I think this is the reason I was hired at my current company and it put me in an awkward position.
I was hired as employee #2 for a critical team at my company. For the first 3 months, my colleague and I worked closely together on everything I was doing. From production problems to day to day PR reviews, I had no one else to ask besides my colleague. We didn't even have a manager we reported to. Then suddenly I was told they didn't work at the company anymore. I was told they were still available for 2 weeks on Slack for any knowledge transfer I needed, but they would have no other access to our network, our Github, or anything else.
My advice is that option 1 in the SE question (hire a replacement, then terminate) should be avoided. How is that going to look to the replacement? It really shook me up. I was only a few months in, I didn't have time to build trust in the company yet. If I could have, I probably would have went back to my old job right away. Then what happens to that knowledge you were hoping to retain? A year later I still wonder if someday the same will happen to me.
Instead, I would recommend approaching the employee and working out a deal for them to amicably train a replacement. The replacement should know going in that they are a replacement and they should be told to focus on training themselves and others on this knowledge. If they don't agree to the deal then you fire them immediately. Yes, that'll suck, and maybe you even have a production problem because of it, but you can make it work.
I specifically asked this question to Sales and they told me no. There probably isn't an official policy and it's up to the discretion of the people involved. In my case I had 100 MB of data on S3 that I was serving to a lot of users (250 TB - 500 TB of egress per month). This is free for me on R2 because you aren't billed for requests served from cache and we have a 100% cache hit rate. I was very up front about this to sales and they said they didn't care as long as we paid for some kind of support package. We were paying for the $20/mo plan but later elected to upgrade to the $200/mo plan. Not a bad deal since the data transfer from AWS alone was more than $20,000.
I don't want to take advantage of them and get on their abuse list since this is production. I'm happy to pay more! I just don't want to deal with negotiating an Enterprise plan. They ask you so many questions like "how many Page Rules do you want? How many Worker requests?" I just want R2. And this response confuses them too because they say "well R2 is pay-what-you-use..." I would honestly be happier with a $5000/mo "excessive R2 bandwidth" fee. But they don't seem to want to implement that.
It keeps forgetting for me too. That is to say, in my mobile browser and desktop browser I opt out of the redesign in favor of the old.reddit.com design, but about once per month it'll just revert back to the redesign. I don't think my cookies are being cleared because I'll stay logged in and I've never found any other setting that flips in the same way, it is only the Redesign opt-out that does this.
I don't know how to explain why many people say "this never happens to me" and other people say "this happens frequently."
While I'm on the subject, another grey pattern the article missed is the button to opt out of the redesign on mobile. When clicking the hamburger menu there used to be a button at the bottom called (iirc) "Opt out of Redesign." The same option exists today except they've moved it into a Settings submenu and renamed it "Request desktop site" which implies it's a temporary change.
Lastly, if you search you'll find threads where people say the web pages are sometimes rendered without any opt out button. I just opened an incognito window to test this and I simply cannot find a button to revert to the old design, even when using my mobile browser's Desktop Mode. So unless a visitor knows about old.reddit.com they are forced to use the new design.
There is also a bug with the AMP pages such that the submission dates for the threads are often wrong. For example you're searching for threads that have been posted in the last month, some of the results will say something like "7 days ago" until you click and see it is actually 5 years old.
> Suggestion: Create a new Wikipedia article with the same Name, upload your own profile photo onto it and put a Disambiguation (Programmer/Hacker) in it so that Google will associate it correctly.
That Wikipedia article would probably meet the criteria for Speedy Deletion and just causes unnecessary effort for the Wikipedia editors.
Amazon is in an interesting situation. They create the delivery routes, dispatch the drivers, and set the KPIs the drivers need to meet, but if anything bad happens they can say "The driver isn't an Amazon employee so we're not responsible." If a crash occurs you often can't figure out what the contracting company was as the trucks are often unmarked and Amazon won't help as they have plausible deniability that the truck was even performing an Amazon delivery. If a contracting company is identified with a crash it often goes out of business the next day and those records are lost.
This is a good opportunity for me to ask something I've been wondering for a while about what is appropriate to put on a blog tied to your real identity.
The majority of this article could be seen as negative toward the author's former employer. The website is also listed on the author's CV, and knowing the author's name it is easy to find the website. Is there the possibility that this is seen as unprofessional, or that someone who was involved might read it and be upset? Maybe it is okay because the company is defunct (I assume), or because it was so long ago?
I ask because I am early in my career and I just finished a job where the majority of the things I learned were non-technical in nature. I would like to write about the lessons learned but, like this article, it would have some component of criticism about the company. Like the author, my website is on my resume and the website can be found by searching online for my name. Someone reading my resume could figure out what company I'm talking about, and some people who work there might find it. I don't live in a large tech hub in the US so it's very likely a future potential employer knows some people personally that I might have criticized vaguely (but due to process of elimination from the jobs listed on my resume wouldn't be hard to identify).
The advice I've been given from people I know is to either not have a website tied to your identity at all, or be as professional as possible if it is tied to your identity.
What do you think? If you knew this author, or it you stumbled across this article because you are thinking of hiring the author, how would you feel?
Richard Feynman in What Do You Care What Other People Think? says something similar happened with his first wife Arlene who contracted tuberculosis. If we trust his account, then it went something like this:
Arlene presented with bumps on her neck and the doctors couldn't figure it out. In his free time Feynman read medical textbooks in the Princeton library, and the first thing in the book is tuberculosis, which it describes as being "very easy to diagnose." Feynman assumes if its so easy and the doctors can't figure it out then it has to be something much rarer, something like Hodgkin's lymphoma. He asks the doctor about Hodgkin's, and the doctor admits it is a possibility.
> When she went to the county hospital, the doctor wrote the following diagnosis: “Hodgkin’s disease?” So I realized that the doctor didn’t know any more than I did about this problem.
After several months the doctors order a biopsy of her neck and pretty easily confirm it was tuberculosis. Feynman concludes that he made a huge mistake assuming they ruled out the easiest diagnosis.
Why can't you simply ask the candidate "We offer $min to $max for this position, is that acceptable?" That lets you and the candidate know whether proceeding further is a good use of time.
What I find interesting is the part at the bottom that shows how much a donation helps: a $5 donation is enough to cover the company's budget for 6 minutes. This sounds really good for a few reasons: 1) since I play Lichess for several hours a month, I feel that I'm really getting my money's worth; 2) Lichess only needs a few thousand people to contribute $5/mo to stay net positive and I feel like it's easier to convince a few thousand people in a supportive community to part ways with $5 than it is for other companies to get a million people to donate $1; 3) I remember Reddit used to show on your profile how many server minutes your Gold purchase was worth and it would display something like 200 minutes for every $5 purchase, but this is only a single server out of hundreds and doesn't account for any other expenses, so Lichess is unsurprisingly very cheap to operate in comparison.
I was hired as employee #2 for a critical team at my company. For the first 3 months, my colleague and I worked closely together on everything I was doing. From production problems to day to day PR reviews, I had no one else to ask besides my colleague. We didn't even have a manager we reported to. Then suddenly I was told they didn't work at the company anymore. I was told they were still available for 2 weeks on Slack for any knowledge transfer I needed, but they would have no other access to our network, our Github, or anything else.
My advice is that option 1 in the SE question (hire a replacement, then terminate) should be avoided. How is that going to look to the replacement? It really shook me up. I was only a few months in, I didn't have time to build trust in the company yet. If I could have, I probably would have went back to my old job right away. Then what happens to that knowledge you were hoping to retain? A year later I still wonder if someday the same will happen to me.
Instead, I would recommend approaching the employee and working out a deal for them to amicably train a replacement. The replacement should know going in that they are a replacement and they should be told to focus on training themselves and others on this knowledge. If they don't agree to the deal then you fire them immediately. Yes, that'll suck, and maybe you even have a production problem because of it, but you can make it work.