Didn't they do that? Staples only came in as CEO at the end of 2024, and I assume he has been working on a plan to restructure the company since then. Because their financials are not great, and they have been losing money every year since 2019.
I don't know about gitlab, but tech companies (Meta and Grab) tend to hack off the bottom of the management chain, instead of cutting off the top (aka as the people that created the 8 layer system).
bottom level teams are merged to form larger teams.
Yeah, they never fire the VPs and SVPs in this process. Just a bunch of the hard-working line managers who are actually involved in the day-to-day engineering work
Companies are shaped more or less like pyramids. If you want to cut a meaningful amount of people from the organization, there's just not enough of them at the top.
If one person at the top of the pyramid earns 100 times what people at the bottom earn, cutting a few of them is still meaningful. Also, cutting a single/few person(s) that are mismanaging the whole organization is extraordinarily valuable too.
I've built a startup on AWS, and same. Since we started about a year ago, I've gotten two "action required" messages from AWS.
One involved migrating our Go-based lambdas from the "Go 1.x Runtime" to a more generic one that AWS wants to use for compiled binaries across languages. They provided a very helpful guide, including the Cloudformation template changes. I implemented them, and they worked perfectly just as promised.
The other message I got was rather urgent and telling me I need to upgrade the SSL cert on my RDS. The due date on that action is August 22, 2024.
There are a few areas of AWS I've found to be pretty abandoned. (Don't try to send push notifications using the AWS Platform Application + SNS approach, woof.) But overall, I've been very happy with AWS as a developer.
As long as the value proposition is there, it will work out for them. I can tell you, for me it is definitely not. In fact, I just feel bad about the opportunity cost (time) of reading one of their articles let alone actually paying to see one.
If I worked at WIRED I'd be very concerned with increasing the quality of content.
While there may be some benefit to avoiding free riders, that definitely is not the goal. The goal is to hopefully prevent some new installs of ad blockers with a hope that some of those existing free riders disable their ad-blockers on Wired or pay a subscription.
Let them be the case study and prove all of the "welp, won't go there again" crowd wrong. I have my doubts that that blocking blockers is a wise long term strategy.
Is this true? Walmart Labs was sounding pretty good to me after reading the rest of this thread, but I would never work for a company that does drug testing. If anyone has the true story here I'd be interested to hear it.
I would gladly work at one. I have worked around people who did drugs with all the claims of how they were responsible. I will never subject myself to that again.
I did the piss test prior to my current employment and haven't in nearly twenty years since then. About the only chance it will happen is if you give clear signals your messed up.
Plus many industries are required by law to test. Considering the breadth of WalMart operations its likely they cross one of those laws and to avoid discrimination they test everyone.
Walmart do say on their hiring page that they require a drug test unless prohibited by state law[1]. I would assume it applies to their subsidiaries as well. It seems rather unnecessary. I can sort of understand it for jobs that require security clearance or where there's a risk factor (a friend of mine had to do one when he took a tech job at a bank). I don't quite see Walmart fitting into that category though.
I can confirm it was a request made when I was contacted regarding a position. I lost all interest at that point.
It's not about drugs (though that really shouldn't be a concern). It's about respect, privacy, and power relations.
There are companies which have mandated drug-testing policies by regulation (mostly involving transportation or pharmaceuticals). It's still a major chilling factor so far as I'm concerned.
> but I would never work for a company that does drug testing.
I wouldn't drug test employees, but I can understand why some companies might be compelled to do so. I have friends who smoke pot recreationally, and they're fine. I have also had friends/coworkers who became genuinely addicted to drugs, and very consistently they ended up as ticking time bombs for their employers. Things didn't end poorly, they ended disastrously. I know that's not always the case, and that it doesn't justify drug screening everyone, and that it's an unpopular opinion here. But I've seen enough that I know why some employers think it's worth it.
But you can use existing workplace protocols to deal with the drug users who are bad employees while also ignoring the drug users who are good employees.
I can also confirm that WalmartLabs does do drug tests after accepting the offer and before orientation. The fine print says they can also drug test you at any time after starting employment, however, I have yet to see this happen in practice after three years.
The problem with drugs tests is the test itself. Drug tests are very effective at finding thc metabolites (30+ days in some accounts) but rather bad at finding those for heroin, cocaine, ecstasy etc (1 - 4 days). So in reality its less of a 'drug test' and more of a pot test.
I assume you're not a software engineer. Because if you were, then it would make it sound like you're anti-union and pro-pure-capitalism until it might actually affect YOU.
I am very much a software engineer, except that I exclusively work contract jobs where I automatically get fired each time the contract ends, and I don't, and don't intend to, participate in the traditional W2 employer/employee market, so the presence or absence of employee defense unions is irrelevant to me.
Seems like a fair assessment. Maybe they should start by getting rid of the people who put that structure in place?