4 ms·

Ok. To be more blunt I think many of the things you have written are simply not true, or are at least not broadly applicable.

ddevault 6y ago
Are you unable to recognize that you're a fish telling the birds that there's no such thing as the ocean? You have a biased perspective.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- rossjudson 6y ago
  Your response, like your article, is essentially useless. You have massively overgeneralized, telling an elementary schoolchild's story. Is a city bad or good? It is both. Complexity is unavoidable. Different experiences in a large corporation happen. I've personally seen counterexamples to every single point you've made, and they are not isolated. Your failure to acknowledge that points directly at the most obvious bias -- your own.
- WJW 6y ago
  Your own viewpoint is pretty biased too Drew. Your entire software philosophy is based on your own model of ethics and admitting that the software megacorps might not be the very epitome of evil would invalidate most of the reasons for the existence of sourcehut and your other projects. I hope you continue to explore other places in the design space, but calling people evil because you disagree with them makes people disengage. It makes you look like just another zealot screaming his viewpoint into the uncaring masses.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    I have called no one evil. I have spoken of behaviors that I believe are unethical, and necessarily if someone in this thread is doing these behaviors then they may be offended by this. If we are unwilling to talk about ethics for the risk of offending someone who doesn't meet them, then we are inevitably going to fail to uphold our ethics at all. Some of the stuff megacorps are doing is so unethical that we would use it as a grandiose example for the purpose of debate. If there is a point at which it's acceptable to call behavior out as unethical, and we aren't there yet, then I don't know where it is.
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  Out of curiosity, have you worked at a megacorp? A lot of the things you say in the article don't really ring true for me. Maybe it's team-dependent, but I actually have much better visibility here for how my actions impact "the bottom line", and I'm fairly confident that nothing I'm working on is being used to support genocide or slavery. I've worked at small smaller companies and actually had the opposite experience. Way more NDAs, way more issues with HR (at a megacorp, it's true that HR might not give a shit on a personal level about outcomes when there's issues. I'll take that over the situation where HR is a blood relative or close personal friend of someone involved in an issue). This sort of vague apathy is awesome--I can make code contributions to a team I've never met and they're happy to accept them. At smaller companies I've worked at, crossteam collaboration was a lot more difficult because everyone had a little fiefdom they wanted to protect. Even though I don't think (reasonable) NDAs are that big of a deal, I had way more of them at a smaller company. A bigger company is much more vertically integrated so they aren't necessary. And it's not like I'm gonna impress people at a party by reciting proprietary Xilinx datasheets.

ddevault 6y ago

Are you unable to recognize that you're a fish telling the birds that there's no such thing as the ocean? You have a biased perspective.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rossjudson 6y ago
Your response, like your article, is essentially useless. You have massively overgeneralized, telling an elementary schoolchild's story. Is a city bad or good? It is both. Complexity is unavoidable. Different experiences in a large corporation happen. I've personally seen counterexamples to every single point you've made, and they are not isolated. Your failure to acknowledge that points directly at the most obvious bias -- your own.
WJW 6y ago
Your own viewpoint is pretty biased too Drew. Your entire software philosophy is based on your own model of ethics and admitting that the software megacorps might not be the very epitome of evil would invalidate most of the reasons for the existence of sourcehut and your other projects. I hope you continue to explore other places in the design space, but calling people evil because you disagree with them makes people disengage. It makes you look like just another zealot screaming his viewpoint into the uncaring masses.
- ddevault 6y ago
  I have called no one evil. I have spoken of behaviors that I believe are unethical, and necessarily if someone in this thread is doing these behaviors then they may be offended by this. If we are unwilling to talk about ethics for the risk of offending someone who doesn't meet them, then we are inevitably going to fail to uphold our ethics at all. Some of the stuff megacorps are doing is so unethical that we would use it as a grandiose example for the purpose of debate. If there is a point at which it's acceptable to call behavior out as unethical, and we aren't there yet, then I don't know where it is.
Rebelgecko 6y ago
Out of curiosity, have you worked at a megacorp? A lot of the things you say in the article don't really ring true for me. Maybe it's team-dependent, but I actually have much better visibility here for how my actions impact "the bottom line", and I'm fairly confident that nothing I'm working on is being used to support genocide or slavery. I've worked at small smaller companies and actually had the opposite experience. Way more NDAs, way more issues with HR (at a megacorp, it's true that HR might not give a shit on a personal level about outcomes when there's issues. I'll take that over the situation where HR is a blood relative or close personal friend of someone involved in an issue). This sort of vague apathy is awesome--I can make code contributions to a team I've never met and they're happy to accept them. At smaller companies I've worked at, crossteam collaboration was a lot more difficult because everyone had a little fiefdom they wanted to protect. Even though I don't think (reasonable) NDAs are that big of a deal, I had way more of them at a smaller company. A bigger company is much more vertically integrated so they aren't necessary. And it's not like I'm gonna impress people at a party by reciting proprietary Xilinx datasheets.