There is a limited pool of people out there with the time and talent to help with FOSS projects. Why do you think any of those people would favour a project where they'll be treated as shamefully as this if they make a mistake over one with a more constructive approach to reviews and collaboration where you learn from mistakes and move on?
Oh geesh, it seems you forgot to read the words prior to those that together formed a phrase, and that phrase went something along the lines of "can go from something as not being considered for a raise to being fired, depending on the gravity of the incident", and you also missed the part where I said that I do thing Linus overreacted.
So why did you bring the employment parallel up in the first place? Clearly this situation is different to what happens to employees who make mistakes in a company. The criticism of Linus in this Slashdot discussion hasn't been that he identified a mistake or wanted it fixed, both of which are obviously reasonable. It's the way he did it that is objectionable.
The point of my comment was you being totally disconnected from reality, not if Linus was right or not.
As I noted in a reply to another poster, it is unfortunate that the first response to criticising someone for making overly personal attacks appears to be receiving overly personal attacks myself. Particularly so, when that attack is saying I'm disconnected from reality, where it's management 101 that cultures like hero dependence and blame assignment are horribly counter-productive in the long term even if they sometimes achieve useful results for the immediate future.
So you know, I did read the thread and what I saw was Mauro trying to make excuses for what had happened and blaming the program and not to the bug inserted in the kernel.
Interesting interpretation. It seems to me that in his very first reply to Linus, he acknowledges the error in this case and apologises for it. It also seems like he is concerned about a wider issue that is why this problem arose in the first place, and wants to get to the bottom of it. That doesn't seem like "making excuses" to me, it seems like responsible software development. If Linus doesn't want to spend time on it, that's fine, but there's no need to chew the guy up for trying to make the software better.
Outside of geeks, Linux has never been in favour, despite many years of being probably the most high profile and well supported OSS project in the world. Even among geeks, it is mostly in favour as a server OS or a way to stick it to proprietary software makers like Microsoft; as an end user platform, Linux on the desktop is literally a running joke. Google, a commercial business with actual management, were more effective in developing an end user OS using a Linux foundation in a couple of years than the entire Linux community had been in well over a decade. You might like to think about that for a while.
like the other commenter said, you have a serious disconnection from reality.
Yes, it's interesting that in response to a post criticising someone for being hostile and making overly personal attacks, the best multiple have to come back with is... more overly personal attacks.
There *needs* to be a "top dog" who dictates the qualities of the project
Interesting choice of wording. Managers run things through collaboration. Leaders run things by example. Dictators run things through fear.
In any case, I don't accept your premise. The software development world is full of examples of projects (open and proprietary alike) where having a single dominant person at the helm causes problems and holds back progress, even if the original vision was good and the project so far has been useful. Linus is merely one example. A less sinister one would be Guido van Rossum, whose dislike of basic functional programming techniques that have been spreading through the wider programming world has hurt the expressiveness of Python significantly. And of course looking more widely we have people like RMS, whose histrionics and unrealistic extremism probably do more to damage the FOSS movement today than any other single factor.
otherwise it ends up being endless debate and project systematic individual style hacks introduced, in the end no one knows how it was supposed to work and how it does work now.
I'm not sure what you meant by some of that, but if you're suggesting that any software project without a single strong leader will fail, I strongly disagree. This isn't the military. Some of the most successful software projects in history were the results of collaborations. One good example is UNIX, so any attempts to argue that Linux needs such a structure are going to sound pretty weak. More generally, good projects employ all kinds of review processes today, in part to weed out nasty hacks. In fact, that's exactly what happened here, once you cut away all the melodrama.
Certainly, it will create some grief on the short term when someone is adamant about bad quality and breaking things
And who, exactly, was being adamant about that? The unfortunate victim in this particular case agreed that it was an error, and apologised for it, in his very first reply to Linus. But he also seems interested in knowing whether there is a broader problem that needs attention, unlike Linus, who seems to consider things like finding the root cause of any wider issue to be "irrelevant".
Those doing bad job needs to be punished, and those doing a good job needs a reward.
That is debatable, but even if true, nothing says the punishment needs to be having daddy throw his toys out of the pram like a five year old, in full view of the Internet.
It's no different from being employed in a company, someone screws up and can go from not being taken into account for promotion or plainly being fired depending on the incident proportion.
Don't be silly. It is extremely unlikely that an employee would be fired for a single mistake like this.
For one thing, if you read the entire e-mail thread, it seems there may be a wider issue, where the "employee" in question is genuinely concerned with identifying the root cause, while Linus seems to be more concerned with shouting at someone and brushing the whole thing under the carpet. That hardly suggests that, as Taco Cowboy put it, "the top priority of Linux is to *NOT INTRODUCE ANY USERSPACE BUG*".
However, if you want to consider parallels with an employment scenario, that sort of over-the-top, public criticism would be grounds for a formal grievance, and persistent treatment of that kind could lead to a constructive dismissal case.
Admins and users that are still sitting on the fence would take note, that Linus just don't take fuck as an excuse
No, instead he apparently creates a contributor-hostile culture based on blame assignment and supported by a hero model. And that is far, far more dangerous, because when your hero isn't there (and he can't be everywhere, and he won't be around forever) you have pushed away good people who could have stepped up to take over the job. Internet-famous celebrities like Torvalds are toxic to a constructive development culture that consistently makes good products over the long term.
Doing something stupid, not apologizong for it, failing to fix it in a timely manner and then blaming the stupidity on other people's code - when kernel policy clearly state it's YOUR responsibility - is much closer to the free ticket, wouldn't you say?
No. There's no excuse for being rude to someone in public like that, ever.
When your boss or Finance or whoever wants to impress the shareholders with cost reductions
I think you found the problem right there: management should be impressing the shareholders/private owners by generating good returns. You can do that by reducing costs, or you can do it by generating more revenues, or both. But you can only reduce costs so far and still get the job done, while if you do a good job the increase in revenues can be almost unlimited in many industries.
In my experience, the kind of management team who think of their staff as interchangeable components and understand their business as cells on a spreadsheet are rarely able to conceive ways to significantly increase revenues, so the only tool in their box is cutting costs. These people are toxic. They can only sustain a business (maybe), not develop it. Development comes from the people building better products and services and from the people who go out to market and sell those products and services to paying customers, not from management or Finance or HR. If the productive people are artificially restrained, the business is already dead.
Fortunately, all my companies are privately held and we've always made a point of bootstrapping without taking on formal investors (and the interference that inevitably results), so generally the shareholders are the people who founded the business and maybe a few key contributors as well. And I think those of us who double as the management teams all share a common view on these kinds of issues: spending money to make good people as productive as possible is an investment almost guaranteed to yield excellent returns, whether that is getting someone a third monitor and a high-end graphics card to drive it, sending someone on a good training course (which many aren't, but that's another post), or buying a top-of-the-range chair for someone who's had back problems. That is why it's baffling to me that professional investors and executives used to dealing with them so often seem to pull in the other direction...
Surely the difficult thing is figuring out whether the complaints are valid?
I don't want to hire someone who is going to make mountains out of molehills and whine about every little thing [he said slightly hypocritically, having probably been guilty of that plenty of times himself in his early career]. But on the other hand, if there is a real problem, even a small one, that is unnecessarily interfering with someone's ability to get the job done or their satisfaction with how they do it, then I want to hire the kind of people who will flag it up in some constructive way so we can deal with it.
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.
The thing that really gets me is that the word "resources" feels like staff are a commodity: all drones are the same component, necessarily interchangeable, and if you need more done then you hire more drones and/or hire more expensive drones.
In reality, acknowledging the individual strengths (and addressing the individual weaknesses) of the real people working for an organisation is one of the biggest motivating factors there is. In contrast, and counter-intuitively to some people, just offering more money doesn't actually make that big a difference as long as you're paying a decent rate to start with.
I've always said that if any of my companies ever grows to the point that we have to bring in dedicated people to handle this sort of thing, we'll go back to the old name "personnel department" or some other less offensive/patronising description than "human resources".
As an side, whether it's "HR" or "IT" or anyone else, the default answer to questions for the form "This would help me do my job better, can the company please buy it for me?" will be "Yes". I never understand places who hire programmers for (in US terms) a six-figure salary, but then balk at dropping a few thousand more every few years to get them a state-of-the-art PC, whatever software tools they most prefer, the most comfortable chair/desk/lighting, and so on. And I never understand places who make it unnecessarily difficult for someone good to combine working for them and meeting their family care obligations. Obviously there comes a point where someone can no longer do the job effectively for one reason or another, but until you reach that point, don't you want to hire the best people you can and then make the most of them once you've got them?
In these situations, I think you have to solve this problem as small as possible, with the program manager themselves.
Exactly. If there's a good working relationship with the PM, an honest and open conversation with them about why these recommendations/decisions are being made is almost certainly the best place to start.
That is true, but they aren't direct equivalents: the US concept of fair use is built on general principles, but the UK concept of fair dealing enumerates specific exceptions to copyright.
That set of exceptions is currently absurdly small by modern standards; you know you've gone crazy when even Big Media is saying in public that it won't go after people for doing things that aren't considered "fair" in this way! But there's nothing adaptive about the underlying law (unlike fair use in the US) so advancing technology has left it behind.
After several high-profile formal reviews of UK IP laws that each led almost nowhere despite invariably proposing a bunch of reasonably and widely supported changes, it seems like pretty much everyone is fed up of having daft laws on the books that make the UK look like some backwater village rather than a major centre for creative and technology advancement. Hopefully we really will see sensible change now, particularly with regard to things like format shifting, and hopefully also the whole DRM-nullifies-all-related-freedoms problem.
Surely the solution is to mount a public campaign for any politician (and their family and friends) to be subject to detention for several hours, interrogation, strip search on camera, a dose of radiation, and/or groping of their genitalia, performed by any member of the public who doesn't like the look of them, any time they are on their way to or from work or any other important journey. Every few weeks, someone should also take away all their electronic devices for an extended period and be entitled to publish any data found on them.
However, voting against giving the analogous powers to the TSA should be an absolute defence, available to any politician who prefers to maintain their dignity and go about their daily lives without all the unpleasantness and disruption.
Students who don't turn up to lectures are more likely to drop out of university.
Perhaps, but correlation does not imply causation.
I appreciate the desire to help and the concern over someone who attended well at first but not later, but it's not worth much unless someone in authority will act on honest responses like "Sure, because the lecturer was awful and I wasn't learning anything useful there".
If you didn't attend class and then don't know the material, it could be argued that's rather your own fault.
It could be, but only if you take it as an axiom that the lectures would have taught that material effectively. That's a huge and IME entirely absurd assumption.
Library activity is one of those easy-to-measure-but-meaningless numbers.
To be fair, so is lecture attendance.
The quality of lecturers when I was at university ranged from almost unmissable to almost unthinkable. IMHO, spending half your working day in one of the most absurdly learning-hostile environments yet developed by humanity is rarely worth it for anyone not towards the "almost unmissable" end of the spectrum.
The only thing that would even be a grey area is the holiday thing (though it sounds like you're implying the rest is? of course it's not- everything else I suggested is accepted by HMRC as genuine costs of doing business)
Really? Shall we take a look at some of your specific examples? I'm not a tax accountant, so everything below is based on what I'm looking up in official HMRC documentation as I write this.
Remember, the default position is that you can only reclaim for expenses which have been incurred "wholly, exclusively and necessarily" in the course of running your company.
Your comments about fuel are missing the point, the point is that a PAYE employ can pretty much never claim the commute to/from work as a business expense, but the self-employed can.
Not between home and your normal place of work. In fact, this is explicitly excluded.
Employees travelling to other places on behalf of their employer can usually claim the travel expenses back from that employer anyway.
You have the flexibility to claim many things are cost of work that PAYE employees don't - you have the freedom to claim everything from petrol
Only for business use, the kind of thing an employee would be claiming back from their employer instead.
For private use, even in a company car, petrol costs are considered a taxable benefit.
to clothes,
Clothing is only permitted where it's obviously a uniform or required for a particular job, such as a high-vis jacket. Often, employers would provide this kind of clothing to their own staff so the employee wouldn't pay for it at all.
You cannot claim general clothing that could be used for any other purpose, like a suit you wear to meet a client.
to your phone
OK, this one is fair up to a point, in that an employer can provide one personal phone to someone who is an employee and pay the bills.
This is one of very few specific cases where something that is provided not entirely for business use doesn't automatically become a taxable benefit, though.
to your computer
Only if exclusively for business use, so again something an employer would normally provide for an employee rather than the employee paying anything themselves. Otherwise, there is a taxable benefit.
I do understand your argument that everyone can theoretically opt out of the "normal" employment and tax arrangements and go down another path. But there has been a lot of negative press about people who do this recently, as if anyone who makes different arrangements is a tax dodger and should be condemned. The reality is that it isn't some huge win for people who play the system, and there are an estimated million or so people within the UK contractor workforce alone who almost all probably do this, so we're not talking about some "the 1%" niche group here. And even those people can't magically get away without paying lots of tax that everyone else would.
What you're describing doesn't sound like "optimising" your tax situation through having a good accountant and tax avoidance. It sounds like criminal tax evasion through claiming things as business expenses that you are explicitly, objectively not allowed to claim according to HMRC and/or just blatantly lying about the nature of your business in order to treat things as company expenses that are not. Saying that people running their own businesses have tax advantages in this area is a bit like saying people working for an employer have tax advantages because they can accidentally forget to list half their income on their tax return.
I'm guessing you've never had the pleasure of going through a formal tax investigation, because for the kind of thing you're describing as if it's clever, it sounds like they'd eat you alive. You can kid some guy on the Internet that you're smarter than he is and making clever savings, if it really makes you feel better, but somehow I doubt you would fool HMRC.
Alternative theory A: Maybe the Swiss do well even with much lower tax revenues because they don't spend what they do collect on expensive activities like wars on the other side of the planet.
Alternative theory B: Maybe the Swiss do well even with much lower tax revenues because by maintaining a positive culture rather than using tax revenues to subsidise antisocial/negative behaviours artificially they maintain similar or significantly lower per capita costs for things like healthcare and social security in comparison to most first world countries.
Alternative theory C: Maybe the Swiss do well even with much lower tax revenues because they maintain bilateral trade agreements with the EU and match laws well enough to participate in the single market, but do not contribute huge amounts of taxpayers' money to fund the unaccounted spending of the EU bureaucracy itself, thus saving billions per year compared to the likes of the UK and Germany.
Alternative theory D: All of the above.
In other news, spending a fortune fighting dubious wars, spending a fortune on social security to the point that people don't take jobs as a lifestyle choice, and spending a fortune supporting the EU are all highly controversial uses of taxpayers' money here in the UK right now. How are things for you?
i'm arguing with the guy who says we don't need any taxes at all
I hope you don't mean me, because what I actually wrote was "It is, arguably, a necessary evil for the effective functioning of society at least until we develop better ways to collaborate in our common interest", which has very little in common with your interpretation above.
You must be very lucky to know so many billionaires personally that you can tell us all what they think.
I can only go by what I read in the papers, where I see tech billionaires like Bill Gates and Larry Ellison, media giants like Michael Bloomberg and Ted Turner, creative industry big winners like George Lucas, and of course most famously Warren Buffett, all pledging billions or even tens of billions of dollars to help others who aren't so fortunate.
Perhaps if you actually made a reasoned, logical argument to engage with, we would do better. Selective quoting, swearing, and attacking the poster rather than the post aren't going to generate much enlightenment, and they certainly aren't going to convince anyone to agree with you.
Well, first may I remind you that you're talking to a guy who runs multiple small businesses, and who coincidentally is in the middle of preparing tax records at the moment. So you can disagree all you like, but you are objectively wrong, and I have numbers right on the desk next to confirm it.
You don't even need to see those to understand why you're wrong, though: just consider the issue of paid time off. If an average employee takes say 40 paid weekdays off per year (counting vacation, public holidays and sick days, and ignoring anything else) then that alone is about 15% of the otherwise working days in the year for a typical office job. If someone running their own business wants to take the same time off, that is therefore a 15% drop in income to pay for the holidays. That's probably already overtaken employee's NI and a significant chunk of employer's NI, and you haven't even paid any running costs/expenses yet.
some of the things you mention can themselves be written off against reduced revenue. You can for example claim fuel costs as a cost of doing business to reduce liability there, which a PAYE employee simply cannot.
This doesn't make sense.
As someone running his own business, one way or another I am paying the entire cost of the fuel (and vehicle maintenance/depreciation) when I drive to visit a client. I might be able to count it as a cost of doing business and personally claim back mileage expenses at the HMRC approved rate from my company, and my company might not have to pay any additional tax on those expenses because the money is no longer profit, but the bottom line is that the money is still gone.
As an employee, I'd only see the mileage expenses claim side of the equation. The rate you can claim back is supposed to be set so it's basically a wash in terms of compensation for the fuel used and vehicle running costs. You haven't lost anything personally by taking that journey on behalf of your employer but in your own vehicle.
In short, as the guy who owns the company, my business's profits are taking the full hit. As the guy doing the job, it doesn't affect me whether I'm acting as a company director or as someone else's employee.
The same thing is true of just about any other business expense that you have to eat if you're running your own company. Sure, you personally don't lose out, and you benefit from a modest saving by avoiding some NI. But your company is still paying the full cost of everything, just like any other business, and that's money you can't then pay out as salary/dividend/whatever. When people compare the incomes of someone working as an employee vs. say a contractor with their own company, they often equate salary (paid by your employer) with charged-out rates (paid to your own company, but not paid out to you until after all the running costs have been deducted, Corporation Tax paid, and so on). It's an apples to oranges comparison.
I don't agree with this, having contracted myself, and having a number of good contractor friends I don't think any would disagree that a lower tax burden is part of the benefit of going down that route and part the reason you make more.
I don't see how that is possible under the current tax system, unless you are fairly obviously in the category of disguised employee and you're just playing the game and hoping to get away without an IR35 investigation.
but no one serious in this world thinks civilization is possible without taxes and a strong central government
Repeating your claim (with an ad hominem attached) does not make it any more true.
Indeed, if it were true, there would not be entire books written studying the history of taxation, asking the question of when it is a blessing and when it is a curse, and citing numerous examples throughout history where both good and ill effects have been caused by tax policy.
One could say similar things about the history of strong central governments, too. Sometimes we call them representatives and talk about democracy. Other times we call them dictatorships and people fight bloody civil wars to bring them down because the government was so strong that its people suffered. In the middle is a shady ground where there is a veneer of democracy but different classes in society get very different benefits from the underlying system, which remains the case to varying degrees in most first world nations today.
Consider a sales/consumption tax: I think one could make a valid argument that it's a charge by the state for doing business in their area - a charge that helps pay for the various services (eg, police, sanitation, transport, etc.) that the state provides so that the environment is friendly for commerce.
One could make that argument, but fundamentally you're still talking about taking money from someone else involuntarily, whatever you choose to call it.
I'll also point out that as an ethical argument, that only works if the resulting tax revenues are hypothecated. Typically, they are not, they just get absorbed into the central government coffers for general spending. And in today's world, a lot of people have problems with where a lot of that money goes, and those places it goes may or may not have any measurable benefit to the local community where the commerce was taking place.
I think a similar parallel exists for income and capital gains taxes (where the government takes a cut of what you earn) - it's a charge for use of all the services that the state provides to make the area useful to work in.
But judging what the state provides that is actually useful is subjective and controversial. Part of my earlier post was an observation that some people/countries routinely pay for private services that other people/countries consider essential public services.
Is it just theft when it's done by the government?
No, I think it effectively becomes theft because it's an involuntary/unavoidable charge that isn't made in exchange for any defined/agreed/guaranteed benefit and that may have nothing to do with what would otherwise be a private transaction. As I said before, it may be a necessary evil, but if anyone else demanded you pay them thousands of your hard-earned cash or they'd take it by force, you'd call the cops.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a limited pool of people out there with the time and talent to help with FOSS projects. Why do you think any of those people would favour a project where they'll be treated as shamefully as this if they make a mistake over one with a more constructive approach to reviews and collaboration where you learn from mistakes and move on?
Oh geesh, it seems you forgot to read the words prior to those that together formed a phrase, and that phrase went something along the lines of "can go from something as not being considered for a raise to being fired, depending on the gravity of the incident", and you also missed the part where I said that I do thing Linus overreacted.
So why did you bring the employment parallel up in the first place? Clearly this situation is different to what happens to employees who make mistakes in a company. The criticism of Linus in this Slashdot discussion hasn't been that he identified a mistake or wanted it fixed, both of which are obviously reasonable. It's the way he did it that is objectionable.
The point of my comment was you being totally disconnected from reality, not if Linus was right or not.
As I noted in a reply to another poster, it is unfortunate that the first response to criticising someone for making overly personal attacks appears to be receiving overly personal attacks myself. Particularly so, when that attack is saying I'm disconnected from reality, where it's management 101 that cultures like hero dependence and blame assignment are horribly counter-productive in the long term even if they sometimes achieve useful results for the immediate future.
So you know, I did read the thread and what I saw was Mauro trying to make excuses for what had happened and blaming the program and not to the bug inserted in the kernel.
Interesting interpretation. It seems to me that in his very first reply to Linus, he acknowledges the error in this case and apologises for it. It also seems like he is concerned about a wider issue that is why this problem arose in the first place, and wants to get to the bottom of it. That doesn't seem like "making excuses" to me, it seems like responsible software development. If Linus doesn't want to spend time on it, that's fine, but there's no need to chew the guy up for trying to make the software better.
Outside of geeks, Linux has never been in favour, despite many years of being probably the most high profile and well supported OSS project in the world. Even among geeks, it is mostly in favour as a server OS or a way to stick it to proprietary software makers like Microsoft; as an end user platform, Linux on the desktop is literally a running joke. Google, a commercial business with actual management, were more effective in developing an end user OS using a Linux foundation in a couple of years than the entire Linux community had been in well over a decade. You might like to think about that for a while.
like the other commenter said, you have a serious disconnection from reality.
Yes, it's interesting that in response to a post criticising someone for being hostile and making overly personal attacks, the best multiple have to come back with is... more overly personal attacks.
There *needs* to be a "top dog" who dictates the qualities of the project
Interesting choice of wording. Managers run things through collaboration. Leaders run things by example. Dictators run things through fear.
In any case, I don't accept your premise. The software development world is full of examples of projects (open and proprietary alike) where having a single dominant person at the helm causes problems and holds back progress, even if the original vision was good and the project so far has been useful. Linus is merely one example. A less sinister one would be Guido van Rossum, whose dislike of basic functional programming techniques that have been spreading through the wider programming world has hurt the expressiveness of Python significantly. And of course looking more widely we have people like RMS, whose histrionics and unrealistic extremism probably do more to damage the FOSS movement today than any other single factor.
otherwise it ends up being endless debate and project systematic individual style hacks introduced, in the end no one knows how it was supposed to work and how it does work now.
I'm not sure what you meant by some of that, but if you're suggesting that any software project without a single strong leader will fail, I strongly disagree. This isn't the military. Some of the most successful software projects in history were the results of collaborations. One good example is UNIX, so any attempts to argue that Linux needs such a structure are going to sound pretty weak. More generally, good projects employ all kinds of review processes today, in part to weed out nasty hacks. In fact, that's exactly what happened here, once you cut away all the melodrama.
Certainly, it will create some grief on the short term when someone is adamant about bad quality and breaking things
And who, exactly, was being adamant about that? The unfortunate victim in this particular case agreed that it was an error, and apologised for it, in his very first reply to Linus. But he also seems interested in knowing whether there is a broader problem that needs attention, unlike Linus, who seems to consider things like finding the root cause of any wider issue to be "irrelevant".
Those doing bad job needs to be punished, and those doing a good job needs a reward.
That is debatable, but even if true, nothing says the punishment needs to be having daddy throw his toys out of the pram like a five year old, in full view of the Internet.
You didn't actually read the thread, I assume. If anyone was trying to sweep something under the rug there, it appears to be Linus.
It's no different from being employed in a company, someone screws up and can go from not being taken into account for promotion or plainly being fired depending on the incident proportion.
Don't be silly. It is extremely unlikely that an employee would be fired for a single mistake like this.
For one thing, if you read the entire e-mail thread, it seems there may be a wider issue, where the "employee" in question is genuinely concerned with identifying the root cause, while Linus seems to be more concerned with shouting at someone and brushing the whole thing under the carpet. That hardly suggests that, as Taco Cowboy put it, "the top priority of Linux is to *NOT INTRODUCE ANY USERSPACE BUG*".
However, if you want to consider parallels with an employment scenario, that sort of over-the-top, public criticism would be grounds for a formal grievance, and persistent treatment of that kind could lead to a constructive dismissal case.
Admins and users that are still sitting on the fence would take note, that Linus just don't take fuck as an excuse
No, instead he apparently creates a contributor-hostile culture based on blame assignment and supported by a hero model. And that is far, far more dangerous, because when your hero isn't there (and he can't be everywhere, and he won't be around forever) you have pushed away good people who could have stepped up to take over the job. Internet-famous celebrities like Torvalds are toxic to a constructive development culture that consistently makes good products over the long term.
Doing something stupid, not apologizong for it, failing to fix it in a timely manner and then blaming the stupidity on other people's code - when kernel policy clearly state it's YOUR responsibility - is much closer to the free ticket, wouldn't you say?
No. There's no excuse for being rude to someone in public like that, ever.
When your boss or Finance or whoever wants to impress the shareholders with cost reductions
I think you found the problem right there: management should be impressing the shareholders/private owners by generating good returns. You can do that by reducing costs, or you can do it by generating more revenues, or both. But you can only reduce costs so far and still get the job done, while if you do a good job the increase in revenues can be almost unlimited in many industries.
In my experience, the kind of management team who think of their staff as interchangeable components and understand their business as cells on a spreadsheet are rarely able to conceive ways to significantly increase revenues, so the only tool in their box is cutting costs. These people are toxic. They can only sustain a business (maybe), not develop it. Development comes from the people building better products and services and from the people who go out to market and sell those products and services to paying customers, not from management or Finance or HR. If the productive people are artificially restrained, the business is already dead.
Fortunately, all my companies are privately held and we've always made a point of bootstrapping without taking on formal investors (and the interference that inevitably results), so generally the shareholders are the people who founded the business and maybe a few key contributors as well. And I think those of us who double as the management teams all share a common view on these kinds of issues: spending money to make good people as productive as possible is an investment almost guaranteed to yield excellent returns, whether that is getting someone a third monitor and a high-end graphics card to drive it, sending someone on a good training course (which many aren't, but that's another post), or buying a top-of-the-range chair for someone who's had back problems. That is why it's baffling to me that professional investors and executives used to dealing with them so often seem to pull in the other direction...
Surely the difficult thing is figuring out whether the complaints are valid?
I don't want to hire someone who is going to make mountains out of molehills and whine about every little thing [he said slightly hypocritically, having probably been guilty of that plenty of times himself in his early career]. But on the other hand, if there is a real problem, even a small one, that is unnecessarily interfering with someone's ability to get the job done or their satisfaction with how they do it, then I want to hire the kind of people who will flag it up in some constructive way so we can deal with it.
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.
100% agreed.
The thing that really gets me is that the word "resources" feels like staff are a commodity: all drones are the same component, necessarily interchangeable, and if you need more done then you hire more drones and/or hire more expensive drones.
In reality, acknowledging the individual strengths (and addressing the individual weaknesses) of the real people working for an organisation is one of the biggest motivating factors there is. In contrast, and counter-intuitively to some people, just offering more money doesn't actually make that big a difference as long as you're paying a decent rate to start with.
I've always said that if any of my companies ever grows to the point that we have to bring in dedicated people to handle this sort of thing, we'll go back to the old name "personnel department" or some other less offensive/patronising description than "human resources".
As an side, whether it's "HR" or "IT" or anyone else, the default answer to questions for the form "This would help me do my job better, can the company please buy it for me?" will be "Yes". I never understand places who hire programmers for (in US terms) a six-figure salary, but then balk at dropping a few thousand more every few years to get them a state-of-the-art PC, whatever software tools they most prefer, the most comfortable chair/desk/lighting, and so on. And I never understand places who make it unnecessarily difficult for someone good to combine working for them and meeting their family care obligations. Obviously there comes a point where someone can no longer do the job effectively for one reason or another, but until you reach that point, don't you want to hire the best people you can and then make the most of them once you've got them?
In these situations, I think you have to solve this problem as small as possible, with the program manager themselves.
Exactly. If there's a good working relationship with the PM, an honest and open conversation with them about why these recommendations/decisions are being made is almost certainly the best place to start.
That is true, but they aren't direct equivalents: the US concept of fair use is built on general principles, but the UK concept of fair dealing enumerates specific exceptions to copyright.
That set of exceptions is currently absurdly small by modern standards; you know you've gone crazy when even Big Media is saying in public that it won't go after people for doing things that aren't considered "fair" in this way! But there's nothing adaptive about the underlying law (unlike fair use in the US) so advancing technology has left it behind.
After several high-profile formal reviews of UK IP laws that each led almost nowhere despite invariably proposing a bunch of reasonably and widely supported changes, it seems like pretty much everyone is fed up of having daft laws on the books that make the UK look like some backwater village rather than a major centre for creative and technology advancement. Hopefully we really will see sensible change now, particularly with regard to things like format shifting, and hopefully also the whole DRM-nullifies-all-related-freedoms problem.
Surely the solution is to mount a public campaign for any politician (and their family and friends) to be subject to detention for several hours, interrogation, strip search on camera, a dose of radiation, and/or groping of their genitalia, performed by any member of the public who doesn't like the look of them, any time they are on their way to or from work or any other important journey. Every few weeks, someone should also take away all their electronic devices for an extended period and be entitled to publish any data found on them.
However, voting against giving the analogous powers to the TSA should be an absolute defence, available to any politician who prefers to maintain their dignity and go about their daily lives without all the unpleasantness and disruption.
It all sounds perfectly reasonable to me... ;-)
Students who don't turn up to lectures are more likely to drop out of university.
Perhaps, but correlation does not imply causation.
I appreciate the desire to help and the concern over someone who attended well at first but not later, but it's not worth much unless someone in authority will act on honest responses like "Sure, because the lecturer was awful and I wasn't learning anything useful there".
If you didn't attend class and then don't know the material, it could be argued that's rather your own fault.
It could be, but only if you take it as an axiom that the lectures would have taught that material effectively. That's a huge and IME entirely absurd assumption.
Library activity is one of those easy-to-measure-but-meaningless numbers.
To be fair, so is lecture attendance.
The quality of lecturers when I was at university ranged from almost unmissable to almost unthinkable. IMHO, spending half your working day in one of the most absurdly learning-hostile environments yet developed by humanity is rarely worth it for anyone not towards the "almost unmissable" end of the spectrum.
The only thing that would even be a grey area is the holiday thing (though it sounds like you're implying the rest is? of course it's not- everything else I suggested is accepted by HMRC as genuine costs of doing business)
Really? Shall we take a look at some of your specific examples? I'm not a tax accountant, so everything below is based on what I'm looking up in official HMRC documentation as I write this.
Remember, the default position is that you can only reclaim for expenses which have been incurred "wholly, exclusively and necessarily" in the course of running your company.
Your comments about fuel are missing the point, the point is that a PAYE employ can pretty much never claim the commute to/from work as a business expense, but the self-employed can.
Not between home and your normal place of work. In fact, this is explicitly excluded.
Employees travelling to other places on behalf of their employer can usually claim the travel expenses back from that employer anyway.
You have the flexibility to claim many things are cost of work that PAYE employees don't - you have the freedom to claim everything from petrol
Only for business use, the kind of thing an employee would be claiming back from their employer instead.
For private use, even in a company car, petrol costs are considered a taxable benefit.
to clothes,
Clothing is only permitted where it's obviously a uniform or required for a particular job, such as a high-vis jacket. Often, employers would provide this kind of clothing to their own staff so the employee wouldn't pay for it at all.
You cannot claim general clothing that could be used for any other purpose, like a suit you wear to meet a client.
to your phone
OK, this one is fair up to a point, in that an employer can provide one personal phone to someone who is an employee and pay the bills.
This is one of very few specific cases where something that is provided not entirely for business use doesn't automatically become a taxable benefit, though.
to your computer
Only if exclusively for business use, so again something an employer would normally provide for an employee rather than the employee paying anything themselves. Otherwise, there is a taxable benefit.
I do understand your argument that everyone can theoretically opt out of the "normal" employment and tax arrangements and go down another path. But there has been a lot of negative press about people who do this recently, as if anyone who makes different arrangements is a tax dodger and should be condemned. The reality is that it isn't some huge win for people who play the system, and there are an estimated million or so people within the UK contractor workforce alone who almost all probably do this, so we're not talking about some "the 1%" niche group here. And even those people can't magically get away without paying lots of tax that everyone else would.
What you're describing doesn't sound like "optimising" your tax situation through having a good accountant and tax avoidance. It sounds like criminal tax evasion through claiming things as business expenses that you are explicitly, objectively not allowed to claim according to HMRC and/or just blatantly lying about the nature of your business in order to treat things as company expenses that are not. Saying that people running their own businesses have tax advantages in this area is a bit like saying people working for an employer have tax advantages because they can accidentally forget to list half their income on their tax return.
I'm guessing you've never had the pleasure of going through a formal tax investigation, because for the kind of thing you're describing as if it's clever, it sounds like they'd eat you alive. You can kid some guy on the Internet that you're smarter than he is and making clever savings, if it really makes you feel better, but somehow I doubt you would fool HMRC.
Alternative theory A: Maybe the Swiss do well even with much lower tax revenues because they don't spend what they do collect on expensive activities like wars on the other side of the planet.
Alternative theory B: Maybe the Swiss do well even with much lower tax revenues because by maintaining a positive culture rather than using tax revenues to subsidise antisocial/negative behaviours artificially they maintain similar or significantly lower per capita costs for things like healthcare and social security in comparison to most first world countries.
Alternative theory C: Maybe the Swiss do well even with much lower tax revenues because they maintain bilateral trade agreements with the EU and match laws well enough to participate in the single market, but do not contribute huge amounts of taxpayers' money to fund the unaccounted spending of the EU bureaucracy itself, thus saving billions per year compared to the likes of the UK and Germany.
Alternative theory D: All of the above.
In other news, spending a fortune fighting dubious wars, spending a fortune on social security to the point that people don't take jobs as a lifestyle choice, and spending a fortune supporting the EU are all highly controversial uses of taxpayers' money here in the UK right now. How are things for you?
i'm arguing with the guy who says we don't need any taxes at all
I hope you don't mean me, because what I actually wrote was "It is, arguably, a necessary evil for the effective functioning of society at least until we develop better ways to collaborate in our common interest", which has very little in common with your interpretation above.
You must be very lucky to know so many billionaires personally that you can tell us all what they think.
I can only go by what I read in the papers, where I see tech billionaires like Bill Gates and Larry Ellison, media giants like Michael Bloomberg and Ted Turner, creative industry big winners like George Lucas, and of course most famously Warren Buffett, all pledging billions or even tens of billions of dollars to help others who aren't so fortunate.
Perhaps if you actually made a reasoned, logical argument to engage with, we would do better. Selective quoting, swearing, and attacking the poster rather than the post aren't going to generate much enlightenment, and they certainly aren't going to convince anyone to agree with you.
I completely disagree that it's far outweighed,
Well, first may I remind you that you're talking to a guy who runs multiple small businesses, and who coincidentally is in the middle of preparing tax records at the moment. So you can disagree all you like, but you are objectively wrong, and I have numbers right on the desk next to confirm it.
You don't even need to see those to understand why you're wrong, though: just consider the issue of paid time off. If an average employee takes say 40 paid weekdays off per year (counting vacation, public holidays and sick days, and ignoring anything else) then that alone is about 15% of the otherwise working days in the year for a typical office job. If someone running their own business wants to take the same time off, that is therefore a 15% drop in income to pay for the holidays. That's probably already overtaken employee's NI and a significant chunk of employer's NI, and you haven't even paid any running costs/expenses yet.
some of the things you mention can themselves be written off against reduced revenue. You can for example claim fuel costs as a cost of doing business to reduce liability there, which a PAYE employee simply cannot.
This doesn't make sense.
As someone running his own business, one way or another I am paying the entire cost of the fuel (and vehicle maintenance/depreciation) when I drive to visit a client. I might be able to count it as a cost of doing business and personally claim back mileage expenses at the HMRC approved rate from my company, and my company might not have to pay any additional tax on those expenses because the money is no longer profit, but the bottom line is that the money is still gone.
As an employee, I'd only see the mileage expenses claim side of the equation. The rate you can claim back is supposed to be set so it's basically a wash in terms of compensation for the fuel used and vehicle running costs. You haven't lost anything personally by taking that journey on behalf of your employer but in your own vehicle.
In short, as the guy who owns the company, my business's profits are taking the full hit. As the guy doing the job, it doesn't affect me whether I'm acting as a company director or as someone else's employee.
The same thing is true of just about any other business expense that you have to eat if you're running your own company. Sure, you personally don't lose out, and you benefit from a modest saving by avoiding some NI. But your company is still paying the full cost of everything, just like any other business, and that's money you can't then pay out as salary/dividend/whatever. When people compare the incomes of someone working as an employee vs. say a contractor with their own company, they often equate salary (paid by your employer) with charged-out rates (paid to your own company, but not paid out to you until after all the running costs have been deducted, Corporation Tax paid, and so on). It's an apples to oranges comparison.
I don't agree with this, having contracted myself, and having a number of good contractor friends I don't think any would disagree that a lower tax burden is part of the benefit of going down that route and part the reason you make more.
I don't see how that is possible under the current tax system, unless you are fairly obviously in the category of disguised employee and you're just playing the game and hoping to get away without an IR35 investigation.
but no one serious in this world thinks civilization is possible without taxes and a strong central government
Repeating your claim (with an ad hominem attached) does not make it any more true.
Indeed, if it were true, there would not be entire books written studying the history of taxation, asking the question of when it is a blessing and when it is a curse, and citing numerous examples throughout history where both good and ill effects have been caused by tax policy.
One could say similar things about the history of strong central governments, too. Sometimes we call them representatives and talk about democracy. Other times we call them dictatorships and people fight bloody civil wars to bring them down because the government was so strong that its people suffered. In the middle is a shady ground where there is a veneer of democracy but different classes in society get very different benefits from the underlying system, which remains the case to varying degrees in most first world nations today.
Consider a sales/consumption tax: I think one could make a valid argument that it's a charge by the state for doing business in their area - a charge that helps pay for the various services (eg, police, sanitation, transport, etc.) that the state provides so that the environment is friendly for commerce.
One could make that argument, but fundamentally you're still talking about taking money from someone else involuntarily, whatever you choose to call it.
I'll also point out that as an ethical argument, that only works if the resulting tax revenues are hypothecated. Typically, they are not, they just get absorbed into the central government coffers for general spending. And in today's world, a lot of people have problems with where a lot of that money goes, and those places it goes may or may not have any measurable benefit to the local community where the commerce was taking place.
I think a similar parallel exists for income and capital gains taxes (where the government takes a cut of what you earn) - it's a charge for use of all the services that the state provides to make the area useful to work in.
But judging what the state provides that is actually useful is subjective and controversial. Part of my earlier post was an observation that some people/countries routinely pay for private services that other people/countries consider essential public services.
Is it just theft when it's done by the government?
No, I think it effectively becomes theft because it's an involuntary/unavoidable charge that isn't made in exchange for any defined/agreed/guaranteed benefit and that may have nothing to do with what would otherwise be a private transaction. As I said before, it may be a necessary evil, but if anyone else demanded you pay them thousands of your hard-earned cash or they'd take it by force, you'd call the cops.