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.
They probably got what got left of it in a cashless deal. Basically, the shareholders got to exchange X shares in a fatally wounded company into Y shares in a still-alive startup. The economic sense depends on the ratio between X and Y, but if the board was close to panicking due to recent events, Cognition probably got a good deal.
Easy. Having people change their ways on your demand is called power. And since our brave new economic order eliminated the constructive ways of gaining power, more and more people see this kind of behavior as the only outlet for their ambition to be more than a nameless cog in the machine.
>after said person removed the photo in a completely reasonable, not-online-24/7 amount of time
That was his mistake. He fed the troll. Thing is, trolls like this don't care about the actual issue, they just use it to exert power over other people. If you engage in a conversation with them, you basically volunteer to become a target. If you resist the urge and completely ignore their outburst, they will quickly get bored. For a couple of days to a week the front page of your issue tracker will have one issue where one person is effectively shouting to himself. In a few weeks it will go to the bottom of the list and nobody will care. And as for the Twitter shitstorm, it could be rewarding for trolls to bash someone's response and stick all kinds of labels to them, but it doesn't work if there is no response at all.
>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.
In reality, if you try doing that, the movement will get spearheaded by a small group of cronies that will use it as an excuse to get rid of competition. I bet you can't be very power-hungry in North Korea unless you are a part of the ruling family.
>Maybe it'll all fade away? I hope so. Previous washes of political correctness have come and gone.
This wave has very strong economic foundation. Remember we used to laugh 10 years ago about those people taking $30K loans to study for basket weaving degrees? Well, it got worse. This generation took $50K loans to study social justice degrees. And these degrees taught them that the real source of problems are not the colleges that sold them the worthless degrees. Not the corporations that outsourced the production jobs they would have otherwise taken. Not the interest rates and pro-corporate policies that made many small businesses unsustainable. No, they think it's their neighbor who studied 10x harder to get a STEM degree and occupy one of the last remaining spots in the economy that pays well. And now this neighbor is a privileged $BUZZWORD supremacist who dares to have kids and wants to put them into a good school and hence must be dealt with.
And they will "deal" with them. Or, rather, us. Because burning witches and heretics had been a popular entertainment for centuries and the factors that held it back since the Enlightenment age are fading away very fast.
I think, the social mechanics of this process is very simple. Ability to tell others what to do is called power. Some people are more power-hungry than others, so they seek ways to assert themselves over others. That's a perfectly normal human thing to do. What matters is the way you would achieve power in a society. Getting power through building up your name as a notable researcher or author is one thing. Playing favor games with others in power is another one.
In stable societies the power ladder is at least partially correlated with creating added value. Getting people to buy your product, getting people to elect you into office, even helping out your friends so one day they will help you haul that fridge upstairs. They also have some checks and countermeasures, like the universally trusted independent judicial system, that somewhat impedes attempts to break this correlation. Except now it's breaking apart.
Now we have a growing socioeconomic group that wields increasing power over what others can say by just claiming that they are fighting for a good cause. As long as you are anti-$BUZZWORD and have a sufficient network of followers, nobody dares to oppose you and nobody will protect those who dare.
It's not really about what is in the book or what pronouns someone uses. It's about the fact that a power-hungry person can have the pleasure of telling 1000 other people what to say, and financially obliterate those who don't comply. And no, there won't be a happy blissful day at the end of the road when we have finally eradicated all friction points and everybody can go have a beer together. The power-seekers won't self-disband. They will keep finding a target after target because that's where they get their kicks from.
Entire fucking history of USSR is littered with different power-hungry people using noble goals to chop their competitors' heads off. It didn't end well for them and it didn't end well for the country. I'm happy we are not at the head-chopping stage yet, but I keep wondering how long do we have left...
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.
The problem is that they are going for our kids at schools. Trying to hammer into their heads that instead of shooting for the stars, they should hate themselves for being White and spend most of their life yielding the way to the poor oppressed minorities. That's child abuse if you ask me.
Fellow Eastern European immigrant here. It's hopeless, dude. It's USSR 2.0 being built in our lifetimes. People here didn't see where this road ends, so they've got no idea what awaits them.
My gut feeling is that allowing this at a workplace is a (rather perverse) variation of the "employee of the month" nonsense. I.e. instead of rewarding your subordinates monetarily, you give them a power to bully their peers, but not to compete with yourself.
It is also useful in pushing out "troublemakers". People that will not call BS on the unsubstantiated political claims are also less likely to call out corruption/nepotism/inefficiency of the middle management.
In the long term the company will stagnate and die, but we live in such a wonderful time of government bailouts, low interest rates and desperate investors, so it may take a long time to unravel.
>no kidding. but the other possibility is that you tell the world but no one cares,which is likely the most probable outcome.
Well, there are 3 components to it:
A) Find a relevant problem to solve. I.e. market research.
B) Solve the problem. I.e. engineering.
C) Convince your audience to try your solution. I.e. marketing/sales.
A successful business requires all 3.
>Some of the biggest acquisitions and valuations have been in companies that make little to no money or lose money.
Because their actual product is the expectation of future profits, and their customers are the investors. Ethics aside, it's the same pipeline, really.
This is actually a very accurate depiction of what is happening to the industry. Not too many problems left to solve, so the investors are desperate to fund anyone who can put up a great show and sound convincing. Now a part of this great show would be hiring a great team without actually having a problem to solve, so here you go. The credentials in most cases simply make a difference between doing close to nothing for $300K/year vs. doing the same thing at a less fancy company for $80K/year. Since what you do isn't actually important anymore, your skill or intellectual abilities aren't valued as high.
If you don't want to be a part of the bullshit show, you've got to learn to distinguish between problem-driven projects and show-driven projects. The former are scarce, and the latter are intentionally disguised to pass for the real thing, but unless you learn to see the difference, you'll be stuck in a rather depressive loop of being a prized trophy sitting on a shelf.
My bet is that the COVID-19 pandemic will bring enormous attention to biomedical research, vaccine development, immunology, etc. New discoveries will be made, that would also apply to many less critical conditions. Of course, there will be a fair share of Theranos-like scams, so have your bullshit detector up and running.
>So it's not about being #1, it's about being profitable.
Stop, do you mean that despite cutting the corners with technical support and having a weaker offering than the competition, GCP is not freakin' profitable?
>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.