Using Typst Today: When You Need LaTeX (lee-phillips.org)
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Installing UEFI Firmware on ARM SBCs (interfacinglinux.com)
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Family of MSFT employee who died warn tech companies not to overwork workers
80 christhecaribou 68 8/31/2025, 4:22:38 PM padailypost.com ↗
Abolish the overtime exemption for computer systems analysts, computer programmers, and software engineers. Make it unprofitable to extract labor until someone dies. All other actions are impotent.
* Folks working more can have direct immediate compensation for it, vs handwavy promises of maybe future promotions or stock option rewards
* Creates jobs by lowering incentives to just over-work the people you already have
* Spreads out the income tax load by creating more paid labor out of thin air to get the same amount of total work done - better to have that marginal change in the average person's pocketbooks and income tax than tax-sheltered locations for corporations or the highly-wealthy
Not to mention that even if timesheets were used, they provide no guarantees. We always had to get management permission to put overtime in, but no one really knew how much time we worked - especially with a possibility of remote work.
This can only be fixed by pervasive monitoring, and IMHO this leads to a very unpleasant workspace.
Most western countries are democracies because people got fed up of being exploited by dictators (sometimes called "kings"), removed them and setup a system in which they elect who makes the decisions. This system has issues but is less bad than dictatorship.
Yet, companies kept their hierarchical power structures.
Workers should decide who makes the decisions. If they don't wanna invest time into selling their product, they hire a salesman. If they want somebody to make long term projections, plan what gets worked on and communicates with other teams, they hire an assistant. And they decide how much he gets paid according to how much value he actually brings them.
Managers should be assistants.
Sure, the difference if whether the hierarchy is determined from the top or bottom. Top leads to unfair benefits for the top layer. This is called exploitation.
> wide variety of reasons
Can you give me examples?
We tried that in my country for about 50 years, it didn’t work out.
Don't let a bad implementation ruin a good idea. Instead, look at what specific ways the implementation fails to learn for next time.
It would certainly help to see at least one good implementation of the “good idea”
- A bunch of examples here: https://old.reddit.com/r/cooperatives/comments/p23rxr/what_a...
- Some more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_ownership
- Oxide computer company - idk how exactly the ownership works but AFAIK all workers except sales have the same salary.
- The early idSoftware AFAIK worked similarly with all 4 core gamedevs getting paid the same
Note that nothing says everyone has to get paid the same, it just ends up happening in some examples.
The more interesting question is: Can communalism work without the community having a deep attachment to the idea? The Hutterites achieve that through religion, but if you threw a group of random people together into a similar economic situation without some kind of strong belief system would they endure or would it quickly devolve back to what we see in the broader economy?
Did you notice I specifically said decisions should be made democratically?
Are those two not in direct conflict?
Please, stop pattern matching, and actually consider what I wrote.
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Let's have MORE companies, not fewer.
Put in strong escalating taxes to incentivize cooperation between small companies instead of bowing to the math that encourages consolidation otherwise.
But if there's no private ownership, how would the different companies in the market get created and exist?
It's not (just) about a bad boss. It's about somebody being in a position of power who captures the entire value you produce (sales, IP, patents) and decided what fraction out of it you deserve.
> But if there's no private ownership, how would the different companies in the market get created and exist?
I don't see the problem. Every company starts with just a few people, maybe some machines, maybe some real estate. The issue starts when these people call themselves "founders" and everybody else becomes an "employee"[0].
Even though they are all doing the same work, employees get paid per unit of work, founders capture the remaining value produced. And then they hire "managers" who should be there to help workers be more productive but instead end up serving their own goals (see the Gervais principle).
And yes:
1) the founders took some risk in starting the business. They should get rewarded based on the amount of risk and their investment. Not in perpetuity.
2) some companies need a large up-front investment. Similarly, the investory should get rewarded based on invested amount and risk, not by owning a large chunk of the company in perpetuity.
Key point: as time goes on, the amount of work done by regular "working class" people completely outstrips the initial investment. The reward should go to people doing the actual work.
[0]: literally meaning "person being used"
RMS said whenever he promoted software freedom in the US, everybody pattern matched on communism and he had to explain the difference between voluntary and compulsory. This is the same problem.
This is related: https://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-a...
I don't know if it's right or wrong (and to what extent, most natural systems are complex with a multitude of factors influencing them) but I can easily imagine a similar principle applying to companies.
If you wanna expand by starting an office in the next town over, you need a way to communicate with it, otherwise it's just a separate business with a cash injection to start.
So you have a point.
But the core issue stands - the power hire/fire people, determine their salary and also capture their entire economic output leads to a power imbalance.
this. most countries have similar policies. been there, seen so many others going through this in UK, USA, Japan, Korea, Singapore. it really damages your life.
to everyone, check other countries (Portugal, Thailand, Japan) that give you residency for years and allow to work remotely
don't let your employer hold you and your family a hostage with your legal status
They do have these policies written down: bi-annual performance reviews, stack ranking, PIPs.
We don't have enough information to support that.
Bi-annual performance reviews themselves aren't a bad thing that force overwork.
If he had a history of good performance reviews (100% or higher on average), the risk of getting a PIP would be very low.
Microsoft stopped stack ranking years ago.
I don't think we should speculate on people's behavior or how they aligned with company policies, because we might accidentally be insulting this man.
That’s how I read it
Nearly as horrifying are all of the people that bust their asses because they care and don’t want to lose their jobs, then the managers and/or companies who’ve come to expect that fire them when they burn out, after they’ve amassed health problems, and they haven’t spent any time in career-related training nor networked with others to find something else.
Upd:
I didn’t mean that this is ok, I’m for workers rights.
You are free to be poor, broke and homeless.
We really need a management class that doesn't insist on continuing the cycle of abuse on their underlings.
This won't happen. Your manager puts pressure on you, they get pressure from their manager and so on until it reaches the CEO who might be getting pressure from investors/board.
Only fix is regulations from the government which seems to be a curse word by many posters on this site.
Culture evolves and changes. What is acceptable in a culture evolves and changes with it.
Be the change you want to see, apply steady pressure, speak up when the opportunity arises, debate people who see things differently, and with time, many things can happen.
Most progress is hard-won.
I've had managers who tried. None of them lasted at these companies that did not care. They were politely told they were not meeting expectations and since they had mortgages and other stuff, they took a hint and moved on.
Again, this fight is political and not corporate. Make tech workers hourly and this will stop. There will also be plenty of tech workers who will fight against this tooth and nail.
I can't agree. I don't think anyone who is diligent about recycling or making environmentally conscious food choices believes it will fix global warming. But doing the things that we can is still important for changing culture over time.
If you're a young person growing up in a home that thinks about these things responsibly, the hope is that more people reaching adult-hood will think about the world through that lens. Is it enough? No. Is it still critical? I think so.
> I've had managers who tried. None of them lasted at these companies that did not care.
I've worked at places where management did not behave in the way you describe. The point being that such places exist, and such an outcome is not so impossible.
One way to guarantee things will not change is to do nothing.
Problem is that government is the very same people you just spoke of. If they had the collective will to change things, they could just do it. But as they lack the collective will to see change, government can't change either. I believe they call this the stag hunt dilemma.
I’m all for workers’ rights, though.
Why are you putting yourself in a position where you're forced to find work as fast as possible or you'll be homeless?
For all but the people on the lowest incomes or those with terrible luck this is a solvable problem
Worker cooperatives are to corporations what democracies are to dictatorships.
We, at least those of us in the software industry, tried that. If you look closely, that's what Agile was all about. The associated Twelve Principles of Agile Software outlines what needs to be considered by developers when there isn't a "boss" to oversee operations.
But I'm sure you know how that turned out in practice: The power structure quickly jumped on usurping the name and bastardized it into something that gave them even more power.
So if you can work 10% more than your peers, you get not 10% bonus but rather 30%-100% more. So it makes business sense to put the extra 10%, until everyone is working at 110% and then again, adding an extra 10% pays off, rinse release, death spiral.
The compensation model is pure evil.
Does it actually? I'd buy that it makes silly arbitrary emotion sense to bask in the nonsensical feelings about an even bigger number. The actual business case is much less clear. There is obviously an opportunity cost associated with that extra 10% and 30-100% is not necessarily the best opportunity. I suspect it is often not.
Maybe I've been farming for too long, but my brain, at least, is wired to push until completion and until things are done it will consume me. If you're going to be up all night ruminating about it, you may as well actually work on it.
Of course, in farming you get a nice long break after you've pushed yourself hard. I've never worked at Microsoft, but I suspect, given what I've seen elsewhere, that as soon as it is done it's already on to the next thing, never giving workers a chance to stop for a while.
It gets complicated really fast if you add decades of temporary visa status to it.
As much as they say they care about employees, honestly they don’t. It’s important to draw a line and say no. These companies would dump you tomorrow and not think twice about it. Work hard and have fun, but remember they call it “compensation” for a reason. Don’t let a company you don’t own be your life… that never works out well in the long run.
don't let your employer keep you and your family hostage with your legal status
"Here is a button. If you press it, you get $50.000, but someone you don't know dies. Will you press it?
Some people never press it. Some people press it once, maybe twice. The billionaires press it as fast as they can."
This time we got to know one of the victims, but definitely all those projects he was working on generated so much value for the shareholders.
Insufficient sleep is very bad for the heart. It is critically important for long-term health to to leave work on the dot at 5 pm, then get some exercise done in the evening if not in the very early morning. Also, stop relying on fast food for meals.
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