Not true at all, having seen the other side. In a large enough organization, entire divisions will be cut if a product is missing. Sometimes productive people are on the wrong product that gets slashed to maintenance mode, or they have the wrong manager. Sometimes deep cuts are necessary because the product is failing and a productive person on a growth initiative is cut for subject matter expertise in the core product that will allow maintenance mode to continue. Sometimes tenure is rewarded. Sometimes directors don't see the full story because the managers can't be told of the layoff.
I'd like you to go look at PRINCE2 and SSADM. Or read the original Royce paper - https://www.praxisframework.org/files/royce1970.pdf was written explicitly to term this Antipattern "Waterfall." (Note that Royce marks it as an antipattern.)
We are nearly 70 years into this discussion at this point. I'm sure Grace Hopper and John Mauchly were having discussions about this around UNIVAC programs.
Do you not see the difference between a toy language and a clean room implementation that can compile Linux, QEMU, Postgres, and sqlite? (No, it doesn't have the assembler and linker.)
Or... the places they have deep expertise they have NDA/non-competes to worry about. (At least, outside of California.)
Sure, I could go and create an accounting app - or a clinical trial recruitment app - as a basic clone of what I've already created. And I might even make it better for some niche. But even if I know what that product system needs, I still need to find someone with the relationships to get in the door.
The trick is - you don't need an idea man for a non-technical founder. You really need someone with a rolodex and a problem.
What's happening in practice, though, is a group of people (like Campus Watch) are looking specifically for anyone teaching gender, trans issues, race, and religion, and analyzing the coursework through their ideologies and harassing professors on account of it. And they're going through past years as well as present.
A friend of mine was harassed by these sorts of groups for their teaching. They received death threats, hardcore pornography, and gore in their inbox from these chuds. The trigger was the availability of their course material online.
Cool, if you feel that way then go face them. Don't force professors to stand in the firing line in your stead.
> Not sharing course outlines is not going to help make this problem better.
It would make finding targets more difficult than just doing a ctrl-f, which obviously would make the problem better just by making it harder to find professors to harass.
I see what you are saying, but not publishing the materials is not going to solve the problem. That's because the people who are attacking the professors will just get it by some other means, like having someone attend the class.
Remember, the attackers are not a few oddballs. The are members of a vast MAGA movement that has enough member to elect the present president and that encourages this sort of behavior. And they have tons of money behind them.
> will just get it by some other means, like having someone attend the class.
Not really, they don't have sufficient time budget and a network of agents to do that as comprehensively as with a simple "google search" some bureaucrat/activist can perform in a few minutes
I've heard for years that this sort of cancel culture doesn't exist or isn't a problem, and it's just the consequences of engaging in unpopular speech. Xkcd "showing you the door" and all that.
As a tangent, I'm seeing Lisbon trying to make a lot of buzz, but it seemingly can't crack into the larger ecosystem. What's missing, considering that it should be able to benefit from its EU integration?
There's a lot of problems with bureaucracy there (I've lived in London and Lisbon). It's a great city but the government is insanely inefficient (compared to the UK IME).
Long term visa waits are 2 years+. In a personal example, Portugal was the last country _by far_ in the EU to be able to issue residency cards for UK people after Brexit (despite having a very sizeable british population). This caused a lot of practical problems, as it stuck everyone in a massive limbo - other EU countries wouldn't accept that you were a portugese resident with the piece of paper they gave you. It took intense lobbying by the British embassy and European Commission to get the system in place at all.
In a commercial sense there are other problems. The court system is completely non functional. A simple civil case can take _years_ just to get a hearing. With appeals etc you can easily look at a decade. Again, there's a lot of problems in the UK with courts, but it is on a different scale there. This causes a lot of problems because businesses can get away with various shady stuff knowing it is basically impossible to enforce contractual terms - everything from landlords to b2b has issues.
It's got an enormous amount of promise but until the immigration/court system improves it is very hard to do business there.
The CEO of cloudflare has posted about this kind of stuff on Twitter (Cloudflare is a huge employer there) occassionaly. It's not positive to say the least.
“Don’t be needed” isn’t “don’t be valuable.” The EM should not be a bottleneck. The EM should be able to take a vacation without being paged. (So should anybody on the team!)
My teams would slow down without me because I can due process tasks more efficiently, but nothing demands me to be in the loop.
Someone I know used to be pretty senior at a major SV company. Over dinner one night, he told me that the CEO would take vacations with instructions to the effect of "handle it" if something comes up. (Assume it wasn't absolute but that was the basic gist.) Apparently, a new PR head came in and was like "I can't work under that condition" and quickly left.
Oh, you bet they would. Nothing causes old white people to riot like mild inconvenience.
That's only mildly sarcastic. For many people, it's become a part of being American, especially on the conservative side of the isle. Now, I personally live in celsius and work comfortably in kilometers, liters, and grams. However, it has become a weird point of pride for some Americans.
It's interesting that the first thing you see in the comments is "don't contact anyone."
Right now we're in a weird place - if you have a network, you're pretty well off. If your network isn't hiring, or you are early in your career, it's brutal trying to get through the noise.
The truth is that proof of work matters. But the big problem is that proof of work is easy to fake right now. It takes being creative. I get a few emails a month right now. Honestly, I think this isn't going to work at this point - some go to my personal and some go to my professional emails. But what might work?
Look at people who are writing blogs. Is there something interesting on their blog? Is that worth engaging them on first? (I mean, don't waste their time if you aren't interested or if you're going to submarine it the second or third email - someone will feel used - but showing a dual purpose of the email might not be the worst thing and even if they don't have a position or influence on the position, you might have a good conversation.
Are you involved on bluesky/twitter/threads? Are you getting positive engagement? Are you finding ways to make community? It may not get the formal referral but it might make the social referral and give you 30 extra seconds with the resume and a reason to say yes.
>The truth is that proof of work matters. But the big problem is that proof of work is easy to fake right now.
The big shame is that the hardest PoW to fake right now tends to be under NDA's and proprietary codebases. So if you aren't in the position to make major contributions to FOSS in your free time or "code for fun", it feels like a soft reset all over again. As if those yeras in industry mean nothing.
I especially dread the idea of needing to jump on the very doomscrolling places I left at the start of the pandemic just to get a potential lead. My mental health over 2025 was already pretty bottom of the barrel without that.
If you're interested at all in Eastern philosophy, it has helped me survive mentally the past few years of unemployment and unstable work after burning out from a 22 year career.
Highly recommend Alan Watts. If you like audiobooks, I started out on the one titled You're It. I think it was a good starting point.
I struggle with this a bit because while my network isn’t bad - I really can’t stand social network like threads/X etc - I’m not on any social media bar here and LinkedIn.
Do you think investing in bluesky is worth it? I’m in industry but have a PhD ongoing in TTI models so I should probably get on it :/
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