I don't care where you work, nor where your office is, nor how often you appear there each week. I care that VMware is demanding you subsidize your own employment costs by returning up to 18% of your annual pay to the company... because the company chose to build where cost of living is significantly higher than you can afford on the pay VMware has already been paying you.

The answer should be an emphatic NO. "No, I will not take 80% of my original pay simply because I moved. Where I live is none of your business, except with respect to securing company data and property while I am employed by you. You pay me based on an already unfair exchange for the value my skills and time bring your organization. You don't get to make me pay you back for the inconvenience of having to employ me remotely." That's what needs to be said. And there needs to be class action lawsuits to recover damages for this as well. VMware wasn't charging $100 less per license for sales to Midwest companies. They didn't slap a $100 Silicon Valley differential on local sales. This is bullshit, through and through.

And I apologize for my rage and language, but damn it. Every single one of these executives built their companies on keeping pay low. I've got friends who got stuck in dead-end contracts at these tech firms. One of 'em has literally been on contract with IBM for 5 years, waiting for some kind of fulltime opportunity that they never have "need" for. Another just got furloughed after two years on contracts at Ubisoft. Had a friend from school who launched the Palm Pre only to get laid off within 9 months of joining the company. No transfers, no options, just a "hey, so our idea for that... turns out no one wanted to buy it! You gotta go." Well, not our problem, dude. We didn't get to pick which product our work went into. We didn't get to make a career-interest decision after watching you present to us that you'd done the market- and competitive analyses to back some likelihood of demand for what you wanted us to commit no-strings-attached to.

It's immature, and malicious and deceitful. And too many people break bread and break their backs to get their Agile and SCRUM releases out the door every 5 minutes. Everyone under the executives and senior management deserves more damn respect than this.

Edit: And Sundar has needed to go for a long time. The guy is an idiot. How do you turn the largest consumer and commercial OS into a dumpster fire of exploits, half-finished ideas (Settings vs. Control Panel, anyone?!?), and have to give it away for free because you lacked the expertise to implement a logistics plan that would comfortably roll all consumers and commercial deployments forward without exposing them to significant downtime? You employ people like Sundar. If the man spent 5 fewer minutes writing verbose excuses for not getting results, he'd have 5 minutes each day to work toward getting results. If he tries hard enough, he may up it to 10 minutes in a few years.

Last, I'd like to point out that while I agree this type of virus is relatively new to humans, and the -2 virus is very new, we do have a wealth of longitudinal knowledge from SARS and MERS cases to work with in conjunction with what we are discovering about SARS-CoV-2. So far, it is not the patients with respiratory illness that we need to be concerned about. It is the patients with zero respiratory symptoms, but high risk of other cardiovascular and autoimmune symptoms. I think we're more baffled by how this one virus can go from putting someone on a ventilator to putting someone at a significant risk of stroke in such a short period of time.

That said, I agree with you that these are apples and oranges. The brain-eating amoebas are a panic thing. COVID-19 is not something to shake a fist at. COVID-19 has been found in spinal fluid. Given SARS and MERS do not share this trait, we have a lot more reason to take -2 as a serious threat, regardless of its extremely high short-term survival rate.

But I can relate to the pressure to deliver quick results. I found myself burnt out when working on a forecast model around three years ago. The constant "how's it goin'?" tore my attention away from the work, and I'm still convinced I could have delivered a better result.

So, in a way, I agree. In another, I understand the other side of the issue, and I think there are so many less time-intensive tasks going on around engineering that there's often little awareness that something like refactoring a class for better efficiency pays in smaller but compounding ways long-term, with most of the time cost and perceived opportunity cost being immediate and short-term. It's still worth it if you really do the math on the long-term benefit.

"Sometimes, it's probably almost approximately around what we think could be along the spectrum of known values." - Me, as CEO.

On a related note, Bill Gates' recent doubts about the utility of all-electric long distance trucks was surprising. I don't know of nearly any other time Gates just reached into a field he has zero experience in and reacted to his own repulsion of his discomfort with the subject and its context. It was an odd, uncharacteristic move, and one that makes me wonder if his value set has changed enough that he cannot provide value and authoritative influence in consumer and enterprise hardware and software solutions anymore. People change, so maybe it's true. But man, I idolized Bill as a kid. It's hard to not feel like he's the reason people take people like me seriously, even today.

Frameworks are what smart people use to get results. I believe risk is the tool of geniuses.

It'd be obvious, for example, to add Bold, Italic, and Underline buttons for usability to the textbox I'm typing in. To me, however, the buttons, the textbox, even the text-styling characters are arbitrary constraints. I want to know if this "reply" feature could be built in-line, without a textbox? If I could eliminate the constraints one-by-one, how many ways could you and I interact over this specific topic that would be both novel and, perhaps, more engaging for us both?

I've also grown to loathe that first-line tab beginning the second paragraph. It makes left-aligned text look wonky.

I loathe centered text too.

I'm not a rounded rectangle person.

I think the colored block UI that's all over Android, sites like HN, etc. looks tacky. We went from semi-transparent glass UI to flat colored blocks, and somehow interfaces got slower and more processor intensive. Now, that's a horse of a different color.

It's always fun for me to meet people who do things the complete opposite I do them. It's oddly satisfying, like, I'm glad someone is my polar opposite on an issue or activity.

It's the reason nearly all US citizens who move overseas eventually give up their citizenship. My great aunt left for Poland 30 years ago, and renounced her citizenship within 3 years because she was paying taxes on everything she earned twice, one under Polish law and again under US law.

I stopped programming around 8 years ago because I hate the current MVC model most software is created and maintained with. What got me interested recently in dipping back in was a video on branchless programming. I love the idea of unit testing at the machine code level for efficiency, and then figuring out how to trick the compiler or runtime and the chipset into making quick, predictive outputs to reduce idling on branches or making 15 steps for something doable in as little as 4.

That feels like a completely opposing direction to take given the current priorities of engineers across almost all industries, even oldtime ones like Gaming.

Imagine the American government disbanding. The kingpins would be Silicon Valley and other West Coast Tech executives because of the sheer convenience afforded by us depending on their hardware (their ideas too) for most communication. People would adapt over time, but that's the issue: over time, people would adapt, not imminently. And the Tech executives would have far fewer barriers to implementing controls than the people would have the means to obstruct them.

I don't doubt for a second that Jeff Bezos would announce Amazon as a leader in "keeping us united as a society," while implementing a new policy in their warehouses that requires Safety teams to lash employees with a bamboo reed each hour if they have not met their rate.

The problem with anarchy, Libertarianism, socialism, communism, and so many similar-veined structures argued for is that these arguments so deeply idealize the end goal that they almost entirely are void of planned action during the transition.

We are physiologically engineered to take the path of least effort. Whatever minimal effort ensures the most survival. The downside to technology is an exponential drop in effort necessary for survival. We need look no further than how far off Reagan was about giving rich people more money in American capitalism (it worked until it snagged on steadily increased market instability, which has since caused massive crashes in 1987, 1996, 2001, and 2008, each time in different sectors and each time due to extremely risky and obviously absurd liability risks taken by the highest brackets of networth wherein any net loss on those decisions was guaranteed to be distributed, whereas any net benefit was guaranteed to be isolated in impact.) We can see this in social justice as well: Feminist organizers are struggling a lot right now after having envisioned a world where "misogyny" was eradicated, yet numbers across the board are going up... more sexual violence, more abuse, more online bullying, more conflicts with other civil rights' movements. The emphasis on a perfect vision has led some amazing women leading the movement to be targeted with abuse from other intersectional groups.

This is just a cursory perspective, and so much more nuance and detail is necessary to get a clear picture, but it is absolutely not as simple as saying, "Anarchy wants/doesn't want to abolish ___." Anarchy is one of a number of social philosophies that by nature are self-cannibalizing, and thereby illogical.