No, they published schematics and full BIOS source code.
But it was not libre, they held the copyright to the source code. So to get around this, competing companies wrote a spec from the source code and then had another team which never saw the code implement a new BIOS from the spec.
They got lucky, the economy needed to be rebuilt and the Pinochet government had no idea how to do it and not much interest in it. So they put the economists who wrote the "Ladrillo" in charge because it sounded like a good plan. This combination of a stable government combined with libertarian economic policies lead to the success. Usually you don't get this combination under dictatorship.
Maybe you are running a desktop environment which never changes but Gnome has been constantly broken in many different ways for the last 5+ years. At times it felt more like a developer playground than a usable desktop environment. KDE is more stable nowadays but it still breaks in mysterious ways from time to time.
I also had major issues for some time when Qt6 started rolling out.
And Arch itself also needs manual interventions on package updates every so often, just a few weeks ago there was a major change to the NVidia driver packaging.
I've been running GNOME. I've never had breakage from upgrading. Of course there's the fact that GNOME neutered itself, removing many of its own features, but that's a different story and has nothing to do with ABIs or upgrading.
> And Arch itself also needs manual interventions on package updates every so often, just a few weeks ago there was a major change to the NVidia driver packaging.
If you're running a proprietary driver on a 12 year old GPU architecture incapable of modern games or AI, yeah... so I actually haven't needed to care about many of these. Maybe 2 or 3 ever...
What game was a colossal flop? Cyberpunk was released too early but they kept on delivering patches and then the players game. It's their highest earning title.
IIRC they fixed various bugs but they didn't fix the broken promises. The biggest problems with Cyberpunk were architectural, things that would basically require redesigning the game to match what was promised.
Online sentiment has drastically changed about how bad those broken promises were - a near-complete turnaround, similar to what happened with No Man's Sky. Basically from when the DLC was released, most people started feeling that they fulfilled the essence of everything that was promised.
IMO Cyberpunk is fundamentally not the game their marketing promissed. They marketed it as actually non-linear RPG and beyond very beginning of the game they just could't deliver on it.
After tons of patches and DLCs its just became a very very good game. Just not what was promissed.
Yet those niche nolife hardcore fans is exactly what makes or breaks games. If 10,000 unhappy hardcore fans will go around pouring shit on your game and company then you likely never get 1,000,000 players who could've potentially liked it.
Nolife hardcore fans will also be the the first to buy your game, review it and tell everyone if they did not liked it.
CDPR got huge amount of trust after Witcher 3 and they mostly had to start over after CP2077 release.
EA can survive if 4/10 of their games flops completely, but company like CDPR will likely just end there.
Pre orders are _for that game_ so they count as success for that game, and also may people were still buying it bugs and all. I reckon without Witcher 3 cash flow they’d have survived still anyway, it may not have even been as big a factor as you think.
Probably both. Apple Silicon macbooks seem to never actually sleep, they just switch to the energy efficient cores, similar to how iPhones / iPads never truly sleep either. You can tell by leaving e.g. a while loop in zsh running and printing the date + sleep, and when you reopen the lid you'll see quite a few iterations actually completed.
I have seen this from the manager side at these kinds of companies, explaining to your manager that you are quitting because your level does not match your work is a waste of energy. Their hands are usually tied.
Promotion decisions are made by committees which are 1-2 levels above your manager, your manager presents the candidates. They round up a pot of multiple teams which are discussed at once and there are usually hard quotas (like 5%) of promotions to give out to this pot of employees. These hard quotas make it impossible to "do the right thing" because even if a lot of people deserve the promotion, only x% can get it. The composition of the pot of people can easily cause the problem which is described in the blog post, for example if you have a high number of juniors or a high number of employees who joined at the same time or employees with incorrect levelling from the start. If 20%+ deserve a promotion then it simply turns into a game of luck.
As a manager you try as hard as possible to get these promotions but the system of these big companies is just too rigid. Its like a pit fight instead of objectively looking at output.
I have seen a lot of people leave for the same reason but I haven't seen a single change to the system in 5+ years.
Next we could talk about layoff mechanics, its equally disturbing.
Honestly, I’ve worked at everything from small to medium lifestyle companies, startups, Big Enterprise, BigTech, and now Í am a staff consultant at a third party AWS consulting firm across 10 jobs.
In all of those jobs, I have found line level managers absolutely useless and powerless.
At the jobs where I was responsible for strategy, one of my conditions for employment was I would be reporting directly to a director or CTO.
At Google, in most orgs, manager can influence the chance of success significantly:
- Making sure their team works on what the org leads find "impactful"
- Facilitating cross team collaborations, which will lead to good peer reviews for your report
- Helping your report write the promo packet
- Presenting the promo case effectively during the calibration meeting and being prepared to advocate for the report and respond to criticism from other managers at the meeting
- etc.
There are many managers that do very few if any of these things, and it shows.
Yes, there are quotas, but nonetheless the manager plays a big role in whether their report makes the cut.
There is no harm in saying that you are quitting because you do not feel valued / rewarded enough. Hopefully it will effect change in the manager. Of course it's best to keep it polite and not burn any bridges in the process.
Author here. My manager and I discussed lengths about the capabilities they do, and it is just like this. It's not his fault at all. It's a game at the end of the day, and it's your choice whether or not you want to keep on playing
Having been at G and also getting denied promo several times consecutively, it's almost always a manager's fault. They're either not bringing the committee feedback to you properly or not representing your work well in that room. Either way it's a sign that they're unable to do better, and you're better off not reporting to the long term.
I think counter offers in general are pretty rare, especially in a bad job market. Like unicorn rare. In almost 30 years I’ve never left a company where it was even mentioned during the resignation. The company just says “Well, bye.” Like the Tombstone meme.
Counter offers aren't rare, but they require good timing and finesse to be effective as leverage. You can't simply shove it in your manager's face and use it to demand a raise. You may first need to maneuver into a place where you play a crucial role in a project, for example.
Obviously not everyone can do that. Then again, not everyone can get offers whenever they need also, especially since doing so requires a large network and regular interviews. Most people have neither.
Counteroffers for lower-level engineers are fairly rare. These companies believe that L4s are sufficiently common that another one will come along. It’s unfortunate especially when an L4 is seriously outperforming their level. But that’s a big company for you.
Having received a counter offer more than once, and accepting it once, I'd say that it's better at that point to just leave.
If you're already at the point of having decided to resign, you've already done a lot of soul searching (well, unless it was an easy design to leave) and weighed everything up and decided to leave. Even if the financials were an important factor in making that decision to leave, by the time you've convinced yourself it's the right choice, you'll have looked into all the other areas of the job that really annoy you. Even if you take the extra money, those things will eat away at you, and you'll probably always second guess yourself about how much better life might have been at the place you had lined up and then turned down for the payoff.
In other words, once you've made the decision to resign, there's part of you that has already mentally checked out of the job, and that will never be satisfied staying in the job, even with more money.
The counter offer I accepted was fairly early on in my career, adding about 25% to my pitifully low salary at the time. In relative terms it was massive, and most importantly allowed me to get a mortgage (at the time mortgage companies in the UK were very strict about not lending more than 4x your annual salary). However, the discontentment I had with the job remained and within 6 months I decided I still had to leave because I was still unhappy there even despite the extra money. Sure enough, the next job was much more fun because I was working on something new.
I've not been on the other side, but just from my own experiences, I don't think it'd ever be worth making a counter offer unless you knew they were chronically underpaid compared to the cost of hiring someone new AND you new that even when they were unhappy at work they'd still bring enough revenue to more than justify the extra spending knowing that it's likely to just be a short term fix.
TLDR: Once you've decided to leave a job, just do it. If an employee wants to leave a job, just and wish them well and let them leave.
Ditto. From all the places that I’ve quit, the only counter offer I’d accept would be “we’ll implement this structure/process change that is slowly killing your will to work here”.
Also, one thing I forgot to mention that I think is really important...
If the company is prepared to offer you a big enough raise to tempt you to stay, and able to organise that raise at short notice, why didn't they value you enough to give you that raise before then?
Yeah it honestly feels like the problem here – it's a common pattern where someone tries several times at a promo, then transfers to another team and gets promoted immediately.
All of this is true, though it's definitely worth noting that some managers are better than others at advocating for the promotion of their top performers.
Getting a manger who is too passive, or too checked-out, or just plain doesn't like you, can literally set you back in your career advancement by years.
Get lumped in with the wrong manager, in the eyes of the VP positions, and it can deadend your whole career. They can be a decent manager too. But if they aren’t compatible with their boss, it will burn you all the same.
If only there were some sort of way employees could get together and like... I don't know, use their labo- I mean, work energy as lever- I mean, to convince management to recognize their uni- I mean, get their boss to pay them more.
I have worked several union jobs, collective contracts usually don't touch the promotion process. If they do they often give automatic promotions after X years where X is still a fairly high number. And obviously this is not a great strategy for many reasons.
Negotiations about yearly pay raises are common but these are in the 2-5% range. Even non unionized big tech companies usually still give these yearly adjustments but its nothing compared to the 20-30% you can get when you level up.
How hard can it be for a company with 1000 engineers to create a canary region before blasting their centralized changes out to everyone.
Every change is a deployment, even if its config. Treat it as such.
Also you should know that a strongly typed language won't save you from every type of problem. And especially not if you allow things like unwrap().
It is just mind boggling that they very obviously have completely untested code which proxies requests for all their customers. If you don't want to write the tests then at least fuzz it.
But it was not libre, they held the copyright to the source code. So to get around this, competing companies wrote a spec from the source code and then had another team which never saw the code implement a new BIOS from the spec.
reply