I work in integrity (keeping bad stuff off the platform). My job is to reduce the harm Meta causes. So I'm at peace with myself. I don't think I could work in any other area of Meta though.
I also work at Meta. The chaos and instability is awful. But I think they could fire pretty much everyone and the ads business would still continue to grow at nearly the same rate.
I think it will take a very long time for leadership to feel the effects of what they've done.
But I have enough money now and no amount of more money (that Meta could reasonably offer for my role) would make it worth staying. This place sucks now.
Requiring a computer science degree to apply for a programming job has always been bizarre to me and this blog post is a great example of why.
"The bulk of the effort was memorizing things that I normally would have Googled."
And given how memory works, in a few weeks you'll probably have to Google them again.
To earn my CS degree I learned a lot of stuff before starting my career that I never used. It would have been much more efficient to learn the things I needed on demand. I learned more about programming in 30 days on my first real programming job after graduation than I did in 4 years in school.
Good point. Health insurance is a form of golden handcuffs. The pain of switching health insurance providers has definitely deterred me from changing jobs before. Microsofts insurance in the early 2000's was so good, I stayed there long enough to become grossly underpaid. When I finally did leave, my salary increased by 50%!
There is really isn't much incentive for companies to stop offering health insurance as a benefit.
Their business model is on-demand transportation. The business model doesn't work if the workforce is not also on-demand. I don't think that's spin, but maybe society decides that we don't like on-demand businesses.
This is an interesting idea. Is this an unintended consequence of binding health insurance to your employment?
According to the NYT: "During World War II, federal wage controls prevented employers from wooing workers with higher pay, so companies started offering health insurance as a way around the law. Of course, this form of nonmonetary compensation is still pay. When the war ended, the practice stuck."
I would much rather have a system where I was paid more and got to choose my health insurance provider. That way I could keep my insurance when I change jobs or if I wanted to freelance.
I run a company that helps software engineers find contract work, and the #1 question we get is "how much should I charge?". The #2 question is "what do I do for health insurance?"
It would seem like businesses brought this on themselves by offering benefits to get around compensation limits imposed by the government. Or you could say that this was caused by the government imposing limits on compensation. Super interesting to think that the root cause of our current problem could have been created 80 years ago.
This is awesome! Thank you so much for making this!
Every day I have to relearn how to scroll when I switch back and forth from my Mac and Windows machines. It frustrated me that the scrolling direction of two completely different input mechanisms were tied together.
We started testing paid ads on LinkedIn and Facebook. We spent about $500/month to test. Just to clarify, this was to find customers for our product/service, not to acquire followers. Growing social media followers was only through making posts on LinkedIn.
I started by accepting every connection I received. In month 5 I switch the default "Connect" button in my profile to follow because I was at 20,000 connections. LinkedIn has a max of 30K connections.
When my last startup was struggling to hit our growth goals after closing our series A round, I started formulating a theory: You can build pretty much any business if you have a large following on social media. I started thinking about this when someone told me that Tesla has no marketing budget and relies completely on Twitter and PR form Elon Musk.
So I decided to give it a try with my new startup. We setup ad campaigns to ensure we had a traditional marketing channel that we could scale and then I started posting on LinkedIn. The results have been mind blowing. In 7 months I went form 1,000 followers to over 30,000 followers[0]. I was just named #4 in LinkedIn's Top Voices for 2019 for Software Development.
A single post that goes viral on LinkedIn can generate $500,000-$2M in new sales opportunities for us and it costs us nothing. By developing a social media presence, we've been able to grow our company to $2M in annualized revenue (we aren't SaaS, so it's not ARR) without any outside funding. And we are profitable.
Statistically speaking, the odds of a bug being found first on an unsupported platform, which represents such a small segment of your users, are low. The odds of it only ever being found on an unsupported platform, even though it's not platform specific, probably means it's rare enough for the business not to care about it.
"Don't assume bad intentions over neglect and misunderstanding." - Hanlon's razor
I worked as a Microsoft employee on the xbox.com website from 2007-2010. We didn't officially support any browsers on Linux because it represented <1% of our user base. It just didn't make business sense. We tested it on occasion anyway because we are decent people and, being part of the tech community, we were fans of Linux.
We supplied a list of officially supported browsers to the customer support team. Any bugs on non-supported browsers would never get reported back to our team, so we'd never hear about them. The support team did their job.
This is how pretty much every company in the history of ever works.