I've had the pleasant experience of having worked for PMs at several companies (not at Google) who were great at their jobs, and advocated for the devs. They also had no problem with devs talking directly with clients, and in fact they encouraged it since it was usually the fastest way to understand and solve a problem.

Sounds like you just got stuck with a shit PM to be honest.

Almost every job in the US is primarily about pleasing leadership at the end of the day.

If companies didn’t want that sort of incentive structure to play out then they would insulate employees from the whims of their bosses with things like contracts or golden parachutes that come out of their leaderships budget.

They pretty much don’t though, so you need to please your leadership first to get through the threat of at will employment, before considering anything else.

If you’re lucky what pleases your leadership is productive and if your super lucky what pleases them even pleases you.

Gotta suck it up and eat shit or quit if it doesn’t though

Never escaping the hype vendor allegations at SWEbench are they.

I don't understand how we arrived at letting "random nation crew drags their anchor making the boat extremely slow and loud and breaks $100M+ critical infrastructure" get off scot free including their boat but it clearly can't continue to go on. If not a court then government must step in, nothing less is acceptable to any voting person.

This is not a Bluetooth issue. The chip manufacturer Airoha just felt it acceptable to ship a wireless debug interface that allows reading the SoC memory with no authentication whatsoever, enabled in retail customer builds. They are just not a serious company (which is why their security email didn't work, either).

Wireless 'JTAG'! The Dream :)

Now that's a premium product if I've ever seen one.

Pretty sure modern apple watch has wireless "Jtag", so yeah.

I mean, most companies have security last on their budget list.

It tells more about human nature than about a company.

This can only be fixed systemically by huge fines and/or imprisonment. Otherwise the temptation of taking the risk to neglect security is too strong.

That's never quite how it happens, they can't let go. You can see it in the "Office of the CTO" thing. I've seen that one many times before: when confronted with the endless complexity and depth of building a real global product, they recoil. Everything takes too long, is too uninteresting. They instead build up this parallel engineering organization that is showered with money, headcount and C-level attention to build the new moonshots, with the subtext that whenever it's "ready", it will be thrown over the wall to the actual engineering org. It's a speedrun to make your engineering talent leave.

Oh wow you just described our last CTO to a T.

Ironically the past 6 months now all the political content is just insta dead flagged and removed, the love isn't lost but nobody wants to be the one responsible for defending it.

I'm sure Trump pressure will soon bring those 1000% savings on pharmaceuticals, just hold on.

I think both of those POVs are wrong. The whole thing about F-Droid is that they have worked hard on not being a central point of trust and failure. The apps in their store are all in a repo (https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata) and they are reproducibly built from source. You could replicate it with not too much effort, and clients just need to add the new repository.

So that they can pay 100x more expenses for.. no gain? They would pay an arm just for traffic.

It's OpEx. MBAs will pour unlimited money into OpEx to avoid CapEx.

Clearly I don't have an MBA because this mindset doesn't make sense to me. Burning money unnecessarily is burning money unnecessarily, no matter where it's burned.

And when your Cloudflare site is down, most of the Internet is down too! There's no downside!

That's true. It will be down much less often than a single server in someone's basement.

Counterpoint: that would require using CloudFlare.

That is, in my opinion, far superior to using a single server ran by "someone".

I guess that is the beauty of opinions: they can be different from person to person. In my case, I would rather avoid CloudFlare if possible.

It feels like you already lost the whole point of this thread. Then why is the stock up?

If I could explain why stocks do what they do I would not be writing code for a living.

For good measure, a bunch of this is funded through money taken directly from the electorates taxes and given to a few select companies, whose leaders then graciously donate to the latest Ballroom grift. Micron, so greedy they thought nothing of shutting down their consumer brand even when it costs them nothing at all, got $6B in Chips Act money in 2024.