Funny, I thought the lesson here is that if you take away the barriers to the entry, all regulation, most of the financial burden, and provide nearly complete anonymity for disseminating news and information then foreign state actors will abuse it.
I can point my finger at the problems above. I can clearly articulate the problems above. I can even propose some clear and limited solutions to those problems.
But there are monied and powerful interests who do not want to solve those problems. So we will end up blaming "stupid people" or give a "blank check" of regulatory authority that ends up being abused to line the pockets of bureaucrats who will craft laws that damage free speech and the rights of common people.
Before we go start a class war about educating the unwashed masses, or create a new "TSA for the internet" let's just stop and think about how this problem has been solved reasonably for "old media" without hampering free speech or redesigning school curriculum across the globe.
In Chicago I saw first hand how it turned the Mayor into everyone's favorite punching bag:
Housing prices go up. Developers move in and scoop up desirable properties, remodel the kitchen, paint it grey, and sell to a young tech worker for 3-4x what they bought the property for or demo a 100 year old beautiful greystone and put up a modern shipping container on stilts with 8 apartments and no parking.
Property values go up, long time residents are getting older. The ones who CAN move sell first and you get a runaway housing bubble. The ones who CAN'T move? They're on a fixed income. They need public services but they can't afford more taxes. Property taxes go up. Sometimes older people on fixed income can get a freeze, but taxes go up anyway. More people, more services.
People don't like taxes going up so either you put it off as long as you can while services atrophy and you make it the next guy's problem, or eventually schools start going bankrupt. Teachers go on strike, not enough police, not enough money to keep up transit and infrastructure, and you've got a lot of upper middle class people living in a very expensive post-apocalyptic hell hole.
If you're the best engineer for a company who's bottom line is not direct sales of engineered products you are a middle tier or bottom tier engineer on the open market.
You're the best engineer willing to work in a black box, a niche, in isolation from your peers with constant pushback.
Oh, we've had very different experiences relating to project management! I've never had a PM that was a former developer, and in my world senior developers usually act as solution architects without the title, mostly removed from the day to day development tasks unless they're briefing developers on documentation and implementation details.
I thought I emphasized the point pretty well: Get involved in the process if you're managing a team of developers and don't just look at metrics. They can be misleading if there is no way for developers to communicate UP to managers or if there are self interested parties between you and your devs.
"Don't be afraid to filter people out, it happens that some beginners take a toll on the time of the team, because they develop errors / don't test code."
I would put a huge caveat here: Make sure you're deeply involved the process and understand what's going before taking any steps to sideline a programmer that's underperforming.
I worked for 3 years on a project that was underperforming by every metric. Major features were constantly riddled with bugs, rewritten, over budget. We had no way to push our issues above the PM who was throwing the developers under the bus.
The functional requirements would change daily, deadlines would not move, we were getting less and less QA time and 0 time to write or update tests and we were trying to write an integration with a service that was still in development (trying to hit a moving target).
They brought in a BA and kid you not, she quit 3 weeks in. That got the notice of management, finally, and our semi-technical schizophrenic partner on the client side was let go. Before we were able to escalate these issues there was a very different impression of the work we were doing. Afterward it was like black and white. Perfect releases, on time, on budget, and we were delivering real value to the client.
Sorry, that should have been followed with an, "As they do in China." In the US its more like, "report the issue and watch US authorities sit on it and do fuck all"
Perhaps US police have shoved too many of these cases under the rug and now they need a scape goat because it is becoming too obvious that US companies cannot bribe, influence, or demand justice from their own government when the opposition is "businesses" with the backing and protection of China.
There is one hitch and it’s a doozy. This invasive targeting may be neutralized by market forces when it comes to buying dish soap but it’s proven frighteningly effective in swaying voters even before the internet. Politicians conduct expensive in depth polling and it’s because it works. The move to using data collected online isn’t going anywhere and the normalization of this in advertising helps them.
Speaking of platforms: In the Bernstein timeline someone went to Stockholm and convinced Notch that a cross between Steam and Kiva kicks off the next cultural revolution and all we need is a little “mancala money”
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/146144481666247...
How's that for upping the level of discourse?