This carries the assumption that competence is something that is purely objective. I find it more likely that what is perceived as competence is still subject to bias.
Companies in China have Party Committees, appointed by the government. These committees have oversight over how the company operates, and how the board is appointed. The Chinese government has a strong direct influence inside Chinese businesses, that isn't present in the rest of the world.
They're called Commissars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissar imagine one standing over as you code and reminding yo what the Party expects...and if x feature is complaint with Party ideals or not.
Curiously like in the series Chernobyl, the first person to take radiation measurements at the scene in Goiania thought his equipment was faulty, because it measured at the maximum of the scale.
I think a main reason Microsoft lost their development community is because they charged for access to Visual studio (which is the gateway to the entire ecosystem). People didn't talk about it openly, because no one was building for the microsoft platform outside of work.
Meanwhile a whole community of competing free alternatives appeared - students learnt Java and Python because C# was a paid product that was also not cross platform.
When I was a poor Comp Sci student I couldn't afford Visual Studio so I got an IRC buddy to mail me a pirated copy of Visual Studio Enterprise Edition (gotta love rural dial-up internet.) This was around 2003 I believe.
Package never arrived, so I got him to re-send it. Got the discs a few weeks later.
Some time later I got a call from the RCMP -- Canadian version of the FBI. They wanted me to come to their detachment and answer some questions. When I showed up they took me into an interrogation room and told me they had seized the CD-Rs at the border, that software piracy was a big deal and he had been instructed by his superiors to "make an example out of someone."
They wanted to know who sent them, how I got in contact with him, how much I had paid him, and a lot of other questions. I was 19 and scared shitless. I had seen the warnings at the beginning of Hollywood movies, I should have asked for a lawyer but didn't.
I gave a statement and signed it. I told them that the guy had re-sent the discs and I received them, what should I do? They told me to bring the discs in, and I did.
Never heard from them again. No criminal record. I have no idea what happened behind the scenes, but I thank my lucky stars that I wasn't charged with copyright infringement.
I'm not trying to paint this as some kind of Les Miserables bread-loaf-stealing tragedy, but I am beyond ecstatic at the wealth of free software development tools available to anyone with a $400 laptop.
That free license was called Express, was available per language variant, so you needed on VS Express install per workload and exists since around 2005, until Community made its appearance.
Also the Windows SDK was always available for free, just you needed to get a C compiler yourself.
> Also the Windows SDK was always available for free, just you needed to get a C compiler yourself.
Not quite _always_... For the first few versions of Windows, the SDK was a fairly expensive separate product you had to buy in addition to the compilers itself. I'm pretty sure it was MS C/C++ 7 that was first available bundled with the SDK. IIRC, the product was $700-800 (in 1990 money), took a couple feet of shelf space, and shipped with seven or eight thousand pages of documentation.
Visual C++ (really MS C/C++ _8_) democratized it a bunch by shipping with the libraries/tools needed to develop for Windows and offering a basic product at a <$200 price point. That was also the first version of Microsoft C that shipped with a Windows-based debugging UI.
The early 90's also saw the introduction of MSDN - the Microsoft Developer Network. At the time, this was a subscription CD based library of essentially all of Microsoft's developer documentation (as well as a few tools, etc.) It was essential... and to put the timeline in perspective, Microsoft sold a version of MSDN that was bundled with a CD-ROM drive, since they were as uncommon as they were at the time. They quickly added a premium version of MSDN that got you the full tooling also.
Ten or fifteen years after all that, the full version of Visual Studio was a $10k/seat proposition. Between that and all of the API churn, they lost sight of their original goal of staying developer friendly, and it was to their deteriment. (Particularly given the concurrent ascendence of the Web, OS X, Mobile, Linux, and the like.)
Back in the 90's I used to be the custodian and curator of our great big box of MSDN CD's ensuring that updates and replacements were properly seen to. Oh the memories :)
In fairness you didn't just get the development tools, you also got copies of just about every MS server and office product on what were fairly generous developer licenses. Many of these things didn't even require phoning home for "activation" and MS turned a blind eye to partners sharing one copy amongst 10-15 devs; after all the real money was where the fruit of our efforts would be deployed, stuff running in banks and other corporates paying serious coin for server licenses and direct support. Ultimately all this stuff was about capturing developers mindsets with a view to selling production licenses.
> In fairness you didn't just get the development tools, you also got copies of just about every MS server and office product on what were fairly generous developer licenses.
It didn't start out that way... they added a premium level later, and that was the version that included all the free tooling. I still have volumes 3 and 5 (April 1993 and Fall 1993), and it's a single CD product that was mostly focused on just the documentation. (This is actually how I got my first CD-ROM drive... IIRC, the whole package, a one year subscription and a proprietary interface CD-ROM was $400).
I started developing for Windows 3.0 using Borland tools and never paid more than 100 euro (when converted for today's money) with their Turbo C++ and Pascal compilers, the Windows SDK was in the box.
Have been developing for Windows and UNIX flavors ever since.
Windows has been always developer friendly from my point of view, more so than UNIX ever was, then again I guess we have different points of view what being developer friendly actually means.
> I started developing for Windows 3.0 using Borland tools and never paid more than 100 euro (when converted for today's money) with their Turbo C++ and Pascal compilers, ...
> I guess we have different points of view what being developer friendly actually means.
We may be in more agreement than you suspect, for what it's worth - I think it's mainly a matter of timing. The development community, including Borland, pivoted from OS/2 to Windows right around the 1990 release of 3.0. That forced Microsoft to open up a lot of the tooling required to compile Windows binaries. (IIRC, the effort was something like Open Tools, and there was also ToolHelp, which was Microsoft's way of opening up Win16 debugger support that had been previously proprietary.) This was a big part of the reason that companies like Borland could ship products that let you code for Windows without an SDK.
Prior to that point... 1985-1989/90, the situation was a lot more closed and tools like the SDK were extra cost add ons.
Borland just made one attempt at OS/2, and it wasn't as good as Visual Age for C++ and CSet++. There was hardly anything to pivot from.
As for Windows 1.0 - 2.0, which is the time frame you are talking about, Windows did not matter at all. We only cared about MS-DOS and compatibles.
And on MS-DOS, their Pascal and C offerings were quite lousy when compared with the competition, so we were gladly giving money to TMT, Borland, Nanuteck, Gardens Point, Watcom.
They were also ironically the last C compiler vendor for MS-DOS to add support for C++, the very last edition of their compiler for MS-DOS, Microsoft C/C++ v7.
And in what concerns freely available, MS-DOS did not had any SDK, so yeah we had to pay for a book with the BIOS and Int 21h documentation, like PC Systems Internals.
I really don't understand Microsoft's pricing model for Visual Studio.
In theory, it's just price discrimination; put features that are only valuable to enterprise customers in the $6k/year version, and profit. But then they put key UX features which are useful to _everyone_, like Live Unit Testing, in the Enterprise version too.
The upshot is that they sell a few more Enterprise licenses, but the development experience is worse for 99% of .NET developers on Windows. It's such a weird contrast to their developer tooling strategy in every other area.
(I'm an engineer at Amazon, but I don't speak on behalf of the company, I'm just sharing my experience)
Here are a few different ways that AWS and Retail interact:
1. The obvious that everyone knows: Retail uses AWS's products, providing feedback and ideas for new services and features.
2. Employee transfers: it's quite common for people to move between Retail and AWS and vice versa, and they bring what they learned in one org to their new org, helping to spread information about best practices.
3. Other employee knowledge transfers: I've personally benefited from engineers in AWS sharing their knowledge about general engineering topics on internal interest mailing lists or through tech talks.
4. Best practices: there are some differences, but AWS and Retail operate similarly in many ways: use of 6-pagers for sharing ideas (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/beauty-amazons-6-pager-brad-p...), weekly review of metrics, hiring tools and practices being just a few examples.
This is all a Devils Advocate post. I have no reason to complain about my (future) compensation. Working in the consulting division allowed me to make $BigTech money as an “Enterprise Developer” without studying a single algorithm, and being able to work completely remote from a low cost of living area....
As a soon to be employee on the AWS side and speaking very selfishly, I could see it benefiting AWS employees tremendously being separate from the low margin retail side. They would probably have benefits and compensation more in line with the other BigTech companies.
Employees at AWS definitely wouldn’t be as limited in what they can contribute to their 401K because they are considered Highly Compensated Employees and the contribution rate is weighed down by factory workers.
In general, investors would prefer two companies because those looking to invest in retail wouldn’t have to expose themselves to cloud & vice versa. That increase in demand for each component (investors who formerly ignored the stock owing to the above) would make the share price go up, all else constant.
Amazon stock performs well because a lot of investors want access to both, so it’s not that big of a deal. Also Jeff Bezos holds a disproportionate amount of voting power (part of why he’s the richest person is because he held on to an unusually high percent of an unusually valuable company).
Ultimately they won’t split until one of them stops being a world-eating monster because no one will have leverage to force it on Jeff. It may never happen as long as amazon exists. But I guarantee the day amazon cloud stops growing at insane rates, people will call for a breakup.
> Ultimately they won’t split until one of them stops being a world-eating monster because no one will have leverage to force it on Jeff. It may never happen as long as amazon exists. But I guarantee the day amazon cloud stops growing at insane rates, people will call for a breakup.
People have been complaining about Amazon's investing policies (like reinvesting every penny instead of paying out dividends) for decades and not gotten anywhere though.
I mean it's sad that this change will affect Termux, but at the same time I can see why Google wants to enforce W^X on apps home dirs.
This is currently a big backdoor for apps to sneak unvetted code in at runtime, bypasses Google's review policy. Sure Termux was using this for good, but I guarantee that Google has examples of apps doing this to sneak hostile code onto user devices.
Development tools often need higher security permissions on Desktop, maybe Android just needs a "development" class of app that is more privileged? They'd just need to enforce the limitation to development focused apps really strongly in the review process.
If they were actually vetting the code, they could tell that an application contained a suspicious "download and execute".
In actual fact the Play Store is full of perfectly "vetted" malware, as it stands. What this actually does is prevent the user from coding on the device.
If people notice you, they'll next notice if you are competent or not.