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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • Google gained their initial position fair and square. They had the better search engine, and despite the likes of Bing being actually pretty good they were never able to compete.

    All Google had to do was to follow its initial mantra of “don’t be evil”. That’s literally all it needed to do. Sadly, they were evil, and these are the seeds of that evil. I maintain today that Chrome, YouTube, Maps, and Search would still be dominant if Google were to welcome third-parties to compete and take space on their devices.

    This, IMO, is a case that is damaging to their CEO above anything else. It shows that over the last few years many of the steps taken that have alienated fans and employees have actually damaged the company too. The exec actions have damaged them, and as such the execs should pay the price or course-correct.


  • Atlassian is one of those companies that I equally laugh at, love, and hate.

    They’re in so many markets in software and project management, and have so many large clients that pay for Confluence, Jira, BitBucket, etc. Despite this, people almost universally despise their products, with bugs being left open for years, features blissfully ignored, etc.

    I often imagine what it would be like to work for Atlassian, and what “that” code based must look like. Working there must be fun as hell given the impact and breadth of opportunities, equally frustrating if you dogfood your own products, and infuriating given just how much stuff must be utter shit under the hood.




  • From a company perspective, it’s a common sentiment. Google and Amazon have mantras around trying to stay agile and relevant despite being behemoths, and both have arguably kept into boomer tech territory the second they made a poor CEO hire. Microsoft had their Ballmer era, and while Nadella did a lot of good at Microsoft they’ve had a lot of failures in established divisions to be soaked up by AI and sales.

    I think that all of big tech has struggled over the last 3 years. Sacrificing employee skill for shareholder value has ultimately moved them all into IBM territory, whereas the cool tech is happening at startups again. If AI is a bust, and another company comes along and eats their lunch in their established markets like consumer devices, web tooling, or cloud computing, they’re in real danger of another huge set of layoffs and resetting their businesses to only core profit-making ventures. What I think we’ve seen companies shift towards death, Day 2, rotting from the inside, or whatever your business calls stagnation.



  • Those offices are usually locked down anyway, on floors where the unwashed masses aren’t granted access. Hell, if you want to even be on a call with someone like the CTO you’ll have to reach out to three different entities, book a specific room, and reach out to that person’s team of assistants to ensure everything is aligned.

    If they got access to the CTO office they definitely broke in, or evaded security in some way. That alone at any company will get you fired, and probably arrested.

    Source: Once attended a meeting with a SVP at a big tech company. I genuinely think it would be easier to meet the president.



  • My daily drivers are MacOS and Fedora (with Windows on my Surface Book), but I’m a software engineer, not the average person.

    I would love for Linux on the desktop to be viable for the average person, but there isn’t really a built-in option that can beat Windows at what it’s good at, and that’s backwards compatibility, and a clean interface that users know. The attitude of “well, Linux is just better” hasn’t worked for decades, and it never will until there is a distro that prioritises that (hard) switch.



  • Pretty much anything beats Windows in that regard

    Fonts have looked like shit on Linux for years, if not decades. The poor UI and lack of polish has been a big problem in design communities for a long time, and to many it’s one of the reasons why Linux is less favourable to Mac and Windows.

    This is the biggest hangup for me. Even if there is a GUI, most instructions will send you into the terminal nonetheless.

    For all the deserved shit that Windows gets, it “just works” without ever needing to touch config or a terminal. Until a Linux distro and window management system can get this part right, it’s silly to call it a desktop replacement for the average person because it’s not trying to be.