Yes, why surround yourself with people who are critical of you, when you can surround yourself with yes-men who will loyally toe the line? Positive contributions comes from loyal subjects who agree with their betters.
The “people who are critical of you” are very broad category that includes both toxic behavior and constructive disagreement. The former must not be tolerated, the latter can be encouraged as long as it’s not a blocker. In this case it is clearly the former and it requires suppression, but disciplinary action may have been too harsh or perfectly adequate depending on prior history with this employee. It was not said like “it was insensitive to appear in front of the team this way”. It was indeed said like he is a rich jerk. Zero added value, rage bait, polarization of the team.
> In this case it is clearly the former and it requires suppression
That's not clear at all. Why do you say so?
Read the article. "Rich jerk" are Atlassian's words, not the employee's. Even if they are it's not obviously the former.
I refuse to believe anyone, including Oracle employees, likes Larry Ellison.
If Microsoft/Google/Apple fired everyone who badmouthed Satya/Sundar/Tim, half their products would fall apart overnight.
Do you see any, even little sign of constructive criticism in what she said? Anything that could improve corporate culture or help her peers or management to understand the problem? Any hint on how it could be fixed?
I don’t.
> Read the article.
I did read the article and came to the same conclusion as Atlassian.
> I refuse to believe anyone, including Oracle employees, likes Larry Ellison.
When you sign the working contract, your job is to act in the interests of shareholders. If you despise them or disagree with what they do, you can still work there and use your position to align their interests and the interests of the public. You can try to change it from within. But the moment when you decide to burn the bridges is the moment when you should leave. To me this is pretty obvious, and I’m really surprised to see here some sort of entitlement.
"acting in the interests of shareholders" (which, for the record, no employment contract I've ever signed requires) does not mean blind allegiance to management and certainly doesn't mean not calling out bad actions by management.
The employee's statement here was fact. The CEO did harm the careers of employees and did call in to harass them without even bothering to come to a company office.
The CEO, who has much more of an obligation to act in shareholders' interests than an IC, shouldn't be attacking and alienating their labor force.
Yes, and what is the essence of that labor? It is to create profits for shareholders. You are not getting paid to contribute to toxic culture or to seize the means of production. CEO could have been in the wrong, but the moment when the “us vs them” idea starts dominating in corporate culture is the moment company dies and those jobs that everyone is so afraid to loose are ceasing to exist.
>This is ignoring that the concept of companies having to care about shareholders above everything else is a lie spread to justify evil behavior.
Nobody is claiming the “above everything else” here
> Yes, and what is the essence of that labor? It is to create profits for shareholders
No, it's not. I'm not sure what your source of capitalism koolaid is, but employees are transacting labor for money, and shareholders do not come into it at all.
The nature of labor is stocking shelves, writing code, emptying trash bins, or whatever else you do. Full stop.
If you want employees to "think of the shareholders first", you give them enough ownership that the stock price actually makes a major difference in their life, and crucially, enough control at the company to actually influence the stock price. In practice that's the C Suite and maybe some senior VPs. No one else should be stressing out trying to make the owners richer.
This conversation is not about „employees thinking/not thinking about shareholders“. You are cherry-picking that topic and taking it out of context, for what reason exactly?
I have explained already a few times why and what context matters here. Are you struggling to understand it or just avoiding it?
I fully agree with you, it doesn’t. However I wasn’t saying that, so I have to conclude that you are speaking to someone else here, making up arguments from an imaginary opponent, and I’m not needed here. Good luck.
That's one way to look at it. Another way is that people who are aligned with the CEOs mission will help achieve the mission, and people who are not aligned will not help achieve the mission. And it's the CEOs job to define the mission
When the mission is to screw over the employees, we don't need people who will align with that. CEOs should be held responsible for the enemies they create within their organization. Treating people as necessary collateral damage is unacceptable.
The mission is usually stupid and also dumb, and it would be in the CEOs best interest to surround himself or herself with people willing to tell them that.
Meta could've saved billions of dollars if more people told Zuck that the Metaverse is stupid, because it was. The end result is the same. The death of the idea. That much is actually unavoidable, because stupid and bad ideas will always fail, with or without support. So, it shifts to a question of it being a long, drawn-out, expensive death or a quick Old Yeller type putting down.
I think the issue we're seeing across a lot of companies is that leadership is incredibly stupid. I think we have this wrong idea that, because a CEO exists purely to make decisions, they must be pretty good at it. But that's not really the case. You can only be capable of doing one thing and still be shit at that one thing, it's definitely possible.
The problem is, I think, we assume that CEOs and other leadership work like normal people, but I don't think this is the case. I think there is a brain decay that occurs as people become more rich and powerful. It's becoming evident to me that the human brain was never intended to be in that type of situation, and there are consequences. There's a sort of detachment of reality that comes along with that, and it almost seems unavoidable. Like a type of delusional psychosis that just onsets when you become rich and powerful enough.
It's not a new thing, either. You can basically see this across all of history with kings and rulers of all kinds. The really good ones do something remarkable: they predict their own oncoming psychosis. They build in controls and preventative measures so that, when they inevitable go off the rails, the damage is minimized. It's wild, isn't it? I think about everything George Washington did prior to his rise in US politics, and it can only be describes as stopping his future self from eventually becoming drunk with power.
> I think there is a brain decay that occurs as people become more rich and powerful.
My prevailing hypothesis is that as you advance in leadership roles there's a natural tendency to have the ego grow. After all, you have evidence for your ego: you make important decisions and you've risen up in whatever social structure. And I think there's a natural bias to surround yourself with yesmen. They create less friction, so naturally we want that. And it's hard to distinguish yesmen from people who genuinely believe in the same things as you. But the yesmen are able to hide this way, even by being "disagreeable" in just the right way (which makes it hard to distinguish). With the more proficient yesmen themselves rising to the top too.
So I think it's important for leaders to surround themselves with a distribution of opinions. I think in order to make good decisions we need friction. We need frustration. We need people to tell us we're wrong when we're wrong. We also need people to tell us we're wrong even when we're right, because the challenge of the idea forces us to think deeper. But I think the real challenge is implementing this correctly. It needs most "advisors" to be acting honestly, independently, and in good faith. It's hard to cultivate that and I think to do so you need to let people trash talk you, even egregiously. Because a misinterpretation of punishing someone can be seen interpreted as retaliation (even if completely fair), and upsetting the whole balance. Context can easily be lost
I suspect it's an unstable equilibrium, making it really difficult to maintain.
Qualified immunity just protects the police, and other government officials personally. If there is grounds for a lawsuit then he could still sue the government that employs the police department.
I think in general, if it is a legit warrant, it is very difficult to win a lawsuit for damage. Though with that video, and how high profile this has been, he might be able to win something. though IANAL, and I'm just going off my gut.
The federal government and a most state governments in the US have laws that waive or partially waive sovereign immunity for tort claims against the government.
But these police don't work for the state government. They worked for the Adams County government. The immunity waiver you linked explicitly only applies to the state government.
> (A)(1) The state hereby waives its immunity from liability,
> (A) "State" means the state of Ohio, including, but not limited to, the general assembly, the supreme court, the offices of all elected state officers, and all departments, boards, offices, commissions, agencies, institutions, and other instrumentalities of the state. "State" does not include political subdivisions.
> (B) "Political subdivisions" means municipal corporations, townships, counties, school districts, and all other bodies corporate and politic responsible for governmental activities only in geographic areas smaller than that of the state to which the sovereign immunity of the state attaches.
Additionally even if the officers did work for the state, the immunity waiver still would not apply to the action of breaking down a door while executing a search warrant.
> (3)(a) Except as provided in division (A)(3)(b) of this section, the state is immune from liability in any civil action or proceeding involving the performance or nonperformance of a public duty
and Ohio state law specifically authorizes breaking down doors to execute search warrants so this action would be one "involving the performance or nonperformance of a public duty"
> (A) When making an arrest or executing an arrest warrant or summons in lieu of an arrest warrant, or when executing a search warrant, the peace officer, law enforcement officer, or other authorized individual making the arrest or executing the warrant or summons may break down an outer or inner door or window of a dwelling house or other building
I didn't know about sovereign immunity, but I just looked it up and there are exceptions to it. I think this one in particular could fall under a civil rights violation.
People routinely get money from excessive force used by police officers, and I believe that does extend to property too.
Qualified immunity means it is almost impossible to sue the officers directly, which is why so many people have a problem with it. Not only do taxpayers have to pay for the actions of a bad police officer, the officer themself isn't held responsible for their actions.
On the other hand, you don't want officers afraid to engage with a dangerous situation because they might bankrupt their family if they do the wrong thing in the heat of the moment. It is a sticky situation, and before smartphones and body cameras there was no real way to know if an officer crossed the line. As technology improves, I expect there to be more personal accountability, while also allowing the officers enough leeway to do their jobs without hesitation.
Police departments are sued constantly. Most major police departments even have dedicated divisions set up just to assess and respond to lawsuits. Oftentimes by just knocking on the door and handing over a check.
Making up details of the incident doesn't help either. They didn't eat anything, a cop just did a double-take at the lemon pound cake, and Afroman wrote a song about how they wanted to eat it.
I'm not sure I follow, are you saying that because the current US government is so bad that people are rejecting Microsoft products, the rest of the world should be thankful to the US for "waking them up"?
Yes. The key point of view being from someone outside the US. I cannot speak for those in the US. But the point is techies outside the US had been reduced to merely configuring US products. Speaking where I am from IT organisations were now being led by accountants and lawyers because there wasn't any decision to make, just go with Office 365. The hardest part was negotiating the often opaque licensing. There has been a revitalization of the craft of software development and I think in the long run this will be good for the industry. Yes there might be fragmentation but hopefully standards start getting adopted to counter this fragmentation and interoperability.
Yes, but the issue is that they don't have identity. The idea of assigning unique identifiers to particles is doomed because, basically, "there are no particles, there are only fields" (https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.4616).
Particles are how quantized fields present themselves when probed by localized interactions. In general, they're also observer-dependent.
The idea of assigning an "ID" to an object reflects a macro-level notion of re-identifiable objects persisting through time. But at the quantum level, that kind of classical individuality - object identity - doesn't exist.
I wrote awhile ago on here that he should stick to his domain.
I was downvoted big time. Ah, I love it when people provide an example so it can finally be exposed without me having to say anything.
Unfortunately this is a huge problem on here - many people step outside of their domains, even if on the surface it seems simple, but post gibberish and completely mangled stuff. How does this benefit people who get exposed to crap?
If you don't know you are wrong but have an itch to polish your ego a bit then what's stopping you (them), right.
People form very strong opinions on topic they barely understand. I'd say since they know little the opinions come mostly from emotions, which is hardly a good path for objective and deeper knowledge.
Doesn't that kinda show that these services are not actually based on not creating any genuine value, but are rather just parasites that squeeze as much money from their victims as they can based on the victim's income, rather than the product they can offer?
That is simply not true, token price is largely determined by the token price of their rival services (even before their own operational costs). If everybody else charges about $1 per millions of tokens, then they will also charge about $1 per millions of tokens (or slightly above/below) regardless of how many answers per token they can provide.
It only matters if the rivals have same performance. Opus pricing is 50x Deepseek, and like >100x of small models. It should match rival if the performance is same, and if they can produce model with 10x lower token usage, they can charge 10x.
Gemini increased the same Flash's price by something like 5x IIRC when it got better.
I bet that the actual "performance" of all the top-tier providers is so similar, that branding has bigger impact on if you think Claude or ChatGPT peforms better.
This applies when there is a large number of competitors.
Now companies are fighting for the attention of a finite number of customers, so they keep their prices in line with those around them.
I remember when Google started with PPC - because few companies were using it, it cost a fraction of recent prices.
And the other issue to solve is future lack of electricity for land data centers. If everyone wants to use LLM… but data centers capacity is finite due to available power -> token prices can go up. But IMHO devs will find an innovative approach for tokens, less energy demanding… so token prices will probably stay low.
Of course they wouldn't, owning and operating a plane is -incredibly- inconvenient. That's what we are discussing, tradeoffs of convenience and discomfort, you can't just completely ignore one reality to criticise the other (admiting some hypocrisy here since that ideal train system mentioned earlier only exists in a few cities).
Is this some culture or region or climate related thing? I’ve never heard of BO brought up as a reason to avoid public transport or flying commercial in northern parts of Europe. Nor have I experienced any olfactory disturbance, apart from the occasional young man or woman going a tad overboard with perfume on the weekends.
Should we restructure society so that having a private airplane is easier and cheaper, but if you don't have one you'll have serious trouble in daily life?
I don't know about a full on conspiracy, but it's no secret that in the US they put a lot of additional sugar into products you wouldn't think had them.
Are you sure the difference didn't mostly come down to being a tourist in temporary accommodation vs having access to a familiar grocery store and your home kitchen?
In Europe you don’t expect your bread to have added sugar, for instance. That tasted disgustingly.
You also don’t normally expect sweeteners in your meat. Those sauces are also disgusting. Good beef meat (and in the USA there’s very good meat), needs only salt and maybe a bit of pepper. Not those weird sugary sauces they put in the USA.
Seriously, for someone from Europe, some food in the USA is just disgusting (and it’s not due the quality of the ingredients, as those are usually very good) but due to the stuff they add on top.
All of the things you described are available, that's true, but any major supermarket, even in rural areas, will have plenty of healthier options available as well.
Take bread for example. Sure there will be some crappy sliced white bread on the shelf. But there will also be organic sprouted 7-grain high fiber next to it. In fact, there will probably be more healthy varieties available than just about any other country.
The options are there, but it can be exhausting to actually find them.
There are far too many products that try to position themselves as "healthy", but are closer to the rest of the crap on the shelves than actual "healthy" food. Even more frustrating is the insane amount of food now using sugar replacements to masquerade as a healthy option.
I personally, find it exhausting to shop at new stores because it can take looking at 2 to 5 items to find one that's actually made healthy.
French food having sugary sauces has nothing to do with American food having too much sugar though, and I'd wager 99% of the US has never heard of steak au poivre. We may know of pepper steak, but that doesn't always have sauce.
> In Europe you don’t expect your bread to have added sugar, for instance.
Were you eating sweet bread meant for coffee or desserts and thinking it was for making a sandwich? Most breads use just enough sugar to rise the yeast.
> You also don’t normally expect sweeteners in your meat.
Were you eating barbecue, where the sauce is whole point? There is plenty of unsauced meat in the US. Any steakhouse will give you as much meat as you want without any sauce unless you pour it on yourself.
> America hides sugar in everything. Plain old white sandwich bread often has loads of added sugar.
It's not hidden, it's on the label, and expected. I just don't buy garbage bread.
> Sugar isn’t necessary for bread making. Yeast can break down the starch. That’s what it evolved to do. Flour, water, yeast, salt, done.
That usually means that malt is added to the flour (most bread flour). You can get breads without added sugar or malt, but you're going to have to go to a bakery that makes their own dough and buys flour without additives, which is getting rarer and rarer.
Every day another city or village in 4 different states. I won't go into everything I saw or noticed while staying there. HN doesn't like criticism of the US.
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