It was a little tongue in cheek, but yes. I had large grievances with the software culture there, but after I got sign off on the project to modernise our build process, I couldn't bring myself to abandon ship in the middle of trying to fix it.
After everything was finished up, I was feeling burnt out and realised that I'd held on for too long at a company with a fundamentally bad culture that wasn't going to change just because the tech did, so I moved on.
In my first real job, I worked for a company that maintained a large legacy product programmed in a combination of COBOL and Java.
In order to work on the Java side of the product, you checked out individual files from source control to work on, which 'locked' the files and prevented other developers from checking out the same files. This functionality was not part of our actual source control system, but was instead accomplished with a series of csh shell scripts you could run after ssh'ing into our development server.
Each of our customers had a 'master' jar file that represented the actual final compiled product (a jar file is really a zip file archive, which bundles together the resulting compiled java class files).
Once you had finished implementing your code changes, you ran another set of scripts which found the master jar file for each customer, unzips it, copies the compiled files from your local machine into it, and zips it back up again. Finally the source control lock is released.
This means, effectively, that the codebase was never compiled as a whole at any point in the process, instead, we just manually patched the jar file over time with individually compiled class files.
Over the years, small errors in the process allowed a huge amount of inconsistencies to creep into the codebase. Race conditions would allow two developers to lock the same file at once, or a developer would change a class that was a dependency of some other code that somebody else was changing. Sometimes code changes would make it into some of the customer jar files, but not others. Nobody knew why.
It took a small team two years to migrate the entire codebase to git with proper CI, and a huge chunk of that time was reproducing a version of the codebase that actually compiled properly as a whole. After the project was finished, I resigned.
The crux of Atkinson's argument seems to be that the upfront emissions from the manufacturing process, and shorter lifespan of electric vehicles, does not make up for the reduction in tailpipe emissions.
Is this true? I know that the Tesla Impact report [0] refutes this, stating
> "While EVs today still emit more greenhouse gases during the manufacturing phase, including emissions from the supply chain, it takes less than two years' worth of driving before the total emissions from an EV fall below that of a comparable ICE vehicle."
If you'd like to read more about the roots of Effective Altruism, ranging from old mailing lists, LessWrong, bitcoin, cults, AI and the surprising connections to many well known figures in tech, I highly recommend the 7-part Extropia's Childen series from Jon Evans [1]
After everything was finished up, I was feeling burnt out and realised that I'd held on for too long at a company with a fundamentally bad culture that wasn't going to change just because the tech did, so I moved on.