How would we feel if say, China decided Microsoft/Google/AWS/Oracle had to sell to a Chinese company on the grounds of national security?

But no one is saying that ByteDance has to sell TikTok to a US company. Just divest it to an owner that is not beholden to the Chinese government and obligated to share any and all data upon request. Compared to the legal requirements that China puts on US companies operating in China, this is a pretty tame ask.

The Google Reader shutdown hit me hard also. They offered all of the features in a really great app and many of the competitors shut down in their wake, so when they exited the scene, it left a huge hole.

I sort of agree with you, but not in the way I think you meant it.

Vista’s problem was that it’s hardware requirements were too high for it’s time. Operating systems have very long project development lifecycle and at a point early on they did a forward looking estimate of where the PC market would be by the time Vista released, and they overshot. When it was almost ready to release it to the world Microsoft put out the initial minimum and recommended specs and PC sellers (Dell, HP, Gateway) lobbied them to lower the numbers; the cost of a PC that met the recommended specs was just too high for the existing PC market and it would kill their sales numbers if they started selling PCs that met those figures. Microsoft complied and lowered the specs, but didn’t actually change the operating system in any meaningful way - they just changed a few numbers on a piece of paper and added some configurations that let you disable some of the more hardware intensive bits. The result was that most Vista users were running it on hardware that wasn’t actually able to run it properly, which lead to horrible user experiences. Anyone that bought a high end PC or built one themselves and ran Vista on that, however, seemed quite happy with the operating system.

They can, though the employees would be able to claim unemployment if the job was remote and then changed to on-site but if the job was on-site with a temporary remote policy the employee wouldn’t have a leg to stand on there and could be dismissed for cause.

In the US, what you can and cannot fire someone for is complicated and counter intuitive.

A low performer that is part of a protected class is hard to fire because you need to have copious documentation that they were dismissed due to poor performance and were not targeted for their protected class status. This is a good thing and prevents unscrupulous bosses from firing a woman for getting pregnant, targeting people of a particular race, religion, or gender, or any number of other awful things. Those things will only come up if the former employee sues, and many will not, so some bad bosses or companies get away with this while others end up in court because someone that needed to be fired is crying discrimination.

On the flip side, if it falls outside of those protected classes, you can fire someone for any other reason or no reason at all. “I woke up in a bad mood and picked a name out of a hat to fire” is legal. You may get a fight if the person you picked claims discrimination on one of the protected classes and you have to explain to a judge that you’re actually just a bad human and not discriminating, but it’s allowed.

In the US, there is rarely, if ever, a contract. Unless you can show that you were let go for a legally protected cause (your age, race, religion, gender, and some other things), employers can fire you without any reason at all.

The only caveat here is the differentiation between for cause and without cause, as it impacts your ability to collect unemployment insurance payments. Employers pay those insurance premiums to the government and they are based on how often people let go from that company claim the insurance payments, so a company that lets go of a lot of employees is going to pay more than one that manages to find a way to fire them for cause or get them to quit.

I think this is very likely, though it’s also prolonging this whole exercise by avoiding the dramatic conclusion and spreading the pain out over a longer time.

If every manager at Amazon woke up tomorrow and said “screw it, we’re enforcing this policy”, that would result in a mass firing event of quality talent, and Amazon would feel the pain of their policy decisions and either have to swallow that and try to move on or beat a hasty retreat and call this whole thing off. It would be a quick and decisive end to this whole debate, but instead we have month after month of employees stressed and angry while looking rebellious and unmanageable, managers stressed and frustrated while looking ineffective, and the senior leadership frustrated and looking impotent.

Someone’s going to win this fight eventually, but everyone trying to find middle ground and skirt the policy just takes what would be one big fight and turns it into many months of slow unease and turmoil that’s bad for everyone. I want the remote people to win this, but sometimes the way to win is the lose on purpose. Let the dog catch the car so he can realize what an idiot he was being.

The bit that kills me is that “make Google Chat not suck” doesn’t seem to be in the list of options for addressing this problem at all. I work for a company that uses GSuite and chat is universally loathed with a bunch of Slack instances running around the company, both sanctioned and unsanctioned. If they spent time working to improve chat, the momentum of being a GSuite company would carry the rest of the weight here. It doesn’t have to be better than Slack, just closer.

China coming in with the latest in new tech for people with too much money to accidentally kill themselves. The finest innovation in the field since the Cesna.

Unity did a bad thing, but the stock sale here is a complete non-event.

According to Guru Focus, Unity CEO John Riccitiello, one of the highest-paid bosses in gaming, sold 2,000 Unity shares on September 6, a week prior to its September 12 announcement. Guru Focus notes that this follows a trend, reporting that Riccitiello has sold a total of 50,610 shares this year, and purchased none.

He receives and sells stock constantly, as do most execs of publicly traded companies. Their compensation is majority stock, which incentivizes them to maximize stock prices since a higher price means more money RIGHT NOW for them. Look up any publicly traded company and peek at their insider trading info. Microsoft as a random reference and here’s Unity so you can see everyone else and the long term trends.

The piece cites Guru Focus as their source of this info as if they have some keen inside information or something, but it’s literally public data that anyone with an internet connection can look up as these sorts of notices are required for publicly traded companies. Riccitiello only sold about $83k worth of stock before the announcement for a total of about $1.1M worth of stock this year, vs about $33M last year, and close to $100M in 2021. The idea that he dumped $83k worth of stock to beat bad news Unity was dropping is just a hilariously bad take.

Why is Zoidberg alone on Xmas? What happened to Marianne?

That is the specific app the person I replied to was asking about, so yea. Would have been a little weird if I was talking about some other app.

Mostly. The 6 digit standard ones that you see almost everywhere are standard TOTP codes and most apps work for them. There are some proprietary things out there too but you typically see those with a matching app from the same company. Those are far less common though so for practical reasons you can assume they are all interchangeable.

Those values are computed separately what the app is really storing is just the input values which are then combines with the current time to create the 6 digit code. That means that keeping that input value (seed) safe is a big deal, and how and where that is done is one of the major differentiators between the various options.

Google Auth works just fine. The standard for app generated 2FA is, well, standard. They’re only listing a non-complete list of options for people that don’t know what an authenticator app is and need to get one for the first time.

Too many people were making poor choices. When there’s an incident of an account that should have been secured but wasn’t getting compromised, that’s bad for the platform, ecosystem, and community. This is just another level beyond not allowing you to set a password of “password”

In a case like that, the sentence can be commuted, which reduces or eliminates the sentence, at which point the 5 year clock starts before it can be pardoned, which would wipe the slate clean as if it never happened.

AI resume screeners are very much at risk of bias. There have been stories about exactly this in years past. The ML models need to be trained, so they get fed resumes of candidates that were hired and not hired so the model can learn to differentiate the two and make decisions on new resumes in the future. That training, though, takes any bias that went into previous decisions and brings it forward.

From the Amazon I linked above, the model was prioritizing white men over women and people of color. When you think back to how these models were trained, though, that’s exactly what you’d expect to happen. No one was intentionally introducing bias to the AI process, but software teams have historically been very male and white, and when referrals and references come into play, those demographics were further emphasized. And then let’s not pretend that none of those recruiters or hiring managers were bringing their own bias to the table.

If you feed that into your model as it’s training data, of course the model is going to continue to favor white men, not because it’s actually looking for men, but because resumes that men typically submit are the kinds that get hired. Then they found that resumes that mention a professional women’s organization or historically black or women only colleges were typically not hired. The model isn’t “thinking” about why that is - it just knows that when certain traits exist, the resume is ranked lower, so it replicates that.

Building a truly unbiased AI system is actually incredibly difficult, not the least due to the fact that the demographics of the data scientists working on these systems are themselves predominantly male and white themselves. We’ve also seen this issue in the past with other AI systems, including facial recognition systems, where these systems built by teams of white men can’t seem to make reliable determinations when looking at a picture of a black woman (with accuracy rates 20-30% lower for black woman compared to white men).

The problem is less to do with personal goals and more to do with how your company or manager implements them.

My team has their org goals, which is what our bonuses are based on, and each person’s individual goals that they set with me. Those goals have the boilerplate reviews, and we keep it metrics based. Did we miss, meet, or exceed our goals? There’s a formula, which everyone knows before the year starts (because we wrote them as a group and them got board executive sign off on them) that tells us what our bonus metric will be. We sink or swim as a group, myself included. Each person has individual goals related to their unique role, but those are largely “Did you perform at the level expected of your title and salary?” No fluff. No BS. Some of my people write sentences, some give concise bullets, some write 3 word answers. This isn’t the SATs, so it doesn’t matter how the info is provided.

Then we have the personal goals, which are 100% rooted in the question “what do you want next?” For some people, it’s to move into a more Sr role, for others to break into a new discipline (expertise in a particular area, management, or something completely different), and sometimes it’s as simple as “make $30k more per year” or “have more time with my kids in the evenings.” (For the last one, it’s usually easy - we are remote with few mandatory hours so it’s easy to modify a schedule to have free hours when needed) We set personal goals and I coach them to achieve them, but the only person they answer to if they don’t achieve them is themselves. It has zero impact on their performance metrics, bonuses, or raises.

I want to see everyone have the life and career they want, and we use these goals as way to work towards that. Our 1-on-1 meetings are NOT about their tasks. We have the task board and team syncs for that and I can schedule a 1-off chat if we need to address something. Instead we spend the 1-on-1 more or less on whatever topic they want to address. If something is stressing them, annoying them, etc, they have that time to bring it up and we can try to find a solution. One of my people has a goal to move to a city 9 time zones away. They also highly values their work/life balance, so flexing their schedule is likely not going to solve this so instead I’m helping them leave the team for a new job. Ideally I’ll keep them in the company, but if that doesn’t work out and they have to leave, so be it. It’s what’s best for them and everyone else here sees it - that shit goes a long way.

If you’re doing bullshit personal goals and nonsense 1-on-1 meetings, that’s the manager and culture at fault, not the concept as a whole.