Plus I'd argue that more vacation time would mean each employee has a more even spread of the workload. You depend less on individuals, and more on the team.
The stack traces suck sometimes with the metaprogramming. I have never chased down exactly what causes it, but sometimes you'll have lots of library code calls mentioned, and nothing from the application.
I'd agree that micromanaging is a bad sign. Too often I get micromanaging about style critiques like "turn this into one if statement instead of nested ones and it's more clear", but absolutely no comments on the meat of a significant refactor. To be clear, I think style rules are important, but this is the same guy who writes 150+ character lines with ternaries like they're going out of style.
And if people are writing 150 character plus lines, those are really, no joke, a lot harder to read. If the line is going to break anyway, why not just break it yourself at a spot that makes sense?
I think you're neglecting the effect corporate backing can have on encouraging research from people who are less startup-minded and more I-like-knowing-I'll-have-food-on-the-table-minded.
I mostly agree with the points leading up to the suggestion of mandatory data sharing. I'm still mulling that over.
But I do agree that just breaking up Google, for example, wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. Of all the tech giants, I think Google is still doing the most good in terms of investing in innovation. Their research teams are varied and doing the fantastic.
Disclaimer: I don't work there and forewent an offer to network my way in.
Use case for labelled breaks: collision detection in video game, where anything colliding with anything else ends the game, resets a counter, spawns Godzilla, who knows. With labels, you can break out of the top loop very efficiently.
They really could have done a tiered release. Keep the knowledge of the vulnerability as close as possible for the ~6 months they had it, then release it to a greater (but still restricted) set of people for another ~6 months.
the worst case would have been someone in the latter set leaking the info, which is just what we have now. So it could have been potentially better. There was really no reason to drop a bomb like this.
Indeed, code reuse, testing, maintainability, etc are harder with the latter pattern. And with the latter you also end up using at least 3 languages in the same files. It's just really awful.
Yes, browser-rendering SPA frameworks are heavyweight, but they give an undeniably-better development experience. And that shows in the quality of the interfaces created through them, assuming your interface requirements are complex enough to justify it. I mean, I'm happy with Hacker News' interface and it's simple, but if I'm building the next Google Calendar, I am not using ajax and server-rendered templates.
This is an interesting essay on the minds of our ocean-dwelling aliens.