I think that's being exceedingly generous. It may sound 'sciencey', but certainly he does not have study data to back him up.
Of course one could complain that there's no way in hell that a proper scientific study to examine those hypothesis will get funded/published because it's just such a taboo subject. However lacking such a study, it's not appropriate to lean into a convenient hypothesis supporting your personal world view.
Calling out the ideological culture and generally complaining about excessive obsession with diversity in general terms I think would have been fair game , but going so far as to assert the hypothesis that women were biologically not suited for the work crossed a line.
It's not whisteblowing (he didn't claim illegal activity really), and while you can say he was discussing working conditions, another group of people claim that it represents harassment, and the latter argument seems likely to prevail. He might have had a better chance if he didn't outright claim that women were inherently not cut out for those jobs and instead just stuck to complaining about diversity being too highly prioritized and that the culture was suppressing any criticism of that.
In general, if you write a '10 page manifesto' about anything, you are probably going to come off as a nutjob and probably won't go well for you professionally.
I'm saying that in the *general* sense people are starting from valid perspectives: 1) that there is unfair bias in the industry, where certain folks with all the right work ethic, skill and talent somehow lose out to inferior coworkers over unrelated happenstance of biology in terms of pay and opportunities
2) efforts to forcibly 'fix' the above result in frustrating suboptimal hires, not because the pool of candidates on that side is somehow inferior, but because companies are too eagerly hiring people for sake of diversity rather than being as selective as they are most of the time. Evaluations that take months give way to eager immediate hire of the first candidate to come along.
Then the perspectives meet, vitriolic exchanges happen, and even well composed folks will frequently go full crazy, on either side. Coming in without backstory you see two unhinged sides angrily talking past each other, each failing to recognize the issues on their side. I've no idea about Google, and I'm also sure there exist places that manage to have good fair hiring and working conditions and also have good diversity, but there definitely exist both groups that are anti-woman and also groups that are blindly pro-diversity without adequate regard for the *work* that needs to be done and peoples' exposures to the other side exacerbates the divide constantly.
So what you have are two sides of a situation, both with valid perspectives, pushed to irrational extremism in a game of one-upmanship and dehumanizing the other side.
First off, there is undeniably unfair discrimination against women. Even if hypothetically you wanted to try to blame some biological (which I am skeptical of, but will confess that it's such a taboo subject that science can't explore it objectively) or cultural/environmental factors prior to the professional workplace (which would point to other things needing to be addressed), but the workplace undeniably has a role. I have seen first hand an instance in my role where the best candidate I interviewed was passed over for a lesser candidate despite my recommendation, and I could find no other explanation other than the lesser candidate was a man and folks were more comfortable that way. She was professional, intelligent, and showed cleared signs of working to keep her knowledge up to date and explore new things. The guy who got the job however could not speak to anything new in the last 10 years, didn't seem to even care enough about the interview to try. It was maddening, particularly when they ended up firing him for not doing any work.
However on the other side, careless 'diversity' hires can just make things worse. Years later in a different environment, we traditionally had to scour candidates to find an acceptable one, taking a great deal of effort and multiple rounds of evaluations for promising candidates. It just so happened that all the applicants were male. On one occasion, a woman applied. That woman skipped the initial rounds and went to the final interview and was immediately hired, despite being woefully unqualified, unmotivated, and disinterested in anything but getting paid and talking about social stuff at work. So the same sort of people responsible for the previous scenario get their world view reinforced that women are somehow ill-equipped, because they were forced to work with an unqualified person and they blamed their biology rather than the circumstances of diversity hire. If we did the same thing with a random male applicant, we'd get the exact same BS, but we know better. Folks have good intentions in trying to balance the scales a bit, but hiring unqualified people simply because they have a generally maligned gender/ethnicity is not without problems.
The biggest thing is that maps don't have traffic info, which can be fantastic. Also new construction.
Also, there are some really funky interchanges, like near me there is this weird interchange where 4 highways and two local streets come together in a very small area and it's actually a bit difficult to make out on a map and see how to get through it and end up on the right road at the end. Turn by turn usually saves me having to take the next exit and come try again when I see that I misunderstood the map the first time.
Note that a lot of these services seemingly intentionally make it hard to have offline backups. For example, doing graphical type work in an editor in their webapp, no option to save or export.
I don't know about Cisco's, but generally speaking, the name of the game is to lock the users in to assure recurring revenue, and portable data is counter to that goal.
Back in the Netburst days, you marvelled at how Intel did so poorly despite 'looking' like it should be faster.
From Conroe to about Bulldozer, things were about the same.
The bulldozer screwed up AMD in the same way that Netburst screwed up Intel for a while. Meanwhile Intel progressed well.
Now with Zen, at least on desktop it's back to mostly neck and neck. In high end server, it's a mixed bag, Epyc having more memory channels means better capacity, but individual memory performance is equal to their desktop product. This is fine for a lot of applications (e.g. VDI, similar virtualization) and gets more aggregate performance and capacity, though single thread/process memory throughput takes a hit.
At least when companies ran their own servers the outage would generally only affect that one company instead of hundreds or thousands.
For some business folk, this is an advantage. If all your competitor's are down too, great! If you are an IT manager and it's the vendor's fault, again great!
Sadly, many folks don't care as much about an outage or data loss as they care about who gets blamed.
Of course, if you explicitly make the effort to look, you notice it's marketplace. People who aren't paying close attention end up not seeing the difference (well, until shipping comes up).
The ideal for me was when I worked in a team that did have 'cubes', but it was in a room dedicated to a department, so limited to about 18 people at most. So folks could communicate freely, and 99% of the communication overheard was relevant to your job.
True, my workplace is nicer than you describe, but the one job I held where I had a real office strangely enough happened to be my lowest paying job in the industry. I'm now making tenfold more than that, though now I'm in a shared cube (at least not at a random table).
I have not seen a company paying enough to have strong talent *also* provide real office space anymore.
Can in part blame containers and things like ansible/puppet/chef/salt.
They are all useful tools for adequately skilled admins to manage what they put together, but increasingly it's been a crutch of software devs to not bother doing good packaging and release management. So what if a hapless admin is slapped with some inscrutible stack trace or syntax error? So what if you get lazy and you ship a vulnerable system library that got updated by the distro vendor ages ago? The alternative would be spending a few minutes learning how to package and actually keeping in mind the user's perspective as part of your development cycle, and that would be terrible!
Whoops, I was mistaken, he does work at a company that is dedicated to Apple Watch success, so not unbiased, but not quite as blatant as being poached by Apple.
So nowadays the whole dual camera thing, and some exotic optics mean some on-device post processing can make sense, stuff custom tailored to the hardware config at hand.
But generally speaking, yeah, the ability to post process on the phone does not mean high quality optics are dead. For many people it can guess enough to 'enhance' the picture. It might not even match the original scene, though admittedly it's not like human brain remembers the scene well enough to notice the difference between real scene and extrapolated guesses about what the scene looked like.
Just like 'colorizing' and 'repairing' torn pictures.
In our company, we have one building that is 'a workspace designed from the ground up for the millenial generation'. One of the new college grads in our group in one of the old fuddy-duddy buildings (at least per the real estate people) is glad they don't have to work in that. In fact when we do talk to them, they hate it.
Most folks like having a space to call their own. They may have different levels of privacy desired, but a random seat at a random table makes them feel like their position in the group is tenuous and they don't have a place to call 'home'. Even if it were assigned, clean desk policies that prevail and limited square footage to even try means that space is too anonymous to feel like a 'home' base.
It's a simple matter of the real estate cost of square footage, and in the case of office space, the cost of the building. The 'everyone sits around a table' and even 'you don't need enough seats for everyone, and just assume x% of work from home' is all about that. Of course the problem is people *believing* the warm sounding rationalizing and starting to adopt it for things like this, where *clearly* cost efficiency was not at the top of the list.
I agree with your general sentiment. Software devs cares less and less about good packaging and publishing a manageable low frequency stream of 'releases' for folks to consume, but not uselessly long token release cycles. Part of this is overconfidence in continuous integration, part of it is a misunderstanding of 'Agile', part of it is that on the whole developers are currently a bit spoiled by the way industry worships the skill of software development so they don't have to do things like make lives easier on downstream consumers of their code.
I will say that github is a bit special *as long as you don't abuse it*. Generally, we need *something* where people can reasonably expect to find your code. It needs to be serviceable enough to work, but most critical of all everyone has to agree. It can change as a fad and suddenly we are all back on sourceforge or something tomorrow.
The problem is too many people are using git the *exact same way* as they use centralized VCS. Their 'origin' remote goes down and they are helpless to do any collaborative work. Despite git having excellent capability to create a new remote and moving data to it. Or to even manage it entirely through email. Github is there to facilitate project discovery and providing a standard way for a stray developer to contribute a suggestion or bugfix. Being reliable is a plus, but good usage of git means that you aren't as pissed when it goes down, and your team has recourse to move or augment to another git hosting service, and still be on github and accept contributions there.
Of course, even if that's the case, it's easy enough to change origin or add a new remote if it becomes intolerable. I tend to have an 'internal' remote and a 'public' remote, and 'upstream' so that github going down is no big deal, but when it's up people new to projects can find it and submit pull requests when it can.
Basically opportunistically taking advantage of 'everyone is on github' without the downsides of 'screwed when it goes down'.
For me, GitLab scales great in one respect: I can host a completely isolated instance of gitlab. So if it's an internet wide repository, I pretty much have an obligatory github mirror of it because that's the 'proper' thing to do. However when github goes down as it tends to do, it's not a huge deal because my team can still collaborate on our own instance of gitlab.
In other words, python 2 got stable after the developers got bored of it and stopped fucking around with it.
It's interesting because python isn't too shabby in terms of nice looking syntax, but the developers are so damn fickle and screw with things within a release because they lack the patience/discipline to tolerate something 'ugly' for the sake of compatibility...
Python has long had the problem of trying to provide the 'right' answer and anytime they decided they at one point had the 'wrong' answer, they change minds and break compatibility, for the sake of the newcomers to the current language.
On the one hand, it means python doesn't have to contend with problems other languages have of needing to support old syntaxes and mechanisms that are pretty ugly (Javascript has accumulated tons of different ways of supporting object oriented design).
On the other mind, it is frustrating as hell to provide python software to third parties to use with their interpreter of choice. Even when you go through all sorts of hell to make sure it works on python 2.6, 2,7, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6, some python zealot will still bitch about 'oh, you shouldn't be supporting 2 at all, especially not 2.6', not caring that you have tons of users still using 2.6 that you'd rather not tell to fuck off.
Slashdot Mirror
scientifically based.
I think that's being exceedingly generous. It may sound 'sciencey', but certainly he does not have study data to back him up.
Of course one could complain that there's no way in hell that a proper scientific study to examine those hypothesis will get funded/published because it's just such a taboo subject. However lacking such a study, it's not appropriate to lean into a convenient hypothesis supporting your personal world view.
Calling out the ideological culture and generally complaining about excessive obsession with diversity in general terms I think would have been fair game , but going so far as to assert the hypothesis that women were biologically not suited for the work crossed a line.
It's not whisteblowing (he didn't claim illegal activity really), and while you can say he was discussing working conditions, another group of people claim that it represents harassment, and the latter argument seems likely to prevail. He might have had a better chance if he didn't outright claim that women were inherently not cut out for those jobs and instead just stuck to complaining about diversity being too highly prioritized and that the culture was suppressing any criticism of that.
In general, if you write a '10 page manifesto' about anything, you are probably going to come off as a nutjob and probably won't go well for you professionally.
I'm saying that in the *general* sense people are starting from valid perspectives:
1) that there is unfair bias in the industry, where certain folks with all the right work ethic, skill and talent somehow lose out to inferior coworkers over unrelated happenstance of biology in terms of pay and opportunities
2) efforts to forcibly 'fix' the above result in frustrating suboptimal hires, not because the pool of candidates on that side is somehow inferior, but because companies are too eagerly hiring people for sake of diversity rather than being as selective as they are most of the time. Evaluations that take months give way to eager immediate hire of the first candidate to come along.
Then the perspectives meet, vitriolic exchanges happen, and even well composed folks will frequently go full crazy, on either side. Coming in without backstory you see two unhinged sides angrily talking past each other, each failing to recognize the issues on their side. I've no idea about Google, and I'm also sure there exist places that manage to have good fair hiring and working conditions and also have good diversity, but there definitely exist both groups that are anti-woman and also groups that are blindly pro-diversity without adequate regard for the *work* that needs to be done and peoples' exposures to the other side exacerbates the divide constantly.
So what you have are two sides of a situation, both with valid perspectives, pushed to irrational extremism in a game of one-upmanship and dehumanizing the other side.
First off, there is undeniably unfair discrimination against women. Even if hypothetically you wanted to try to blame some biological (which I am skeptical of, but will confess that it's such a taboo subject that science can't explore it objectively) or cultural/environmental factors prior to the professional workplace (which would point to other things needing to be addressed), but the workplace undeniably has a role. I have seen first hand an instance in my role where the best candidate I interviewed was passed over for a lesser candidate despite my recommendation, and I could find no other explanation other than the lesser candidate was a man and folks were more comfortable that way. She was professional, intelligent, and showed cleared signs of working to keep her knowledge up to date and explore new things. The guy who got the job however could not speak to anything new in the last 10 years, didn't seem to even care enough about the interview to try. It was maddening, particularly when they ended up firing him for not doing any work.
However on the other side, careless 'diversity' hires can just make things worse. Years later in a different environment, we traditionally had to scour candidates to find an acceptable one, taking a great deal of effort and multiple rounds of evaluations for promising candidates. It just so happened that all the applicants were male. On one occasion, a woman applied. That woman skipped the initial rounds and went to the final interview and was immediately hired, despite being woefully unqualified, unmotivated, and disinterested in anything but getting paid and talking about social stuff at work. So the same sort of people responsible for the previous scenario get their world view reinforced that women are somehow ill-equipped, because they were forced to work with an unqualified person and they blamed their biology rather than the circumstances of diversity hire. If we did the same thing with a random male applicant, we'd get the exact same BS, but we know better. Folks have good intentions in trying to balance the scales a bit, but hiring unqualified people simply because they have a generally maligned gender/ethnicity is not without problems.
The biggest thing is that maps don't have traffic info, which can be fantastic. Also new construction.
Also, there are some really funky interchanges, like near me there is this weird interchange where 4 highways and two local streets come together in a very small area and it's actually a bit difficult to make out on a map and see how to get through it and end up on the right road at the end. Turn by turn usually saves me having to take the next exit and come try again when I see that I misunderstood the map the first time.
can't patch them
Convenient that they can't patch and the only recourse is buying half a mil of new equipment...
Note that a lot of these services seemingly intentionally make it hard to have offline backups. For example, doing graphical type work in an editor in their webapp, no option to save or export.
I don't know about Cisco's, but generally speaking, the name of the game is to lock the users in to assure recurring revenue, and portable data is counter to that goal.
Depends on longevity in the market.
Back in the Netburst days, you marvelled at how Intel did so poorly despite 'looking' like it should be faster.
From Conroe to about Bulldozer, things were about the same.
The bulldozer screwed up AMD in the same way that Netburst screwed up Intel for a while. Meanwhile Intel progressed well.
Now with Zen, at least on desktop it's back to mostly neck and neck. In high end server, it's a mixed bag, Epyc having more memory channels means better capacity, but individual memory performance is equal to their desktop product. This is fine for a lot of applications (e.g. VDI, similar virtualization) and gets more aggregate performance and capacity, though single thread/process memory throughput takes a hit.
At least when companies ran their own servers the outage would generally only affect that one company instead of hundreds or thousands.
For some business folk, this is an advantage. If all your competitor's are down too, great! If you are an IT manager and it's the vendor's fault, again great!
Sadly, many folks don't care as much about an outage or data loss as they care about who gets blamed.
Of course, if you explicitly make the effort to look, you notice it's marketplace. People who aren't paying close attention end up not seeing the difference (well, until shipping comes up).
The ideal for me was when I worked in a team that did have 'cubes', but it was in a room dedicated to a department, so limited to about 18 people at most. So folks could communicate freely, and 99% of the communication overheard was relevant to your job.
True, my workplace is nicer than you describe, but the one job I held where I had a real office strangely enough happened to be my lowest paying job in the industry. I'm now making tenfold more than that, though now I'm in a shared cube (at least not at a random table).
I have not seen a company paying enough to have strong talent *also* provide real office space anymore.
Can in part blame containers and things like ansible/puppet/chef/salt.
They are all useful tools for adequately skilled admins to manage what they put together, but increasingly it's been a crutch of software devs to not bother doing good packaging and release management. So what if a hapless admin is slapped with some inscrutible stack trace or syntax error? So what if you get lazy and you ship a vulnerable system library that got updated by the distro vendor ages ago? The alternative would be spending a few minutes learning how to package and actually keeping in mind the user's perspective as part of your development cycle, and that would be terrible!
Whoops, I was mistaken, he does work at a company that is dedicated to Apple Watch success, so not unbiased, but not quite as blatant as being poached by Apple.
It depends...
So nowadays the whole dual camera thing, and some exotic optics mean some on-device post processing can make sense, stuff custom tailored to the hardware config at hand.
But generally speaking, yeah, the ability to post process on the phone does not mean high quality optics are dead. For many people it can guess enough to 'enhance' the picture. It might not even match the original scene, though admittedly it's not like human brain remembers the scene well enough to notice the difference between real scene and extrapolated guesses about what the scene looked like.
Just like 'colorizing' and 'repairing' torn pictures.
"Former Google senior vice president of Social, Vic Gundotra, said that Android phones are years behind the iPhone when it comes to photography."
Better written as:
"Current Apple executive, Vic Gundotra, said that Android phones are years behind the iPhone when it comes to photography."
Apple poached the guy, *of course* he's going to trash talk his former company, that's what he is *paid* to do.
Of course, the business leaders view people claiming they are less productive as whiners trying to get nice space back, and they should suck it up.
Which is why we are where we are, abstract bs about collaboration and open spaces resonate because it also is cheaper.
Conversely, complaints about productivity that would require more money be spent are dismissed as whiny bs because it's convenient that way.
Of course, it's not a simple matter of age.
In our company, we have one building that is 'a workspace designed from the ground up for the millenial generation'. One of the new college grads in our group in one of the old fuddy-duddy buildings (at least per the real estate people) is glad they don't have to work in that. In fact when we do talk to them, they hate it.
Most folks like having a space to call their own. They may have different levels of privacy desired, but a random seat at a random table makes them feel like their position in the group is tenuous and they don't have a place to call 'home'. Even if it were assigned, clean desk policies that prevail and limited square footage to even try means that space is too anonymous to feel like a 'home' base.
It's a simple matter of the real estate cost of square footage, and in the case of office space, the cost of the building. The 'everyone sits around a table' and even 'you don't need enough seats for everyone, and just assume x% of work from home' is all about that. Of course the problem is people *believing* the warm sounding rationalizing and starting to adopt it for things like this, where *clearly* cost efficiency was not at the top of the list.
I agree with your general sentiment. Software devs cares less and less about good packaging and publishing a manageable low frequency stream of 'releases' for folks to consume, but not uselessly long token release cycles. Part of this is overconfidence in continuous integration, part of it is a misunderstanding of 'Agile', part of it is that on the whole developers are currently a bit spoiled by the way industry worships the skill of software development so they don't have to do things like make lives easier on downstream consumers of their code.
I will say that github is a bit special *as long as you don't abuse it*. Generally, we need *something* where people can reasonably expect to find your code. It needs to be serviceable enough to work, but most critical of all everyone has to agree. It can change as a fad and suddenly we are all back on sourceforge or something tomorrow.
The problem is too many people are using git the *exact same way* as they use centralized VCS. Their 'origin' remote goes down and they are helpless to do any collaborative work. Despite git having excellent capability to create a new remote and moving data to it. Or to even manage it entirely through email. Github is there to facilitate project discovery and providing a standard way for a stray developer to contribute a suggestion or bugfix. Being reliable is a plus, but good usage of git means that you aren't as pissed when it goes down, and your team has recourse to move or augment to another git hosting service, and still be on github and accept contributions there.
Of course, even if that's the case, it's easy enough to change origin or add a new remote if it becomes intolerable. I tend to have an 'internal' remote and a 'public' remote, and 'upstream' so that github going down is no big deal, but when it's up people new to projects can find it and submit pull requests when it can.
Basically opportunistically taking advantage of 'everyone is on github' without the downsides of 'screwed when it goes down'.
For me, GitLab scales great in one respect: I can host a completely isolated instance of gitlab. So if it's an internet wide repository, I pretty much have an obligatory github mirror of it because that's the 'proper' thing to do. However when github goes down as it tends to do, it's not a huge deal because my team can still collaborate on our own instance of gitlab.
Google's little recruitment test is still explicitly python 2.
In other words, python 2 got stable after the developers got bored of it and stopped fucking around with it.
It's interesting because python isn't too shabby in terms of nice looking syntax, but the developers are so damn fickle and screw with things within a release because they lack the patience/discipline to tolerate something 'ugly' for the sake of compatibility...
Python has long had the problem of trying to provide the 'right' answer and anytime they decided they at one point had the 'wrong' answer, they change minds and break compatibility, for the sake of the newcomers to the current language.
On the one hand, it means python doesn't have to contend with problems other languages have of needing to support old syntaxes and mechanisms that are pretty ugly (Javascript has accumulated tons of different ways of supporting object oriented design).
On the other mind, it is frustrating as hell to provide python software to third parties to use with their interpreter of choice. Even when you go through all sorts of hell to make sure it works on python 2.6, 2,7, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6, some python zealot will still bitch about 'oh, you shouldn't be supporting 2 at all, especially not 2.6', not caring that you have tons of users still using 2.6 that you'd rather not tell to fuck off.