Einstein spent his later career trying to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics. He failed. So has everyone after him. It's not about Einstein being old. It's that it's a really hard problem.
TFA also refers to just Einstein's 1905 papers. He published general relativity 10 years later. And after GE he contributed e.g. stimulated emission, Bose-Einstein statistics, Einstein-de Sitter cosmological model and the EPR paradox, among lots of other stuff.
Also the claim "toward the tail end of Einstein’s life, he argued strenuously against the concepts undergirding the emerging field of quantum mechanics" downplays that Einstein was pivotal in emerging the field in the first place.
Yes and being 'opposed' to QM contributed to expose the 'spooky action at distance' that QM implies, which is very important..
It's a pity that experimentators were able to demonstrate it only a long time after Einstein's death, what would have been his reaction??
Not a physicist either but my understanding is that is that if you believe that we can discover all the laws of physics that explain how the world operates then it needs to have a solution.
Like we have formulas describing how gravity works. We can test these formulas by observing the motion of the planets and galaxies. Is this theory true? There's lots of evidence for it so it feels like it's gotta be pretty close to "the truth"
We also have formulas describing how elementary particles behave. These formulas have been tested to a very high degree of precision so it seems they've got to be close to the truth as well. But if you use both our formulas for gravitation and formulas for elementary particles you can derive a contradiction. So these two theories cannot simultaneously be true. There's got to be something wrong with them.
I suppose there's the possibility that at a certain point nature simply doesn't follow any laws and you can't possibly make sense of it.
So we do know that all the tiny interactions like charge of particles etc must work side by side with all the big interactions like gravity as otherwise how would anything as we know it work. However it could as easily be neither are the right way to interpret the world and there is something we are missing, or we are right and we can find a method to combine the theory of the big and the small interactions but we are missing a section. At the end of the day we can't interact in any meaningful way with more than half the matter in the universe (it's proven to exist due to a gravitational pull), so it's clear we can't experience a lot of the universe and we definitely can't explain a lot.
So yes there is a solution, but do we, as humans, have the ability to come up with it, who knows. I would say it's unlikely.
In "Failure Is Not an Option", Gene Kranz, who ran Apollo Mission Control in the 1960s, brings up tolerance for bullshit. Someone tried to bullshit him about something. He put his arm around them and walked them out of mission control. They were never in that room again.
> Vacuum-tube amplifiers are not in the same class with techniques that are unlikely to have any perceptible influence on what you hear.
Yes, they are. The Carver Silver 7 was built to demonstrate this. [1]
It's a tube amplifier with 38 tubes per channel that costs $17,000.
It has all the important features - weighs 68Kg, vibration damping mounts,
takes four minutes to power up, and the wiring is silver.
Gets good reviews from the High End crowd.
Then Carver built the Silver 7 T, a transistorized amp with the same transfer function. As a demo, the Silver 7 and the Silver 7 T can have their outputs differenced, or wired up to cancel and drive a silent speaker. Same output. Gets terrible reviews.
Typical transistor-based audio amplifiers are different enough from traditional vacuum-tube amplifiers, but when the cost does not matter it is possible to design transistor-based amplifiers that are equivalent with vacuum-tube amplifiers.
The example given by you shows that there are indeed many people who do not truly perceive the differences or non-differences, so they judge based on prejudices. Of course, I agree that there are many such people and the gold-plated cables were intended for them. I agree that they must exist also among the customers buying vacuum-tube amplifiers.
Everything is lead-free surface mount now. Solder paste, stencils, reflow ovens.
Hand soldering is precision temperature controlled irons, hot air rework stations, magnifiers, cameras, and exhaust fans. The tools are more complicated, more expensive, and better.
One of the lessons of surface mount work is that you really can move your fingers a thousandth of an inch. But you need magnification to see what you're doing.
I'm encouraged to see more hobbyists going surface mount. In my TechShop days, I was the only one doing surface mount. Everybody else was using 1980s 0.1 inch spacing DIP components. That's a US thing. If you learn to solder in Shenzhen, you start with surface mount.
Leaded solder is easier to work with for personal projects. Careful hand washing and handling is required, but it's easy.
I also recommend people go to surface mount, but I don't recommend beginners immediately go for expensive microscopes and reflow ovens. Stick to 0806 components or larger to start and you can populate a board without any binocular microscope or magnification as long as your eyesight isn't too bad. I can populate 0402 components without magnification all day long.
For small boards, reflow on one of those cheap hot plates. They're small enough to back in the drawer when you're done.
Surface mount doesn't have to be hard or expensive, unless you're doing designs with ICs that come in very fine pitch packages.
> Leaded solder is easier to work with for personal projects
it really isn't if you use a nice modern lead-free solder. you'll need your iron to be about 20c hotter, but it's not like the early days of lead-free where it'd flow all weird.
I was extremely surprised when, out of solder recently, I just bought some Draper lead free solder from my local Home Depot(!), and it flowed so much better than my previous roll of fancy lead-free solder from a decade ago. Basically indistinguishable from leaded. I was very surprised.
not really? I have a habit of using the wrongest solder for my projects. The stuff I use currently was formulated for wave soldering, no clue why it comes in spools but it was cheap.
In general the formulation is more important than the brand, and the formulation isn't /that/ important either. If it's lead free, has a rosin core, and comes on a spool, you can probably use it.
Give a shot to the SAC305 mix. It’s a low temperature lead-free alloy, and it’s the one that made me ditch leaded solder definitively. Use more flux and a bit more iron temperature and you’ll never touch leaded solder again. Oh, and it’s available both as a hand-soldering wire reel and solder paste.
It's the 3% silver that does it. That gets the melting point down. Unfortunately, the price of silver has tripled since 2023. Hobbyists won't use enough solder to notice, but it's an issue in production.
After moving to Asia, it did seem that fewer of my colleagues remarked on my choice of SMT for everything. I hadn't really thought about it until now!
Custom PCBs are even cheaper here than in North America, and longer workdays meant I had less time for hobbies. That probably made me double down on my choice.
I don't own much fancy equipment, just a cheap hot air rework station. I've found that mixing in fresh gel flux into my solder paste to get the right consistency made a big difference, enough that I never really needed more tools.
After doing that, I just sort of smear some near-ish the pads (perversely, often using a THT resistor), drop the parts in approximately the correct position with tweezers, and heat it up gently. Surface tension handles the rest. Once in a while, an 0402 resistor shifts out of position, but otherwise it just works. I'd probably need better tools for BGA.
What I love best is that SMT microcontrollers can be very, very cheap. I like the attiny10 (36$ for 100 computers! What a wonder!). There are plenty that are under 10 cents each, but I rather like AVR assembler, and their datasheets are very good.
I tried soldering. With a TS100 (might have been a TS80P). I tried to solder a a Valetudo Dreame adapter [1]. Took me two hours, then I gave up. I attributed it partly to my unstable hand. Next day I tried to make a USB to (I think) TTL cable. Also failed, the cable wasn't reliable. The fumes were horrible, probably inhaled a lot. I ended up borrowing an adapter, and easily succeeded rooting the damn thing. Never again (the soldering, not the rooting). Same with cable crimping. These physical things are just not my cup of tea. I got two left hands. I hate soldering.
I appreciate the enthusiasm, but I have given up. Maybe it will inspire another reader. I didn't write it to discourage others, but to underline that sometimes, defeat is OK to admit, rather than keep trying.
I mean, a smell is temporary unpleasant but what happened to my health here? I am a former smoker, so I guess damage was previously done there.
This specific iron is a portable one (I had it hooked up on a powerbank), with temperature control and FOSS firmware. It was lead-free soldering tin with flux included. I held the item with my hands, so maybe it did get greased by skin oil, who knows. I had a lot of help from other more experienced people. They guided me through it, with a lot of patience. Without them, I'd been stuck way before. But even they were like... maybe this isn't for you.
My motor skills are just not that good (possibly related to my ASD or father having MS), and I notice that with everything where I gotta use my hands. From elementary school handwriting (learning to write) or even before with tasks like eating, putting clothes on, etc. That is as far back as I can remember. Ever onwards, things like sports. I am simply physically clumsy, and it requires a lot of effort and practice to get on a decent level. Can I do it? Can I hand write? Yes, I can. But it requires a lot of practice to get to a decent level. I can satisfy my wife with my hands though, probably my most important skill I am grateful for. No joke, btw. Although the fact I can, say, give myself food (eat) is probably more important, survival wise.
The one skill I would love to be able to achieve throughout my life, would be programming, not soldering. I mean, something like soldering is awesome, I am a sucker for right to repair, second hand, reusable hardware, etc something like programming comes close to, say, Lego. Though programming wise I am not sure nowadays, given AI. And there too, I tried VB, TCL, C, Java, Python. Multiple Python courses, too, from MOOC, books, to a professional teacher in a classroom. I've been (and am) able to make small adjustments to code, and do some shell scripting (and mIRC scripting, but that was roughly 30 years ago). That's it. That is without AI, I haven't bothered with that. I like to run LLMs locally.
> It was lead-free soldering tin with flux included.
Flux core solder is crap. It doesn’t contain enough flux to begin with and since it’s inside the solder, it can’t actually do the work it’s supposed to. You need to apply flux separately before soldering, and lead-free solder used to be harder to work with. That’s the leading mistake I’ve seen frustrate beginners.
Steady hands aren’t a requirement unless you’re doing very complex repairs like threading wire through a BGA grid. You’re supposed to use the surface tension of the solder to snap the component’s pins to the PCB pads. After you snap two corners to the pads, you can just glide a tip with some solder over the rest of the pins and the heat and flux do the rest of the work (the flux’s main job is actually changing the solder’s surface tension to make this easier and more predictable).
>Steady hands aren’t a requirement unless you’re doing very complex repairs
I remember I was in college when I tried to solder some jump points on my xbox to enable me to mod it. I went in expecting electronics to look like what they did when I was growing up (I used to take everything apart, but I usually was able to put it back together). I open it up to find the jump points are smaller than grains of sand. It left me very much wanting some sort of mechanical aide to help. I occasionally watch videos of people repairing gpus or mbs and I cannot imagine how they do it.
Toys like the TS100 are not what people think they are, and tend to cause more harm than good.
Thermal mass is important, please have a look at my other post for a recommended tutorial set. Silver based solders like SAC305 will also stick to most plated pin types.
Sometimes people are given a BS fools errand, and convince themselves there is some hidden secret to workmanship. You would have been better off with a $25 30W Weller iron and $7 flux+Wick kit off Amazon for through-hole style PCB kits. =3
It's also shockingly easy to just get boards made and populated these days. I of course have a station but I use it less and less.
I paid like 40€ last week for 5 smaller PCBAs, 0402s all nice and correct, jumpers, all my ICs. Don't have to worry about diode orientation or solder bridges. Just complete boards shipped to me. Easily beats my own labour rates.
I use jlcpcb, they're common in the prototype and hobby domains. But there's quite a few board houses in taiwan and china that do this, definitely shop around.
The annoying part is getting the bom and component placement files correct. I use kicad since it's free, and there's solid instructions from most houses on what they need.
JLBPCB does small runs cheap as a loss leader, so they get the production runs, if any, later. Also, they get to see what people are doing, in case something interesting goes by.
There's also a suspicion that JLBPCB may be encouraged to do this by the Party, to discourage other countries from maintaining an independent prototyping capability.
There's a 'github down' post here every other day.
The ball is right there, bouncing alone in front of the goal, and they just have to position themselves as "we're the stable ones" to score that market when the exodus inevitably happens.
This is what happens, when decision makers are out of touch.
So many things they could be doing, to make people buy into their services. For example they could simply run campaigns about how they promise to never use customer and user repositories for AI training. Or they could show better uptime statistics. Their CI language is better than Github's too.
If anyone gave me a choice between Gitlab and Github, I would go with Gitlab. But if I had additionally the choice to use Codeberg, I would choose that.
Maybe they are just not looking to grow. If they made such a statement, that would actually be a pleasant surprise. No hunger for "infinite exponential growth", just to impress investors? Great! That's a fat plus in my book!
I was on gitlab up until nov last year. I don't really miss it; have yet to experience issues with github.
Gitlab pricing was bonkers. It always felt like their sales team were trying to play gotcha with us over the years with pricing schemes that would milk us for money.
> The ball is right there, bouncing alone in front of the goal
Their pitch is not to you, the dev. But, to the investor class. We are in this funny place in the market where you can make more money by catering to the investor class than to customers. In other words, an upside down world.
The big thing on their roadmap is rearchitecting for something that can handle the increased load, though. Like, they're clearly paranoid that if they don't move fast, they're going to be just as busted as Github.
TBH the open source nature of gitlab means that any sufficiently large and clued-in hosting company (think: servercentral/deft/summit, whatever it's calling itself these days, or one of its competitors) could put up gitlab instances for people to use and meet more nines of uptime than github. It doesn't have to be the gitlab company itself running servers with the httpd and back-end database.
I understand the meaning, however, in that they're well positioned by having the company name and domain name, same general way that non-technical people will pay wordpress.com to host their blog/small website because it's very easy, rather than DIYing it or paying a 3rd party.
GitLab isn't open-source. It's "open-core". Third parties hosting GitLab instances don't have access to the same range of features that GitLab-the-company does.
GitLab Community Edition (CE) is available freely under the MIT Expat license.
GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE) includes extra features that are more useful for organizations with more than 100 users. To use EE and get official support please become a subscriber.
JiHu Edition (JH) tailored specifically for the Chinese market."
Personal opinion, but I think a great deal of the people who are presently overloading github with one person created vibe coded projects would be just fine with the "CE" feature set.
I just rolled out CE in our small org, it is a nice step up from Free GitHub, there are Wikis, and no uncertainty about the runners. Founders like it better because their IP is on their own servers now.
I find it a bit concerning that this piece focusses so much on customers and shareholders... I know I don't pay, but perhaps sometime I will, and I am learning GitLab and applying at large orgs as GitLab consultant. All because of CE... So I hope it will stay. It is a nice and very complete on-ramp to EE.
GitLab was never going to be the ones to take the mantle GitHub left on the ground. They’re a “clone” company and have very few original ideas of their own.
To be fair to GitHub, "GitHub" Actions is just Azure DevOps Pipelines wearing a mask. Which I think explains a lot about it's quality as a feature. It was brought in as a rushed copy-paste of the existing Azure DevOps feature very quickly post acquisition.
I have to regularly use Azure DevOps and the whole platform is painful, and now is rotting on the vine. I hear there is internal strife at Microsoft between Azure DevOps and GitHub products.
To build good software you need to take the time to make your existing features work well, and improve or prune the ones that don't. In other words, it is craftsmanship.
The American corporation and its values are anathema to craftsmanship. You can ******* a **** all you want, it's never going to turn into gold, but your hands will be covered in crud.
Yup. That was such an embarrassing incident and their postmortem of it was worse. They actually thought being transparent about how bad their engineering was would do them favours.
> Interpersonal excellence: individuals who are good humans, embrace diversity, inclusion and belonging, assume good intent and treat everyone with respect
I'm not even sure it even means "work harder, not smarder and wach yor seplling." In my experience it's more of a shibboleth to the new masters to let them know they're down with creating a top-down organization where information flows only one way.
Were I to have crafted this post, it would have included things like
"We ask our employees, customers and investors time to prove ourselves to you again as we re-commit to listening to our stake-holders and ensure our organization is properly re-positioned to execute our continued plans to deliver the best possible service..."
But instead it comes across as "someone read an article about Amazon's two-pizza team rule and we figured there were worse things to try."
Which I wonder if it will end with closing up their own public Gitlab instance for their bugs/features, their open operations manual and the generally transparent culture that for example brought us the live streamed fix of the infamous "I dropped the database" situation.
If they're asking you to do more for less pay and with fewer coworkers to help, don't feel bad if the company code turns into unmaintainable, unintelligible garbage. They can't really stop you. It's just AI. Something is going to have to give.
Every IC ought to use the present day as the opportunity to build a nimble competitor to their old employer (or whatever industry incumbents they want).
Having been in some of these values meetings, I really imagine it went like this: someone wanted speed, and someone else wanted quality. Sorry, I mean Speed and Quality. Many people said there is a tradeoff between those two things, and only one thing can be first.
Some brilliant businessman: "I know, we'll combine them. We want Speed _and_ Quality." Thus, "Speed with Quality." Tada!
Values are a tradeoff: only one thing can be first. Trying to duck that is stupid.
The funny thing is you absolutely can do things which improve both speed and quality at the same time (basic good engineering), but they're like 3 or 4 orders of effect removed from those outcomes and impossible to do when you have someone breathing down your neck asking "does this make us go faster" at every step of the way.
Also "our velocity is 3x higher than it would be in the imaginary invisible universe where we made worse decisions 6 months ago" is impossible to measure, whereas "we cut a bunch of corners and shipped a piece of garbage on an arbitrary deadline" is very measurable.
Yep. These companies forget that we can use AI too, to unpack these ridiculous corporate statements in record time to get right down to the point: We're going to dump all our values, and not even going to pay lip service to things like integrity, transparency, or diversity anymore.
Every company I've worked at hammers the "ownership" idea and I hate it so much. It's how they drive a culture where employees are expected to invest themselves into "owning" a problem space that can be taken from them at any moment. It's how they trick you into doing extra work that's not in your job description.
Unless you're ACTUALLY an owner, don't be fooled by an "ownership" value.
It's the norm at Big Tech these days. Directors and VPs take all the glory if it goes well while ICs, team leads, and people managers get all of the blame if it doesn't. When the charlatans get exposed, they bounce on to the next company with their charlatan friends. Rinse and repeat while swapping RSUs for index funds, retire with >$10m before 50. If we stopped allowing this to work in our industry, it wouldn't be such a common thing. Unfortunately, with how everything is these days, these people are getting hired on vibes and bravado.
Ownership means just that, owning the company. The people pushing to place additional burden on workers are the actual owners (the investors and C level execs). Quite the hubris to create a fake class of "ownership" that only extends to taking responsibility and being held accountable but carries none of the benefits of actual ownership.
Conversely, you have "full ownership" and have the ability to decide the direction, as long as it's the same direction as your higher-ups have decided.
All the talk about higher-ups taking the big paychecks for "carrying so much responsibility" is in most cases just complete horseradish. When something goes wrong or doesn't run well, suddenly none of the higher-ups are taking the responsibility. Hmmmm it's strange, innit?
"Speed with quality" combined with that says a lot. Sounds to me like it will be the base expectation that their remaining developers slop out features in record time. Any failures will be theirs to "own" personally.
"And that ownership will of course automatically mean that they will work extra hard to ensure quality! Man, what a great idea! Yo, why we didn't think of that before?!"
One must really wonder, if they ever try to hear themselves talking or read their own prose. Maybe they do, but simply don't care at all?
Heh, tell me about it. This "ownership" thing is some Grade A bullshit. I see at workplace, all the autonomy on deciding any part of technical solution is taken away but on the other hand I have to take ownership of all consequences of their half-assed decisions.
I think same group of management consultants do a round of industry and in short time every company is using same duplicitous language of ownership, design thinking, customer first mindset, cloud first, cloud native, AI native, enterprise 2.0...and on and on it goes.
I read this and often think, yes, yes we know, but then I hear juniors at work taking these ideas at face value without considering things like stock splitting and preferred shares.
Owner is the one who gets the added value assigned to. At least according to the Das Kapital. So the check is easy - do you see the added value flowing onto your account or not.
Whenever someone at work tells you to take more ownership, the correct response is: "Sure, I'll take more RSUs". Of course, that's never what they mean. Ownership for me, responsibility for thee.
There seems to be a massive push against DEI over the last few years in the tech industry globally, despite it being one of the industry's greatest strength.
How well would the tech industry do if they fired all the autistic people for "not being team players"? How many dev teams are there without at least one furry, trans person, or socially awkward geek?
The irony is that DEI promotes merit by forcing companies to justify hiring beyond basic “cultural fit” vibes.
I’ve been in the business and seen a ton of hires on vibes. DEI actually asked people to expand the talent search, not hire anyone unqualified (which is what the anti-DEI folks are desperate to have us believe it did).
I predict some major EEO lawsuits will eventually bring the pendulum back in the other direction because my sense is that the return to vibes hiring (and RIF-ing) is resulting in very actionable discrimination cases.
The enthusiasm for disparaging DEI combined with a lack of articulation of how they plan to quantify 'qualifications' in a non-biased manner. My sense is that they don't plan to do this at all, they don't have a plan, and they are going to blunder into patterns of discriminatory practices that DEI frameworks were protecting them against.
If DEI operated on merit, there would be no need for the special new concept of DEI.
Ive seen many cases where HR stalls hiring until the most qualified candidates move on, prefilter insufficiency "diverse" candidates from the pool presented to teams, or implement internal quotas to meet external funding or contract requirements.
Not to mention the actual external requirements for "diversity" from public tender process, government backed funding bodies, and politically protected mega wealthy.
If hiring practices were purely operating on merit and free from discrimination, we wouldn't have studies repeatedly showing that people with the 'wrong' names, and otherwise identical resumes, weren't called back as frequently.
> Ive seen many cases where HR stalls hiring until the most qualified candidates move on
HR departments have screwed around with delays in the interview process long before anyone ever imagined the concept of expanding the candidate pool, doing blind resume screening, and standardizing the interview process. I don't think having fairer hiring processes created this problem.
> If DEI operated on merit, there would be no need for the special new concept of DEI.
Yes, there would, because un-diverse candidates (not white, young males from a handful of schools) would never get their foot in the door. Companies only interview a small fraction of their candidates.
> It’s not like we have a term like “individual contributor” or anything in the industry.
Perhaps I'm missing something here.
To me "individual contributor" means anyone who is NOT: A (technical) "Lead", "Chief", "Architect", or (possibly) "Staff" anything, and has no management or team-leader responsibilities.
Alas, I’ve learned that while everyone wants to hire them to fix their hideously fucked systems, they really don’t enjoy being told that their systems are, in fact, hideously fucked. They’d much prefer you quietly put out fires while biting your tongue about how they aren’t actually fixing any root causes.
I'm not saying there can't be very clear counter examples, I guess the overall sense though is that "being a team player' is generally considered an attractive quality in any employee. If A is a team player and B isn't, and they're otherwise equivalent, you're probably going to take/keep A.
It's not like (most) hiring managers put "not a team player" in the pro column.
The problem is that people are being cut for not being perceived as a team player, because they don't exactly fit the narrow perspective avoided by the dominant social culture. That doesn't mean they aren't team players.
For example: someone not always looking into your eyes while talking can be perceived as "rude". Same for wearing noise-canceling headphones in a talk-heavy environment. Oh, you don't drink alcohol during the "optional" Friday-afternoon company mixer? That's just weird. Want to have a day off for Eid rather than Christmas? Wellll, you did ask for it six months in advance and we did approve it already, buuuuut Dave planned a last-minute meeting which conflicts with the mandatory team meeting, so we moved the mandatory team meeting onto your day off... We'll just pay the hours you spent doing first-line support during Christmas in cash, okay?
heres an article that discusses how inflated diversity could possibly be a cause of social tension. the article's abstract concludes with a shrug ('too many factors!') but it does provide links to research papers arguing both for and against this case.
on the surface it seems pretty clear to me. behaviour is encoded in genetics. if one were surrounded by the same group for a few thousand years, they would share a common base of encodings, therefore social behaviours could be assumed to a higher degree. reference behavioural encodings drastically diverge across cultures (as embodied by religious value sets, or at a different meta level, the idea of low trust vs. high trust societies). based on this drastic divergence, predictions made about one's neighbour scale downwards in accuracy relative to increased cultural diversity.
so i see that jacking up societal entropy leads to lowered societal cohesion. but thats just my stance and id love to hear yours.
> on the surface it seems pretty clear to me. behaviour is encoded in genetics. if one were surrounded by the same group for a few thousand years, they would share a common base of encodings...
Which homogenous country with thousands of years of existence did you have in mind when writing this??
I couldn't disagree more. "predictions made about one's neighbour scale downwards in accuracy relative to increased cultural diversity"? I feel like this is just a fancy way of saying that you're uncomfortable with people being different from you. The social tension you're describing is in your own head. Even the article you're citing doesn't even agree with what you're saying.
your post is an ad hominem without substance to back the personal accusations within. i said there were arguments both in favor of and against diversity. the article i posted showed arguments both in favor of and against diversity. obviously some contradictions will present when looking at both sides.
diverse, millenia old, genetically encoded behavioural structures exist in our shared reality. id love to discuss this idea and the exact types of behaviours that can be encoded, down to the generational timespans required for encoding. that way we can talk about my idea in objective good faith.
'its all in your head' isnt objective good faith. applying the golden rule, you clearly accept bad faith ... man you couldnt tolerate a dissenting idea even momentarily before bringing out social ostracization and logical fallacies! sounds pretty similar to the behaviour of a racist, were you projecting?
that was said facetiously. im not trying to accuse you of anything, rather to show how it feels to be accused. to conclude i think its pretty easy to predict what my neighbours are eating for dinner at home and pretty hard in the city so youre gonna have to try a bit harder to convince me that the evidence of my eyes and ears is wrong.
Human populations dont share enough genes when they do share culture for this argument to make sense, people identifying as X culture but with Y genetics don't magically act like Y - saying "genetically encoded behavioral structures" is usually just code for "black people are dumber than white people" so you should understand why people are assuming bad faith.
thank you for clarifying why bad faith was assumed, that makes sense ... im pretty sure different levels of intelligence do present across racial/cultural borders, but assigning that to any one factor (ie. black=dumb) is unscientific
If a qualification for the role is "appreciation for certain less represented cultures/ideas/..." then sure. Otherwise, for a backend c++ engineer the benefits are significantly less obvious, to the point it's really hard to make a case for why DEI concerns should trump traditional evaluation metrics for skill.
The goal should be to hire the best team for the use case, regardless of gender/race/culture/background.
Appreciation isn't always enough, lived experience provides a lot of value as well.
See all the Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names/Addresses/Birthdays/Phone Numbers/Time Zones/etc, for example. Do you want a backend engineer who designs a 64-character ascii text field for legal name and have everyone nod in agreement, or would you rather have one who knows that it isn't going to work for their cousin "Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso"?
> it's really hard to make a case for why DEI concerns should trump traditional evaluation metrics for skill
It doesn't. The goal of DEI has always been to attract a diversity of perspectives, all else being equal. Nobody ever proposed choosing a woefully unqualified diverse candidate over an obviously-qualified Generic White Guy. The only people who would oppose that would be the unqualified Generic White Guy who just happens to be the nephew of the CEO's golf buddy.
I don't know why someone with a cousin named Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso is that much of a better hire than someone named Jón Bergþóruson, 王小明, Sukarno (with no surname), גִּדְעוֹן בֶּן־גּוּרְיוֹן , or Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Wilhelm Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg. None of whom would classically qualify as diversity hires.
Hiring someone in the off chance that their ethnicity gives them some unique critical unknown unknown that will pop up half a decade down the line resides in the same mental space as a programmer writing `if (5 == i)` in case a future programmer accidentally deletes an =. It's just speculative defensiveness whose efficacy is simply not well established by actual research. And, in my view, just works to confound actual signals that, evidently, gitlab and other employers feel get unfairly overshadowed when emphasizing explicitly pro-diversity hiring policies.
McKinsey has studied this extensively had has repeatedly found that diversity is financially beneficial to companies. They've had at least 4 reports on the subject.
It's obvious why this is the case if you sit down and think about it. Echo chambers of like-minded individuals can't understand customers as well as a workforce of people who represent the diversity of those customers.
This isn't just diversity of race or gender, it's also diversity of thought and background.
Also critical and under-emphasized: the E and I in DEI, equity and inclusion. Power distance and lack of inclusion can railroad companies into giving the people with the most power the most influence on decisions, rather than giving the best ideas a chance to breathe.
In business a classic example might be "men designing women's clothing." How are you going to understand your customers if none of your employees and leadership resemble those customers? Perhaps you can figure it out and make some decent products but your competitor who has more diversity in their workforce is likely to outperform you, which is exactly what McKinsey's studies have demonstrated.
I will also point out that the only reason anyone started questioning this obviously true business concept and changing opinions into being against DEI is because the Republican Party's strategists figured out that they could appropriate and leverage the term "DEI" and attach it to the latent reactionary racism that much of the US still holds dear.
You can get away with saying "I don't like DEI" in public but if you say "I don't like black people" or "I don't think women should get hired for important roles" [1] that is obviously not acceptable, even though a large percentage of Americans feel that way. Right wing media twisted a largely innocent term into a useful dogwhistle.
Those McKinsey/HBR studies are trash. They privilege the hypothesis, overlook the obvious ecological fallacy at play and add in a bit of a sampling bias for good measure. The fact that East Asian Economies are all booming and exporting globally with ~0 diversity and unique cultures ought to refute this notion. I'm sure there is some no true scotsman line you can play here about how the true meaning of DEI, and I would agree that the stated goals of DEI are all laudable. But in practice these initiatives often amounted to unprincipled discrimination and venal power grabs, which is why they are so widely despised.
The teams in the Manhattan project, the Apollo project, the inventors of the transistor, the guys who designed the Hoover dam, who wrote Doom, etc. etc. etc. etc. were not very diverse.
You might not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.
It seems like you’re using the achievements of white men as some kind of odd way to put down the achievements of people who aren’t men. They’re “peak performance” but everyone else isn’t, is that what you’re implying?
Ever heard of Ada Lovelace?
Grace Hopper, inventor of the compiler?
Katherine Johnson, who performed the calculations for John Glenn's Friendship 7 orbital flight, also did some calculations for the Apollo 11 and Apollo 13 missions.
Margaret Hamilton, who created the term “software engineer” among other accomplishments as a computer programmer for the Apollo project.
Adele Goldberg, part of the team who developed Smalltalk.
You brought up Doom, so I’ll bring up the creative director of Uncharted series Amy Hennig, Kim Swift the game designer for Portal, Shannon Loftis at Microsoft, Ellen Beeman game designer for the Wing Commander series…
I think the industry's greatest strength is actually outsourcing bulk of the work to culturally homogeneous, cheaper labor countries of Eastern Europe and South [East] Asia.
Big Tech CEOs having a front-row seat at Trump's 47 inauguration should give you a decent hint: they bribed the right people, so now they get to enjoy the kickbacks. There's no risk of being regulated to death right now, so there's no need to pretend having the same values the Democrats pretend to have.
Corporate DEI was never real. There's no "push against" it, simply because there was never a genuine push for it. Large companies don't have moral values - if they did their CEOs wouldn't be billionaires.
Most DEI programs at big companies ended up setting goals based on things like race and sex. Zealots in HR departments then started implementing programs to change hiring and promotion and compensation to implement progressive identity politics at work, under the DEI label. These things happened in secret, because the companies didn’t like to highlight how being the wrong race or sex means your career is worse off.
That’s totally illegal and discriminatory but companies were not facing consequences for it under the Biden administration. The constant injection of DEI politics all over society - at work, in movies, in ads, etc - led to a backlash and personally I think it is one of the things that led to someone like Trump being re-elected. And this administration is very against DEI ideology. That’s one reason corporations quickly abandoned it - they didn’t want to face legal scrutiny now.
Another is that DEI culture produced no positive results, as expected. Companies already had incentives to hire the best employees they can. If you change that with other incentives thrown in, it’ll make things worse. And ten years after DEI began to appear everywhere, it was obvious it produced no benefit at best, and led to worse teams at worst.
Another reason is simply that a lot of the activists pushing this type of ideology grew out of the activist age group. And I think many of them likely don’t hold those beliefs as strongly anymore. But either way, younger people are different. Especially young males who are more conservative.
All of that and other things has led to DEI being removed or at least de emphasized.
industry's greatest strength? where did that idea come from? hiring a bunch of didnt earn its based on race or sex? would you want your brain surgeon to be dei or do you want someone who is really good at the job?
> There seems to be a massive push against DEI over the last few years in the tech industry globally, despite it being one of the industry's greatest strength.
Okay, I'll bite. Why is it a strength, and why is it the greatest strength?
All people are equal, so it shouldn't matter if you have an all Asian team, an all black team, or any mix of all races.
Groups formed of people with similar life experiences have a greater tendency to fall into group-think that misses out on both giant errors and giant opportunities compared to more varied groups.
And all people aren't the same, you want a mix of minds and skills for most types of work. I'd totally hire someone that couldn't really do that much directly but was fun to be around and connected introverts that have some (potential) synergies in their ideas and generally made the group more productive over all.
Especially in business, the actual (not the managerial) judgment is the collective judgment on the whole groups output and actions by the market. Forging a high performing group out of different people is not the same as maximizing the median metric on some individual test of skill. Like quality, it's a bit undefinable, tho unmistakable when you experience it.
I keep seeing this term “earned” ITT; what does this mean to you? Did you earn something which you were denied when a less-experienced other person got a job? We all have two brain cells and understand there’s a tradeoff being made here, and it sucks being on the other side of that, but i struggle to see what privilege you believe you have or should have.
Yes, MONEY. Companies and their management couldn't care less about DEI, they care about pleasing whoever in in power in order to get benefits and make as much money as they can. You could literally have Hitler in power now and you would see what companies would do for their survival.
I thought that the GitHub degrading would be an opportunity for them to be an alternative more focused in stability and a customer centric approach .
But it's just more slop
GitHub is already the main platform for random open-source projects, and that's unlikely to change any time soon. GitLab's selling point is essentially "Github, but not by Github". They would do Just Fine offering a highly-restricted free account for the handful of hobbyists who care enough about leaving GH but don't care enough to go to Forgejo & friends and for the people doing evaluations, offering free credits to the few high-profile FLOSS projects who accidentally end up on GL-the-SaaS instead of self-hosted GL, and for the rest just focusing on paid corporate customers.
Basically "screw any part about employees working together do what I say fast". What a shame. I love the AI bros who think utopia is coming, 4 day work weeks, etc. more like "get screwed, work more, for less, in worse environments".
The code and product will turn to shit, and the company won't be able to extract itself from the mud.
Employees tasked with doing 10x more work with less help don't even have to feel bad about it happening. It'll also create employment opportunity in disrupting their old employer.
These companies are willingly signing up to become IBM.
AI code review with code ownership is fine. If people have to build working software, they'll do that, or you hold them accountable. Modern software dev at most organizations has far more code review than is needed outside of soc2 purposes.
Of course, once you have a big incident, then the value of more human review becomes obvious.
It's an important touch point for other code owners. I guess if no one is looking at the code anymore why even do an AI code review. It's kind of theatrical?
I seriously don't know how people are working like this now. I'm on my ass looking for work and in the last month it feels like everyone has completely lost their minds.
> I love the AI bros who think utopia is coming, 4 day work weeks, etc. more like "get screwed, work more, for less, in worse environments".
Where do you find those, seriously? That might’ve been the case a couple of years ago, where they’ve gaslighted people and played on their feelings, but now gloves are off. AI bros are literally posting about lack of sleep, dopamine hits, vibe coding on a toilet/walk/watching TV, FOMO is through the roof everywhere, prophesying doom of SE, etc.
Non American here, but as I understood it DEI is an older and very broad framework, which includes handicap accessibility and hiring military veterans. There are probably still plenty of companies that support that.
I don't understand why companies are abandoning DEI so quickly and so decisively. What happens if/when a Democrat president is elected that mandates DEI and ESG all over again, are they going to add them back into their core values as swiftly as they abandoned them?
At least companies like Coinbase made principled stances against forced DEI and employee activism earlier than everyone else. Doing it now seems weird because if it does become mandated again, they're going to look so phony.
It always was unprincipled: regardless of whether someone's a fan of DEI or not, these companies are short-sighted, profit-driven, and at best reactive to trends. The only reason any person thought otherwise is that they were either desperately looking for a victory or desperately looking for an enemy to be angry about.
>What happens if/when a Democrat president is elected that mandates DEI and ESG all over again
Mandates? There is this weird revisionist history that DEI was a Biden era invention that all these companies were forced to roll out in January 2021. These programs were simply the latest evolution of prolonged and steady cultural shifts. I remember attending events trying to promote diversity in the computer science department when I was in college 20+ years ago. Killing DEI isn't wiping out four years of progress, it's attempting to wipe out decades.
The obvious decline started around 2010; coincidentally also the era of the rise of SJW-ism and nontechnical derailing drama. Once the diversity quotas started appearing, the inevitable results were obvious.
I'm not going to get in the argument you clearly want to have, but as I said in my previous comment, I can confirm with my own experience that you're wrong and this trend started earlier than 2010.
I never used the word "Biden" once in my post. You should correct your biases.
Whether or not you are left or right, the objective truth is that a Democrat added DEI mandates and Republican removed the DEI mandates. I didn't say anything about whether or not that is right or wrong, but the fact that companies seemingly embraced DEI and then once a Republican removed it, then they abandoned it so quickly means they really didn't care about DEI at all and it was all phony. It just goes to show you that when they start praising themselves for being "moral" it's not because they actually care, it's because they are forced to and they don't give a shit about anyone.
I said Biden because you're acting like you only remember the last 6 years. Diversity programs predate and survived Trump's first term. You seem to be suggesting that culture naturally swings back and forth as the president changes and I think that's ahistorical which in turn means you're minimizing the extremism of the shift we're currently seeing.
Why is this even a question? Of course they would, they're just companies, they go chase profits and cannot have real values, don't anthropomorphise your lawnmower, yada yada yada.
Trump’s entire administration is all, 100% DEI hires, he is a DEI King (DEI by its pure definition is someone getting a job while many other people are more qualified for said job)
I'm firmly not in Trump's anti-DEI camp but I have seen what can happen when you make it one of your core values. You can end up with a lot of people talking about it a lot, lots of meetings and initiatives rather than doing actual work. And usually those don't go anywhere because the people doing it don't have any power to actually change things. It's unlikely that a company like Gitlab really needs anything changing anyway.
It doesn't make sense for it to be 40% of their values, especially if they're losing money (or very close to it).
Places I've worked that actually seem to have inclusion as a core value are great places to work and seem to have high functioning teams. My impression mostly though is more that it was never really a value for management but they wasted a bunch of time talking about it. In general any mismatch between stated values and actual values has been awful to deal with and is a red flag for places to work.
> Places I've worked that actually seem to have inclusion as a core value
I am not sure if you had implied it but that would align with my experience as well: places that tout diversity were the worst places to work (as someone who is seen as 'diverse') while the ones that treated everyone the same and had the expectation everyone pulls their weight.
I absolutely despise people treating me differently because of who / what I am rather than doing good work. I will take mildly inappropriate good-nature jokes over head pats every day of the week.
I love wildly beyond mild inappropriate jokes as they are a litmus test for a thinking person. The people that take things way too sensitive are a net drag and buzz kill for doing the grinding required. It goes both ways too. I love it when people are agressive with me. So, by freedom of association, cliques form and I have no problem with nepotism because the ultimate currency in life is trust.
I lost shame a long time ago. I am not even sure what reality is. Like, am i a computation within this meat brain? Or is the brain a two way transceiver to the real dimension and this body is just an avatar a mech that im piloting for a few years. It seems like a cosmic joke. And then think about the sheer obsurdity of sex ... yeesh
That's the thing - you can have it as a lived value, or you can have HR run programs. Very few places have/had both. Given the choice, I'd pick door #1.
(Saying this as a strong advocate for diversity and inclusion, lest there's confusion)
You don't ask HR to go out and push some value if you already have it. You only ask when you want to change or want to pretend to change.
That said, some management people say it's important for a large company to write down the values that they actually practice. I can see several reasons why it's good, but I haven't ever seen anybody go and do it, so IDK.
HR run programs are costly and applied to either mandated trainings or things the org has issues with.
DEI isn't mandatory, so an org heavily invested in DEI training probably had serious issues in the first place (whether they end up on the other side at the end of the trainings being another question)
That's different from putting it as a core value though. Most companies have some kind of "make more money with less resources" stated value, and I don't think we see it as an issue ?
There are two ways to do diversity - the first is to put a brutal skill filter and take everyone that passes it no matter their skin color, body weight, religion or politics. The other is to reduce people to their demographics and push for (in)visible quotas. One of them leads to crappy results.
I just want to be clear that these are not the only two ways to do diversity. Even if you're just focused on hiring (which is a myopic way to view diversity, even at the most simplistic level you need to think about retention) hiring is complicated and I've seen people try a variety of things to get a wider pool of qualified candidates in the pipeline (offering remote work, better paternity/maternity leaves, outreach with local women in engineering groups, etc). This isn't at all my area of expertise and I've seen a lot of things outside of the dichotomy you described.
Also, idk why people view quotas as all of "diversity". I've literally never worked at a place that considered this but I see people mention them all the time on the internet.
The meritocratic delusion is that you would be in the "have" pile, rather than sitting in the back of the bus with the rest of the "have nots".
Of course, its statistically most likely that any individual would belong to the much larger latter group but stats like that only apply to other people, right?
Worse, its a zero step thinkers solution. Step zero is a merit based system, step one is for the people with motels on Boardwalk and Park Place to ensure they can never lose again by rigging the system to ignore merit in favor of capital.
I'm not a random variable, I'm a specific human. Predicting future outcomes need to take into account my personal traits. Otherwise you get into absurdities like "statistically speaking, when you join a family reunion, 15% of the people you see there will be Indians, and another 15% Chinese".
> You can end up with a lot of people talking about it a lot, lots of meetings and initiatives rather than doing actual work. And usually those don't go anywhere because the people doing it don't have any power to actually change things.
Someone I'm close to is going through this right now. They work at a place that officially highly values "inclusion", and their employer's website is dripping with virtue-signaling language related to it. But that someone is disabled, and in fact there's nobody at the organization who owns accessibility issues. Disability accommodations are haphazard, and often not timely. Why? Because no one owns them. They just get punted to an internal employee affinity group of disabled people who don't have a real chain of command, a real budget, or even a real prerogative to do accessibility work, let alone meaningful power— many of its members are routinely chastised by their bosses whenever they dedicate any time to solving access problems within the company. "That's not what we pay your for", "that's not your job", "I need you on this other thing", etc.
Meanwhile the organization receives public accolades from meaningless business press organization as a "great place to work" or even "great place to work for people with disabilities".
I think it's fine for companies to value diversity, and to value it publicly. A little virtue signaling is fine, as a treat; it may actually repel nasty people, encourage good behavior, or make employees feel more welcome sometimes. That stuff is good.
But there's also a real possibility that a company making diversity an explicit value results in lots of energy going into activities that let that company's executives pat themselves on the back about how good they are without actually doing much for inclusion. I wouldn't take any sizeable company's stated values too seriously, including that one.
On the one hand, yeah, you should respect people who are different from you. On the other hand, this is really so obvious that I doubt elevating it to a “core value” makes much of a difference. Are there marginal people who wouldn’t respect diversity unless it was a core value?
Then again I don’t even know what it means for something to be a core value. What is the practical upshot of “collaboration” being a core value of a company? Were people not collaborating before?
> Then again I don’t even know what it means for something to be a core value.
Yeah I think they're mostly useless. At least you definitely don't get core values by just declaring that they are your motto. For example Amazon is pretty widely agreed to have customer satisfaction as a core value. They didn't get it by saying "Our core values are customer satisfaction...".
I will push back on what you are saying here. I think this idea that DEI becomes "yet another annoying meeting" has been amplified by political media. This political media has successfully grown the seed of this idea in our heads that DEI is just useless nonsense, and it's associated with those "liberals who want to take your freedom and guns and tax money and jobs."
Essentially, what's happening here is that this right wing political media saw an opportunity to latch onto resentment of employees whose companies were just trying to change employee behavior for the better.
Companies are well aware that implementing DEI successfully will financially outperform other companies who don't. McKinsey has found this to be true repeatedly. But of course, people don't really want to hear these kinds of things and a lot of socially conservative people don't like being told that they need to learn how to interact with that queer looking person they'd rather just avoid. When Jim and Bob want to hire a new employee they just want to hire another Jim or another Bob and be left alone.
You know how your company puts meetings on your calendar where they preach about wellness and exercise and stuff like that? Just because they are annoying meetings doesn't mean they're wrong. You should focus on your wellness and exercise. Same deal with DEI: it's obviously beneficial to everyone, but America has a whole lot of people who really don't want it.
We are within the same lifetime as full blown segregation, redlining, of women being disallowed from opening bank accounts without spousal approval. There are people still alive from that era. Your great-great-grandparent may have been alive during legal racial slavery.
I think "inclusion" is fine as a value. "Diversity" is not, because it is an outcome and not an action one pursues. What matters is that all have equal opportunities to participate, and perfectly fair opportunities can create unequal outcomes through no fault of anyone's. Moreover, I think that fixating on the demographics of who joins the company is morally misguided. I want my teammates to be capable and enjoyable to work with, not to check someone's "we must have X number of minorities checkbox". Diversity initiatives always turn into the latter in my experience.
you say suck it fascist in response to DEI being removed, i say DEI would get canned by communists and fascists both, autofill the rest of the argument with some prose
Alas, it’s pretty obvious to everyone else that you tried to pick a fight by shoehorning your dubious, pre-formed argument into an inappropriate place. Better luck next time.
i was indeed trying to pick a fight, with gitlab, because i think its pathetic to pivot and abandon values for money, regardless as to those values, and regardless as to whether the abandonment is done by a human or a corporation. your comment was a convenient conversational entry point, as you made the scenario political, offering a chance for me to generalize to my point. thats the way i saw it anyway. did something in particular make you feel like a target?
Consider that the negative reaction to your (flagged, not by me) pompous, blathering comment has nothing to do with politics, or the point you failed to make. It didn’t make sense in context, was purposelessly accusatory, and generally added nothing to the conversation. I’m done explaining the obvious to you. If you don’t get it at this point, it’s because you’re not letting yourself get it. Go back to Reddit or X or wherever and pollute that space. It’s just not how HN works.
So much of the kerfuffle about DEI has always been around the fact that people don't understand what DEI means.
Also, in the current environment, I don't see how anyone can look around and argue that merit-based hiring is a norm anywhere. Even at hotspots of anti-DEI, "merit" often means "friend of a friend" or similar.
I think the idea is that each letter in there is considered a merit, hence why it's always discussed under the "core values" section. That is to say, they're properties that they supposedly value, next to technical excellence, team fit, being a spitfire, whatever.
And that the discussed-to-death diversity hiring quotas are not its entirety, or even necessarily a part, of it.
Merit not being a threshold but a range in actuality probably also plays a role (along with how utter theater the typical job interview really is).
> I wouldn't want to be hired based on something so meaningless.
But that's kinda the point of it all, isn't it? That it's supposed to be empowering the disadvantaged / marginalized. If your background does not put you at a disadvantage, there's nothing to compensate for, then it would indeed be meaningless. But if there is, and you made it, then that is by definition extraordinary. So it is meaningful.
There's definitely a question about whether they'd be stealing your thunder by this, but I'll leave that to an actual aficionado of the topic. Not exactly the expert on all this.
For someone whinging about torturing language, you're the one asserting that compensating for racism is racism [0], while also proudly exclaiming that since your background was reasonably alright, other people from your ethnic class shouldn't be helped, so as to not hurt your precious little ego.
Tough crowd.
[0] and funnily enough, I agree! I just also think that if you believe there's a way out of this that isn't racist, you're a moron.
Why don't you assume my fucking gender before assuming the contents of my mind?
Is this how fucking retarded the MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ [0] is these days, where you can't assume the man with a big swinging dick is a man, while you divine the contents of other people's souls without pause?
> Why don't you assume my fucking gender before assuming the contents of my mind?
What for? You seem to be enough of a victim already.
Or sorry, do you have a preferred slur?
---
It's incredible how far culture war has rotten the North American mind. I literally just joined in to offer my understood perspective to the guy, which I don't even necessarily find right (as I explicitly highlighted), but I do appreciate facets of.
But oh no, John Convenient-Idiot-Illiberal saw the right trigger words and had to spiral into a tirade with their sob story. You sure showed us dude. Hope that middle class money affords you a therapist. You sure could fucking use one.
They can make it unnecessary for you to understand.
Consider hash tables. Nobody implements a hash table by hand any more.
I've written some, but not in this century.
Optimal hash table design is a specialist subject. Do you know about robin hood algorithms? Changing the random number generator's seed to discourage collision attacks?
A basic hash table starts to slow down around 70% full. Modern hash tables can get above 90% full before they have to expand.
Who keeps Knuth's Fundamental Algorithms handy any more? I own both the original edition and the revised edition. They're boxed up in the garage. I once read that book cover to cover. That was a long time ago.
That's not AI. That's solving the problem and putting it in a black box. That's how technology progresses.
That's obviously not what I'm talking about. If you're asking an AI to write an optimal hash table algorithm, something is clearly wrong. I'm talking specifically about understanding the business domain and problem you are trying to solve.
> That's not AI. That's solving the problem and putting it in a black box. That's how technology progresses.
The key word is solving. Meaning someone, after coming up with the solution, has taken times to prove that it works well in all usual and most extreme cases. With their reputation on the line.
That’s why you trust curl, ffmpeg, Knuth’s books,… but you don’t trust random cat on the internet. We don’t trust AI and the cost to review its output is not a great tradeoffs compared to just think and solve the problem.
Governance: basically anarchic, but with one person ultimately calling the shots.
That's the classic problem with pseudo-anarchies. They're really dictatorships.
The larger scale form of this is the non-profit with the self-perpetuating board, where the board of directors appoints its successors.
It's the standard form for big non-profits, such as hospitals or national organizations.
Non-profit organizations with real elected officials, where the incumbents get kicked out now and then, are rare. They take too much attention by the members.
Nobody knows how to run a meeting under Robert's Rules of Order any more. The whole point of such meetings is that the group is in charge and the outcome is a binding decision. Most organizational leaders don't want that.
I think there's a pretty critical difference between a "dictatorship" and what this is, which is rule-by-the-least-apathetic; maybe let's call this "pathocracy" (from pathos). The minimum number of pathocrats needed to sustain such an organization is one, and the pathocracy either successfully grows until it warrants a more formal organizational structure or it dies when the sole remaining pathocrat bows out. For plenty of community events--maybe even nearly all of them--this is sufficient; the bi-monthly knitting circle at your local library probably does not greatly benefit from imposing a bureaucracy upon itself. And I say this as someone who's sitting within thirty feet of a copy of Robert's Rules of Order.
Many small organizations don't need much governance. Those are usually the ones with no real assets. At the community space level, you have assets and constraints. At that point you need some degree of governance.
This article would have been more interesting if it wasn't just one guy and his space, but an article by someone who had visited a few community spaces to see how they were organized.
I've watched Bay Area maker spaces come and go. TechShop is gone. TheShop is gone.
The gym model didn't work.
HumanMade has some government funding for its job training function, and is quite expensive.
Noisebridge, the most anarchic space, is still running. They've had to shut down for months for cleanup, or move, twice. Some spaces were taken over by arts and crafts people, and now are more into paper-folding and glue guns than CNC milling. Some spaces ended up in the teen college resume building niche.
It may have something to do with the audience though. I would say it is closer to Pratchett's idea of monarchy in Ramptops than anarchy. It is not that people there were not interested. They may even cheer the king on principle. After all, kings are supposed to be kings.
It is rather that when kings did something stupid enough, pitchforks were there to remind them. In this case, the audience can simply stop being part of the group.
Yup. Google and Amazon knew their tech could be used for human rights abuses in Israel (their lawyers warned them so) but Google and Amazon apparently value $$$ more than human rights per this EFF article:
reply