4 ms·

Look at the absolute state of what they are working on. If they are not losers, they are dispirited clock-punchers who don't care about their craft.

by linkage 10mo ago

munchler 10mo ago
It’s more likely that most of them are competent professionals doing their best in an impersonal corporate environment, just like the rest of us.
- shevy-java 10mo ago
  Not all of us sold out to corporations. Admittedly some of those may be a bit ... unusual. Like the guy who created TempleOS.
  - d3Xt3r 10mo ago
    Unfortunately, some of us are stuck in a country which is a Microsoft shop, which makes it next to impossible to get into a Linux job - especially an entry-level one (these are basically non-existent where I live). I've even considered moving to a place where Linux jobs are a thing (Europe), but that would mean learning the local language first and also already having sufficient professional Linux experience (no one would hire a foreigner for an entry level role when they could just hire a local). So unless you've got any bright ideas, I'm stuck in this Microsoft job till someone comes up with some magical Linux roles, or I start my own Linux-based company and twiddle my thumbs because there's no customers...
  - ok_dad 10mo ago
    Gotta sell yourself to someone in this world. There’s no sense in demeaning someone about it.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
- account42 10mo ago
  Shielding individuals from outside criticism is a big part of that impersonal corporate environment.
aeonfox 10mo ago
They could also just be people with bills to pay who are maybe faced with—by some accounts—a very challenging employment market. Or maybe due to disabilities they find the process of finding new work difficult or impossible.
- shevy-java 10mo ago
  That is fine, but they adopt or delegate corporate opinions onto others. I feel that if you need to lie to people because of money, your job is not honest. (I don't mean you; I mean people who need to do this because otherwise they may lose their job etc...)
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - KingMob 10mo ago
    > I feel that if you need to lie to people because of money Then your beef is with capitalism, not Github/MSFT.
    - spencerflem 10mo ago
      It’s not either/or
- vdupras 10mo ago
  Except for the "disabilities" part, which is problematic to classify, wouldn't your description broadly fit the word "losers"? EDIT: I don't understand the downvotes. It's not a value judgement on Github employees, it's about the meaning of the word "loser". Go back to your teenage years. What's a loser? Someone, often through no fault of their own, keep being in a bad situation, having the "short end of the stick". What characteristically makes them losers is that they lack the audacity to snap out of it. Isn't that an accurate definition of what "loser" generally means?
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
bigyabai 10mo ago
The absolute state of Github is that I use it dozens of times a day and it works flawlessly, for free, with intermittent outages. Microsoft is doing more with Github than I can say for most of their products. I won't go to bat for the Xbox or Windows teams, but Github is... fine. Almost offensively usable.
- mason_mpls 10mo ago
  Given the trajectory of Microsoft products it stands to reason Github’s future is uncertain. Also Git is ultimately a hosting platform that any competent software shop can recreate; the people behind the platform matter more than the platform itself.
  - DeepYogurt 10mo ago
    True eventually, but not today
  - gen220 10mo ago
    As someone who is intimately familiar with GitHub’s data models, I wouldn’t say that replacing it is so technically trivial. But even then, you are right that that the moat of social cachet and implicit trust is still more valuable than the moat of technical implementation.
- shevy-java 10mo ago
  So you are ok with 2FA, right? If you contribute code there. Now - what if you are not ok with it? What can you do? > Almost offensively usable I think you conflate two points here. One is how useable github is. The other is: control. At which point are you no longer ok with what a private company does? This is not solely about Microsoft alone by the way.
  - hobofan 10mo ago
    > So you are ok with 2FA, right? Yes. Are you not? It's one of the most effective measures to prevent a whole class of supply chain attacks. On Github the 2FA is also flexible enough to allow non-hardware passkeys, so you can choose a privacy preserving option with good UX.
__turbobrew__ 10mo ago
Github is migrating from their old infra to Azure. Doing migrations like that is hard, no matter who you are. And from a business and engineering perspective I think it makes sense to leverage the economies of scale of Azure instead of GitHub running their own boxes.
- logicchains 10mo ago
  Anyone being forced to use Azure has, at least temporarily until they can find a new job, lost at life, not necessarily through any fault of their own. The poor souls probably also have to use Teams.
  - __turbobrew__ 10mo ago
    The engineers at github are getting paid $300k/year at SWE3 to do their job. I don’t think they lost at life. Why bring people down so hard? That is really solid money and you can provide for a family, retire in your 40s, and it is work that does not destroy your body.
    - nostrebored 10mo ago
      Spending your life working on making things worse (and knowing it) is pretty demoralizing. I know many people who have made the decision to take a pay cut or just quit when they realize that’s their job.
      - Jach 10mo ago
        Sometimes those people aren't realizing that they're making things worse, they're just in a depressive spiral and can't see the other end, or see how much good is still being generated while other things are temporarily worse, or see that different tradeoffs have been made to make things worse in some ways and better in others. Just as people can delude themselves that they're always making a positive impact, people can delude themselves that they're making a negative one. The latter tends to be more costly, though, which can sure be annoying to those with a bias for a more cynical or pessimistic outlook... Trying to ascribe positive/negative impact to strangers isn't usually a useful exercise, even if you have enough data to make a solid case. It can be cathartic -- imagine a different world where programmers making things worse would screw off and go do something else that's not programing! (I have a similar imagining, like of a world where programming is done by those who love it even outside of work -- even though I've worked with and helped hire excellent engineers who only treated programming as a job, they weren't my favorite to work with, and some were very much not excellent.) The best you can hope for is to trigger some self-reflection, and I do think that's important on an individual level. It's better to not make the world uglier, if you notice yourself doing so, and it's not just a distortion of your thinking, then you should probably stop, do something else, or figure out if it's at a level that you can compensate. A Richard Stallman quote I like: "The straightforward and easy path was to join the proprietary software world, signing nondisclosure agreements and promising not to help my fellow hacker....I could have made money this way, and perhaps had fun programming (if I closed my eyes to how I was treating other people). But I knew that when my career was over, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had made the world ugly."
franktankbank 10mo ago
> they are dispirited clock-punchers who don't care about their craft. Interestingly that is synonymous with losers according the definition of it in gervais principle. Which weirdly makes being called a loser less of an insult. (More like realist)

Look at the absolute state of what they are working on. If they are not losers, they are dispirited clock-punchers who don't care about their craft.

by linkage 10mo ago

Look at the absolute state of what they are working on. If they are not losers, they are dispirited clock-punchers who don't care about their craft.

munchler 10mo ago

It’s more likely that most of them are competent professionals doing their best in an impersonal corporate environment, just like the rest of us.

shevy-java 10mo ago
Not all of us sold out to corporations. Admittedly some of those may be a bit ... unusual. Like the guy who created TempleOS.
- d3Xt3r 10mo ago
  Unfortunately, some of us are stuck in a country which is a Microsoft shop, which makes it next to impossible to get into a Linux job - especially an entry-level one (these are basically non-existent where I live). I've even considered moving to a place where Linux jobs are a thing (Europe), but that would mean learning the local language first and also already having sufficient professional Linux experience (no one would hire a foreigner for an entry level role when they could just hire a local). So unless you've got any bright ideas, I'm stuck in this Microsoft job till someone comes up with some magical Linux roles, or I start my own Linux-based company and twiddle my thumbs because there's no customers...
- ok_dad 10mo ago
  Gotta sell yourself to someone in this world. There’s no sense in demeaning someone about it.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
account42 10mo ago
Shielding individuals from outside criticism is a big part of that impersonal corporate environment.

aeonfox 10mo ago

They could also just be people with bills to pay who are maybe faced with—by some accounts—a very challenging employment market. Or maybe due to disabilities they find the process of finding new work difficult or impossible.

shevy-java 10mo ago
That is fine, but they adopt or delegate corporate opinions onto others. I feel that if you need to lie to people because of money, your job is not honest. (I don't mean you; I mean people who need to do this because otherwise they may lose their job etc...)
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- KingMob 10mo ago
  > I feel that if you need to lie to people because of money Then your beef is with capitalism, not Github/MSFT.
  - spencerflem 10mo ago
    It’s not either/or
vdupras 10mo ago
Except for the "disabilities" part, which is problematic to classify, wouldn't your description broadly fit the word "losers"? EDIT: I don't understand the downvotes. It's not a value judgement on Github employees, it's about the meaning of the word "loser". Go back to your teenage years. What's a loser? Someone, often through no fault of their own, keep being in a bad situation, having the "short end of the stick". What characteristically makes them losers is that they lack the audacity to snap out of it. Isn't that an accurate definition of what "loser" generally means?
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]

bigyabai 10mo ago

The absolute state of Github is that I use it dozens of times a day and it works flawlessly, for free, with intermittent outages. Microsoft is doing more with Github than I can say for most of their products. I won't go to bat for the Xbox or Windows teams, but Github is... fine. Almost offensively usable.

mason_mpls 10mo ago
Given the trajectory of Microsoft products it stands to reason Github’s future is uncertain. Also Git is ultimately a hosting platform that any competent software shop can recreate; the people behind the platform matter more than the platform itself.
- DeepYogurt 10mo ago
  True eventually, but not today
- gen220 10mo ago
  As someone who is intimately familiar with GitHub’s data models, I wouldn’t say that replacing it is so technically trivial. But even then, you are right that that the moat of social cachet and implicit trust is still more valuable than the moat of technical implementation.
shevy-java 10mo ago
So you are ok with 2FA, right? If you contribute code there. Now - what if you are not ok with it? What can you do? > Almost offensively usable I think you conflate two points here. One is how useable github is. The other is: control. At which point are you no longer ok with what a private company does? This is not solely about Microsoft alone by the way.
- hobofan 10mo ago
  > So you are ok with 2FA, right? Yes. Are you not? It's one of the most effective measures to prevent a whole class of supply chain attacks. On Github the 2FA is also flexible enough to allow non-hardware passkeys, so you can choose a privacy preserving option with good UX.

__turbobrew__ 10mo ago

Github is migrating from their old infra to Azure. Doing migrations like that is hard, no matter who you are. And from a business and engineering perspective I think it makes sense to leverage the economies of scale of Azure instead of GitHub running their own boxes.

logicchains 10mo ago
Anyone being forced to use Azure has, at least temporarily until they can find a new job, lost at life, not necessarily through any fault of their own. The poor souls probably also have to use Teams.
- __turbobrew__ 10mo ago
  The engineers at github are getting paid $300k/year at SWE3 to do their job. I don’t think they lost at life. Why bring people down so hard? That is really solid money and you can provide for a family, retire in your 40s, and it is work that does not destroy your body.
  - nostrebored 10mo ago
    Spending your life working on making things worse (and knowing it) is pretty demoralizing. I know many people who have made the decision to take a pay cut or just quit when they realize that’s their job.
    - Jach 10mo ago
      Sometimes those people aren't realizing that they're making things worse, they're just in a depressive spiral and can't see the other end, or see how much good is still being generated while other things are temporarily worse, or see that different tradeoffs have been made to make things worse in some ways and better in others. Just as people can delude themselves that they're always making a positive impact, people can delude themselves that they're making a negative one. The latter tends to be more costly, though, which can sure be annoying to those with a bias for a more cynical or pessimistic outlook... Trying to ascribe positive/negative impact to strangers isn't usually a useful exercise, even if you have enough data to make a solid case. It can be cathartic -- imagine a different world where programmers making things worse would screw off and go do something else that's not programing! (I have a similar imagining, like of a world where programming is done by those who love it even outside of work -- even though I've worked with and helped hire excellent engineers who only treated programming as a job, they weren't my favorite to work with, and some were very much not excellent.) The best you can hope for is to trigger some self-reflection, and I do think that's important on an individual level. It's better to not make the world uglier, if you notice yourself doing so, and it's not just a distortion of your thinking, then you should probably stop, do something else, or figure out if it's at a level that you can compensate. A Richard Stallman quote I like: "The straightforward and easy path was to join the proprietary software world, signing nondisclosure agreements and promising not to help my fellow hacker....I could have made money this way, and perhaps had fun programming (if I closed my eyes to how I was treating other people). But I knew that when my career was over, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had made the world ugly."

franktankbank 10mo ago

> they are dispirited clock-punchers who don't care about their craft. Interestingly that is synonymous with losers according the definition of it in gervais principle. Which weirdly makes being called a loser less of an insult. (More like realist)