> [post 2] "Of course they share responsibility."

I'm not following.

We're also still disregarding the fact that none of us can even prove that it was one of his staff that did this and not him, but your OP is worded like it's a given it was staff.

> The more useful job of a politician may be similar to how managers in general have a "more useful" part of their jobs then publishing status report. "Gathering information, making decisions, nudging others." Lobbying for their constituency (at best) or the people who paid for his campaign (at worse).

> Or, heavens forbid, writing legislation on a topic that he knows something about, as opposed to whatever crap he had to slop about.

Not sure about you, but I often find my job will oftentimes not always include the things I have the most experience in, and I'm expected to be able to rise to the occasion because I was hired to do so.

> As I said, responsibility has to be shared.

You said that? Because I read "one of them is guilty, the other one is responsible." If you mean that responsibility is synonymous here, why the distinction?

--

Revisiting my original questions that have gone unanswered:

- Is procedure not his job as a politician?

Given that you appear to have instead answered "If not, what is his job / the more useful thing?", I'm assuming "No", to which I disagree. If your answer is that "yes, procedure is part of his job", then I assert he failed to do his job here, regardless of how boring you find that job to be personally.

If the guilty/responsible distinction still holds, I'm still unclear as to what applies to whom.

> that politician trusted some poorly paid staff

- I assume that politician is the one / main person in charge of doling out payments. Does that mean they share guilt/responsibility for the result?

> to write a boring procedural speech while he was doing something (hopefully more useful).

- Is procedure not his job as a politician?

- If not, what is his job / the more useful thing?

> One of them is guilty, the other one is responsible, the conséquence [sic] should be in proportion to the gravity.

- Which is which?

- Which has more gravity and why?

- What consequences are you envisioning, in both cases?

- If, as I suspect, the consequences are lesser (proportionally) for the politician himself, what if any deterrents can be put into place to stop that behavior? After all, he manages his staff, in theory.

This describes basically every FAANG / MANGA company. Or even past that, any company that hit it big with a cash cow and now needs to come up with something new to satisfy shareholders.

In Meta's case, they have 3B MAU, they absolutely hire from the same tier of developers, and (pre-layoffs/economic downturn) they throw 10x more of them than they need at a problem. They even outcomp Google. The number of employees is more because employee growth was an indicator for company growth and only once that became a liability against the stock price it stopped.

Meta is just a newer company than Google.

> Facebook on the other hand, cares about internal DX, sees it a problem when developers are stuck with cumbersome processes, and greases the skids.

I am married to a Meta engineer and have mentored folks that have gone to work there. This might be the case if you work for a product that drives their cash cow of ads, but if you are doing anything that doesn't fit within that narrow bucket ... let's just say our viewpoints diverge significantly.

> The problem with React is that mediocre developers can use it to build big things that are too big for them to handle. The problem with Kubernetes is that above-average developers can use it to build small things they can't handle. And the scalability of Kube is more than almost all of the industry needs.

The problem with the Chrysler 300 is that bad drivers run over people. What does that say about the engineering culture at Chrysler?

Look, I agree that most cloud stuff is overkill, but I have a hard time indicting Google's entire engineering culture over a project they released into the wild 12 years ago that just happens to not fit your use case and that theoretical "above-average" developers wouldn't be able to tell that.

Can you elaborate on why these are at all comparable techs to use as a developer?

React seems to be the frontrunner in FE, but what do you see the BE equivalent to be?

This sounds like an inversion of cause and effect.

> All three activities are hobbies. [...] It's nothing that gives life a purpose.

I find this to be a dire outlook, myself.

From just a sustainability point, I really hope that the parent post's quote is true, because otherwise I've personally seen LLMs used over and over to complete the same task that it could have been used for once to generate a script, and I'd really like to be able to still afford to own my own hardware at home.

The Church as defined by the institution is a community. I do not see it as a contradiction that the head of the institution is instructing the leaders to not add more layers of abstraction between them and the community, especially when those messages are on the subject of what it means to be human.

I don't pay for the Atlantic and thus am limited by paywall, but this ignores power dynamics.

I live in the PNW and regularly visit most of the major cities there and in NorCal. What exactly is more depressing there than any other city of any economic relevance in the nation?

I worked on the MS Word core team for a little over three years from 2010-2014, and de-facto owned a significant part of implementing ODF / OOXML Strict support.

The binary format was a liability for Microsoft to begin with, because of decades of cruft lining up with actual memory alignment. During my tenure there I ran into code my GM had written as an intern and was still intact -- he had 20+ years of tenure (mostly on Word) when I joined the team.

The translation of the file format to XML involved a significant amount of performance degradation if you weren't careful. Hundreds of millions of people use the app monthly, and MS still tries to maintain backwards compatibility. Given that open APIs were a relatively late development for the app, I really don't think in the current reality of what's expected by boards of directors for the companies they oversee that _anyone_ would take years to:

a) define a spec that maintained that backwards compatibility

b) reach whatever nebulous simplicity metric today's HN article wants

c) not get whoever greenlit the project fired for taking that many engineering hours for a and b

This exists in America, in ways that have generally escaped the label of "Communism". The most basic example of this most will be familiar with is zoning laws, but there is significant precedent otherwise. There will always be a gradient of control, and claiming that a singular government action in expansion is therefore communist is not intellectually honest.

Downtown has improved wildly since when even when I was growing up near there in the 80s/90s, but people don't realize how large Detroit is. It's nearly 140 square miles. Downtown is, charitably, 2sqmi, and that's including all the way up to Wayne State. The light rail is the People Mover loop downtown plus a trolley up Woodward, within that range.

The theft mentioned in the article occurred at 8 Mile and Wyoming, which is a 20 minute highway drive from Campus Martius in no traffic. "Clean Downtown" that happened when the city hosted the super bowl and other related efforts have very lopsidedly focused on the downtown area.

Uh, those that stormed out did it right after the salary piece, and they didn't put it together?

ETA: often this work is volunteerism, which does not have a capital incentive in the individual case here.