oh boy, nepotism is rampant. It might as well be a written rule, if your father works as a director, you can expect his kid gets to run a department for 6 figures a year
SLAs and maybe even company politics. Incidents are politicized at a lot of companies. Even if the official rhetoric says "when it comes to incidents we don't blame people and there are no politics" the reality is often the complete opposite.
Setting a goal of "Zero or Near" down times doesn't necessarily mean less down times, but it usually does mean politics, shell games and 'clever' bookkeeping by middle and lower management, all of which is clearly visible to the rank and file.
Before you had down times and customers wondering if they could trust you. After a goal of "Zero or Near", you still have "down times", and you still have customers wondering if they can trust you while they stare at a status page is clearly lying to them.
But now you have employees watching their managers lying to their bosses, and wondering why they shouldn't do the same. You have a fall in morale, because those pretty numbers usually come at the expense of the things on the "Our Values" page. But to the Suits the graphs look better, and that's the important bit.
This isn't how is always is or always goes, but I've seen it enough.
Outages mean down, badly, and require RFOs. In my experience working at an ISP we only did any sort of "blame-game" if customers demanded an RFO. We still did post-mortems but usually in a more gentle, roundtable way.
This is really hard to understand. The only way to prevent future incidents is to have a culture free of blame.
Your goal is to identify service impacts, do post mortems where no one is afraid to say something went wrong, and to improve processes to prevent future events. You can't do that if there is a culture of blame.
Maybe this is true if you are stuck with roommates, but given how terrible most open offices are now the bar is pretty low for home to be better.
My home office in my small 2br city center apartment has a better monitor than the one at my open office workstation, I can listen to whatever music I want, no BS small talk, and I don't feel like there are eyes on me constantly. Plus, commuting sucks no matter where you live, most city dwellers don't live within walking distance of their offices.
I do like the opportunity to socialize w/ coworkers from time to time but 2-3 days/week in office is more than enough for me.
Based on what we've heard from Google yesterday, and FB's Q1 results just now, it looks like the much heralded ad crunch is turning into not much more than a speed bump.
You're making a sweeping assertion with zero evidence to back it up.
One obvious counterpoint to this argument is that this recession was not caused by markets realizing that many publicly listed tech companies actually had no market and no path to profitability.
Also, non-tech companies took on a large number of engineers in the late 90s to address Y2K - many of whom got laid off afterwards. Not an issue here.
Up until the web existed, I think it was extremely hard to usefully predict the Internet's impact. TCP was invented in 1974, but it wasn't until 1993 that we started seeing things that really pointed to where we were going: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor...
Of course, everybody knew computers would be important. But that was true starting in the 1960s. E.g., Stand on Zanzibar has a supercomputer as a central plot element.
I mean, if you even look at popular sci-fi, nobody exactly predicted the internet as it is today. It wasn't until someone coined the "information superhighway" that gears started turning. Even then, the earliest commercial websites were basically just digital brochures and catalogs. It wasn't until SaaS, search and social took off that we grasped what the specific use cases were that were going to be the dominant money makers. And the internet evolved quite a bit as a result.
Some people like me still lament the loss of the 90s internet in some ways, as it felt like a more "wild west" domain and not saturated and stale like it is today.
It looks like those terms from the 60s and 70s referred to "superhighway" in regards to communication, but didn't prefix it with "information". And whether someone incidentally used the word or not is sort of irrelevant. It started to become popular as a means of visualizing the possibilities of the internet in the late 80s and 90s, and that's when I think the first people started to imagine what this might become in the abstract.
I'm leaning the other way -- that the usages were significant.
The Brotherton reference in particular interests me -- masers and light-masers (as lasers were initially called) were pretty brand-spanking new, and were themselves the original "solution in search of a problem". I've since come to realise that any time you can create either a channel or medium with a very high level of uniformity and the capacity to be modulated in some way, as well as to be either transmitted/received (channel) or written/read (medium), you've got the fundamental prerequisites for an informational system based on either signal transmission (for channels) or storage (for media).
Which Brotherton beat me to the punch by at least 55 years, if I'm doing my maths correctly.
I've made a quick search for the book -- it's not on LibGen (though Internet Archive has a copy for lending, unfortunately the reading experience there is ... poor), and no library within reasonable bounds seems to have a copy. Looks like it might be interesting reading however.
Point being: Brotherton (or a source of his) had the awareness to make that connection, and to see the potential as comparable to the other contemporary revolution in network technology, the ground-transit superhighway. That strikes me as a significant insight.
Whether or not he was aware of simultaneous developments in other areas such as packet switching (also 1964, see: https://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html) would be very interesting to know.
Not much information on him, but Manfred Brotherton retired from Bell Labs in 1964, and died in 1981:
That's a cool article on Baran, it looks like he predicted Amazon in 1968, and they were experimenting with early email type systems in that time, too. I'm sure the bulletin board followed shortly after.
Baran's full set of monographs written for RAND are now freely available online. I'd asked a couple of years ago if they might include one specifically, and they published the whole lot. Asking nicely works, sometimes.
not sure Westerners are in a place to criticize given that we love to thoughtlessly appropriate Hindu/Buddhist imagery all over the place in our culture
personally I love this aspect of Evangelion because it makes me examine my own orientalist biases
The anime "Haunted Junction" is fun in this regard.
The main characters are the son of Buddhist monk, a Shinto shrine priestess, and the son of a Christian minister; they protect their school from spiritual dangers.
If an eastern monk can be a D&D class, then why not Christian minister?
