Unpopular opinion: there has been a steady decline of standards in the research community in the past decade or two. First reproducibility crisis. Then, some topics becoming political taboo where the unorthodox opinion would get you fired and canceled. The credibility of the science in the West has been falling, and the recent change of administration is predictably axing something that has a perceived strong bias in the opposite direction.
An optimist in me hopes that we can get back to unbiased science, where it doesn't have to agree with the current side, but both sides perceive it as fair and agree to leave it alone for common good. A realist thinks that it will happen in China, and the West has just run out of steam.
If you know how to get stuff done yourself, start your own company, get stuff done, and enjoy the profits (or losses, depending on how good you are). It's your risk and your reward.
If you are working for someone else, the unwritten rule #1 is that a single employee should not amass too much influence within the company to start dictating their own conditions. So, the management culture averages decisions across multiple people, to make sure the loss of one-two team players won't be noticed.
It can be extremely demotivating if you are smart and capable, but these are the rules of the game. Be nice, get paid, accumulate some savings, make connections with other smart people, learn the market, and eventually start your own game on your own rules. Until then, trying to stand out will get you labelled as a troublemaker, and will hamper your progress in the long run.
This looks like an additional incentive to channel owners to somehow convince their audience against the ad blocker use. Makes sense, better than trying to win an unwinnable arms race against the blocker maintainers.
>You can tell them what they are doing well, what they aren't doing well, praise good employees and criticize bad managers.
You can do that over a beer or two with the (ex-)colleagues any time before or after you leave. It's not like you are forced to delete them from the contact list. And if you have managed to build this kind of trust between yourself and another employee, it's always a good idea to keep a connection to them. Ping them a couple times per year, discuss some common topics, and be ready to refer each other if one is looking for a job and the other one has an opening at their company. This is called "networking".
As far as the exit interview goes, the only things it's wise to say there are the same as telling your new employer why you left the previous workplace. "Just wanted to work with X, while they were focusing on Y, so we shook hands and parted". Everyone knows it's bullshit, but it's a test of your ability to de-escalate and avoid conflict, and it is very important.
Oh, and don't underestimate the bad managers either. If they abuse you and you still act professionally (and leave politely), you are just a resource. You are no longer needed, they have no interest in abusing you, they might even give you a neutral reference if anybody asks (although don't count on that). If you personally call out their bullshit in front of other subordinates, they may take it personally, and you really do not want a personal vendetta with someone who's full-time job is to spread gossip and manipulate people.
I am wondering if we could solve the current madness with arbitrary content policing by waiving copyright protection for monopolistic platforms and enforcing interoperability.
Imagine if anyone was legally allowed to create their own fork of Reddit, or Google Groups, preserving the original content, and even being able to post new content through the fork, as if they did it directly. If google decided to ban some content, the fork could easily show it from a backup, leading the users to quickly flee the over-restrictive platform to the fork with the most reasonable moderation.
As a nice side effect, this would kill the rotten ad-based revenue model where everything is free, but your data is sold to the highest bidder. Ad-blocking forks would quickly take over the originals, so in order to be profitable, the original platforms would have to charge the costs to the users directly (or to the forks that would pass them to the users with a possible markup for their added value).
That said, it would be completely against the interests of the VC crowd that wields considerable political influence, so I cannot imagine this happening in the U.S. Europe is another story though.
>I wonder if these people were always fired, or has something in the business changed that made immoderate instances of these traits a liability.
Economic cycle. As long as the main product of a typical west coast company remains the feeling of the future potential it sells to the investors, feelers are mostly an asset and thinkers are a mainly liability.
An optimist in me hopes that we can get back to unbiased science, where it doesn't have to agree with the current side, but both sides perceive it as fair and agree to leave it alone for common good. A realist thinks that it will happen in China, and the West has just run out of steam.