So while the current presidents language is more colorful and entertaining the policy is at least a couple of decades old.

There seems to be broad discretion that the government has in revoking visas.

There’s a school bus. It’s big and yellow. The stop is shining and blinking. There’s kids about to cross the road. So yes, my sympathy for this sort of behavior is non existent.

The privacy threats were always there.

Just another day.

From the book authors perspective, signing the severance (and by definition taking the payout) means you're giving up the rights of disparagement and legal action against the company. This happens a lot of times. For example, if you have a legal employment complaints against your supervisors in a US company and have filed for external legal action, signing severance (if the company lays you off) means you give up your legal action and agree not to disparage company leaders.

The solution here was to not sign the severance and write the book.

Fwiw - I believe severance should be like non-competes. It cannot come with these clauses unless the value of the severance is over some set amount (e.g. above $10m).

I think the publisher should just make the book freely downloadable and distribute it via torrents and any other means.

When you read the Anthropic and DoD (or DoW) saga, Anthropic ceo was happy to provide exceptions for use of clause.

I agree with you. The category list in H1B needs to be trimmed. So that companies have less wiggle room for things like this.

The layoffs were also worldwide. Not sure what the impact to US workers was. India was hit hard.

You can mandate an installation on self managed infra. We install / use it on a completely self managed cloud install with pretty solid exfiltration protections. It’s a data platform, provides interesting connections in the data. But that’s where its utility ends.

Do they work with US defense and govt? Sure they do. But you don’t have to share your data outside of your cloud infra.

In short, you are not going to solve this problem blaming developer ethics. You need regulation. To get the right regulation we need to get rid of PACs and lobbying.

Spec driven dev is good software engineering practice. It’s been cast aside in the name of “agile” (which has nothing to do with not doing docs - but that’s another discussion).

My problem is writing good specs takes time. Reviewing code and coaxing the codegen to use specific methods (async, critical sections, rwlocks, etc) is based on previous dev experience. The general perception with c suite is that neither is important now since “vibing” is what’s in.