> Businesses don’t do promotions at senior levels because you “deserve” it. They promote those who have the highest potential to deliver outsized impact and value.
I guess it will sound like a nitpick, but to me it matters a lot:
They promote those they believe have the highest potential to bring value.
The whole thing is that the person who promotes you is a human in a dominant position. You can't change their mind about what they believe is a good reason to promote an employee, because they are in a position to feel superior.
If you want a promotion, you have to do whatever those with that power want to see in order to give you a promotion. If that involves bringing doughnuts every Monday morning, you have to do it.
Luckily, cargo cult means that those people probably all read the same kind of books, so a valid proxy may be to just read those books and try to fit in this completely arbitrary world. Coaches are people who decided that instead of reading those books to try and get a promotion themselves, they would just make a business out of reading those books and selling you that knowledge.
> They promote those they believe have the highest potential to bring value.
Thank you for writing that! That would have been my first comment as well. Due to the organizational hierarchy, there is a standard assumption that the company or the decision-makers within the company are magically capable of making objective assessments and decisions. Of course, this is not the case. But in the style of corporate language, there is often a strategic concealment of the fact that in every functional role, even at the very top, individuals work and make subjective decisions (hopefully competently, hopefully to the best of their knowledge and belief, but nonetheless always subjectively).
Unless you work in a metric driven role ( like sales ) - of course it's subjective. Also bear in mind the assessment includes not just what you do, but how you do it.
Not pissing other people off is an important skill, but at higher levels so is being able to make the right decision even if it's not very popular.
Being able to do both simultaneously is gold dust.
A lot of metric-driven roles are subjective as well. Most sales funnels are intentionally a random lottery. When prioritization exists it is often influenced by all those subjective categories like "management likes you".
As software developers we often see the raw data of this. The science often even isn't that hard based on the software you are asked to write how almost none of the "objective" metrics are truly "fair".
Metrics aren't an escape from subjectivity, they just smoke screen it. Companies love "rich get richer" lotteries and easily confuse that for "objective" or "fair".
If you are in a company where all that truly applies - I'm not sure your best option is to look for a promotion - you'd be better off looking for another employer.
Even if you take the completely cynical view that bosses are out for themselves - then if after promotion you stay in their team, they are going to what to manage promotions in a way that makes them look good.
Now if what makes them look good is not related to improved impact/output then I refer you to by previous advice about getting a promotion by leaving, but most of the time it is - are you helping them hit their( the teams ) goals?
I guess my point is that when a coach teaches you how to get a promotion, the implicit assumption is that your hierarchy is following the same book as they are.
And the very fact that one needs to learn how to behave to get a promotion kind of proves my point. In a perfect world, you wouldn't have to go convince someone that you have value. And in a world where you have to do that convincing... those who are better at convincing get more promotions.
Because you are better at convincing does not mean you bring more value, though.
Again it's a hard problem, but what matters to me is that people understand that it is a hard problem and there is no silver bullet.
> the EU will have more to worry about than Windows
The US can, right now, crash pretty much the entire western industry/economy by disconnecting their digital services.
The US already threatens the western world with that power. They already use it.
Of course the EU has to care about that. The reason they accepted the dependency was that for a long time they were looking up to the US, and couldn't imagine that the US could become an enemy in the space of a few weeks.
Now the US has proven that they could realistically go from this state that the western world trusted to declaring war to allies in a matter of weeks. Of course everybody is scared.
I never understood why some people really, really want others to switch to Linux. I don't really care if many people switch to Linux. If anything, a lot of beginner switching to Linux may well make Linux worse for me.
I see a lot of "if you want to convert Windows users, you have to...". I really don't want to convert Windows users. I did not move to Linux to please those who like Windows.
Said differently, if a distro managed to please all Windows users, it most definitely wouldn't please me. I don't see why I should hope for that.
Disagree. It is good for users of all operating systems, if Linux becomes so usable that it threatens Windows. Then Windows has to improve and we have a race to the top.
I disagree with "usability" being one dimension. I disagree with assuming that Windows is the definition of "most usable" and "Linux should move towards Windows to get more usable".
Linux is different. It's great to learn something different. I don't use Linux because I don't want to pay for Windows. I use Linux because I like how Linux is.
The more Windows people join Linux and try to make it look like Windows, the more Linux starts looking like the platform I left 15 years ago.
You are making a philosophy out of it, but I claim that usability is not a philosophy but an objective value. The more usable a tool is, without losing anything else, the higher it's value.
> I claim that usability is not a philosophy but an objective value
Counter-example: many times, what I find more usable is what others find less usable. Unless I'm objectively stupid, usability is subjective.
I hate it when people tell me "Linux should look more like Windows, because Windows is more usable. And if you don't find that Windows is more usable, then you're objectively wrong".
1. It's a moral good (free as in freedom). Wider Linux adoption makes software more free for everyone and creates a feedback loop: more users means more engineering effort, which improves the many many projects we colloquially call Linux, which (i++) attracts more users. As a corollary to #1: do you really want Billy G spying on your mom?
2. It's often better for the environment to keep old hardware running (manufacturing emissions usually dwarf operational ones for consumer devices).
And a more personal corollary to #2: I love old hardware and don't want to see it die (and I'm not talking about vintage tech). A 16+ core Haswell Xeon (that riiiing) and Polaris RX 480 (HWS, why yes) remain perfectly useful in the modern world. I like knowing both are out there, somewhere, just chugging away long after they were retired from some server or mining operation.
> Wider Linux adoption makes software more free for everyone and creates a feedback loop: more users means more engineering effort, which improves the many many projects we colloquially call Linux
I don't think it is necessarily true. More users may mean that some platform (say Ubuntu) gets so much traction that the rest becomes irrelevant. I already see "free as in freedom" projects that only support the last two versions of Ubuntu, and couldn't care less about other distros. To the point where they will have hard dependencies on things that only work on Ubuntu and are very difficult to adapt to other distros.
> I love old hardware and don't want to see it die
I have a counter-example with Android. Android/AOSP is pretty good with backward compatibility. It is pretty easy for a developer to compile an app for older devices, the OS totally supports it.
But developers/companies will just happily target newer devices and drop older ones ("98% of our users are on Android "X", let's drop the support for older ones") and tend to test their apps on recent hardware (meaning that a perfectly fine device will still be able to run the app, but it will lag to the point where it is unusable). Happened to me: I had to change my phone because random apps (like banking or weather forecast, I'm not talking high-performance like games here) became unusable. A banking app just shows a few numbers, still they manage to make it lag on a phone from 2020.
Agreed. Some degree of elitism is a force for good. I want Linux to be the programmer's system. Just enough popularity to be relevant and have people actively developing it. Never enough popularity that we have hordes of computer illiterate randoms. Linux should be a system built by programmers and for programmers.
Totally. And even for developers: many developers will happily ship their program as a docker image, just because they can't be arsed to learn how to properly package it.
I see all these people suffering -- pointlessly -- and I want to tell them "come! suffer for a while! In exchange you get low latency, native docker, no ai or bing or other shovelware, being the master of your computer feels great!"
I see a difference between "you should try to learn Linux, you'll see it's cool" and "we should change Linux such that Windows people don't need to learn it".
Most people want Windows to be better, not to have to move to Linux. You can't make people convert, especially people that quite frankly might not want to.
People just want the Windows they have been using to be better, they don't want to move away from it and that's perfectly reasonable.
> IMHO the main point of these schemes is to make it hard for adults to use social media somewhat-anonyously. So the government can more easily identify those posting 'prohibited speech'.
Geoengineering scares me. We fundamentally cannot know the full impact of doing geoengineering, it has to be a real-life experiment. We've already screwed the climate, I don't know if risking making it worse is a good idea.
We have plenty of examples where we've tried to improve things (e.g. for invasive species) and actually made it worse.
On the other hand, we know exactly what is screwing the climate.
Geoengineering feels like saying "smoking is killing me, but I won't stop smoking: I'll try to ingest medicine that I believe should help, but may just kill me faster".
If it was, would it mean that qBittorrent would share with web clients by default? My understanding was that it's not the same protocol, so I'm guessing that a client like qBittorrent would have to choose to "bridge" between both protocols, right?
I did not downvote, but I'm guessing that it is perceived as disrespectful to call them failures to the point where they don't even qualify as "alternatives".
But, they are technically correct. The language is defined as by CPython: it is the standard!!! None of the others fully meet that standard, which includes quirks! It's knows trade offs with them! They are, literally, attempts to adhere to that standard.
I heard him talk about GPLv3 someday, and what he said was that it was a mistake to call it "GPLv3", as if it was the evolution of GPLv2, because for him it should have been a totally different licence.
Which I find fair: there are different kinds of copyleft (like MPL vs GPL), it makes sense to say that GPLv2 is a different concept than GPLv3. Whereas I don't know if anyone should use GPLv1 because GPLv2 sounds like it fixed GPLv1 without changing its spirit.
GPLv2 was clearly intended to let you change the software on your devices. In some countries, GPLv2 already prohibits tivoization.
However, big tech found an exploit: In some countries, GPLv2 allows tivoization. This was not intended by the authors of the GPLv2. There was another exploit involving patent licenses, and a reverse exploit about license termination that allowed some developers to extort some users. They fixed these and made it the GPLv3. It's a bugfix release, not anything new. You only don't like it if you relied on the bugs.
Well, that's not really mutually exclusive with what I said. Those who called it GPLv3 consider it's a bugfix, those who decided to stay on GPLv2 consider it's a new licence.
I guess it will sound like a nitpick, but to me it matters a lot:
They promote those they believe have the highest potential to bring value.
The whole thing is that the person who promotes you is a human in a dominant position. You can't change their mind about what they believe is a good reason to promote an employee, because they are in a position to feel superior.
If you want a promotion, you have to do whatever those with that power want to see in order to give you a promotion. If that involves bringing doughnuts every Monday morning, you have to do it.
Luckily, cargo cult means that those people probably all read the same kind of books, so a valid proxy may be to just read those books and try to fit in this completely arbitrary world. Coaches are people who decided that instead of reading those books to try and get a promotion themselves, they would just make a business out of reading those books and selling you that knowledge.
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