Dystopian SaaS idea: Integrate facial recognition and Yelp reviews. If someone shows up who gave you a negative review, send a text to staff and/or deny sale at POS.
I had a junior engineer once, a few years back, who could not take criticism.
He would get flustered, angry, sarcastic. His work wasn’t good. I did my best to help him — and even though I was polite, he always seemed to take a kind of deep, personal offense at whatever criticism I had for him.
There were many problems I had with his work — he wasn’t great at testing his code (at a surface level, sure, but rarely thought deeply about the implications of his changes. E.g., once he got a ticket to clean up some code throwing lots of warnings, and solved it by making the code not work at all. He tested that it wasn’t throwing warnings, but didn’t realize that it had an early escape condition that was being triggered inappropriately every time.)
He surprised me with his lack of basic knowledge that I would’ve expected from a CS graduate who’d also made an app or two outside of school. He didn’t know what a database index was, for example, among other issues.
He was also not great at communicating. When talking about his work, he’d use technical jargon incorrectly. His emails to outside vendors were meandering and difficult to parse. I coached him on these points extensively.
In the end, after 6 months or so of trying to help him, I asked our CEO to fire him. We gave him a month’s severance.
A couple months later, his lawyer got in touch with his, alleging racial discrimination. The allegation was that we fired him because of his accent. He interpreted my problems with his communication as being a problem with his (slight, barely noticeable) accent.
Our CEO told me to work on how I levy criticism of others. I mean, he’s right I’m sure. I thought I was being precise and polite, but perhaps I did give the wrong idea.
Or, maybe this hire just wasn’t used to criticism. He didn’t understand how to take advice. He didn’t know how to internalize it and act on those suggestions. When fired, he blamed an immutable quality about himself rather than something he could change.
I mean, this is story of management incompetence basically. This has much less to do with person nit accepting criticism or being outright sociopath/psychopath. This has to do with management not knowing how to fire people, keep paperwork and getting scared when the word layer is used.
It is hard to prove racism or sexist discrimination. It is just not easy at all and you need more then assertion.
I left out a great deal of detail. We had documentation. We closely work with an HR lawyer, and consulted with her extensively about this individual long before firing him.
We didn’t get “scared” of his lawyer. Lawsuits are distracting and expensive for both sides even if the allegations are baseless, and we avoided one in this case by just offering a bit of a larger severance than we originally offered.
I just read The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovitz. It’s an incredible book and talks at length about the issue in the article.
A word about this:
“What technology and trade have done, however, is displace millions of Americans from their middle-class jobs, and send them hurtling down the income ladder into less remunerative occupations.”
It’s not that simple. It’s not just trade and technology.
The causes of the erosion of good middle-class jobs are extremely complex. I’ll talk about just one here, since I don’t have too much time:
Tax law works to advantage higher tier workers over middle class workers. It costs much less in payroll taxes to hire a single superskilled worker at extremely high compensation than it does to hire a bunch of mid skill workers at middle class comp.
Quoting from the book:
“A simple example illustrates the special burden that the payroll tax imposes specifically on middle-class labor. If a bank deploys midcentury financial technologies to issue home mortgages using twenty mid-skilled loan officers who each earn $100,000 per year, this costs the bank and the workers, taken together, $306,000 in payroll taxes. By contrast, if the bank were to switch to the current mode of production and displace the mid-skilled loan officers with a single Wall Street trader who earns $2 million, this would cost the bank and the trader only about $90,000.
“Where two technologies of production are economically equivalent, but one requires twenty mid-skilled workers while the other requires one super-skilled worker, the mid-skilled approach currently faces an average payroll tax rate over 10 percentage points higher than the meritocratic approach, which produces an aggregate payroll tax burden over three times as great.
“The payroll tax, in other words, substantially suppresses mid-skilled employment and wages and fosters super-skilled employment and wages. (Indeed, if the super-skilled worker can get capital gains treatment for her income, by styling it as founder’s shares or carried interest, the income tax adds a further bias, on the order of 20 percentage points.)”
While 306 vs 90 is nothing to scoff at, we're talking about 200 / 2000 = 10% of a difference, in the extreme and unrealistic case you quoted. So in less extreme cases it would be just a few percentage points.
In MySQL, discovering the UNION hack a couple years ago was like a revelation. It’s something that I’ve since been preaching to everyone who’ll listen.
It’s extremely common to want to OR a small set of items. It feels like the compiler would be smart enough to use an index (presuming one exists matching the searches fields), but it doesn’t. UNION makes it use the index.
"Meritocracy is not as good an idea as it seems to be in practice"
Why not just consider that it is a label which may not apply to the reality you observe? Have we gotten to the point where considering that any X is not Y is considered a "no true Scotsman" fallacy?
The only problem with meritocracy is that it's unattainable in a society with inherited power differences. Other than that it would be a great idea. Just one that hasn't truly been tried outside limited organisations yet.
I’ve seen a couple comments saying that it’s the non-SWE’s that are the liberal ones.
That’s a very different experience than my own, and that of my friends.
My experience: Designers tend to be pretty liberal. Product managers and other managers tend to be moderate (tend to be Biden and Buttigieg fans). Salespeople tend to be extremely conservative. Support is kind of all over the place. Engineers tend to be either diehard socialists or (and this is the minority) libertarian.
"diehard" seems like a stretch when you consider how much support there tends to be for unionisation (and most of us could get by on way less than we make, so it's not like we don't have to power to take some stands)... Lot of social democrats in my neck of the woods for sure but in US terms it'd be way more Warren than Sanders, and she is absolutely not a socialist from what I can see.
I meant socialist in the same way that Bernie Sanders seems to use it, which I have trouble distinguishing from Warren’s states policies. (I do agree that the traditional definition of word applies to neither Warren’s or Sanders’ policies for the most part. Except for the health insurance industry, where the proposal is nationalization.)
I should have said social democrat. Indeed, now that I think about it, few engineers would label themselves socialist. I don’t, though I am a Warren/Sanders supporter.
