The cognizant google employees I worked with were actually VERY in support of unionizing, even more so than google employees themselves, it was a really interesting mix of people and they didn’t have their heads up their asses like normal techbro google employees who are used to everything working out and handwaving away systematic concerns.

Multiple attempts over the years had been made to unionize, but Google always crushed them with an iron fist.

Notice how Google Maps data hasn’t been improving, and if anything getting worse?

I worked for Cognizant, a contractor for Google maps at the Bothell office. I worked for a contractor that Google would fire every 5 years, contract it to another company and change the sign on the office building they owned…then rehire everyone. One of the benefits of this for them (one of the key benefits) was it made it much harder for workers to organize especially because Cognizant and Google can just play “go talk to the other parent I cant do anything” when workers ask for help because they were suffering/needed higher pay to survive/needed basic accomodations.

I worked for Google but Google didn’t want to pay me or my coworkers a living wage, so Google paid some lawyers to make it so they could pretend we didn’t work for Google.

Google is a trash company with absolutely zero idea how to move forward into the future, the company was absolutely chock full of intelligent interesting smart people but Google was so shortsighted that they forced my whole department back to the office for no good reason (literally everything was remote work too).

My experience after working for Google was that Google was most definitely going to collapse within the decade in terms of market power, at the very least in the realm of maps/spatial data.

What a shameful, pathetic company and the management should be ashamed of how stupid and out of touch they were.

Also, completely and utterly anti-worker.

(Cognizant is trash too but if you have ever heard of the company Cognizant you already know that).

A particular point of shame I want to level at the management above me at Cognizant and Google, most of our work was involved with prototyping google maps data editing and QC workflows… that could then be exported to India or somewhere else with cheap labor… except upper management was racist as fuck against Indian workers and would complain about their shoddy work indirectly all the time…

…and never bring up that they specifically wanted to hire Indians so they could pay them shit and treat them like shit. If you were a tech worker in India would you work as hard as I did for far far far far less pay and WAY worse treatment?

I actually led a training class on a workflow that was absolutely not suited for new workers to Google Maps gis data editing to… totally new entry level hires in India, and the Indians were frequently cheating or totally checking out… again because why the hell would they take this shit seriously? To be clear most people were like most people, they just did the best job they could, but there were lots of people I was training that could see right through the bullshit of the entire system and I can ZERO percent blame them for not disrespecting themselves by treating Google like it was genuine in its offers of employment, stability and a career.

Management encouraged a culture where lowkey shitting on Indians for being lazy and dumb was basically accepted because it rationalized the cruelty, inefficiency and stupidity of the entire system.

I hate Google.

Hacker News might be the most insufferable and childishly naive place on the internet.

I mean… how big really is the category of software tasks that you can’t properly do on Linux in 2024? I feel like it is getting to the point where you do genuinely have to be specific about what Linux can’t do that is a dealbreaker for you rather than just falling back on “Linux can’t do what people need to do” as a general criticism of it.

Windows can’t do what people need it to do, and it fails to do so while sucking up your private data (which if you work at a business with confidential information IS a dealbreaker). At least when Linux fails it usually isn’t simultaneously violating the IT security structure of your organization….

The funny thing is businesses and government entities can’t even claim with a straight face that they can trust Microsoft to adhere to the meager insufficient data privacy laws that do exist when there is zero evidence Microsoft would behave that way based on the track record even if the financial penalties for failing to do so were actually real to the ruling class and not just theoretical thought experiments that involve a slap on the wrist or more like a light tickling with a feather on the nose.

But it will die down. People will just accept it. They always do. They always will.

I understand the frustration and cynicism that comes from wanting something to happen and waiting a good stretch of your life for it to do so but I am sorry, this is not reflective of reality.

Don’t mistake your own fatigue for the behavior of people in general.

Support for software on Linux or Wine is now orders of magnitude more complete and functional than it was 5-10 years ago. There are fundamental changes going on, just because we operated in a paradigm that suffocated the possibility of Linux adoption in the past doesn’t mean that paradigm will continue indefinitely.

There is a difference between being permanently powerless and being powerless under a certain arrangement of forces and actors.

We are entering a period of the status quo being smashed for better or worse in almost every dimension of our lives, what was likely to happen in the past 20 years does not reliably predict what is likely to happen in the next 20 years.

There is actually a true opening for Linux here in a way there never has been.

It is okay to be the person that always recommends Linux, especially if you are a kind person with the patience to explain things to people in approachable terms (and you don’t just scream at people SOMEBODY ALREADY ASKED THIS QUESTION USE SEARCH whenever a newbie walks in the door and asks the obvious questions a newbie would ask).

Now is the time, Linux is pulled up out front waiting to pick us up (with bags packed) and Microsoft is loudly shitting the bed upstairs, NOW is the time to walk straight out the front door, jump in the car with Linux and never look back. We owe it to Microsoft’s long relationship with consumers to leave Microsoft sitting confused on the porcelain throne wondering why they were abandoned and where all the toilet paper is (we are the toilet paper in this metaphor).

Well yes because customers will be sunsetting support for Microsoft products with the end of Windows 10 :P

I feel like most people at Microsoft must know it and don’t care, the upper execs are either out to lunch or they are pre-emptively throwing away away the consumer desktop market because they just don’t value it anymore for whatever reason.

I think for the richest and farthest looking powerful people at Microsoft, the desktop battle is over, desktop OS software has become commodified (even though… it hasn’t actually yet by the numbers just by the practicality of the alternatives) and it isn’t worth investing seriously in maintaining their operating system long term as anything but a skin for their particular corporate flavor of Linux.

Internet Explorer to Edge but repeated with Windows.

Good riddance I say, but the complete divestment from giving a shit is pretty shocking, I don’t know where they think the on-ramp for customers is going to come from that will bring people fed up with Windows 11 onto friendly Linux distro where they can still use Microsoft software and services. I think it is more likely the bulk of people will just stop using desktop operating systems and…. Microsoft lost the battle to have relevance on mobile years and years ago?

It is weird because it feels like if Kodak saw the digital photography revolution coming 5-10 years before it happened and pre-emptively gave up on the entire film photography market and started releasing crap film and film related products and invested all their money into R&D for digital cameras… except that because Kodak was by far the biggest player in the film market before Kodak could develop a decent digital camera (if they were ever going to do that) the personnel photography market collapsed, fed up customers left, and there wasn’t a market for Kodak to sell personnel cameras of any type by the time they finally got their shit together to make a good one.

Digital photography in this metaphor is a consumer computer market where most people run a Linux based FOSS operating system with proprietary Microsoft services bolted on top and thus Microsoft finally can truly tell its customers to fuck off when they demand their operating not be trash (not that linux is trash). Certainly many many people are going this route, the year of the Linux desktop is no longer a joke these days and I am hyped, but it will be nowhere near enough for a company the size of Microsoft.

The way most people react to seeing big spiders in their home (a mixture of aggression and fear) is the same way I react to LinkeIn.

Why? Using a car you can lock up seems like a better alternative intuitively, I am pointing out that other than the emotional distress of having an object of yours stolen, owning a car is a regular rolling disaster of costs and suffering that dwarfs somebody running off with your $800 used e-bike every couple of months.

How is this a bad take? It is literally a documented phenomena that people don’t rationally take into account how expensive owning and using a car is.

Alright buddy so you want to burn it down and cause utter chaos just cause you don’t like how things are going?

Well, when you put it that way it actually sounds a lot like the US military/government! You too should be friends!

…or are you only interested in blowing up pipelines in rich countries where the correct oil companies and defense contractors already own everything and are making money hand over fist?

If so would you hurt the soul of America like that? It would be like burning down Fenway or smashing the liberty bell to bits. Those poor executives would have to go home to their families and explain through tears and sobs that the halcyon days of shitting on the future of humanity for the next 15,000 years are over, and that consequences for the ruling class have officially arrived.

shudders what an awful thought!

I mean, how much does your e-bike cost? If you can get one, especially a used one for a relatively affordable price and you actually sit down and tally up car costs like insurance, gas, maintenance, AAA, tires, any number of other costs…. I don’t think it matters if someone occasionally steals your e-bike (outside of it being extremely frustrating and inconvenient). Someone could steal your e-bike every 6 months or so and you likely will still be spending FARRRRRR less buying a new/used electric bicycle than you would just owning a car and using it and then having to deal with the insane never ending bullshit costs of keeping a car on the road.

So idk, build up a savings so you can replace your e-bike if you need to and then just use it. So long as you get a years use out of it or so it has already earned you quite a bit of money from cutting car costs.

Get one of those e-bikes with a removable battery with a key lock, then take your battery so if someone steals your bicycle they can’t steal the actually expensive part.

Hey, I agree with the sentiment but sex work is a respectable job unlike being a crooked as shit congress person ruining the future of countless people :)

Also being a slut is a respectable job too, the world runs on sluts like me.

Boston is a lame puritan colony, there was a criminal from there named Roger Williams who founded a pretty chill spot nearby though.

But just like in any profession, the “professionals” are able to handle the complex tasks that others can’t/don’t want to do

thank you for opening your heart for me and giving it a go!

take a pizza for your travels 🍕

waait fuck there is a rat down over there in the corner by the barrels quick GET THE PIZZA BEFORE THE RAT GETS IT.

                                            🛢️                   🛢️ 
                                                            🛢️   🐀  🛢️ 
                                                                              🛢️ 

That’s the same thing

Please please please open your heart and listen to me a second.

It is not the same thing. There is a lot of research on this and it turns out it is not as simple as one person winning means another person losing (or 5…). The reason the world is currently set up this way is a choice made by an economic class of people to mortgage the entire future of another economic class of people, into a doomed construction of decay that can only ever collapse in flames.

That is the crux of literally this whole miserable slush of suffering we are in.

The only truly zero sum game here is between the ruling class getting to own everything and the rest of us getting to live a decent quality of life.

If you don’t listen to anything else I say, fine, I mean I can be insufferable as fuck, but consider the truths in that point alone outside the context of my nonsense.

That being said, software engineers EVERYWHERE are earning “a living wage” at least. We are way overpaid, in fact, compared to social workers or teachers. A company with hundreds of thousands of employees relocating some positions to other countries is just mundane.

Who said violence and class warfare can’t be mundane in practice?

We are way overpaid

No y’all aren’t, the problem is rather that everybody else is way underpaid

You know how most of the software engineers in India feel? Like they are even more micromanaged, overworked and deprived of agency in the work place than US tech workers.

I want software engineers and India and Mexico to earn a living wage just as much as I want software engineers living in my city to earn a living wage and have a workplace that treats them with decency (and doesn’t try to treat humans like robots).

I am sure most Indians and Mexican software engineers feel that way about software engineers from other countries too.

The only zero sum game here is between all of us and the ruling class and if you don’t see that now I hope one day in the future that thought will find you with an open mind.

Thank you!