I agree, there seems to be a level of criticism of marketing bordering on irrational among devs, it's almost like it's trendy to hate on marketing.
For devs who currently think this way, I suggest thinking about it more deeply from the perspective of a developer: Let's say you want to start a company/startup from a passionate idea you had. What do you think happens when you build it? In reality, do you truly expect "build it and they will come"? What happens when you bought a domain, put up your product on the web, or the app store? I can tell you what will happen: there will be zero people signing up to use it. Posting it on a Show HN or Product Hunt is an illusion of ease to publicize a product. A PH launch is a carefully planned and curated process involving hours and hours of marketing work to prepare for. A Show HN post will go unnoticed with no clicks 99.9% of the time.
And if you just work in a bigger company, as a non-founder, and say "this isn't my problem, I just build stuff for a job", what do you think the founders did to build their company so there are users who sign up and pay?
It's literally an arms race. If nobody put effort into marketing; quality would bubble to the top. If everyone spends some amount of time optimising their seo, tweaking for the algorithm, etc, then in essence, nobody has (and thus, in theory, quality would bubble to the top). The situation we actually have is worse than both of these; bad actors spend the most on marketing, with the more marketing and the more effective marketing being for the worst products.
I can agree that marketing is necessary, but it's not irrational to resent that one's attention is being manipulated with or that internet - which is an amazing technology by itself - has become a lot less useful than it could be basically because so many people decided to do marketing and sales on it.
> Could it be bigger? Sure. But at some point — maybe even before 1,000 people — the vibe breaks. The intimacy evaporates. You stop recognizing names. People talk less because it’s harder to know who’s listening. Growth would make it worse, not better.
>
> Some things work precisely because they’re small.
I'd argue this is true for social networks like Facebook actually. There was a magical period in Facebook between 2005 to 2010 or so where it was mostly college friends, high school friends, some work friends, and we all actually shared what we thought on our posts, shared links to interesting stuff, etc.
When all the relatives started being added to your network the vibe became decidedly different, and then acquaintances, people who aren't close, etc. and everyone has that one experience where one time they post something and someone who isn't close get offended, whether it's political or not, and they gradually share less and less.
I remember saying something on Facebook that wasn’t even that inflammatory but had a curse word and my grandma messaged me telling me to delete it. Instead I blocked grandma. Much happier just seeing grandma at holiday gatherings. I don’t think she even noticed honestly.
This goes both ways (old to young and reverse), but family goes before politics. You don't cut out, or disown, or stop visiting, or badmouth family because you disagree with their politics...
If you do so, you were a shitty relative to begin with.
…and you usually find out they’re shitty because of how they handle (or don’t) “political” conversations.
Pro tip: You don’t get to decide for someone else what’s “just” politics. If someone else says it’s important, while you’re interacting with them, it’s important.
>Pro tip: You don’t get to decide for someone else what’s “just” politics. If someone else says it’s important, while you’re interacting with them, it’s important.
It's rarely, if ever, important to any concerned party's day to day life. It's bullshit partisanship instilled into idiotic brains by the media and social media.
Just because they say it's important, doesn't make it so.
Eh. While that might be true in the course of say, governance - where IMO it’s important and worthwhile to use scientific methodology (statistics, etc) to establish “importance” -
…your family around the notional holiday dinner table? The personal is what’s important, kinda by definition. The point is the subjective and emotional.
It depends, if the political take is sufficiently shitty it’s a betrayal of your morals, friends etc to continue to associate with your family spouting it.
Typically that has to be some extreme form of bigotry people won’t let go of after repeated coaching. Extreme bigotry or conspiracy thinking is arguably a form of abuse directed at other family members and it’s 100% ok to cut people off for being abusive.
Where does it stop? What if your relatives support, eg, racist policies? What if they support genocide? How personal does it have to be?
What if you’re dating a person of another race, and your relatives support keeps making racist comments to you, even after you try to explain why that’s not okay?
No, sorry. Nazi family members come last. Family members with no respect for the rights and freedoms of others and who encourage and support inhumane treatment of others don’t get a free pass.
Unless your family members are card carrying members of the Nazi party, "Nazi" is just a codeword for "disagree with them" just as "no respect for the rights and freedoms of others" is the same.
That is either a very naive take, or a dishonest one. You don't need an actual nazi party issuing member cards to recognize someone strongly aligned with the values, opinion and realities of the WW2 (and previous decade) nazi party as such.
By all means keep trolling or worse if it makes your day, hide behind pedantry if it's any help, but you're fooling very, very few people.
If someone votes for and cheers on the sending of specific ethnic groups to concentration camps, the removal of rights and freedoms for political opponents, and the advancement of authoritarianism, they are Nazis.
We are way beyond Godwin’s Law at this point and it’s time to recognize and acknowledge that fact.
I've never cut off a relative for their politics, but I've cut off relatives because they wouldn't shut up about their politics.
Talk to me about all the gardening you're doing after retirement, about your new motorcycle, about the fishing this year, hell talk to me about your favorite sports team. I'll listen and interact, even if I'm not particularly interested in those things. Tell me for the 500th time about how Biden was a commie and I'll just eat Thanksgiving with my in-laws.
There's actually a term for this, Context Collapse [1] that explores how social media forces everyone to have a single online persona instead of presenting in the way that makes sense for a given social context (e.g. the "you" at work vs. the "you" at school vs. the "you" with family).
Circles was a killer feature. And then I never really used it. In hindsight, any SNS begins as a megaphone and if it can't make statements in culture, it doesn't exist. It's not actually about the individuals. Sure, people want to post things, but they want to be feeding into something that does stuff. I don't think Google ever made that case. It was pure chicken and egg with no ice breakers.
The point is that we weren't looking for social media, so killer SNS features didn't matter. It was a better mousetrap for a market that's deep down motivated by mashed potatoes.
That's a great point. In the mid 2000s I remember thinking about this. "You don't talk to your parents the same way you talk to your friends. So it's like, you are different people to different people."
Wonderware has an automatic I/O assignment feature that - if you follow some basic rules on naming things - sets up all your data sources for you automatically. It cuts out maybe a quarter of your development time.
I don't use it because I mostly automate fuel farms, and I do that by taking a blank fuel farm config we created and customize it for a particular site. We have scripting in place to assign data sources that work with a standardized set of PLC data structures that we've written. Most Wonderware installs are one-offs that start with a blank slate, so our use case is unusual.
That doesn't make auto-assignment a bad feature. It just means it's not the best fit for me. Likewise, Google Circles was a good feature that I never used because I only ever knew one other person who used Google Plus.
I remember being the last one of my friend group to sign up. Having been an old-school internet who grew up on IRC and such, I thought it was insane people would enter their real name and picture into what looked like some shitty PHP site allegedly run by "some dude at Harvard". But all the girls were on it and the rest is history I guess.
Google's Circles is a classical example of something that seems like a great idea on paper but doesn't work in practice. It had too much friction: categorizing people by circles and then also deciding which circle should receive what. Apparently nobody liked it and it's one of the reasons Plus failed so spectacularly.
Circles is group chats (WhatsApp, or whatever's popular in your neck of the woods), which I'd argue is how (most?) people in 2025 actually do “social networking.”
It's how people talk to groups of dozens of people at a time: friends, neighbors, acquaintances, the parents of your kid's school mates to discuss school stuff or to setup a birthday party… coworkers if you include more work oriented chat apps.
I have dozens of such groups, some with photos of kids around a birthday cake that I'd never have put up of Facebook (if I still used it).
If that's not social networking, I'm not sure what is.
Another reason was asymmetric friendships. Meaning Alice could add Bob to a circle without Bob adding Alice back. Made it so much harder for the network effect to kick in.
I liked Google Plus. "Circles (of friends)" is exactly how my brain works. So I had a family circle and computer geeks circle and photography circle and general circle. It was super easy to create and manage the Venn diagrams, and be in control of both how you share and what you see. It was even easy to share circles themselves! The joy of discovering somebody's shared circle with awesome photographers to follow. I felt in control and joyous and it was awesome.
I am, as always, a negative focus group - perhaps precisely for same reasons I loved it, apparently nobody else did :-/.
People hated it because Google for some reason decided to force it into YouTube by forcing you to link your YouTube account to your G+ account. Remember that stick figure tank guy that was plastered over every comment section?
I believe that’s mostly what killed Google Plus. People were introduced to it in the worst way possible, so nobody actually cared to try it out, even if it was technically a good product.
This was also introduced in the same moment as a bunch of real name initiatives from multiple companies. People were rejecting it based on what it demanded compared to what was offered. It also killed or force reworked other Google products that were working fine to end users (e.g. Google Talk).
In my eyes it was one of the key moments that put them on a downward trajectory in public opinion. So while it might have had the right features the rest of the deal sucked, and people were already tiring of social media overall.
Unfortunately the solution that works for most people is to have multiple identities on multiple social media sites. So FB with one circle, work relationships on Slack, several channels on Discord, a group of friends on Instagram, a couple of groups on What's App, some mobile game friends on Line...
That's a really good point that I haven't seen made before. Even with apps/networks that are ostensibly pretty similar, like Slack and Discord both offering channel-based text chat, real-time audio calls with screen sharing, and the ability to join multiple servers/organizations, the people I hang out with and the type of things I talk about with them on Slack versus Discord are very different. I've never worked at a place that used Discord for their work communications, and I've never had a group of people I gamed with who use Slack to coordinate and talk while playing. While there's potentially a bit of friction if I happen to want to start gaming with a friend from work or something like that, I'd honestly still want to use separate accounts for my personal life and work stuff even if the same app was used everywhere, so having everything in a single place just doesn't feel like it matters.
And that's why the real name policies helped kill Facebook. The best way to section off your friends from family from work is a separate somewhat anonymous account for each.
I understand the negative focus group part. The internet radio stations I like end up closing. I dislike advertising, but radio stations without income are unsustainable. This makes it hard for me to design products since they will likely fail! Maybe I should design them to be the opposite of what I'd like them to be...
You can't though. The problem is, that humanity is a web. Not a set of communities (at least on the scale of 1000s of people). And since those webs overlap you will either need to solve the overlap problem at the boundaries (taking engineering effort) or you will end up with essentially one big shard again. On the other hand, you really don't need to change anything on the backend. Simply limit the number of "tier 1" friends to 50, have a "tier 2" category for your 1000 and put everything else in "acquaintances" and split engagement between those.
The problem with that though is: You will generate an enormous amount of social friction "why am I tier 2, but (without loss of generality) Karen is Tier 1?" and reduce monetizability. So truly nobody will feel happy about those restrictions. And since it doesn't solve any engineering problem you run into (see above) there is no one incentivised to build such a thing. (Ironically this may not be completely true, given that this is pretty much how Chinese social media apps work. So maybe states [or at least power structures] are incentivised to build such a system)
I can see many way where you can only follow (and be followed) by 1000 people would be better in many way. An audience of 1000 isn't monetizable so the network wouldn't be poisoned by ads ("sponsored content" AKA "sponcon").
> Path was a social networking-enabled photo sharing and messaging service for mobile devices that was launched on 14 November 2010. The service allowed users to share up to a total of 50 contacts with their close friends and family.
The problem I see is that people naturally compartmentalize, and Facebook basically disallows that.
I’m sure we all have people we sometimes talk politics with, and people we completely avoid the subject with. If both of those groups see my posts, how is that supposed to work? Well, it doesn’t. The typical outcome seems to be that people mentally compartmentalize, posting stuff intended for a particular group, but everyone sees it and it all goes to hell.
There are some people whose company I enjoy whose Facebook posts are basically an unending stream of “people who don’t support Trump are evil/stupid/garbage.” And I’m thinking, you realize that includes several people you supposedly like? I’m sure they have a group of people with whom they talk shit about the political opposition, and another group where they stick to other topics, but both groups end up seeing the stuff and it’s just alienating.
This is pretty true, but funny because it’s maybe the simplest problem to solve at least on Facebook, with the group visibility. People just either don’t care or are too incompetent to select the correct audience when posting.
Yeah, Facebook's best days were when it still required a .edu email to sign up.
Makes me wonder if there would still be a market for a smaller, niche social media like that, but on the open web and not locked behind something like Discord servers.
This is the reason for facebooks success the rollout. Regardless of when you joined it was always better for you then the next group.
Everyone knows it's best days were when it was limited to Harvard.
There is a market for one. Can you roll it out the way facebook did to make it a success. Facebook technology started off pretty basic. There success is creating demand. Remember when facebook use to offer to login to hotmail and invite everyone for you before hotmail caught on and banned it? That's the secret sauce.
This is sorta something people are discovering with Mastodon. Lots of instances are realizing it's better to cap registrations before they get too large and just have someone spin up another instance.
You sorta get the best of both worlds with Fedi. I'm glad I get to go down hashtag rabbit holes or see boosts from other instances, but I recognize names from my local instance and I feel comfortable we mostly agree on norms and moires which makes folks trust the moderation more (although maybe I'm biased, I'm on the trust and safety team of my instance).
Google + solved this issue with 'circles' or whatever it was called.
For me, facebook died when they replaced the user generated content with random garbage and links. Same with instagram, when photos of sunsets and plates of food turned to random videos of people I don't know.
The total number of people on the site never mattered to me, the user content getting replaced with random stuff made it.. well.. "unsocial", and we had other sites for that (digg->reddit, stumbleupon etc.)
Yea the first few years of Facebook were magical. It felt like suddenly you could connect with your peers in a new way, discover old friends, etc. Went downhill pretty quickly though.
Once a sister of my friend messaged me asking to take down a picture of him with a beer mug. It was because they were looking for matches for him (Indian wedding). I said no and told her that it is better to lose such a match :p
At this point, my network is bunch of 'aunts' and 'uncles'. I take secret pleasure by posting stuff that irks them :)
SomethingAwful is still fun precisely because they don't have too many people. At any given time, there's about ~2500 active users, which is enough to keep the chats funny and interesting and avoiding "dead mall" vibes, but not so much that it's horrible like LinkedIn or Facebook.
I think of this as the Dark Forest problem of social networks.
The original "Dark Forest hypothesis" is the idea that alien civilizations are silent not because they're not out there; and not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions; but rather because they've all concluded — from evidence or pure logic — that there are likely to be scary things "out there" listening; and that, by trying to draw attention to themselves to make friends, they would also draw the attention of these scary predators.
Modern social networks have the "dark forest problem" insofar as your mom, or your boss — or the HR departments of random companies you might in the future apply to work for — might be able to join, follow you, and see your posts. In this analogy, your mom/boss/bigcorp-HR are the predators lurking in the Dark Forest. Knowing they're there makes you go silent, refusing to "make yourself known" / "make yourself vulnerable" in any way these predators might potentially latch onto.
The analogy does break down a bit, because unlike alien civilizations in the cosmic void, there are signals we as individuals can send out on a social network that "make us known" at least somewhat but don't "make us vulnerable." These are the "performative, groomed" posts you see shared on Facebook, posted on public Instagram accounts, blogged on LinkedIn, etc. (I suppose a more-precise name, that incorporates this consideration, would be the "chaperone problem" — but that's less evocative.)
Social networks are good and fun and easy — possibly even a net positive for mental health — when they either inherently or coincidentally avoid becoming a dark forest.
In real-world terms:
• Interest-based activity groups (think "knitting circle" or "D&D group"), and community [not professional] sports leagues, are great social networks.
• Conventions, youth summer camps, and adult workshops [think "pottery class"] are all also great — though ephemeral — social networks.
• Group therapy sessions are good social networks.
• A high school is — perhaps shockingly — a decent social network. (It has failure modes, yes, but it almost never fails in the dark-forest sense of "nobody ends up making any friends because everyone's too scared to talk.") And a college is a slightly better social network — not as good at producing friendships, but the friendships are more likely to last beyond the years you spend there.
Good online examples of social networks are mostly older: the single-interest phpBB forums; early online games, before ELO-based matchmaking; and, yeah, old Facebook. (And MySpace, too.)
• I think Tumblr is probably the oldest major "modern" social network that hasn't yet succumbed to the dark forest problem. Not sure why. (Maybe it's just never attracted the right sort of celebrity posters to give moms or bosses any reason to join, I guess. Or maybe the fact that Tumblr posts (used to?) have public web URLs, meant that viral-meme Tumblr posts could simply be linked to, without that then forcing visitors to join the platform? Or maybe the fact that Tumblr lets users have multiple blogs each — sort of like how YouTube accounts can have multiple YouTube channels each; so Tumblr users can have one "clean" blog tied to their identity, that they can show people, and then other blogs that they post more outré — yet meaningful and vulnerable — stuff to. But without these being true "alts", as account DMs can still only originate from the main-blog identity.)
• BlueSky has also avoided the dark forest problem for now, but that's likely temporary; there's nothing in its design that makes it any less "for everybody" + "for public performance" than Twitter is/was.
Everything else is either a ghost town save for its performative stage (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, even HN somewhat); or it's an archipelago of out-of-band-formed groups of mutuals who are otherwise private and undiscoverable through the platform itself (Instagram, all group-chat apps); or it's not a "social network" at all, in that there is an expectation of anonymity / creating alt accounts / being able to (Reddit, 4chan, modern online games.)
It'd be interesting to design a social network from the ground up with the goal of making it inherently impossible for the network to devolve into a dark forest.
I think this is really insightful. I would add that modern Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok add another dimension in that they try as hard as possible to discourage interactions among friends, by focusing on algorithm-based curation (and push everyone to vertical-video-swipe-mode for all but Twitter). It seems obvious that someone did the math years ago and determined ad dollars are better when people see friend posts nearly 0% of the time, replaced by posts from random mysterious “Pages” you don’t follow, celebrities you don’t follow, and viral public posts by complete strangers. People’s posts are increasingly for nobody to see, because unless they are public and go viral, they’re invisible.
So it’s like most of these “social media” sites are no longer social. They’re more like “targeted media feeds.”
True, but – at least for the networks born in the "organic era" — I don't think the shift to algorithmic curation is a causal factor for the disappearance of organic traffic on these networks.
I think, for these older networks that had an "organic era", it's the reverse: the falloff was due to the space becoming a dark forest for organic interactions; and then a curated global engagement sphere was implemented to fill the void / decrease user churn.
I know this was true at least for Facebook. I recall a clear 5+-year gap, after a lot of the original FB core demographic had already left, but before FB adjusted its recommendation engine, where FB was just... a ghost town.
My impression of this gap time, was that back in the "organic era", FB had implemented some sort of damping, ensuring that posts by commercial posters got "promoted" to only a small fraction of that poster's subscribers, and preventing multiple posts from the same commercial poster from making it to the same user's feed at once. (Presumably to prevent something they saw as "advertising" from overwhelming the organic posts they considered the user to be "there to see.")
The gap ended once they shut off this now-vestigial damping, and opened the floodgates to commercial posts showing up in feeds, being shared to non-subscribers the same way organic posts could be, etc.
Other social networks seemed to "follow the trend" on both counts — previously having tuning parameters in their algorithm to protect users from commercial posters flooding their feeds; and then later suddenly "opening the floodgates" in response to organic engagement decline. But (IIRC, correct me if I'm wrong) they didn't all do it at once; each network changed only at the point that that network needed to change to retain metrics in the face of declining organic participation.
Networks like Tiktok, meanwhile, that were born entirely after this sea-change among networks, just let brands into users' FYPs from the start. That was half the point.
No, the argument was exactly the standard form of "Dark Forest."
> > not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions
> Not sure where you got this adaptation from.
It's not an "adaptation", just an elaboration / amplification / clarification.
N.B, it's written in the negative. And, AIUI, the "Dark Forest" hypothesis does indeed not say that the reason we're not hearing from any alien civilisations is that they're all absolutely uninterested in establishing contact with other alien races (like us), but just fear that some of them would be hostile. So yes, the silence is not "because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions"; only because they're afraid some of those interactions would be distinctly negative-sum.
Perhaps they got it from the experience of being a human being. I and many other human beings would love to meet an alien civilization and form positive-sum interactions, yet at the same time I'm not sure the risks outweighs the benefits. It doesn't seem like a very far-out addition to the theory to me.
I mean, it's arbitrary, but it's not like it's a contradiction. In both instances, you can start with an assumption of mutual interest in positive-sum interactions, and still end up with a universal threat-assumption.
(And it's also kind of definitional to the meaning of "positive-sum." A positive-sum interaction is better than no interaction. Insofar as a civilization is optimizing for... basically anything, it would prefer positive-sum trade [from which it acquires resources, information, etc] to no trade. At the very least, all else being equal, the resources and information would increase the civilization's odds of survival.)
Let's assume that the vast majority of alien species would like to have positive-sum interactions with other alien civilizations, if that were possible. But they can't assume a guarantee that there isn't at least one civilization that defects into being predators, and would come to destroy them (and any other civilization they could discover through them) if they caught that predatory civilization's attention.
As such, the civilization goes silent, hiding from such predators; and, as such, the civilization immediately punishes any other civilization that may reach out to them, trying to "shut them up" before that other civilization's directed communications reveal their own location. Which means that, in effect, due to simply being aware of the existence of the possibility of such predators, every civilization becomes the very predators they're imagining.
And because every alien civilization can work this out, every civilization can conclude that even if there weren't predators at first, the equilibrium state is for everyone who wasn't a level-1 predator to have become this type of level-2 predator.
(And yes, there is a social-network equivalent of the level-2 predators — these are the "cringe reaction" accounts that get attention by punishing the violations of the performative-perfection norm.)
---
Or, to be formal about it: the dark forest hypothesis is essentially timeless decision theory applied to the game-theoretic tit-for-tat strategy. The same logic that argues that Roko's basilisk can force you to enable its existence before it exists to enforce that, argues that the structure of "the lawless cosmic void"-as-social-network can force your own civilization into choosing "defect" over "cooperate" before you ever actually meet any aliens who could enforce that. Even if your civilization really wants to choose "cooperate"!
I don't have "the right answer" for you but I would just chime in that in the current job market, your best bet is your existing/previous network. Reach out to folks you previously worked with in past companies, especially those in tech leadership positions. With more and more AI applicants trust is weighed more than ever and existing relationships is a major leverage point now.
I don't know if this "should" be how it is but this is the reality based on what I observe now. Hopefully you have some relationships you can reach out to.
One thing that not enough people realize is that the gap between haves and have-nots widen in almost everything when technology advances, and I don't mean just wealth (that is one too), but also knowledge (LLM/AI widens knowledge gap between the curious and not-curious by a lot), and in this case socialization -- the availability of technology (in both organizing activities like your example and in AI loneliness like the article) widens the socialize and not-socialize people.
In the old days, not-socialize people tend to be forced to socialize anyway; but techonology enables them to not-socialize 99% of time now. Likewise, socialize people needed to put in more effort to socialize in the old days, but now it's easier than ever.
When more people realize this, the discourse should shift from "technology creates this trend" to "technology widens the gap between X and not-X".
> In the old days, not-socialize people tend to be forced to socialize anyway; but techonology enables them to not-socialize 99% of time now. Likewise, socialize people needed to put in more effort to socialize in the old days, but now it's easier than ever.
This is my favorite point from the whole thread.
It has never been easier for someone to stay home, get a remote job, and even order grocery delivery to their door if they want.
A couple of my friends started going down that path unintentionally. Once you have a well paying remote job and your city makes it easy to get groceries and food delivered, combined with the infinite availability of entertainment on Netflix or from games, social skills and relationships can start to atrophy rapidly.
It’s even worse for people who never had much of a social life. When there are so many paths forward to continue avoiding a social life, it takes a lot of effort to break free and change your routines.
I've been using Cursor pretty extensively in the past few months and I use it to code pretty hard problems sometimes, and a while ago when the options were between claude 3.5 sonnet vs gemini 2.5 pro, there was such a significant difference in quality that claude 3.5 often straight up failed -- the code it wrote woudln't work, even after retrying over and over again, and gemini 2.5 pro often was able to solve it correctly. In a particular project I even had to almost exclusively use gemini 2.5 pro to continue to make any progress despite having to wait out the thinking process every time (gemini was generally slower to begin with, and then the thinking process often took 30-90 seconds).
Yup, same. My Google API costs were way too high. Sonnet and Opus 4 are much better now so they take care of most of my "easier" tasks. Gemini 2.5 Pro is still somehow better for larger scopes so I have it do all the pre-planning and larger tasks
I think the general public (and by that I mean including software engineers too) overestimate the likelihood of a huge screw-up leading to being fired like they do in the movies, if the screw-up is neither (1) malicious/intentional in nature, nor (2) demonstrates that you're grossly incompetent for the job.
Most huge screw-ups happen to well-intentioned, knowledgeable software engineers, who simply made an honest mistake.
The correct way to handle it, on the company/management's perspective, is not to fire the person who made the mistake, but to allow them to correct it (perhaps with help from others). And that is indeed what happens in most cases. There are certainly poorly managed companies who would fire someone in these scenarios, but they should be less common than otherwise.
I'm not going to name any names: in the late 00s/early 10s I worked in one of the highest-profile, high-growth tech startups of its era, and I've personally made a blunder that corrupted literally millions of user records in the database. This incident was known internally as one of the most disastrous technical things that happened in the company's history, among a few others. The nature of the product was one of very quickly updating data, and updates were critically important (e.g. is affected by user spends) and hence restoring from DB backups of even the night before was unfeasible. There was irreparable damage where a whole team of us had to spend the next few weeks painstakingly hand-fixing data for users, and coming up with algorithms/code to fix these things as users use the product as they go. As you expect in this anecdote, I did not get fired, I was part of the team that worked tirelessly following this incident to fix user data, and I continued to have a good, growing career in my remaining time in this company (the next few years).
Work long enough and a person will screw up. That's how things go. And if you never screw up, then you're not really pushing yourself. Personally, I've deleted customer tables, updated the whole table when meaning to update one record, even shipped our private key once. There are probably even more I can't remember, and others from people that I helped fix (one time a boss locked us all out of the db - only fix was restoring lol) In all cases I became a better engineer by owning the mistake quickly, fixing the issue, and then putting processes in place to avoid it in the future. I think it shaped who I was to be a better engineer, manager, and owner.
The only time I've seen people fired on the spot is when they lie. After seeing someone fired, I asked one of the owners at an old company I worked at why that was the line. He responded that even the best performers make mistakes, but if he couldn't trust someone, he couldn't work with them. This was many years ago, and as I've grown in my career I have found it to be a pretty good line to draw.
> A young executive had made some bad decisions that cost the company several million dollars. He was summoned to Watson’s office, fully expecting to be dismissed. As he entered the office, the young executive said, “I suppose after that set of mistakes you will want to fire me.” Watson was said to have replied,
> “Not at all, young man, we have just spent a couple of million dollars educating you.” [1]
In most European countries it is certainly hard to fire people on a whim like in US and countries with similar weak labour laws.
I have seen often enough puzzled looks from team managers from such countries, when leeding European teams for the first time, and routinely get a NO for whatever crazy requests they happen to do.
Depending on which country, there still are mechanisms in place to fire people for what's called "culpable reasons" where I live, but there's a mandated layoff period (15 days here) after being fired to leaving the company. You get paid a certain fraction of what you'd otherwise be paid during that period and so on.
So yes, they can fire you if you (maliciously) screw up, but it's not like they just escort you out of the building on the spot.
Egregious cases can lead to immediate dismissal, you also don't have to let anyone continue working even if you still pay them if they are on the notice period (the notice period is for both sides, honestly - for employer to have chance to find/train replacement, and for let gone employee to find new work).
There's a bunch of cases that can lead to immediate dismissal though in most EU countries, starting with illegal activity, some things that are borderline (disallowed in law even if sometimes tolerated by employer - for example being drunk on the job or otherwise under influence by ones own action, not accident), or explicit action against the company.
> I think the general public (and by that I mean including software engineers too) overestimate the likelihood of a huge screw-up leading to being fired like they do in the movies
I’ve done some volunteer mentoring for a while. Fear of getting fired for small things is very widespread among younger generations right now. As far as I can tell, some of them build their mental model of the office from a combination of movies, Reddit posts, TikTok rage bait, and stories on social media. They’re so convinced that every corporation is an evil entity set on destroying their lives that small mistakes are catastrophized into career-ending moves.
The saddest part is when they make a small mistake and then let it snowball into lies and manipulation to cover it up. In the program I’m familiar with I don’t recall any stories of people being fired for singular honest mistakes, but there have been plenty of stories shared where people made a mistake and then caused far more problems by lying about it or even doing things like trying to attack and discredit people who witnessed the mistake as a defensive measure.
A large part of it stems from layoff culture. None of us know if this is going to be the last day at work. Is it rational? No, layoffs typically hit randomly and with little predictability, but that's not salve to those who worry about their jobs
There are, I think, different norms and risk levels in different types of employment.
Somewhat ironically, it's much easier to get fired from a minimum wage fast food service job than it is to get fired from a six-figure-salary job at Google.
The expense and time required to hire a well-paid, highly qualified engineer is much bigger than to hire someone to do a burger-flipping job. Firing is writing off these expenses.
Your point aside, that particular example is not the best since it's a lot easier to quickly land a customer in the hospital as a random fast food worker than as a random software engineer.
That's the rationale, but most of the firings of fast food workers I've seen are not related to hygiene but rather due to scheduling and attendance issues. And very often because of management lack of planning.
It is not that easy, actually. There is remote possibility for it to happen, but it is not likely nor easy. You need to break quite a few rules and also be very unlucky too.
You're not really a sysadmin until you take down prod and not really a network engineer until you cut off your arm (drop a router connect with no way back in) or cause an STP storm. I'm sure there are more examples...
The joys of learning how tech works in the real world.
in one of my first jobs we used to call that "the kalidas problem", after an old indian legend about the great playwright kalidas being a fool in his youth, and cutting off the branch of a tree while sitting on it. https://www.indiaparenting.com/the-legend-of-kalidas.html
My team is in charge of infrastructure so most of us do everything. Sometimes I get to take down prod AND cut myself off from the network in one move.
Why is every service on this site alerting? All I did was plug something in. Maybe that cable wasn't labelled correctly after all, proof is in the results.
I've made my fair share of mistakes at my current employer. Took down business critical infrastructure, dropped productions tables, accidently placing test orders for clients and not getting them cancelled quick enough
Not once have I ever been reprimanded for my actions (Out side of being the butt of a few jokes and having to write a few "sorry" emails), they aren't something to be proud off but I'm definitely a better developer now because of these mistakes.
Mistakes happen, that's life, important thing is how you deal with the issues.
After dropping the production table, I had the fun job of restoring the backups and then having to scour through logs to rebuild any missing information between the last back up and the incident. I have never felt anywhere near as sick in my life, that was a fun Monday.
When I dropped the table and realised what I had done I went to my boss with my tail between my legs and just said "I fucked up", he didn't get angry and just said well get to work fixing it and so I did.
This kind of thinking is super destructive too because you'll just panic, turtle, and stop communicating which makes it impossible to get anything done.
I made a somewhat similar blunder to the original poster at a job some years ago. I got a dressing down from the CEO and that's it, went back to work and never heard of it again. As far as I can tell it had no effect on my career at that company.
In the software engineering industry, what I have seen is people not afraid of being fired due to a mistake, but to be afraid of the cost of their mistake in their next performance review. Make two mistakes (not necessarily in a row) and you are putting yourself in a dangerous corner (e.g., you may be considered to be lay off in the next round of lay offs).
> I think the general public (and by that I mean including software engineers too) overestimate the likelihood of a huge screw-up leading to being fired
I've seen this misconception perpetuated by management even in countries with very strong worker protection laws. Works particularly great on people who already have strong work ethics and internal fears, it stokes that fire. Employees would work as if any failure could lead to termination, especially in emergencies. Those managers use this as a "motivational" tool (as much as a hammer to the face can motivate you). They can squeeze more results out of their teams and maybe edge out a promotion.
It's illuminating to see when the people understand the pressure is many times fake, that even the internal SLAs are more relaxed than what they fear.
While I agree in principle, in this particular example the author was a new-ish hire who included an easter egg for no particular reason, which included copyrighted content that required all the existing CD's to be destroyed.
Great share! What do they say, "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs". I think people can go through life trying to never make mistakes and ultimately I think that just holds them back.
I'd be curious to follow along and read more. My experience is that everyone's body is quite different and what causes chronic issues with everyone can be quite different. That's not to say his observations and solutions won't be useful to others, but it's another good anecdote to understand and things worth trying for others having similar issues.
I myself for example have had headache and migraine issues for more than 25 years. I understand deeply an incredible amount about what causes my migraines, how they feel, how I help with it, and so on. I understand migraines more than anyone else I ever know in my life because I observe, pay attention, study, and try different things so much. I understand it more than most doctors I talk to. But I also know that everyone's migraines are a little different and not everyone gets triggered by the same things (though there's a lot of overlaps) and my solutions may not help for everyone. I'd totally write something like this for migraines if I had the time (I don't :( ).
I think most people underestimate how much of their immune system depends on their sleep. Sleep quality, amount (hours) of sleep, time in bed, all of it -- they matter.
In stressful periods, it's likely not stress crushing the immune system, it's the indirect relationship that stress causes bad quality sleep and low amount of sleep, that in turn crushes the immune system.
If, even if under stress, you manage to work out a system/habit that allows you to get proper sleep, you'd likely be ok.
Would anyone still use a desktop-only (no mobile) messenger where you have to run/turn on intentionally (not always-on like most mobile-first messengers nowadays), lists online/offline friends the way AIM/ICQ did, and you can only send messages with online friends?
I get that most leisure computing has moved off of desktop to mobile in modern days, but there's definitely enough of us nerds who're on a computer a lot (even if just for work, if nothing else). It can't be any less than in the late 1990s when ICQ was popular.
I think it probably is less. I’d hang out on my laptop in the evenings and mornings (like, while watching TV or reading news when eating breakfast) in a way I don’t now. I use my iPad or phone now.
I do wonder, though, if there’s a gap for a messenger app that runs only while in the foreground in your phone [edit: or tablet or computer!] - or maybe until you next lock the screen, so you can ‘be online’ only while reading, playing a game, or doomscrolling.
For devs who currently think this way, I suggest thinking about it more deeply from the perspective of a developer: Let's say you want to start a company/startup from a passionate idea you had. What do you think happens when you build it? In reality, do you truly expect "build it and they will come"? What happens when you bought a domain, put up your product on the web, or the app store? I can tell you what will happen: there will be zero people signing up to use it. Posting it on a Show HN or Product Hunt is an illusion of ease to publicize a product. A PH launch is a carefully planned and curated process involving hours and hours of marketing work to prepare for. A Show HN post will go unnoticed with no clicks 99.9% of the time.
And if you just work in a bigger company, as a non-founder, and say "this isn't my problem, I just build stuff for a job", what do you think the founders did to build their company so there are users who sign up and pay?