..and of course you do not see a relation between the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few oligarchs and public spending oddly ever more looking like a neoliberal's wet dream...
...interestingly enough, they have been publishimg this same "story" every few years for a long time now. He seems to be very carefully maintaining the image of a frugal billionaire. Either that or making sure to initiate every new generation to the personality cult of granpa-genius/uncle/frugal investor/ Warren Buffet.
No, the workers have generated billions, not him. But he and his ilk damage the society by pressuring the company mgmt to perform layoffs and cut costs until shit hits the fan. Have you not heard of the struggles of workrs at one of "his" companies regarding the sick leave, have you not heard of the East Palestine, Ohio disaster (I know - not his company, but may have been as well), precision-scheduled railroading and how it completely messes up the lifes of the workforce affected. Did you sleep over the increasing push for RTO so the billionaire class could keep the value of "their" real-estate? The lives of people and environmental impact be damned! The letter of that investor to Google CEO, asking for even more layoffs, commending him for a well-done round one? Finally, have you been living under the rock and have not heard the steady talk of "incoming recession", well for more than 12 months now, the Fed's Powell openly calling for higher unemployment rates and lower salaries. That CNBC talking-head from a few months ago, saying effectively, people still had too much money in their savings accounts? One gets an impression they seem to really, really want to spark the next recession. Are you perhaps too young to remember the credit crunch of 2008? Hint - do a bit of research on Uncle Warrens wise investment decisions leading up to that crisis. Well yes now, one does wonder, how the hell did the likes of WB exactly cause economic damage to the society?
You are missing the point and are confusing real-world applications with SEO-optimised websites and e-commerce apps. Besides if anything, dark patterns, tracking etc. are pushed mainly by the product mgmt. sect, a group which I agree has had a lot of toxic impact and is mentality-wise closer to the monkey-banana-hoarders than to their engineering peers.They share the same lack of competence, unfounded arrogance and tunnel vision with the likes of Uncle Warren. It all has nothing to do with the genuine, intrinsic motivation of an engineer.
How could you possibly know what his inner motivations may be? Do you live with him or have at least talked to him for an hour? Yes I was talking about them based on the visible outcomes of their actions, that is what experience tought me about life and people in general. It's not the talk - it's the walk. Another real-life lesson: what we feel as being morally wrong or right, usually passes the test in the end, at least on major topics (equality, dignity, human rights, economy). Something being just legal, does not make it right. South Africa had a legalised discrimination against the blacks and in the nazi-era Germany it would have been against the law to hide a jewish kid from the deportations. Probably some weird nerd back then around 1937. discussed how we could not get involved based on just moral feelings. All this aside, how could anyone admire or worship these weird characters: WB eats at McD everyday, Bezos apparently dislikes music (!), Altman apparently had a prepper bunker since 2016, not to mention the boy-genius who blew away 44B on twitter. But yes, billionaires dont really have any liquidity, the money is all 'tied up'. They practically live hand-to-mouth.
No, not really. A bad comparison. A programmer building software, commercially or not, will have a positive impact on something (product, customer, technology, ideas). Any negative impact coming from an enthusiastic programmer, in form of bugs causing outages or general errors in programme output will be unintentional. We rightfully call those programmers who intentionally cause damage in order to generate economic gains for themselves or their clients, a small group of people, cyber-criminals. We prosecute them, put them into jails, as is right. After serving enough time and provided they genuinely repent, we might let them integrate back into the society, like we did let Kevin Mitnick. Now people like WB who similarly use their competencies to intentionally cause economic damage to the society, in order to gain "value" for themselves and their clients, a small group of people, what should we call them and how should we treat them? What do you think?
^This. Please stop publishing the frugal, benevolent billionaire propaganda, we've heard this nonsense so many times. Look up "precision scheduled railroading" for just one real life example of how these KPI-focused idiots ruin the livelihoods of many working people. Those are the stories that should be told, not these hagiographical snippets.
This is pathetic. You provided only multiple repetitions of a general description of your supposed process, dancing around very specific and concrete questions. You did not dispute any of my claims. Your explanation sounds a lot like the non-language of these moron CEOs in their layoff letters. A modicum of respect for your readership here would have been to highlight which other threads already display this information and discussion. Instead you clearly posted in your first response that it was an arbitrary decision. Also, calling this guy "grinchy" to make it somehow cartoonish is oversimplifying the danger these present to real livelihoods. Think US employees and health insurance for them and their dependants being tied to employment, etc. Just hideous. Please put the whole thread back to the frontpage.
That is a lot of words to bend around my arguments. Apart from effectively stating that your curation can be completely arbitrary, you are offering no arguments in the way of explaining WHAT specific criteria did you apply here? Not wanting to embarass a billionaire? You have completely ignored my arguments, what bloody sensationalism are you talking about, the man said openly he approved of 12k people kicked out and then prongued 'Dear Sundar' to push out another 28k. Why not just be honest about it and stop repeating this line about "how HN works". My account may be new, but I've been reading here for many, many years. I've never seen a topic literally disappear within 60mins - at least be honest about not wanting to embarass a 'high roller'. Put this discussion back to the front page.
It is extremely relevant topic because it is *not a standard bureaucratic-technical layoff discussion around roumors, numbers, departments, teams etc.
Our new buddy Chris, in his own words, un-covers all the shitty corpospeak, all the bullshit about focus, values, alignment, performance and lets not forget - the so called "corporate social responsibility" etc. for what it really is - greed and maximising profits at the cost of people who build these companies.
The immorality of someone probably not working at all, who dares openly incite a disruption of the livelihoods of at least 12k working families should not be hidden from the public, least of all from the segment frequenting sites like HN.
It is important because for one high-profile like this, there are thousands of MBA-types at smaller companies who are learning by watching and who inevitably pass it down the line and spread the disease of these practices everywhere. We need to publically call these people out and ostracise their dangerous practices.
This topic was trending on the frontpage before you hid it.
How many people here contributed to this thread? The topic was clearly interesting to many and is clearly super-relevant.
Please put it back on and allow for the discussion to continue.
I am sorry but this does not sound very convincing. You are blocking the visibility of a highly important topic.The thread was not just down-weighted, but also taken away from the topic listings altogether. It happened within a very short time-frame. There is not a ton of stories on HN about how an 8B net worth and highly influential person is inciting a mass layoff of 20℅ of Google staff, just so this person's hedge fund profit would be raised by 1℅. This coming from an already super high EBITA of 39℅ is a prime example of greed of a few is "disrupting" the lives of many. If you are already manipulating the feed, at least dont insult our intelligence with run-of-the-mill explanations. For the record, I was never a Google employee, just irritated with the letter in question.