Sweeping generalizations, without any empathy or ability to understand circumstances different from your own is a recipe to become a person that is incapable of understanding others.
I don't see why this has to be some kind of common stance in the tech community. Yes many of us make decent money, but you have no idea what peoples life circumstances are. Learn some empathy before you comment.
> Juniors and interns really strugle in a remote environment.
Blanket statements like this are trying to make a multifaceted problem into a single problem. I don't understand why we are always so quick to say underperforming remote junior engineers are underperforming because of remote work. Maybe the problem was Meta went half in on supporting remote as an onboarding ramp and teams did not put the work in to make sure Juniors thrived in a remote environment.
Speaking from experience, If you are truly trying to be a remote company, you adjust as needed to support new employees, junior or not.
I think you both are correct. Take normal graduate, split spacetime continuum into 2 parallel universes, and let 1 join same company remotely and onsite. Unless given company/team is very toxic, graduate who has gazillion questions every day and gets stuck even more will get them answered more easily if he just comes in person to seniors, rather than chasing calls/chats every time he is stuck or uncertain how to decide.
Quick brainstormings, pair programming. I mean its not up to discussion, real world on site is more efficient. Now from perspective of senior always bothered by those pesky juniors with their stupid questions, loud environment etc. its a different story. Company can set itself up to be much more open to fully remote, but its a conscious and continuous process that needs to be accepted by all seniors, people tend to revert to previous way of working.
Personally, I can see this also for seniors who are also onsite. In truly global teams, you are constantly chasing people and teams to do their work, approve processes, deliver stuff etc. Compared to person X who will respond to your email/chat in 4 hours it takes 1 minute including walking to get feedback, understand problem, manage expectations, push things further etc.
It really depends on a lot of factors. For somebody who's shy / socially awkward / introvert (lots of those in tech) it's _a lot_ easier asking questions in chat than in person, especially a shared chat with not too many people, it's also way faster than walking across the hallway to catch the person that you need.
In my experience coaching many young engineers in person and remote, the problem is not so much that it's easier for them to ask questions, is that they don't ask questions, like, at all. They are too worried to sound/appear dumb, even when all the senior/staff engineers are super nice. And in a way I understand that, they are unproven, they have to show their worth to everyone else.
My theory is that the idea that early career people don't do well remote is that it's easier for the senior people to forget about them and not check up on them regularly to make sure they're progressing. If a person is sitting close to you and not making progress it's a lot harder to miss. Also the casual "hey everything OK with your problem?" is a lot easier in person than online. That being said, with some adjustments it really doesn't take too much effort on the Tl/Manager side to make sure junior folks don't get stuck.
I've lead a few teams remotely now and the most successful ones were the ones where I started checking up on the most junior ones often, as often as every day, just asking low-key questions like "hey do you have any questions for me? are you stuck anywhere?" for a bit, just to make sure they were feeling OK asking me when they had a problem, and re-routing them to the right person as needed. After a while they feel safe and start doing it on their own, but it might take a while depending on the person.
As an experienced person, I can chat with anybody at the company within minutes, it's so much more productive than chasing somebody in the office (which could be easily 10~20min walk away).
In person is way better for socializing, creating team bonds, etc. but you don't need that every day, a yearly/quarterly team/company offsite is sufficient.
This is my perspective working at companies that are big enough that they would be global anyway. For a smaller company I can see the argument of having everyone in the same office, but even then your giving up a lot to make up for that (commuting, walking around finding the right person) and I don't think that scales well beyond the 1000 people mark.
How many people out there randomly zoom with their former coworkers that they never met in real life, after leaving their job?
Your 20s are a critical time for your career to make connections and friendships - in person. You need to be around people, making friends over beers and community lunches, and learning social skills in a professional environment.
Are we that spoiled that the excuse is "I don't like public transportation"?
Do companies take a productivity hit when people are in the office? Probably. And many openly acknowledge that, but asking people to come to the office two times a week is not some sort of wage slavery.
> Your 20s are a critical time for your career to make connections and friendships - in person. You need to be around people, making friends over beers and community lunches, and learning social skills in a professional environment.
Okay, sure. But why does this need to happen in the workplace?
And more importantly, why are you advocating for employers to unilaterally declare that this needs to happen in the workplace?
Connection doesn't need to happen in the workplace, but the reality is that most people spend a majority of their weekday waking hours working so would be great if building connections there were feasible.
> Your 20s are a critical time for your career to make connections and friendships - in person. You need to be around people, making friends over beers and community lunches, and learning social skills in a professional environment.
No one is saying you don't need to be around people, but a job can be just a job. I don't need to make a ton of friends at work to do my job, and the idea that that should be a requirement/expectation needs to stop. It enables the chance for too many unhealthy boundaries to be created young workers that don't know any better. If you start in your early 20's and are made to see everyone as friends, family, etc. Then when someone tries to push you into a 12 hour day, it doesn't seem that bad. You can forge working/professional relationships virtually just as well, if you put the effort in.
Now sure it doesn't work for everyone, but again my argument isn't that one is worse than the other, it is just that we make too many blanket statements. What works for you might not work for me, and these organizations trying to force one or the other is harmful in the end. You can have co-existence, especially in a company the size of Meta, you can have a plenty successful office presence and remote presence.
> Are we that spoiled that the excuse is "I don't like public transportation"?
I don't think anyone said that in this thread... That being said, it shouldn't be a surprising fact that people in US cities dislike public transportation. In a previous job of mine, it was quicker to sit in 45 minutes of traffic outside of Washington DC then take the metro, and I was in an area with supposedly great access to public transit. Maybe if all these companies were serious about their workers' best interests they would do more to help invest in and lobby local governments to support public transportation.
> And many openly acknowledge that, but asking people to come to the office two times a week is not some sort of wage slavery.
If you were hired with the expectation to come into the office x number of days, that is fine. A lot of people were hired with the promise of being able to work remote, so changing that is where it tends to be a bit of a bad situation.
In general this animosity between office work and remote work advocates has gotten out of hand. These can co-exist.
If that means only hiring at half the rate because of the longer onboarding ritual then that's a good a reason as any not to do remote onboarding for some companies.
the adjustments may not be possible. People tend to build rapport easier when physically close by, and this rapport is how trust gets built up over time, and only by having this trust do knowledge and institutional culture gets transmitted.
I do believe that junior/new grads who come into a fully remote work place would have a harder time to build trust with existing employees, get less mentorship, and/or find it hard to "gel" properly.
I agree that this seems to be an issue for new hires that I've seen.
But I think the blame for this lies in management and the seniors on the team. If a fresh out of college grad feels hesitant to ping a coworker then that coworker is doing something wrong. I'm seeing a lot of companies and teams seem to shift this blame to the WFH situation, where really it is a failure of the team to not integrate and work well together in a shifting situation.
Plenty of companies that are remote first have no issue mentoring junior engineers, so I don't see what the excuse is for companies that are not.
> the blame for this lies in management and the seniors on the team
It absolutely does. Point is a lot of industries never formalized training, instead relying on osmosis across teams. That creates a--hopefully temporary--disadvantage for new hires. Again, in some fields.
The thing that has always frustrated me about anti-cheating/anti-plagiarism software is that it almost always only hurts people that did something by accident or unintentionally. When I took the one kubernetes certification exam as part of an old job, you used software like this and at one point I leaned too close to the screen and the proctor couldn't see my face and that got me flagged.
People that want to cheat or game the system will find ways, it isn't hard to do. In undergrad we setup a copy of the code checking software that our department used so that we could share code without it getting flagged as copies. I'm sure there are ways to game these systems too if you are motivated enough.
One of the issues is also just academia being so hyper-focused on thinking everyone is there to become an academic which is not the case for the vast majority of people. So these exams and the guidelines for student evaluation is grounded in that expectation instead of the reality.
My partner recently finished her PhD and has started working as a medical writer. During her academic career, it was beat into her head don’t plagiarize, everything must be yours.
In her first review after a few weeks on the job, her manager says that she takes too long to do her work; they just need her to take what the client says verbatim, fact check it, and then slap it in a document. She was treating her work like an academic assignment and putting in the effort to craft something unique, when they really just need a fact checking typist.
8 years in higher ed, published study on cancer drugs, thousands of mice died, millions of dollars spent on the lab... all so she can transcribe some text and then validate it against the studies.
Unfortunately each faculty member produces about 30 PhD students in their career (one per year). The number of faculty positions has been close to flat since the 1970's. So one in 30 PhD's will get to be faculty member. She probably took the job because she wants/needs a job and the company likes to have the status of PhDs doing the work.
Sure, so what? Anyone smart and dedicated enough to complete a Phd is smart enough to realize this going in. Surely the vast majority of people getting Phds don't expect to ever become academics and have some other plan.
> Anyone smart and dedicated enough to complete a Phd is smart enough to realize this going in.
No, this isn't true at all. People don't complete PhD's because they looked at their options and thought that one was the best. They do it because other people told them they should, and they just never thought about it.
Society treats university as a jobs training program. Observationally it seems like the universities (in Asia in particular, and the US to a lesser degree) encourage you to treat your diploma like a golden ticket to a good job.
> Academia is the worst job training program ever.
Pet peeve of mine. Academia is not a training program for jobs. The role of academia is not to produce business-perfect-candidates.
If business wants trained workers, they should train them. Cutting costs by not training them, then blaming universities for not producing trained workers is disingenuous at best.
Yes... and no. Yes, what you say is true - that isn't the point of an academic degree.
But no, because the way students (and parents) think about it is "go to college so you can get a good job". And many, many employers require a degree or they won't look at the candidate. In the real world, academia is functioning as a job training program.
Or at least as a gateway to the good jobs. But if it's going to be a gateway, but not do any training... that's pretty inefficient.
>> People that want to cheat or game the system will find ways, it isn't hard to do.
As someone who taught a college, that's a flawed statement. Let me propose this to you. You teach Calculus 1000 and there is an end of term exam. Your normal end of term exam is one where everyone sits in the same room, proctors are looking for cheats, things checked, etc. Instead this year you tell your students that this year it will be a take home exam with the following rules: 1) they have 2 hours to do it during the team home peroid; 2) no cheating by the honor system.
Do you think the rate of cheating will be the same? I mean by your logic, it should be.
I had my fair share of uncheatable open book exams, calculators allowed back in college. One I had on Calculus (or was it Linear Algebra?) was way harder than a comparable closed book exam. You really needed to know the subject to pass vs just memorizing a couple of formulas and plugging them in the right place.
Another professor devised an exam that used your student ID as a variable of the first question, and subsequent questions used the previous answers as inputs. Impossible to cheat.
> I had my fair share of uncheatable open book exams, calculators allowed back in college. One I had on Calculus (or was it Linear Algebra?) was way harder than a comparable closed book exam. You really needed to know the subject to pass vs just memorizing a couple of formulas and plugging them in the right place.
We're discussing this in relation in relation to COVID, so no large gathering. This means no open book in person exams, I'm specifically talking about take home exams.
> Another professor devised an exam that used your student ID as a variable of the first question, and subsequent questions used the previous answers as inputs. Impossible to cheat.
If someone can figure out how to cheat on an exam where each answer depends on the previous, and the original seed is unique to each student, wouldn't it show a pretty thorough mastery of the subject matter?
I think the larger point is that it is fairly easy in any subject to design a test that is very hard to cheat on. It is much harder to find the resources in modern education to grade that test since each submission is likely unique.
Tests that are easy to grade (like multiple choice), tend to be tests that are easy to cheat....
How do you propose that this should work e.g. in proof-based maths courses? You can't just tweak a theorem to prove by the value of some "unique seed", the theorem might become wrong.
It's true that you usually can't cheat your way through such an exam provided you actually write the answer yourself, but in a take-home situation you can always ask someone else to solve it for you.
You give it a few hundred problem classes, and constraints for possible answers, and it will randomize the class of problems and generate a unique problem as well as calculate the answer. Then you submit the answer as well as your work and it gets corrected.
For things such as proofs, it might give you a problem for which the theorem is needed, then ask you to solve the problem, indicate which theorem you used, and then prove the theorem.
Do you have any example of any software that can generate problems for actual proof-based courses (e.g. abstract algebra)? I'm having a really hard time imagining this, we can't even fully automate theorem proving - how are we supposed to automate theorem generation? And this ignores the fact that you also need to make sure that all the proofs are "of the same difficulty" in terms of fairness.
Ah, no, the theorems would have to be manually selected. But given a high enough number and an automatically generated context it makes cheating much harder.
One option, if you have a reasonably low student-to-instructor ratio: make it an oral 1-1 exam for each student. A video call with the instructor and the student; you ask questions, they answer. If you have 20-ish students, it will eat up half a work-week or so, which is more work than grading 20 exam papers, but not _that_ much more.
Of course if you have 50 students per instructor this is not going to work...
> had my fair share of uncheatable open book exams, calculators allowed back in college. One I had on Calculus (or was it Linear Algebra?) was way harder than a comparable closed book exam. You really needed to know the subject to pass vs just memorizing a couple of formulas and plugging them in the right place.
The idea that an honor code is enough is belied by the fact that software like this catches cheaters, no?
I mean, we're obviously upset about false positives, and we should be. But I'm presuming that some people are caught who were cheating, and without the software they would have cheated and not been caught.
We can suggest that with an honor code in place, maybe some of those cheating students would have not cheated, because... I mean, if they were willing to cheat with software in place, I'm not sure why would have been deterred by an honor code.
I think in about 98-99% of cases, people who claim an honor code prevents cheating are deluding themselves. Yeah, if you don't have any way of catching cheaters, then you can pretend you have a 0% cheating rate. But it's pretend.
I have taught at multiple honor-code institutions (and still do). It does not prevent cheating. However, it shifts focus: I can go about my teaching life starting from an assumption that students are not cheaters—and I'm personally convinced that most aren't.
The flipside is that when you do catch a cheating case, you completely throw the book at them. It's legitimately easier to cheat under an honor system, if that's what you're wanting to do... so my assumption is that if we catch you at it, it's likely part of a pattern, and if we catch you multiple times the pattern is irreformable. It is not uncommon at honor-code institutions to expel students on the second offence (sometimes even on the first).
I do think that cheating is less prevalent at my institution (and my previous institution) than it is in the larger university population.
I perhaps wasn't clear enough but I meant solely when it comes to these type of anti-cheat systems being used. Obviously it would be different for in-person vs remote/take home.
I don't see why we should allow for the possibility that the ratio of cheaters would stay the same with or without the surveillance. That could only be true if the ratio of potential cheaters were so low that the threat of detection introduced by the spyware can't reduce the ratio further.
We may hate the software on ethical grounds, or because it degrades the exam-experience on many levels, or because its use can be considered abusive, but obviously it has an effect in the intended direction.
> One of the issues is also just academia being so hyper-focused on thinking everyone is there to become an academic which is not the case for the vast majority of people
I'm not sure I follow why this is bad. I think academic rigor and being a decent scholar, as well as being able to parse and produce research are good things (and in my mind, those are the corner stones of being an academic). Did misunderstand you?
FWIW, in germany (and likely other european countries) we have a two tier system for higher education, consisting of universities and "applied universities", with the latter focusing on applied skills and the former focusing on research, which in think is sensible.
I don't think the problem is that academic rigor isn't good. I also should have stated I was talking more about US universities in this particular case.
The problem I see is that what you talk about as academic rigor isn't what is taught and evaluated in many of the programs and classes that I've seen or been a part of. A lot of these exams and assessments don't particularly evaluate you on your ability to research and understand knowledge. If I know for example that my physics professor uses a bank of questions then it is much more incentivized for me to memorize that bank of questions vs. understanding the content and working the problems myself. Whereas in say a Discrete Math or Algorithm based class, the final exam/grade is based on a proof you have to write yourself, that encourages (or rather at times forces) you to learn and research like you said.
I also think the issue, and this may just be me looking at from my own experience, a lot of people don't want to be scholars, as you put it. They went to a University based on the unfortunate expectation for some jobs that say you need that diploma as your entry ticket.
in germany (and likely other european countries) we have a two tier system for higher education, consisting of universities and "applied universities", with the latter focusing on applied skills and the former focusing on research
While it isn't codified, we effectively have this in the US as well.
Most of the "brand name" universities, plus the flagship state universities, conduct research and grant various doctoral degrees.
Then we have the middle-tier colleges (state and private) that grant masters (often only professional degrees like nursing, MBAs, etc).
And thousands of Baccalaureate-only and 2-year community colleges.
Also, in the US, "university" generally indicates a post-graduate degree granting institution. And "college" usually refers to a 2-year and Baccalaureate-only school. But, also not codified and there are notable exceptions (ex: The College of William & Mary is a top-notch full university who's name pre-dates the convention).
In the US, "college" means narrow subject matter, and "university" means a wide variety of colleges all together on one campus.
For example, there may be a "College of Engineering" and a "College of Arts and Science" that are part of one university.
It's possible to have a stand-alone college that isn't in a university. A good example is Berklee College of Music, which is narrowly focused on music.
By all means, you are definitely oppressed at work for making a sexual joke. Let's ignore the fact that that joke may be seen as harassment of others in the office. You shouldn't be called a Nazi, but if you are contributing to an intolerant culture then the company you work for has a perogagitive to get rid of you.
And you are probably downvoted constantly because you are spewing beliefs and opinions that scream, "I would prefer to work in a Mad Men era office, than one that values and respects the opinions and beliefs of others."
Fact of the matter, our society is better by saying that beliefs about making a statement like, "there are only two genders", are inappropriate and have no place in modern society.
As always you are more than welcome to exercise your right to free speech, but that doesn't mean others can't exercise their freedoms to remove you from the equation.
> By all means, you are definitely oppressed at work for making a sexual joke.
I think 'ecmascript was referencing a particularly well-known case of a person making a sexual joke to another in a causal private conversation outside of work, in which some busybody overheard the joke and made so big a ruckus that the joker got fired from his job.
> but that doesn't mean others can't exercise their freedoms to remove you from the equation.
I know you didn't mean it like that, but the way you phrased it kind of reinforces ecmascript's point about social justice being pushed by a group of extremely intolerant people, who are willing to break all the rules of civilized discourse in order to have things their way.
I never wrote anything about being oppressed lol. I never even mentioned work, just community. A lot of open source projects utilize the same rules. If you so much as make a single dongle joke, you may be excluded.
I always say whatever I believe, even if I am at work. If the company would fire me over a joke then fine I wouldn't want to work there anyway. So far I haven't met any issues on that front. Also I don't work in the US so you can't really fire someone where I live because of a joke and it's outright illegal to do it over beliefs.
I do not get the mad men reference, since I haven't seen the show. But so what if I am? No one values or respects everyone's opinions, that is just such a load of horseshit imo. Obviously people here don't value or respect my opinion for example.
> are inappropriate and have no place in modern society
This is very funny, a biological hard fact has no place in modern society? I don't even understand how this is even a controversial thing to believe yet you believe it has no place in a modern society.
I do not wish to live in your definition of a modern society.
> Obviously people here don't value or respect my opinion for example.
While it may seem like that, people aren't valuing your opinion that involves beliefs or views that can inherinitly make groups of people feel discriminated against. A person that identifies as non-binary or gender-fluid would not feel comfortable being around your opinions.
Everyone is entitled to their opinions and beliefs, but when you say whatever you believe you have to understand the potential to be disliked because of that.
People constantly view your dongle jokes or whatever as being insane that you can't make them anymore, but the thing is even before it wasn't socially acceptable, people still were made uncomfortable by it.
A person that identifies as a flower wouldn't either. What is your point exactly? I think that is bullshit and the science is on my side. I don't care if those who claim to be allergic to electricity gets offended when I say that shit is not real, just as I claim that there is only two genders and you are the one who is a bad actor if you try to make others believe otherwise.
It's like a sect that people just seems to buy into for some reason. It doesn't make any sense, it doesn't have any scientific validity what so ever and still that is a touchy subject but calling out other silly stuff people believe aren't? Do you also believe in a flat earth perhaps? If not, why not?
I have a hard time living that hypocrisy, dislike me or not. I do not care if everyone doesn't like me as I expect everyone not to. It is ok if you have another opinion but it is pretty typical since intolerant people usually are like that, can't accept that other people do not share their worldviews. Also I actually am pretty good at making jokes, so it doesn't seem that way to me.
I should've added that I do speak my mind when asked about it or if its a open discussion. I don't go around calling people overweight, but if they ask me if I think they are I will for sure tell them what I think they are ;)
Bucket encryption doesn't protect against anything except someone getting access to the hard drives underlying S3 and somehow recovering data.
If you've somehow left access to a bucket open the odds are that you also have it configured to let anyone with access to the bucket decrypt the files. AWS calls this server side encryption, where S3 automatically encrypts and decrypts files for you. You can also do client side encryption, of course, but it's much more difficult to manage because you have to deal with keys in your application.
Default bucket encryption would require you to misconfigure two controls instead of one. S3 only automatically decrypts if you are an authorized principal on the KMS key, having S3 permission is not enough.
"You can also do client side encryption, of course, but it's much more difficult to manage because you have to deal with keys in your application."
Well,SSE-KMS is not difficult to manage if you have sensitive customers data like Capital One does. I use it all the time. You can pretty much audit the buckets and see what is going on.
And if Capital One has used SSE-KMS on the buckets,we might not be talking about this data breach today.Incompetence? Complacency?
I am well aware how S3 works, I just mean you can use custodian to enforce SSE on the bucket as well as KMS based encryption, so the original commenter is just being a troll was the point I was getting at.
And if you knew anything of what you were talking about, you would see how easy it is for an engineer to make a mistake and there is 0 auditing or oversight. Also, if YOU actually took 10 seconds, you would see all the data was un-encrypted and in plain text. So where is all this "safety" the dude is speaking of? Cloud Custodian does shit when implemented incorrectly -and that's my point. You think banks are making all this effort, but in reality, the security team is completely understaffed, often not listened to, and in the end - we find this stuff happening all the time.
There, I gave you more than 10 seconds. Trying keeping up.
Wow, talk about someone I wouldn't want to work with...
Regardless of whether or not the app makes sense or should be used, (I am not a fan of it), the rhetoric you are using is childish and immature. You can voice dislike without being an asshole about it.
Well, this is odd. I agree with him, and I really do not care about the way he expressed his opinion to the point that I would work with him more than people who think that an Electron-based terminal is a good idea. If I have to choose between the two, I would choose the former. We are different, I suppose, which is OK.
I imagine that at one point there were people that didn't want to work with people who thought that garbage collection was a good idea. Or IDEs. Or high-level languages.
Voicing dislike with brutal honesty is far more effective. And it's the truth. Why should the truth be watered down? Just to make a few sensitive people feel better? That's not reality. As far as I'm concerned, that is fraud.
> Voicing dislike with brutal honesty is far more effective
then your way of voicing it is not brutal honesty, because you are most definitely not being effective, the only thing you are going to accomplish is putting whoever you are talking to on the defensive and now you lost your opportunity of convincing them. Or maybe brutal honesty is not that effective, you choose which one of the 2
You can say the truth of the matter without being brutal. You are trying to tear down someone that contributes to open source, and whether or you not like it, people out there do or they wouldn't still be developing it.
And contrary to what you seem to think, if you don't like the product don't use it, and better yet don't comment on it as you aren't helping anyone.
What's fraud is that you represented your opinions in such a tremendously ineffective way that none of us can read them now, and you are acting like you blessed the world. Nobody even knows what your opinion was, I hope you're happy.
It is easy to assume that from the vantage point of being a developer and being able to notice an app that is native vs. something like electron. But for most users and even a lot of developers, they won't notice as long as the app functions.
I work on a team that encompasses both Tech and Business Associates and all the non-tech people love slack, and have no complaints about the app itself. Hackernews loves to get on its high horse and complain about electron and so many other trends, but as us developers love to forget, we are rarely the target audience for the apps in which we create.
People may say they love using Slack, but they certainly wont like their computers being slower and/or their laptop's batteries draining. And they wont blame Slack or any other Electron application for that, largely because they do not know why that happens! They'll blame their computer, perhaps Apple/Microsoft, their luck or whatever, but they do not have enough knowledge to judge Slack or any other misbehaving application unless the application makes it crystal clear that it is the reason.
It is up to the techies and developers to point out why that happens as they are the ones who have the necessary knowledge to figure out what is wrong. You cannot rely on users to figure out that stuff.
For a hobby project that I wouldn't expect to monetize, $200 is too much, I totally agree. For a side project that makes some passive income however, I would hope to start out under $50 and scale up as needed.
I don't see why this has to be some kind of common stance in the tech community. Yes many of us make decent money, but you have no idea what peoples life circumstances are. Learn some empathy before you comment.