"One thing that helped me immensely in my career is understanding that my relationship with a company is a business relationship"
That is just a culture thing. Most prominently in the US. In many cultures there is no clear boundary between personal relationships and business relationships. And why would there be? I would like to live in a world where kindness, dependability, punctuality, warmness, openness and forgiveness are values upheld both by natural and legal persons. And I have worked with many companies that have! As you can read in the comments, for every bad example you can find companies lead by empathic people that treat their employees humanely.
Google always pretended to be that company. And maybe they were for a long time. Now they've shifted. They really didn't have to but they did. The excuse of "it's just a business relationship" really is just that: an excuse. The symptom of a culture with values so bankrupt that it accepts citizens being treated poorly and then blames the victims for expecting to be treated humanely.
And yes, it saves you a lot of personal pain if you expect the worst from your employer from the outset. But is the world really better off if we all expect to treat each other like criminals?
It always boggles my mind that python is so popular while being so unfriendly and hard to use. Terrible package management. Poor typing system. Useless stack traces. Unintuitive syntax (no ternary operator?!). And yet it has become the default language almost.
I guess the way forward now would be to "make python good". Thank goodness uv is trying.
This. In German the word for "video-calling" is "Skyping". Similar to MSN, the strength of the brand and goodwill that it has in some geographies is on-par with Google for search, or Coca Cola for coke. The fact that the software got consistently worse, year on year on year is hard to grasp for me. Microsoft made the right call to cannibalize and use teams. But how was Skype such a pain? Not being able to share screenshots in chat killed it for me.
Here's a European perspective that is somewhat pro-Trump, surprising as it may sound. I am Dutch and if someone would come along and promise the following:
"We're gonna lower your taxes so you have more money to spend"
"We're gonna take a sledge hammer to bloated policies so everything will run smoothly. Then we will build a million houses per year"
I would very much consider voting for that person. That said, Trump is a madman, he lies all the time, is a danger to institutions etc. At the same time, I am so disgruntled by the current system and by not a single politician tackling or even speaking about relevant issues that I am easily swayed.
This is cool. I don't watch so many movies anymore, so there must be many good ones i've missed. Is there a functioning natural language query somewhere?
"I want to watch a science fiction movie that is not a super hero movie. Movies I love are Dark City and Daybreakers. Prioritize movies of short length, nothing more than 2h30. Filter out movies I've already rated, here's my Watchlist"
I really wanted windows phone to be a success and am still sad it wasn't. I loved the interface. The native integration between my desktop/laptop and phone would have been great. Nowadays with so many apps being PWAs and built with nativescript or ionic, maybe windowsphone has a chance again? I have no idea tbh.
At home I have a book telling stories of Dutch WW2 survivors still living today. One of them was an eye witness account of the Hiroshima bomb. He was a POW and worked in a quarry or mine on the outskirts of town. He saw a single plane fly over. A bomb dropped with a parachute attached. Moments later he was flung to the back of the quarry and the city was gone. I would never have guessed there were eyewitnesses like this, let alone coutrymen of mine.
That is just a culture thing. Most prominently in the US. In many cultures there is no clear boundary between personal relationships and business relationships. And why would there be? I would like to live in a world where kindness, dependability, punctuality, warmness, openness and forgiveness are values upheld both by natural and legal persons. And I have worked with many companies that have! As you can read in the comments, for every bad example you can find companies lead by empathic people that treat their employees humanely.
Google always pretended to be that company. And maybe they were for a long time. Now they've shifted. They really didn't have to but they did. The excuse of "it's just a business relationship" really is just that: an excuse. The symptom of a culture with values so bankrupt that it accepts citizens being treated poorly and then blames the victims for expecting to be treated humanely.
And yes, it saves you a lot of personal pain if you expect the worst from your employer from the outset. But is the world really better off if we all expect to treat each other like criminals?