Also, they complained that their previous job was super stressful because the sales people kept making promises to customers that were really hard to keep ("of course we'll implement this in two weeks") and so they were constantly scrambling to meet impossible deadlines.

I take offense at this! We weren't that stupid back then! We just put the text 5 times on the page, with position: relative, 4x in the outline color, each copy with a 1px offset in a different direction, and the final one in the text color. That trick worked with pretty early CSS.

In Austria, the employer can terminate a contract immediately if the employee behaves in a manner that would harm the employer.

If the employee does nothing wrong, the contract can still be terminated, but you have to give notice 6 weeks ahead (or longer if the employee has worked at your company for a long time).

People get these things confused and think employees generally can't be fired without a reason, but that's not true. They just can't be fired on the spot without a reason.

You have to pay people the minimum salary depending on their trade, you have to give them 5 weeks of vacation, pay overtime, pay for health insurance and so on.

Employers can't exploit their employees, but employees still have to do their job.

But there is also a big area of the economy where employers ignore the law and treat employees like shit. For example, service workers are not generally treated well in Austria, and many are afraid of losing their job so they don't complain to the authorities.

I live in Austria and you can fire people for pretty much any reason. You have to give them 6 weeks notice, and there are some extra protections for people who are old or who have disabilities and who have been working for your company for a long time, but even then you can fire them.

You can even fire people for getting sick a lot.

And that's assuming you directly hire them as employees in the first place. Many people work via agencies or as contractors, and they have practically zero protections.

I offered 4 day work week, no on-call, no overtime, but paid less than their previous employer (because I couldn't afford it).

I am sure lots of people value things besides salary.

Take security scoped bookmarks. The only way that sandboxed apps can persistently access files outside their sandbox. It's an important feature. It's broken on some Macs. I know from logs that about 0.5% of my users run into this bug. It's been broken for years, and every time I report the problem to Apple they ask me for steps to reproduce or and Xcode sample project. I have no idea what to do, it's a bug in ScopedBookmarkAgent or in SecKeychain somewhere.

With Sequoia, they managed to break the feature for about 10% of users. That was apparently enough to get Apple to pay attention, so they fixed it in macOS 15.1. I think it's back to 0.5% now.

Somehow Apples own apps aren't affected by these bugs. Bugs that mostly affect 3rd party apps seem to slip through a lot more easily.

The security tech in macOS is unreliable garbage. And people praise it, they just think 3rd party apps are buggy. But for a lot of my bugs, the bug is in the macOS frameworks, but users come to me and complain.

It's no wonder that many developers don't sandbox their apps. It's just perpetually broken.

I wish they would make their tech reliable.

It's the only way it all makes sense. I don't think that all those voters who vote for Trump and Putin and Erdogan and all the other autocrats think they'll have a better life. But they know that all those other people are going to suffer, and it makes them feel a bit better.

The most dangerous man (or woman) is someone who thinks they have nothing to lose.

People feel dispair, and therefore they vote for people who will make others suffer.

Notarized Mac apps have to used the hardened runtime, which comes with a few restrictions. For now, there are no content restrictions for notarized apps on the Mac. Let's hope it stays that way. But there are very significant content restrictions for notarized apps on iOS, and who knows how long until Apple introduces them on macOS as well.