It seems to me that almost all upper management, and even many working as a manager inside the technology or I.T. departments, simply treat their tech workers and departments as arms of the finance department proper. Over time, every management decision is eventually made to only support the prime finance goals which is HIGHLY RISK AVERSE so decisions are made to avoid all risk at all costs -- at the expense of more "human-based" decisions like employee satisfaction, process improvements, experimentation or innovation. When this happens to highly-technical people like doctors or engineers, it tends to impact overall job satisfaction because training, experimentation, and innovation goes away usually because management starts saying "No" way too much.
"Hey boss, can I try this new process? It might make our department happy."
"No that costs too much."
"Hey boss, can I learn this new programming language? It might making our jobs easier and faster to do."
"Nope, there is no budget."
The language spoken from the manager to the team member is "finance speak" which the subordinate employee usually has absolutely no idea how to communicate to the boss.
So when a member of the team asks the boss for something interesting to do, the boss just starts saying "no". Every. Single. Time. This effectively trains their teams to never ask to do interesting work. So they stop asking... and the job becomes mundane and boring. And when the job is boring you start losing meaning in the job. And when you don't have meaningful (or fun) work to do, you just don't care anymore and eventually hit apathy. Then the mistakes start happening, and the employee turnover comes.
I do think we need to figure out better ways to run our companies. Profits (while important) _cannot_ be the ONLY goal because it just isn't sustainable for the long-term at all. We all know that balance is needed. Food for thought.
This is a direct outgrowth of the Shareholder Primacy theory which is what many MBA students are taught. A business has many stakeholders and obligations and at some points in the past, employees and community were valued in balance with shareholders. Corporations provided pensions and acted for the good of the community in addition to making a profit for shareholders.
Once you embrace that your primary reason to exist is to enrich shareholders, everything lines up under the CFO. CEO pay packages are now typically weighted to incentivize the CEO to maximize shareholder value too because so much of their compensation is in stock.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_primacy#:~:text=Sh....
From a purely financial and management perspective, this is an EXCELLENT decision. It really is a _lazy_ method to handle layoffs with excellent perception from stock holders' viewpoint. We all know how bad it looks when management executes on a situation similar to Gavin Belson firing the Nucleus team. Perception is all that most management and financiers care about anyways as long as the money keeps flowing. The people do not matter, only the money does. It is acceptable to sacrifice your people, as well as the welfare and good will of your employees, in favor of shareholder primacy anyways. So instead of doing layoffs, instead you can make business decisions that negatively impact employees to _make them want to quit on their own_. Hell... that saves a lot of money in the long run as well as a lot of time on management's end ( time = money ). Then when top or even mid talent is lost, it still doesn't matter because the "left overs" that remain still keep the business running at a "good enough" level.
And that, my friends, is the key phrase on what is prioritized in all business right now ... "good enough". All that matters nowadays is the answer to the question of "good enough". For example:
- Are the quality/quantity of FT employees we currently have on payroll good enough to keep the business running?
- Does our invoicing/contracts/income look good enough?
- Are we doing good enough to keep our competitors at bay?
- Is there anything we can cut to stay good enough?
- Are there good enough incentives for our employees to stay with us?
- Are there good enough incentives for our CUSTOMERS to keep doing business with us?
It is my opinion that the days of "expecting excellence" or striving to "be the best" is totally over for the current generation. For the most part in the tech business environment, management and market forces are only interested in keeping money flowing at a "good enough" level. On top of that, western culture seems to have forgotten what "the best" even means right now. And without even having a definition of "the best", how is it possible to be "excellent"?
We are in the middle of an extremely boring time in our lives. There is a massive drop off of real talent and creativity. Top and mid talent are deciding to hold back because the incentives are few, if any exist at all. Honest improvements and true innovation will be stagnant for at least 5 more years. Boredom will be the norm for a while. Until something actually _exciting_ happens or something incredible is discovered (I have NO idea what that could be), this will be the norm for a long time.
> this is an EXCELLENT decision. It really is a _lazy_ method to handle layoffs
That's one way to see it. You could also see it as a tremendous blunder. The people who will "self-layoff" are not the low producing team memebers. These are the people who know their value and have competitive even better offers elsewhere. You just took anyone with a modicum of ambition, skill or talent who was already contemplating a move and gave them a big ol' nudge to do it. People who are low producing will put up with what they have to. They may complain but they won't self select out.
"...The trick is that they're not promoting an ideology/cultural value domestically; they're bowing to local influence everywhere, including domestically."
I think that this is the main issue. It is my opinion that this problem stems from the business and finance minded dogma of pushing efficiency, regardless of the long-term damage done to a brand/product/service, simply because in the short term it is _cheaper_ to do so. The long term damage is traded for short term gains.... kicking the bucket down the road if you will but doing long term damage to the business or institution overall.
In this particular context, lets take the example of Disney cutting/splicing/editing certain scenes from their films and shows in order to gain release approval in China. Instead of having one film product with a certain edit in the US, then another for China, then another for India, and so on, it is just _cheaper_ to have a single version edit of the film to release "everywhere". So in order to do this Disney has to appease a variety of censors and overview boards and make all changes in order to make a single film product where every governmental review board is happy. The pros is that you have a single version of the film thus making overall production costs cheaper. However the main con is that you may have specific ideological influence added to the product where it should or shouldn't be, or the tone or message of the film product might fundamentally change which breaks the premise/lesson, or the story is watered down essentially making the product meaningless, or the entertainment product might not be entertaining! The only real benefit in this case is that Disney still gets to release the film in as many markets as possible (thus meeting the rule of numbers for possible profit) but the customer starts to feel less connected to the brand so they start to lose interest and eventually abandon it. There are better examples of course. This is just one.
Glad to see that a big US retailer like Target is using the same types of "de-facto" observability tools that I've been using for a while at all of my various employers over the last 5+ years - which are Grafana, Prometheus and Elastic Stack (specifically the Kibana UI for the logging analysis screenshot).
"Yeah, the US sounds rather hostile to raising children".... As a lifelong US citizen with three kids of my own, I do feel there there is some truth here. In my opinion most of the school systems across the USA have shifted to treating children as burdens instead of blessings. I would argue this has happened enmasse in the culture at large and getting worse over the last 20 years. Perhaps a big portion of the problem is that we don't take good care of our teachers first and foremost.
It is best to set your expectations extremely low for this type of acquisition. My personal opinion: Broadcom is _buying_ its way into the Enterprise technology space by hook or crook. When Broadcom acquires a company their M.O. is to immediately install finance-driven leadership and focus strictly on cost cutting measures coupled with accelerated profit-making endeavors. The only thing VMware employees have to look forward to in the near future are layoffs, all types of cost reductions, team consolidations (i.e. you do more work with less resources) and severely reduced R&D. And the only thing that VMware customers have to look forward to are increased VMware costs, more vendor lock-in, reduced satisfaction with support, and almost zero innovation.
Again, this is just my opinion so I could end up be wrong. Or maybe I am just in a bad mood today... meh
What are the opinions on moving a personal family domain on the GSuite Legacy free over to Proton?
It seems like the cost is reasonable, 9.99€/month for 15 email addresses and 3 custom domains. I have just one domain and 5 email addresses for my family so I don't need much. Curious to what everyone thinks about Proton or if there might be a better alternative. Side note: I know Proton is based in Switzerland but my family and I are based in the US. Not sure if that is something which would be a problem.
Otherwise, I think they are really the best private email company.
And now with this change, they are the only privacy ecosystem out there, unless you count nextcloud which a different thing and isn't as heavily encrypted as proton.
Be aware that proton doesn't offer standard SMTP connections, you need a bridge which is only available on desktop.
The same thing is true with the calendar/contacts there is no cardav/caldav sync.
I hope they are working on integrating a Dav bridge on desktop and syncing from mobile apps.
>The same thing is true with the calendar/contacts there is no cardav/caldav sync.
The lack of CardDav and CalDav are absolute deal breakers for me. If I can't get my contacts and calendars into my preferred apps on my phone there's just no way they'll get adoption from me. I stick with Fastmail because it just works for mail, calendars and contacts across all of my devices and apps.
However I would remind you that since Fastmail is based in Australia, its privacy is pretty limited.
> The new law also allows officials to approach specific individuals—such as key employees within a company—with these demands, rather than the institution itself. In practice, they can force the engineer or IT administrator in charge of vetting and pushing out a product's updates to undermine its security. In some situations, the government could even compel the individual or a small group of people to carry this out in secret. Under the Australian law, companies that fail or refuse to comply with these orders will face fines up to about $7.3 million. Individuals who resist could face prison time.
Email isn't really secure or private anyway. And Proton's email is only making email between Proton accounts private, so unless a large number of my email recipients are also on Proton it's a moot point.
I don't get the draw of Proton. If I send email to someone else outside of Proton I should assume that email is now in an insecure state.
Fastmail may not advertise privacy, but honestly, I don't think much email in general should ever be considered private, including much of what is sent from Proton.
Proton's major draw, in my view, is the storage being encrypted and not accessible unencrypted to the server, not the transmission and emails to others. While it does do relatively convenient PGP encryption to other ProtonMail users (and annoyingly inconvenient PGP encryption to others, when I've tried), these are rather limited in scope, because of the limitations on recipients.
If your concern is a major state-level actor, able to spy on every recipient/sender you're communicating with and generally tap emails being transmitted, yes, Proton offers little protection, and email is insecure. If you're worried about a data breach or targeted attack compromising your stored email in its entirety, however, it does. These are more feasible for smaller-scale attackers, and in getting an entire, potentially complete history of your emails, potentially offer something more than just spying on one email.
I'd speculate that targeted attacks are more often client-side, usually trying to steal credentials from the user, but at least the user can be careful about these. Having all your correspondence stored and readable on a server that isn't under your control means you have to trust the security of the server much more than you would with this type of encryption.
> annoyingly inconvenient PGP encryption to others, when I've tried
If the recipient has set up Web Key Directory for their key the encryption looks just like for a Proton recipient (transparent key fetch in the background). And WKD is quite common and easy to setup (eg all major Linux distros have it).
Proton's feature is its privacy adovacay and now its ecosystem.
Its a compelete ecosystem designed with privacy in mind, and encrypting emails is not the only benefit, another ProtonMail benefit is that no one can read the stored emails, only you can do that.
Maybe so, but if the recipient of the email, or sender of the email is not using an email service that provides the same then those emails should not be considered private. They might not be accessible on my email service, but they are on someone else's.
Yeah, anything in the US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the UK should be considered accessible by the government and shared between the 5 upon request.
It would work if you are all fine with using the same login.
If you want separate logins, take a look at Tutanota, it's 1€/month and you can add each family member as a full user.
As to the location, there is no issue, Tutanota is based in Germany, but both options (Switzerland or Germany) are fine for usage from the US. At least I've never heard about anyone complaining.
Our family did the same thing... gmail is pretty superior in most aspects, but so is their ability to search your deepest darkest secrets. a tradeoff we were fine making. that said in the year we've been using it their overall "arc of change" has been positive and this latest refresh looks to follow that trend. FWIW I use the iphone beta app through trustpilot and it's a lot better but this refresh looks like they're moving towards GA'ing that version soon.
I have Visionary, which allows for five logins if I recall right. It also has a drive replacement, and something like 12 VPN assignments. I run a few domains through it without issue.
Edit: Looks like they aren’t allowing anyone new to sign up for Visionary. That’s recent as I was seeing signups available as of a week or two ago if I recall right.
I use Visionary subscription for that, so far the only downside was lack of mailing lists - I really want some emails to be received both by me and my wife.
I had an extremely similar situation when we purchased our home last year.
The home had an estimated valuation of 320k but because of the ridiculousness of the US housing market bids were going for upwards of more than 20k higher than the asking prices. We put in our bid for 341,100 - and we got it. I found out later that the next highest bid was exactly 340,100. That extra 1k in our offer made the difference for us.
“…In exit surveys during the last two years, a majority said they would recommend working at Twitch but preferred to move on, the spokesperson said.”
Yeah right… Give me a friggin break. Exit interviews? You are telling me that they actually _believe_ that exit interviews are truthful or honest? It is crystal clear to me the B.S. being said here by the company rep. This is all corporate politics and it shows. The vast majority of the tech employment situation nowadays (in the U.S. at least) is that we are effectively “tech mercenaries” with loyalty only to our close colleagues and no loyalty to any company. Companies burned their employees’ loyalty away during the mass layoffs of 2020 and 2021. I know there is some nuance to the layoffs that occurred for some company circumstances - but not the vast majority of publicly traded enterprises on the stock market.
Exit interviews are an HR mandated necessity and are completely useless. The claim is that exit surveys are to help better understand _why_ an employee has decided to leave and then relay to management to help them with improving employee retention. This is a lie. In my personal experience, exit interviews are really just a final test by the company to determine if the exiting employee should be blacklisted, kept on lawsuit watch, and/or can be trusted to keep their mouth shut (I.e. will they honor their non-disclosure agreements? Can they keep our IP secret? Will they blab about other internal product ideas or customers to their new employer? Are they going to try to make others quit with them? Etc).
In almost all of the cases that I’m aware of where an ex-employee was honest about the long list of issues/abuses on their way out, it has always been a bridge burned and never turned out for the better.
My personal policy on exit surveys is this: on your way out, be a nice as possible and keep you mouth shut about the bad stuff. When asked why you are going, the only good answer is “I just know it is my time to move on.” And if asked if you would recommend others to work at the employer, you will respond with a yes because this is true (For example, yes you would absolutely recommend someone you don’t like to work at a place you don’t like). And after that, say NOTHING else. Be nice then run for the hills.
Edit:: one note on my personal policy on exit interviews, the example provided _implies_ the previous employment was a bad situation. Thankfully I haven’t had a great deal of negative ones. I still stick with my opinion of lying your ass off at exit interviews because it just isn’t worth the hassle otherwise.
There are two reasons why I continue to use a personal Windows machine - PC Gaming and Microsoft 365 Family. On the gaming topic, almost all of the games that I play are also on console which is where I spend most of my gaming time anyways. On Microsoft 365 Family, OneDrive backup and sync is the top reason why I have it. I use it to sync all of my family photos between my phones, PC, Macbook, and iPad for myself, my wife, and my kids. It is extremely convenient and hard to argue otherwise. Beyond data backups, the biggest reason why we have the subscription is because my wife really really wants to use the Office Apps because it is what she is used to the most (Word, Excel, Publisher). So to my family and I, Microsoft 365 = value and convenience.
For me, if a good OneDrive linux sync client was out there that would be a good reason for me to finally jump ship off of Windows. I suppose I'm just waiting for the right push to move away from Windows. Maybe this is that time. Hell, I already know that my personal PC (which I built early January 2021) "fails" the Windows 11 upgrade readiness check anyways so I already feel burned. All of the reasons why I used Windows for decades was because of its "value" for me. Lots of convenience, tons of community support and tons of software, etc. But not anymore. In my opinion, what Microsoft is doing with Windows is similar to what Disney is doing with their parks. "Value" is being removed while increasing prices and limiting "choice". Maybe I still do have _some_ "convenience" in using Windows. But I'm losing more and more reasons to stick with Windows over time as more of Microsoft's business decisions are impacting you and me, and not necessarily for the better.
"Hey boss, can I try this new process? It might make our department happy." "No that costs too much."
"Hey boss, can I learn this new programming language? It might making our jobs easier and faster to do." "Nope, there is no budget."
The language spoken from the manager to the team member is "finance speak" which the subordinate employee usually has absolutely no idea how to communicate to the boss. So when a member of the team asks the boss for something interesting to do, the boss just starts saying "no". Every. Single. Time. This effectively trains their teams to never ask to do interesting work. So they stop asking... and the job becomes mundane and boring. And when the job is boring you start losing meaning in the job. And when you don't have meaningful (or fun) work to do, you just don't care anymore and eventually hit apathy. Then the mistakes start happening, and the employee turnover comes.
I do think we need to figure out better ways to run our companies. Profits (while important) _cannot_ be the ONLY goal because it just isn't sustainable for the long-term at all. We all know that balance is needed. Food for thought.