Really grabbing at straws to dismiss the evidence of your eyes and ears here, huh?

"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past." - Jean Paul Sartre.

Is this "vibe researching"?

I think the same thing every time. I've never had anyone read my meeting notes and they're better off in some sort of work order system anyways.

All I'm hearing is an appeal to making the workplace more isolating. Don't talk to each other, just talk to the machine that might summarize it wrong

Are you suggesting people are poor because they don't have good time management?

There are certainly “innocent” poor if you want to use the term - those who are disadvantaged through no fault of their own and are working hard to get out of it.

And just as certainly being poor can be a result of bad choices and other things. Denying that either is possible is a recipe for disaster.

What we should do is work on the things that will work for those who need help and help them improve their skills or provide them a structured environment where are those skills are not necessary.

Many of them, yes. And a plethora of other complex problems. Severe trauma, drug and alcohol addiction, low executive function are all in the mix.

This isn't an attempt at blaming, just a statement that there are significant hurdles.

I don't agree at all that it's the easiest of careers.

I never had to work free overtime as a postal clerk until 1AM because of a production bug in deployment

I never had to figure out how to fix a fry machine on-the-spot at McDonald's because the person who normally fixes it is on vacation in the mountains

I also never had to learn brand new ways of driving cars every few months as a valet driver.

Maybe your software engineering job is easy but, this is the most stressful job I've had. And i'm not your average HN'er that's only ever known being a code slinger

That does not sound like normal work for a software engineer. That sounds more like you have found an unusually bad workplace. Why are you changing out tools every few months? Why are you working overtime for free? Why is there only one person who knows how to fix things when they break (especially if that happens so regularly that you have one person who "normally" fixes it)?

> Why are you working overtime for free?

Thats what oncall is, every job ive seen makes you do it

Apparently this is an EU/US thing, because here overtime and on-call is always paid extra (as is essentially anything beyond your usual 40 hrs/week, or whatever you've got in your contract).

That said, I also see very few jobs that involve on-call. Maybe that's because companies know they have to pay extra for it and therefore don't hand it out willy-nilly, but typically there'll be an ops team who do have on-call, and whose job is to triage and fix anything they can, otherwise just minimise the damage, and then maybe the most business-relevant couple of teams will also have an on-call rotation in case the problem can't be solved by ops alone.

Personally, I've never had on-call.

The other two are dysfunctional but in the US, SWE are pretty much universally classified as exempt and legally aren't entitled to overtime pay.

I see from your bio that you are based in a country with much better worker rights than the US.

Ah, if that's the case I can understand the argument a bit better, but maybe the article should then be titled "the insanity of being in one of the best-paid professions in one of the richest countries in the world, and still having poor working conditions".

This. I've worked plenty of places that have awful work/life balances, friends that work in the trades are getting 1.5x to 2x on overtime while I'm working 12-16 hour days and weekends for nothing extra except the possibility of getting fired for performance if I didn't.

I've worked construction when I was younger and wouldn't want to be still doing it at my age, it was physically harder but I wouldn't say it was tough work and at the end of the day I'd leave and not think about it again until I showed up the next day.

Kinda what convolution in animal brains detects outlines of moving objects. It's statistics all the way down.

This is my main concern. What's the point of other tools when none of the LLMs have been trained on it and you need to deliver yesterday?

It's an insanely conservative tool

Yeah, except the bundling wasn't the problem. It was that Microsoft was using their size to build a giant moat around IE. If you wanted modern features, it was all on IE and behind their proprietary scripting languages (vbscript, jscript, mshtml, activex controls)

This was all part of the anti-competitive embrace, extend, extinguish strategy that was so common at Microsoft then. They would offer a tool that was "close" to a popular standard (javascript, html), then extend it with their own tooling (jscript, mshtml), and finally they would replace those with a proprietary toolchain (vbscript, activex controls)

That meant the entire market moved to IE and it ate up almost all the market share overnight, even though it was a dumpster fire of a browser compared to the competition

> Companies don't have violence and only have rules in a limited sense. E.g. a company can't lock you in a box for failing to give it some of your money

Companies certainly do "have violence" and certainly have locked people up in the past. The only thing keeping large corporations from doing this now is the state.

In the article, the author puts forth the problem with the Great Leap Forward: large central authority being disconnected from those starving workers. That's a problem large, centrally planned, corporations face.

> the author puts forth the problem with the Great Leap Forward: large central authority being disconnected from those starving workers. That's a problem large, centrally planned, corporations face.

This is not the whole truth. The problem with the Great Leap Forward was that the state enforced farming techniques, and even what farmers should work on instead of farming, and took food to bring to the centre. It's not just disconnection. Disconnection is far too vague a word to choose. To compare a company not listening to its workers with what the GLF did - it's hard to avoid thinking you picked the one vague word that could technically describe both of those scenarios, despite the vast gulf between them.

As I sort of said elsewhere - some companies are bad. That's fine, unless there's no competitor to move to. Then workers' situations are really bad, because they have to choose between retraining, moving, and staying, none of which is a great choice. But if you think that's bad, think how much worse it is that a state bureaucrat can lock you in jail, and your only option is to flee the country. Companies aren't perfect, but they limit the blast radius of the damage an incompetent or malicious employee can achieve.