Not really “has to”, he just is doing it because he’s got nothing better to do. Much like how he didn’t have to fire the previous head of moderation and spend the last week calling him a gay pedophile and releasing his work emails.
Isn't he CEO of 2 or 3 other companies? I know a lot of people think that CEOs don't actually do anything important; Musk is not hurting their argument.
I think he's the "CEO" of several more companies. How many 100 hour work weeks has Elon logged at the Boring company this month? I'm going to guess zero.
>Do you think they still run Ruby that can't reclaim allocated unmanaged memory?
No, I don't.
My point is their initial success years (which wasn't that off the current product) wasn't some hardcore engineering feat: just a cruder-than-average Rails app.
Did he actually send such a letter to everyone? That's really a dumb move cause there's no reason for key engineers to stay - they have millions of dollars and will be immediately hired if they want to.
Why would anyone go and destroy their career by sabotaging an employer? Such person is clearly can't be trusted cause god knows what they do if they think their boss is an asshole. I quit two times not on the best terms with the management and the only "sabotage" was a zero-day notice and a two-week notice. It just never crossed my mind.
"They didn't get run over the last two times they ran across the freeway, so running across the freeway is perfectly safe."
They developed those methods of dealing with JVM and scheduler issues because those problems rose in prominence against the background of a zillion other problems. They became the longest poles, most worth spending time and effort on. But those other problems still exist, with more appearing every day. Yes, even without code change, because environments and workloads change too. Anyone who has actually been responsible for large complex systems, not just in the sense of working at the same team/company and riding the coat-tails of those who actually understood it, knows that they require continued attention and always will. Entropy exists.
Try Uber in Stambul. The driver will send a message asking where are you going and ask for double the Uber fare or will cancel the order. They don't care about their ratings.
Uber in California and Russia (it's actually Yandex.Taxi for quite some time here) works great.
Sometimes the scraping situation gets kinda ironic. I worked at a large eRetailer/marketplace and obviously we scraped our major competitors just as they scraped us (there are four major marketplaces here). So each company had a team to implement anti-scraping measures and defeat competitor's defences. Instead of providing an API everyone decided to spend time and money on this useless weapons race.
Absent someone breaking really far away from the pack, that's a classic example of one type of "bullshit job" called out in Graeber's book... Bullshit Jobs. Zero-sum, ever-escalating competition. Militaries are another obvious example (we'd all be better off if every country's military spending were far closer to zero—but no one country can risk lowering it unilaterally, and may even be inclined to increase theirs in response to neighbors, which sometimes gets so insanely wasteful that you see something like the London Naval Treaty or SALT come about in response) but so is a great deal of advertising and marketing activity (you have to spend more only because your competitor started spending more—end result, status quo maintained, but more money spent all around)
I wonder how anyone in IT could take Graeber seriously. One of his opinions about programming was that programmers work "bullshit jobs" for their employer and do cool open source stuff in their free time which is demonstrably false.
The presentation of that in the book, based off a message from someone in the industry, doesn't seem out of line with the overall tone and reliability-level that Graeber explicitly sets out in the beginning, which is both that the book is not rigorous science and that it's mainly concerned with considering why people's perceptions of their own jobs would be that they're bullshit.
[EDIT]
> One of his opinions about programming was that programmers work "bullshit jobs" for their employer and do cool open source stuff in their free time which is demonstrably false.
Further, I'm not even sure that's incorrect. It can both be true that most open source (that's actually used by anyone) is done by people who are paid to do it, and that most programmers have very little interesting or challenging to do at work unless they work on hobby projects—maybe open source—in their free time.
The overall letter as quoted in the book, and Graeber's commentary on it, actually makes some good points aside from all this. Things don't have to be perfect to be useful.
