> This would be escalated to upper management to find out why people are under so much time pressure that they need to take calls in the bathroom, and at the very least doing so would be made some kind of violation of new policy.
Or why there are people so idle that they can defecate without working.
Remember, HR protects the company, and complaints about heavy hitters because they work on porcelain aren't going to reflect well on the complainant.
Yes, that old chestnut. It's such insanely toxic advice too.
You're correct that HR is there to protect the company. The original post did not specify "heavy hitters", nor did I ever say to make an accusatory report. HR doesn't have to specifically know who is taking their calls this way.
I'm sorry if you or others have had such bad experiences with the most basic of HR interactions, though if I assume you're taking your own advice I doubt you've ever tried.
There's the tactful way to do this, and then there's whining to HR. I would be very careful taking advice from whiners because they're the ones who keep propagating this bad faith myth about HR.
All I'm saying to do is notify them about ongoing behavior with an emphasis on how it probably makes the company look bad and that it's done by many. They don't care who is doing it and it's not personal. I'd honestly be very surprised if this behavior doesn't already fall under some existing policy.
> I'm sorry if you or others have had such bad experiences with the most basic of HR interactions, though if I assume you're taking your own advice I doubt you've ever tried
I use HR to protect my company from people like you.
It's exactly as I suspected. The only people spreading the toxic advice about HR are the ones who benefit most from making the workplace suck for everyone else.
I can only hope you just think HR is there to insulate you this way and haven't had to test it, because it simply isn't. You really don't want to be on the losing end of a wrongful termination suit. It's only because people rarely bother that you may not have come across one of those. Then it then escalates to worse when all of HR spills their guts about the pressure they were under to protect higher ups.
There is no loyalty after all. It's just a job to everyone else.
Yes, this is a classic example of a programmer (or data scientist in this case) believing their expertise in one areas generalises to topics which they don't fully understand.
The great thing about the internet for now is that anyone can chime in, but anytime you find yourself wiring something like "I don't see why", it may be time for a deeper dive to see if the why is well founded.
This completely overstates the problem, is not supported by the evidence, and is exactly the kind of alarmism that undermines genuine climate science.
An AMOC slowdown or even collapse does not trigger an ice age. Full glacial periods are driven by orbital forcing, not ocean circulation alone.
The evidence points to regional cooling of a few degrees in parts of Western and Northern Europe, not rendering everything north of France uninhabitable.
Past ice sheets advanced over millennia under much colder global conditions than today, not on human timescales.
Even severe AMOC scenarios would be major and costly disruptions, not close to Europe being wiped off the map.
Companies don't care about you or any other developer. You shouldn't care about them or their future well-being.
> Because this cost is implicit and not explicit it doesn’t occur to them.
Your arrogance and naiveté blinds you to the fact it is does occur to them, but because they have a better understanding of the world and their position in it, they don't care. That's a rational and reasonable position.
>they have a better understanding of the world and their position in it.
Try not to use better/worse when advocating so vociferously.
As described by the parent they are short-term pragmatic, that is all. This discussion can open up into a huge worldview where different groups have strengths and weaknesses based on this axis of pragmatic/idealistic.
"Companies" are not a monolith, both laterally between other companies, and what they are composed of as well. I'd wager the larger management groups can be pragmatic, where the (longer lasting) R&D manager will probably be the most idealistic of the firm, mainly because of seeing the trends of punching the gas without looking at long-term consequences.
No, they just have a different job than I do and they (and you, I suspect) don't understand the difference.
Software engineers are not paid to write code, we're paid to solve problems. Writing code is a byproduct.
Like, my job is "make sure our customers accounts are secure". Sometimes that involves writing code, sometimes it involves drafting policy, sometimes it involves presentations or hashing out ideas. It's on me to figure it out.
> Like, my job is "make sure our customers accounts are secure".
This is naiveté. Secure customer accounts and the work to implement them is tolerated by the business only while it is necessary to increase profits. Your job is not to secure customer accounts, but to spend the least amount of money to produce a level of account security that will not affect the bottom line. If insecure accounts were tolerated or became profitable, that would be the immediate goal and your job description would pivot on a dime.
Failure to understand this means you don't understand your role, employer, or industry.
> Your job is not to secure customer accounts, but to spend the least amount of money to produce a level of account security that will not affect the bottom line
I completely agree with every line of this statement. That is literally the job.
Of course I balance time/cost against risk. That's what engineers do. You don't
make every house into a concrete bunker because it's "safer", that's expensive and unnecessary. You also don't engineer buildings for hurricanes in California. You do secure against earthquakes, because that's a likely risk.
Engineers are paid for our judgement, not our LOC. Like I said.
You can apply the same logic to all technologies, including programming languages, HTTP, cryptography, cameras, etc. Who should decide what's a responsible use?
The NIH/RECOVER programme and equivalents worldwide provide a path to treatment for ME/CFS. Prior to covid, substantive funding for ME research was too small to explore disease pathways and diagnostics. Many ME sufferers were told their disease was solely treatable with CBT, and lacked aetiology. Basically, they were denied any validation of having a disease.
The NB thing, right now is "no common cause" and probably would stay there, but the patients deserve some basic respect and their concerns should be acknowledged. Handling small cohorts is hard. A lot of public health funding could be wasted but then things like prion disease, AGS emerge. Tick Bourne diseases in Australia receive short shrift because "they have never been seen here" but there is no domestic testing regime, it's expensive, and treatment (long term antibiotics) run counter to general views on risk/reward issues.
I'm not a health professional. I have a lot of respect for public health and epidemiology, the corner cases interest me. For ME, covid provided "evidence" which public health could use. Maybe for the NB thing something similar will emerge. I don't think Morgellens is going to turn out to be in the same bucket, I do think this is a socially acquired mental illness but perhaps I am unfair?
> Many ME sufferers were told their disease was solely treatable with CBT, and lacked aetiology.
This is true? CBT and related treatments were pretty much the only thing that had been shown to be effective at reducing the severity of symptoms (no one should be making claims about whether it is changing an underlying disease process, but improving symptoms is a huge deal), and the etiology was unknown. Any responsible clinician or scientist should have been telling patients exactly that.
fair enough. i didn't really feel like getting in a back-and-forth about ME/CFS as i find they generally never end. CFS does not appear to impact energy to engage in online arguments.
> StackOverflow was successful explicitly because of the people/question it excluded. The "toxicity" was the point.
This is a very charitable read of the situation. Much more likely is, as another commenter posted, a set of people experiencing a small amount of power for the first time immediately used it for status and took their "first opportunity to be the bully". Question quality and curation was always secondary to this.
> > The point of StackOverflow was explicitly not to help the question-askers, but to prioritize the people who would reach the question via Google.
It obviously was only tolerated because of that, as evidenced by the exodus the moment a viable alternative became available.
> Much more likely is, as another commenter posted, a set of people experiencing a small amount of power for the first time immediately used it for status and took their "first opportunity to be the bully". Question quality and curation was always secondary to this.
It always looks like this from the outside. Especially for those who don't understand what the quality standards are, or what the motivations are for having those standards.
There is a Code of Conduct and a flagging system for a reason.
> It obviously was only tolerated because of that, as evidenced by the exodus the moment a viable alternative became available.
This is not a contradiction or rebuttal. Every Internet community is allowed to decide its own objectives. Stack Overflow's was explicitly not "help the question-askers". It was brought into existence specifically because of the social problems, and lack of utility for later searchers, observed in "help the question-asker" environments (i.e., traditional discussion forums). Of course there was an exodus when it was no longer required to bother a human to make a natural-language query find the right information (more or less, most of the time). From Stack Overflow's perspective, that's just an improvement on conventional search, and no more of a problem than the fact that Google used to be good at indexing the site.
(I still don't understand why Firefox spell-check doesn't think "asker" and "answerer" are words. They're not in my /usr/dict/share/words, either. I've been speaking English for over four decades and I still hate it.)
I don’t know that the vast majority of Americans know who Eric Schmidt is. And unless they find little green men, no one will care about this project, so it won’t affect his (essentially nonexistent) reputation.
It’s not unlike if you had a blog post about a gardening project in your backyard. Perhaps interesting to gardeners, but approximately no one cares.
Sure, all lethal weapons are a horrific nightmare on some level.
But you also have to keep in mind that China, Russia and Hamas will gladly develop them anyway. Until we've figured out the worldwide peace thing, we need to keep running the race, awful as it is.
But AI weapons aren't horrific in some way common to "all lethal weapons." They have that and more.
AI weapons are specially horrific in the way they have potential put massive and specific lethal power under the total control of a small number of people, in a way (like all AI) that basically cuts most of humanity out of the future (or at the very least puts them under a boot where no escape is imaginable).
In some ways, they're even worse than nuclear weapons. A nuclear attack is an event, and if you survive there's some chance of escape. Station 100,000 fully automated drones around a city with orders to kill anything that moves, and the entire population will be dead in a couple months (anyone who tries to escape = dead, everyone else sees that and stays inside out of fear until they starve).
Manpower and attention limitations have been and important (and sometimes only) limit on the worst of humanity, and AI is poised to remove those limitations.
Honestly, I think the tech is probably getting pretty close to what I described. You don't need AGI or anything like it. Just autonomous surveillance drones watching for movement, and attack drones that can autonomously navigate to the area and hit the target (the latter is just stringing together a lot of drone tech I've seen implemented, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzWIYOOKItM, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/magazine/ukraine-ai-drone...).
> But even if it's true, I don't see why letting China and Russia etc be the only ones having these weapons is good?
That doesn't mean the tech isn't scary (a bad thing) or that I want SV people like Schmidt developing it. There's something weirdly misanthropic and unhinged about many in SV.
He was responsible for a bunch of the anticompetitive hiring agreements with Jobs at Apple and he’s a fairly well known lothario, but otherwise benign IMO considering his competition at that wealth level.
He is also the man who said ”If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.” as if people are not being hunted for being LGBTQ even in the west, or persecutions of various kinds are a thing of the past, or spousal abuse doesn’t matter.
It seems to have worked for Bill Gates as well. He definitely did some not so nice things when starting and running MS - I think it unfortunately goes with the territory of running a successful company at scale.
But subsequently he has become more know for his philanthropy.
I mean, yeah. When people way saving the planet they mean saving humanity. That's exactly it. A barren rock does no one no good. I don't get it why people hang onto this expression, it's as if you heard that George Carlin bit and now that's your anchor to reality.
It's not like the dinosaurs had a save the earth campaign. Yet, before humans the rock had life forms that died out while the rock itself continued being a viable planet supporting life. If humans die off, the planet will continue on with life continuing in new ways.
For the past 50+ years there really has been a somewhat significant and quite influential body of people who genuinely want to preserve the planet’s ecosystem even at the expense of the people living on it.
Bezos is one of the best, though? Blue Origin, the Long Now foundation, and I could go on all day. I don't know of too many other billionaires so willing so spend vast sums on the Heinleinian dreams of their youth.
I don't believe it's a net benefit to the world when a single person fundamentally changes entire economies, captures a significant portion of the resource stream and then maybe a some point redirects a portion of of it to their pet projects. Although I strongly support shooting tech bros and politicians into space (one way; even better)!
Or why there are people so idle that they can defecate without working.
Remember, HR protects the company, and complaints about heavy hitters because they work on porcelain aren't going to reflect well on the complainant.
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