Whinging and navel gazing are necessary and fine activities. For a while.
But at some point, one has to transmute outrage into action. Adapt, grow, assume agency.
This issue is settled. The smart people figured out better solutions. The public supports reform. This stage requires the hard work of organizing and lobbying.
My only regret is assuming Caruso (author) is American. Alas, he's in the UK. So he probably wouldn't have known that bail reform is on CA State's 2020 ballot.
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Have you ever taken a CPR class? One of the action steps is to point at someone as yell "Call 911!" as you start checking vitals. If everyone is just standing around trying to figure out what to do, the victim (patient) dies.
Activism, effecting real change in the real world, is a bit like that.
In a startup you want to actively screen for candidates like this. Someone who idolizes technological "purity" above all else and looks down on business will never be happy at a startup that needs to get shit done quickly. It's a lose-lose situation. They'll eventually grow resentful and quit, or you'll have to manage them out. Better to avoid the whole thing in the first place, no matter how great a programmer they are otherwise.
I am totally the type of person who values software expediency, and has a lets just get shit done attitude.
But people like the author who have the opposite attitude are also invaluable. There are parts of your code base at an organization that need to work, where doing the expedient thing is doing the wrong thing. People who went told to don't worry about that just ship the damn thing, fight back so your entire organizations infrastructure doesn't fall down on itself.
It's more about finding the right person for the job.
The only comment on HN more tiresome than "lol I can build twitter over a weekend" is a comment by a throwaway implicitly claiming that fixing the twitter product problems is easy.
Sour grapes, more like. If simply asking how they'd work with people from diverse backgrounds was triggering enough for this person, the process worked perfectly in rejecting them.
I could be very wrong and am no HR expert, but I don’t think that question was actually about what would happen if you were an HR director. They wanted your thoughts on those situations in regards to the position you were apply for.
Andy Grove talks about this in "High Output Management". He says there are two kinds of managers, "know-how" managers and "position" managers. Both have a certain amount of authority, and a successful technology company needs both.
If you're a senior enough person who doesn't want to manage people, you should think of yourself as a "know-how" (knowledge, experience) manager and find a role that allows for that.
It's because HN prides itself on "civility". So you can "innocently", "just to be fair", "playing the devil's advocate", "but what about" say any offensive thing you like, and when someone who's sick of hearing that bullshit uses a naughty word they get downvoted for being "uncivil".
The rest of the internet figured out long ago that such behavior is actually pretty toxic, and is called "sealioning" [0][1]
Indeed it simplifies software, but it also makes life much easier for humans trying to coordinate communication across timezones.
There's probably some research somewhere estimating the cost to business (or loss of revenue) from mistakes in doing timezone conversions. In the simplest case, if you have a business call with someone halfway around the world, and one of you has recently gone into or out of daylight savings time, then there's a good chance the call will not happen when it should. Or perhaps you were supposed to be watching a political debate online at a given time so you could provide instant advice and feedback to advisors present in the debate, but you missed it because you didn't realize they had left DST a week before your location does.
I could go on and on with examples of the human cost to keeping the current system.
No one is disputing that a better system cannot be devised. This is true for many problems in the world. If you could start from the zero state, you can do it much better.
So let me say this: _coming up with the ideal system is not hard_. But how will you transition the world from its current state to this ideal state? Consider that the metric system (or SI), which is much better than the US system of measures, has still not been adopted in the US. Why? Because the problem of transitioning between systems is called politics.
But if you do much international travel, at some point you will encounter the problem where your various calendars, clocks, and other tools don't do the right thing (perhaps they get incorrect location information, or any number of other problems occur).
Then you have dis-information. If you don't realize it, then you will suffer by missing something important or wasting your time.
The tools are far from infallible now, and there's really no hope that they will ever work correctly.
Oh, right. Because it fits right in with the bullshit reflexive contrarianism around here.