person rarely complains and has well thought out criticism then it can be helpful.
Even people who complain all the time *can* be useful. Ultimately it's everyones job to find problems and fix them or reduce their impact. But you need people who have some clue.
If that means someone in management has to put up with a stream of minor complaints from each new starter for a while because it turns out that our management processes suck in a lot of silly little ways, then so be it.
Absolutely, the gap though, between someone who is just immature, and someone who is a chronic complainer is hard to find, and if an employer has had a really bad experience in the past they tend to over compensate.
Indeed, it's very hard to weed out complainers in an HR process, but they are enormous drains on productivity, even one slip and you can be toxic to a potential employer if they are expressly trying to minimize problem employees.
I've had to work with a few of those over the years, one who was an old codger that refused to use e-mail and demanded an office in an area only accessible via stairwell (not allowed because students (i.e. customers) with mobility issues could never get there), and refused to attend departmental meetings. Which usually were about 15 minutes of 'hey lab person, anything we need to know about broken equipment that might screw up our plans?' He was a constant waste of management time trying to get him to do his fucking job. Another is a younger person who had a fit at customers because of where they were standing, basically all she did was spend her days complaining about how everything that went wrong was someone else's fault (which, because she complained about everything that went wrong, even if it had nothing to do with her was true). She was a giant sap on everyone else's productivity listening to her, a huge sink in employee morale, and just a generally unpleasant person to have around.
The first guy didn't start out that way, apparently for 20 odd years before I got there he was very well regarded, and then he got sick and something rattled his brain. The other one if you caught her between fits seemed like she had a lot of useful ideas on how to improve things (which was sort of what was looked for in an employee). In HR some of her ideas were... impractical but you can't fault someone for not knowing departmental budgets and resources when they aren't actually in the process. When she was actually in the loop her ideas became even more wildly impractical as people told her no to the just impractical ones.
While not at the same place, both of those people will heavily influence future hiring decisions. Contracts will be much more restrictive to deal with the first, and anyone who even seems like they might be a complainer is just not going to be hired for a years, even if that sort of thing could be useful.
Slashdot Mirror
And I think the point is that they should stop.
If you want to have an ad on your site you should take responsibility for it. That doesn't mean you can't have an advertising company supply you with ads, but I'm getting google supplied adds on LordLimecat.com you're not taking responsibility for what you're showing me, or how that information is being used to track me across sites.
Admittedly, it's an idealistic pipe dream. But I think that's the point he's trying to make.
The EU drug companies that were selling the stuff to the US that was being used for executions got in trouble for it. You are responsible for what you agree to let the other party do with what you sell them.
China made a big deal about buying their aircraft carrier as some sort of tourist attraction/scrap/whatever that wasn't really to be an aircraft carrier. And now its an aircraft carrier. They went to that stink precisely because the company selling to them wouldn't have been allowed to do so if it was to be used as an aircraft carrier.
Useful for educational purposes. You give people a chance to execute code on an actual distributed cluster setup without taking away CPU time from actual projects, and it's still going to be a lot more powerful than most people have access to.
They are if they sell them to north korea or Iran.
This is a fairly common problem anyway. People tend to get stuck in their ways, the new guy comes in and knows all of the new stuff in the language, the new theories of software engineering etc. The last guy, what he learned 10 years ago or 20 years ago was good enough, and hasn't bothered to keep up.
Really it's not the job of another lower level person to level specific criticism. Your best bet is to talk either training sessions with bosses (everyone gets refresher courses), or just do it with new tech and show the person how it can be done.
If tax credits and rebates are what make wind profitable.
Lots of industries start with various forms of government subsidy. The mistake made in ontario was thinking that the price of wind turbines was going to remain as high as it was for a lot longer.
The government was trying to convince the public that wind generators weren't going to destroy property values, deafen children etc. They were willing to take a loss on this up front in the hopes that by the time generation came down in price people wouldn't put up a huge protest about it. Unfortunately for the government, the price came down far faster than anyone anticipated, which is good for basically everyone else.
Had they stayed hugely expensive the government would be basically subsidizing half a dozen wind turbines here and there to show off, which, on the scale of things costs basically nothing, and if it made it easier to convince people to install a few thousand of them 20 years from now so much the better. But the price came down much faster than they anticipated.
Keep in mind, that's the microsoft version. That means the 3rd party manufacturers are going to come in with better hardware for less money.
Also, paying a premium to have x86 seems like it might be worth it, linux or not.
Outside of...?
If you mean the case, then all cases would have to be changed to allow it. If you mean the mobo itself then you still have to open it. There is probably room on the back panel for suck a switch, but that's likely to have unknowning users messing with it.
This seems straightforward.
HP paid 11 billion dollars for something. They are now claiming it is actually worth 2.2, and that difference is accounted for by fraud on the part of the seller (essentially lying in their books to hide what it was actually worth). It's like going on a date with a girl and telling her you make 100k a year when actually you make 70. Or, as the case may be, telling her you make 110k when actually you make 22.
Now the thing is, some of the 'asset' they were buying was a brand name and other intangibles, so those are always of questionable value (AMD wrote off a few billion dollars in their ATI acquisition for this reason). If autonomy presented its brand and existing sales relationships as worth 8.8 billion dollars when they weren't, that's fraud. If HP is now claiming that they really aren't worth 8.8 billion dollars anymore (when they are) they're essentially defrauding the government, potentially quite legally as HP can kill the Autonomy brand and make it worth less. And if it's actually worth 8.8 billion dollars less, then they just wasted a bunch of shareholder money.
With all acquisitions you're trying to find something you can buy for less than it's actually worth, or will be worth in the future with enough investment on your part. Lots of people were warning that HP was paying too much, but the whole idea is that they figured (rightly or wrongly) that there was something there worth paying that much for. If you spend 180 bucks a share on apple stock on dec 31 2007, and looked at the price of 85 a share in march of 2009 you would have been thinking that was a really bad investment. Until it hit 700 bucks a share in september of this year and is now down in the 510 range.
Probably because people may still want to update their MOBO firmware without opening the case, same with installing a new OS.
It's one thing to do it on your machine at home. It's another to deploy 500 machines where you have to change a jumper on each one, and then change it back.
Followup
http://www.rcrwireless.com/article/20120412/devices/att-verizon-sprint-and-t-mobile-usa-agree-to-block-stolen-phones/
Although one has to wonder how big the market for iPhones really is. It's not the like the vast majority of consumers aren't stuck paying one of the big carriers for a monthly sub anyway, and for them how much cheaper is a stolen iPhone than the carrier price anyway?
But then with phones it's a little easier. The EU has been working on this, stolen phones should be blacklisted from carriers. If you can't resell them, what is the point of stealing them? There is still the overseas market but it eliminates a lot of the casual disorganized piracy, and the EU and US databases should be able to talk to each other.
Sinofsky was there and in charge. He has since been removed, because whatever choices he made prevented the feedback of "do not release a product like this" from reaching him. And that is exactly what we're trying to avoid in linux.
Good people who have their head on their shoulders being dissuaded from speaking their mind by asshole managers is a recipe for disaster.
He cares more about the product being right than other peoples' opinion of him.
He cares more about the product right this second than creating a culture that will create a great product 5 years from now, 10 years from now, or 25 years from now.
old boss may have been widely regarded as an asshole, he was an effective asshole,
Yes, and that's the problem. Linus is setting a tone that relies on his celebrity to enforce. No one else will get away with behaving like that, and suddenly their effectiveness will fall off a cliff if anyone else tries to pull the same stunt.
Those who get butthurt about being dressed down are free to find something else to do with their time.
Already addressed. The military, and microsoft hold out carrots of fat paychecks, pensions, health benefits etc. Linux has no such carrot to hold out, especially not to the voluntary organizations and their employees who keep it going as a serious project, and who can go and make their own if they get sick of putting up with it.
That and you're in a fantasy land of coloured glasses about your time in the military. Militaries have become much 'softer' for want of a better phrase since the advent of professional armies. Sodomy and the whip are no longer core portions of the navy experience, nor is it appropriate to treat enlisted men like they're chattel to be used at the discretion of their betters (the officers, naturally), hell, we don't even have 12 year old drummers on deck anymore or running ammunition. Unless you think 6th graders should be manning up and learning to stand to their guns.
Don't get me wrong, this is a spectrum of behaviour. You do need *some* sort blunt truth, but you can't be a dick about it and drive away all of your potential volunteers either.
Step right up if you can do it better or know others who can.
I run my own software projects just fine thank you. Not everyone wants to spend their days squabbling over operating systems though.
Or it looks like someone (i.e., you) has never encountered anyone from another culture.
I'm a mix between 3, and I live in a 4th.
Culture is exactly what this is about. What is acceptable for an israeli to do to another israeli is not a chinese guy should treat an american. In a voluntary organization you're pushing your luck being a dick to people you don't know. And you're really pushing your luck setting that as the tone for everyone who wants to follow you.
Because highly skilled, charismatic, outspoken arseholes are so few and far between in the FOSS community.
Precisely the problem, and the cause.
It's not like 65k is a lot of money.
But therein lies the problem, and what I was getting at with windows 9. Depending on what MS does to fix their UI issues for windows 9 we could be seeing these guys come hat in hand to us again in a year or two, and this money will have been wasted.
Everyone here, you, me, every single VLC developer, should be vigorously resisting anything to do with windows 8 until MS gets its shit together. I don't really want to find out I've donated money to a plan that is going to become like silverlight, and basically abandoned, or, god help us, replaced back with silverlight since the whole mess that is windows 8 is largely a result of the internal MS shitstorm that was the battle between silverlight and WPF, where thus far silverlight has lost, but the people in charge of that choice are now gone.
http://www.liveside.net/2012/08/22/is-this-what-really-happened-to-silverlight/
As I said in my post. How the fix it will be windows 9, and the technical future of that product is far too uncertain to be hoping windows 8 development will directly translate to windows 9.
Or it looks like someone had a temper tantrum because he's a celebrity and doesn't have to be decent to other people.
And the thing is, that happens. A lot. Even at microsoft. "That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard!" - Bill Gates. And that was in Paul Allens book, and apparently an oft used phrase.
Linux lives and breathes on its contributors, if you make too many public scenes you can end up with a lot of important people and companies saying it's not worth it to contribute to, or it's not worth it to contribute to under Torvalds, that would be a very ugly mess for the entire industry. Worse still is if this sort of behaviour sets the tone for everyone else trying to be the next Linus, and they try to copy his to behavior (and that definitely happened at microsoft) and you end up with an organization full of asshole managers who no one wants to work for. At least microsoft can hold out the carrot of a fat paycheck to put up with it, Linux relies on people volunteering to help.
Granted, it's not really a shock that Torvalds likes to... speak his mind. That's part of his thing. Still, it poses a lot of questions about the sort of person who's going to be around to succeed him if he gets hit by a bus so to speak. Certainly Tim Cook and Steve Ballmer have not been able to find the right magic replacing their more famous bosses, and one would hope Linux manages better than Apple and MS have, admittedly, those jobs are completely different.
That probably hurts things like the Elite update, which is about 400k short (~30%) with about 2 weeks left.
We do student projects on this scale in 4 months with 5-6 kids. Doesn't seem like it's that big a deal.
It's just changing the UI to use the metro language, and performance optimization for ARM on windows RT and anything that crops up along the way. It's not trivial, but it's not like they have to write an entire media player, with codec support etc. from scratch, or at least, hopefully don't.
For real.
This was a stupid idea. Windows 8 is a trainwreck. No serious application should be aiming for microsoft app store approval. Turning windows into a walled garden is bad for windows and bad for the PC industry as a whole. If all you have is an app store (google play or iOS app store) app, fine whatever, porting it to windows walled garden isn't making it any worse. But taking a program from the open platform desktop into the walled garden of 'metro' is a monumentally bad idea.
Now the thing is, windows 8 isn't just bad because the store is a bad idea. It's bad because it glues two completely different interfaces together in a confusing manner. And how they fix that, with windows 9, may mean a completely rewrite of 'apps' or programs, or both. And until we know what that is going to require we shouldn't be throwing money at windows 8 projects.
Those are two very separate problems, one philosophical and industry related, and the other a very open ended technical question.
throw the whole "right tool for the job" bit out the window because one dude doesn't like it?
Imagine a conversation goes like this. (Imagine that this is a shop that does C development right now).
New guy: This project that needs doing. I could do it in C++, I could do it a lot faster than in C.
Old manager guy: If we do it in C++ it means we have to keep C++ capable people on around. Even if you stick around 10 years from now you might be out of practice coding.
New guy: Ok, but if we don't do it in C++ we're probably not going to get it done at all, because we don't have the resources to do it in C at all.
Old manager guy: If it means we lock ourselves into a future of more skills than we have, it's not worth doing, because we can't guarantee being able to support it, and I don't want our name on abandonware.
They'd both be right. And that would be why GNU still doesn't consider itself to have a stable release. If you demand everything be done exactly perfectly you'll never even finish one thing, and if you accept 'good enough' you can easily end up with bits of code clinging to life that you will eventually have to just rewrite.
I just was on a project where one of the other software guys took all of the function names of a MS windows package, and completely rewrote how quite a lot of them behaved (not just implemented the same API differently, he actually completely changed what the functions do), but that was about 10 years ago. Now, to try and update that code and use the new version of the actual MS api we had a nightmare of a time, trying to figure out what he changed, and why was actually really hard and wasted a lot of money. And yet, it meant he had a working piece of software out the door 10 years ago that kept him in business for 10 years.
Indeed.
Some of this is cultural too. A bunch of my friends work for a company that is owned by israelis (we're not in israel) and when the israelis come here they occasionally yell at customers and complain to customers that they're not behaving properly. And these are big corporate customers, cable companies and ISPs and that sort of thing. You just don't do that here. Ever. But that's the way they do business in Israel. Here if a customer asks for something you cannot do, you politely tell him that you don't think it's reasonable for the budget available, or that you can't do it. You don't complain that he's being impossible to deal with.
Surely the difficult thing is figuring out whether the complaints are valid?
Yes and no, the person making a complain is a large part of this. If everything they ever do is complain then it becomes a signal to noise problem. If the person is particularly stupid it may just be them not knowing how to do something (which itself may reflect a training issue, or not). If the person rarely complains and has well thought out criticism then it can be helpful.
Even people who complain all the time *can* be useful. Ultimately it's everyones job to find problems and fix them or reduce their impact. But you need people who have some clue.
If that means someone in management has to put up with a stream of minor complaints from each new starter for a while because it turns out that our management processes suck in a lot of silly little ways, then so be it.
Absolutely, the gap though, between someone who is just immature, and someone who is a chronic complainer is hard to find, and if an employer has had a really bad experience in the past they tend to over compensate.
Indeed, it's very hard to weed out complainers in an HR process, but they are enormous drains on productivity, even one slip and you can be toxic to a potential employer if they are expressly trying to minimize problem employees.
I've had to work with a few of those over the years, one who was an old codger that refused to use e-mail and demanded an office in an area only accessible via stairwell (not allowed because students (i.e. customers) with mobility issues could never get there), and refused to attend departmental meetings. Which usually were about 15 minutes of 'hey lab person, anything we need to know about broken equipment that might screw up our plans?' He was a constant waste of management time trying to get him to do his fucking job. Another is a younger person who had a fit at customers because of where they were standing, basically all she did was spend her days complaining about how everything that went wrong was someone else's fault (which, because she complained about everything that went wrong, even if it had nothing to do with her was true). She was a giant sap on everyone else's productivity listening to her, a huge sink in employee morale, and just a generally unpleasant person to have around.
The first guy didn't start out that way, apparently for 20 odd years before I got there he was very well regarded, and then he got sick and something rattled his brain. The other one if you caught her between fits seemed like she had a lot of useful ideas on how to improve things (which was sort of what was looked for in an employee). In HR some of her ideas were... impractical but you can't fault someone for not knowing departmental budgets and resources when they aren't actually in the process. When she was actually in the loop her ideas became even more wildly impractical as people told her no to the just impractical ones.
While not at the same place, both of those people will heavily influence future hiring decisions. Contracts will be much more restrictive to deal with the first, and anyone who even seems like they might be a complainer is just not going to be hired for a years, even if that sort of thing could be useful.