Indeed, it's the underlying principle of "division of labor".
Karl Marx' coined the term "Alienation" for describing most of the negative societal/human consequences of this principle, leading to isolation of humans "from themselves" (their natural will to construct something whole meaningful, not just complete a task in a process, but also isolation between humans themselves)
off topic, but related to the recent github alternative discussion:
Wow, this gitlab instance looked so much cleaner/simpler and less clunky than my past experiences! Also loaded really fast on first page load as well as subsequent actions
Sure, I've cancelled my Max 20 subscription because you guys prioritize cutting your costs/increasing token efficiency over model performance.
I use expensive frontier labs to get the absolute best performance, else I'd use an Open Source/Chinese one.
Frontier LLMs still suck a lot, you can't afford planned degradation yet.
Intermediate lvl, not Amazon.
And indeed I’ve also observed this to be the case, too startups pay such base salaries (eg Gitlab and Neon did) for similar lvl. But there aren’t too many such openings.
Not only, but also due to this.
Relocation through switching teams is not possible.
Compensation took a big hit due to dollar depreciation.
Worst case I'll end up being on unemployment insurance for a year, ~ 2800 EUR per month while travelling the world in my late twenties...
When property costs 1 million+ (the case in Berlin/Munich), financially it really doesn't matter whether I net 6500 EUR month working 50+ hours for FAANG or 4500 EUR working 35 hour weeks for a German corporate, even though the gross salary for the FAANG job is twice the German job.
As a German, I genuinely cannot comprehend this short-sightedness and ignorance:
Our current Chancellor (Merz) publicly boasts that Germans work too few hours and calls on them to work more [0] implying this would generate more tax revenue.
Yet working has arguably never been less rewarding for workers: Germany currently has the 2nd highest tax wedge among all OECD nations (≈48% for a single worker, nearly 13 percentage points above the OECD average) [2][3]. This is compounded by demand-side welfare measures for low earners such as Wohngeld (housing benefit) and pension supplements like Mütterrente ("Mothers' pension"), creating a massive redistribution from working people to non-working people.
Meanwhile, the German government has spent years failing to fully prosecute the CumEx/CumCum tax fraud scandal, a scheme through which banks and investors systematically robbed the German state of an estimated €36 billion in tax revenues [4][5].
The contrast could not be more glaring: squeeze workers harder while letting financial fraudsters off easy.
I've handed over my resignation for my FAANG job and am looking for a job in other countries as I don't see myself building a future here.
Isn’t this the proof of my point - How does the need of writing „@external“ annotations by hand not contradict the point of being „out of the box“ usable?
Hayleigh, when I asked on the discord about how to solve my JSON problem in order to get structured logging working, you replied that I’m the first one to ask about this.
Now reading this:
> It's ok if you don't vibe with Gleam – no ad-hoc poly and no macros are usually dealbreakers for certain types of developer
Certainly makes me even more feel like gatekeeping.
Coming from Elixir, I gave Gleam a try for a couple of days over the holidays. Reasons I decided not to pursue:
- No ad-hoc polymorphism (apart from function overloading IIRC) means no standard way of defining how things work.
There are not many conventions yet in place so you won’t know if your library supports eg JSON deserialization for its types
- Coupled with a lack of macros, this means you have to implement even most basic functionality like JSON (de)serialization yourself - even for stdlib and most popular libs’ structs
- When looking on how to access the file system, I learned the stdlib does not provide fs access as the API couldn’t be shared between the JS and Erlang targets. The most popular fs package for erlang target didn’t look of high quality at all. Something so basic and important.
- This made me realise that in contrast to elixir which not only runs on the BEAM („Erlang“) but also runs with seamless Erlang interop, Gleam doesn’t have access to most of the Erlang / Elixir ecosystem out of the box.
There are many things I liked, like the algebraic data types, the Result and Option types, pattern matching with destructuring.
Which made me realize what I really want is Rust. My ways lead to Rust, I guess.
Or you ask Gemini to do this for you (timestamps were removed when formatting into markdown)
Based on the podcast "Microsoft: Powering Israel’s Genocide? | Hossam Nasr," here are the main human rights issues alleged against Microsoft:
1. Complicity in Military Operations
- The podcast claims Microsoft is a key tech provider for the Israeli military, specifically using the Azure cloud platform to run combat and intelligence activities.
- It alleges Microsoft sells AI services (including OpenAI models) to military units like "Mamram," which are linked to automated targeting systems used to accelerate lethal strikes.
2. Surveillance and Infrastructure
- Microsoft is accused of hosting roughly 13.6 petabytes of data used for mass surveillance.
- The "Al-Munassiq" app, used by Palestinians to manage movement permits, reportedly runs on Azure and is described as a tool for collecting vast amounts of surveillance data.
- The company reportedly sells technology directly to illegal settlements in the West Bank.
3. Internal Labor Rights & Suppression
- The speaker alleges a double standard and discrimination against Palestinian and Arab employees.
- Microsoft is accused of "weaponizing" HR policies to fire workers (including the podcast guest) for organizing vigils or protesting the company's military contracts.
4. Historical Context
- The discussion references Microsoft's history of providing tech to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in the US as part of a broader pattern of supporting "systems of oppression."
> It's like they are building tech for made up in corporate conference room use cases.
Totally felt the same during the live-translation demo, when these two casual business folks were talking about "the client will love the new strategy". Dystopian corporate gibberish.