I once worked at a very pro-hacker firm (USA) - our CTO, good as he was, once tried to migrate our Ubuntu based servers to BSD, this being a very high tier performance oriented HFT firm, purely on his love of the distro.
A good dozen engineers in a team of 50 ran relays, one bold fool ran an exit node and was falsely fingered for CSAM type crimes during my tenure. The net effect was no one ran relays anymore. The poor exit operator remains an Irish to this day because he has dozens of headlines about his arrest and none about the dropped charges.
I hate to be “that guy” - but I truly believe there is a degree of so-called privilege in that perspective.
Not that I don’t value or agree with it, those soft skills are incredibly important, but one can I hope have both the soft and the hard skills.
Family and romance have evolved quite a bit in recent years - but all things equal are you wanting to marry into a family with productive skills, assets, etc? Would you pick true love with the peasant girl or marry to strengthen the alliance with Normandy? Would your answre to the latter change if you were the pauper?
I don't doubt my comment comes from a place of privilege, but the OP seems like there is some privilege there too so maybe in a way, that makes it an even better fit ;)
I also think both hard and soft skills are important, it just feels to me that a parent's job is primarily the latter, not the former. There are plenty of places that can teach your child very well how to become a programmer/electrician/younameit, but not many places that you trust to teach your child how to be a good human (amplified by the fact that a lot of social conditioning happens and is engrained before we really go super deep down the "tech tree" of hard skills in life)
During COVID times I witnessed the most absurd pissing match - our CTO (and founder) was taking calls from his boat at anchor (camera on, palm trees in the back drop) while was working from a coffee shop(!)
The CEO tried publicly dressing down the CTO on a large call because his workspace must be “too distracting to work from.”
I had a similar incident just after COVID. I couldn’t be fired for reasons, so I complied with the psychotic RTO bullshit in the most noxious way with a smoker in the back of my truck, had it cooking all morning, and hosted lunch in my office.
CEO guy was in Mexico or something and lost his mind, and went on a 10 minute tantrum with the principal of the group the owned the company, who happened to be in my office eating brisket. It was a good laugh.
A more popular example seems to be giant Russian boxer Nikolai Valuev, who sports some serious brow ridges and a lower forehead, but still has too much chin.
I checked my hometown “lighthouses” which technically exists and technically has a light but only exists as a tourist trap monument built in the 1980s. Well, it’s on there.
> 1. Finding out a company wants several grand to flip the "allow SAML" switch on the tenant config, and a few thousand a year in additional licensing to leave it on. (I had a vendor both tell me it "takes five minutes" to get it set up, and then quote me $4,800 to "implement" it.)
If I’m paying for at least one Senior to build and support this awful enterprise authentication pattern, I’m looking at around 200k per year in total cost - you damn well bet I’m billing you for it!
The total cost to employee a Senior Software Engineer, and I mean a real one, not some kid with three years experience, including benefits, taxes, etc. easily gets up to 200K in a normal city at a non-FAANG job.
Im sorry if your UK salaries are much smaller, but I’m not P Diddy taking anyone’s piss out here m8!
Not denying that, but if its a full time job for that person to monitor the keycloak machines for a typical SaaS vendor then something's wrong at mill cobber (may have used that wrongly as not English)
Liability is kind of wild and the fact that “the internet” washes it all away is wilder still.
In my state, which perhaps takes liability too far in the other direction, if I serve sober you a single beer, you proceed to visit a second bar, have ten shots of tequila in an hour, and kill a man driving home - I share equal liability as the tequila bar.
Perhaps there is a middle ground in this world where a firm that makes billions has to have some basic “Know Your Customer” systems to prevent abuse?
(Premise: it isn't 'alcohol and drugs'; it is 'drugs'. Alcohol is a drug, and while we are at it: a powerful one.)
The reason for that is that you've been serving a hard drug to a customer. Don't do that if you cannot bear the responsibility (liability). In order to bear the liability, the price has to go up, including perhaps a safe escort home of the drug user, but of course that would be too expensive/socialist/authoritarian (blimey they want us to take responsible action regarding our customers! I knew a club here for young people where it was very normal to have them taxi'd home. Son, wanna go out? The taxi is part of the price), and lead to 'off the record' drug usage. Which is how we ended up in opioid crisis.
If alcohol would only be invented today, there's no chance it would be legal in the current umbrella of drugs. And, for good reason: it is too addictive, too harmful for self and their environment. Compare with the various empathogens or harmfulness of psychedelic drugs. These cause, normalized, far less damage to both user and their environment.
I abstain from drinking (I am sensitive to addiction which is how I ended up to that conclusion), and this weekend I had a tiramisu (it was on sale, wife bought it). Did I notice that? Oh hell, yes. Would you serve a child tiramisu? No, we should not.
I agree with most of what you are saying. That said: alcohol is also a controlled substance, rather than an illegal one. It is perfectly legal for the original person to serve it within the legal limit. They're saying that the liability goes too far when they are held accountable for another server at another establishment that serves beyond the legal limit afterwards. On that part, I will agree with them.
Like you, I abstain. Yet I do have to deal with bartenders, and I will say that some are responsible and some are not. (I have pissed off some fairly powerful people along with people who commerially produce alcohol, and ought to know better, that they cannot serve alcohol because they are unlicensed, uncertified, or uninsured.)
Unless you’re making an especially boozy recipe, there’s not much alcohol in a reasonable portion size of tiramisu. I wouldn’t give it to someone strictly avoiding alcohol, but I’d have no concerns with a kid having some.
Both Bush and Obama used the Department of “Defense” to launch regime change “operations” across the MENA. If anything, Trump is guilty of saying the quiet part out loud, AKA “Truth in Advertising.” If anything, he got this one right. We’re a militant state.
A good dozen engineers in a team of 50 ran relays, one bold fool ran an exit node and was falsely fingered for CSAM type crimes during my tenure. The net effect was no one ran relays anymore. The poor exit operator remains an Irish to this day because he has dozens of headlines about his arrest and none about the dropped charges.
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