The "chance at making FU money" and "100% more work/stress" and "losing funding or... goes bust and can't make payroll", that's stuff that happens at startups that are paying _below_ the VC-backed market rate.
Once a company gets money to be paying employees in the third hump of the trimodal distribution of SWE pay, those "exciting" parts are long gone. You're no longer in the running to receive a hilarious amount of money should everything 10-100x, and you're no longer worried about going bust and not making payroll.
Even a pre-series A startup I worked at saw the writing on the wall with 5 months of runway left and switched from trying to get funded to finding an M&A deal. At the very least you can get the team acquired by someone in the expansion phase and get the rare chance to interview as a group and compare notes and have an exec try and negotiate your salary _up_ for once.
By the time a startup is paying VC-backed market rate, the level of stress you have just comes from the usual suspects: management, culture toxicity, etc. some of that you can absorb, some might prompt you to find a new job, just like normal.
There's still a level of "hoo-rah, we're a startup" present of course, but I just consider this a bad attempt to keep the magic of when the company and products were small alive. I let it affect me none.
$JOB-2 got sued over website accessibility. The way these cases go is someone uses the WAVE browser extension to identify accessibility issues, and anything yellow or red becomes part of the cause of action. IIRC we settled out of court.
We were pretty large, big-name online merchandise retailer. Definitely put our heels to the fire on giving the frontend a design refresh.
A reference to Postel's Law: be conservative in what you produce and liberal in what you accept.
The law references that you should strive to follow all standards in your own output, but you should make a best effort to accept content that may break a standard.
This is useful in the context of open standards and evolving ecosystems since it allows peers speaking different versions of a protocol to continue to communicate.
The assertion being made here is that the world has become too fraught with exploiting this attitude for it to continue being a useful rule
> Is there some reason a cryptographic algorithm developer must track the latest release of a compiler?
Tracking the latest release is important because:
1. Distributions build (most? all?) libraries from source, using compilers and flags the algorithm authors can't control
2. Today's latest release is the base of tomorrow's LTS.
If the people who know most about these algorithms aren't tracking the latest compiler releases, then who else would be qualified to detect these issues before a compiler version bearing a problematic optimization is used for the next release of Debian or RHEL?
> Logically, therefore, must we not also expect CPU designers to
also forego changes that could alter timing behavior?
Maybe? [1]
> freezing all compiler development
There are many, many interesting areas of compiler development beyond incremental application of increasingly niche optimizations.
For instance, greater ability to demarcate code that is intended to be constant time. Or test suites that can detect when optimizations pose a threat to certain algorithms or implementations. Or optimizing the performance of the compiler itself.
Overall I agree with you somewhat. All engineers must constantly rail against entropy, and we are doomed to fail. But DJB is probably correct that a well-reasoned rant aimed at the community that both most desires and most produces the problematic optimizations has a better chance at changing the tide of opinion and shifting the rate at which all must diminish than yelling at chipmakers or the laws of thermodynamics.
The "chance at making FU money" and "100% more work/stress" and "losing funding or... goes bust and can't make payroll", that's stuff that happens at startups that are paying _below_ the VC-backed market rate.
Once a company gets money to be paying employees in the third hump of the trimodal distribution of SWE pay, those "exciting" parts are long gone. You're no longer in the running to receive a hilarious amount of money should everything 10-100x, and you're no longer worried about going bust and not making payroll.
Even a pre-series A startup I worked at saw the writing on the wall with 5 months of runway left and switched from trying to get funded to finding an M&A deal. At the very least you can get the team acquired by someone in the expansion phase and get the rare chance to interview as a group and compare notes and have an exec try and negotiate your salary _up_ for once.
By the time a startup is paying VC-backed market rate, the level of stress you have just comes from the usual suspects: management, culture toxicity, etc. some of that you can absorb, some might prompt you to find a new job, just like normal.
There's still a level of "hoo-rah, we're a startup" present of course, but I just consider this a bad attempt to keep the magic of when the company and products were small alive. I let it affect me none.