throwaway19937
It's a poorly argued rationalization for antisocial behavior from someone with a bad case of engineer's disease.
> Since I’ve posted it this article got flagged and unflagged multiple times, the first flag appeared within minutes (i.e. the user pressing the button did not even have a chance to read the article).
You don't have to eat the whole apple to know it's bad.
> I wonder what made people so aggressive and short-tempered about different points of view recently.
It might have something to do with the ongoing pandemic. I'm really not interested in yet another article from someone who's too precious to be vaccinated.
I have found that I get fewer questions about my drink if I have the bartender put a lime in the Coke.
I don't think that HPC or the DoE have anything close to such a mandate. My guess is that the request comes from a a user who wants to try compiling their code with gfortran.
AWS cut off Parler after several months of moderation problems (https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/parler-llc-v-a...). They weren't motivated by Parler being hacked.
The NSA's warrantless surveillance program (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(...) and the CIA's Operation CHAOS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_CHAOS) are two examples of this behavior.
She doesn't give a rationale.
My impression of the OP is that he expects other teams to drop everything and make the change. He may have been told about the roadmap but feel that his project is more important. That seems more likely than the following excerpt from the post.
> So I reach out to the manager and ask what is going on. This is a simple task, I said. Why does it take an entire quarter for your team to deliver? He doesn't have an answer.
It's probably easier and quicker to change the app to work with their platform. If nothing else, it's going to be much easier to staff the project; your team knows the app.
> The first engineer I talk to doesn't even attempt to answer my question but redirects me to their manager. Ok, that's odd, I think, but whatever.
That's not an unusual response (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20070522-00/?p=26...).
> Manager says sure, just fill out this feature request doc. It's a Google Docs template with 4 (!) pages of required documentation to just explain why I want this feature implemented. It asks for my team name, the motivation, why I can't solve the problem some other way, yada yada...ok, I guess it's good to document your work, so sure. I fill it out and submit it.
This strongly suggests that ad hoc feature requests are or have been an issue for the team. It's also a good way to weed out requests that the requester isn't serious about or has an available alternative.
> No response after two days. Then I get an automated email that their skip level manager has approved the work. Huh? This is followed by an email that the team's eng manager approved the work. Why do two layers of management need to approve work on something they have no knowledge about?
These managers are running interference for their team so they can get work done.
> Finally, after many rounds of arguing about why this needs to be done in the first place (ahem: you told us to migrate to your platform, and it literally does not work for our app), they quote us a delivery timeline of end of Q1 in 2022.
Most development teams have a backlog; I'd be concerned about the work quality of one that didn't.
> At this point I am in absolute shock. This should take no more than a few days to implement.
The change might take a few days but the team already has a backlog of WIP (work in progress) (http://www.leanmanufacture.net/leanterms/wip.aspx). The time to completion is based on the other tasks in the queue. If the migration needs to happen sooner then that's between your manager and the manager of the other team.
> So I reach out to the manager and ask what is going on. This is a simple task, I said. Why does it take an entire quarter for your team to deliver? He doesn't have an answer.
Every task is simple when you aren't the one doing it.
This was a bad move tactically; calling him out is not going to get you the results you want.
> I tell him I'm happy to fix the issue myself, if they link me to the relevant codebase. "It shouldn't be too hard to dig in and submit a patch," I think to myself. He says he cannot give me access to the codebase for compliance reasons, and that only members of his team have R/W on that repo. What???
Maybe they don't want to support bespoke features for your app. You can check in the code and be done but they're stuck supporting the change forever.
They would still be faced with knock-offs that either copy code or violate the license; Paint.net (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint.net#History) is an example of this happening for an open source project.
Security teams are stuck with securing the tire fire; they didn't choose the library or platform. If anyone should be advocating for supporting open source, it's the developers who benefit by using open source libraries.
Sun and its peers declined because PCs running Linux became good enough; selling commodity hardware is a different business model (https://yarchive.net/comp/sgi_market.html) and it's incredibly difficult to move down market.
Oracle acquired Sun because they didn't want Java be owned by a competitor (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oracle-alphabet-trial/ora...). Java was also why IBM offered to buy Sun; it seems hard to consider Java a business failure when it's most of the remaining value of the business.
This is a transcript of a Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) talk with some substitutions made (SmallTalk -> Haskell, Ruby -> Rust, and others). The original talk was mediocre; the changes haven't improved it.
Unfortunately both of these platforms have removed their security controls - the JVM's SecurityManager[0] was deprecated and recent versions of .NET have dropped sandboxing. [0] https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/411
You don't have to wait for others to agree with you. Part of activism is making other people aware of an issue and inspiring passion about it.
> If however lots of people start to agree, to put their hands up and say they feel the same, then I can take a next step which is I'm guessing to do what you say which is to define a call to action - but what would that be, can you suggest?
The book Playbook For Progress: 16 Qualities of the Successful Organizer has a detailed description of how activism works. It isn't theoretical - the author founded the Bus Rider's Union (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_Riders_Union_(Los_Angeles)).
If you're looking for other references on activism the Radical Book Club (https://status451.com/tag/radical-book-club/) series of blog posts has detailed book reviews and recommendations. It's targeted at right-wing readers but the advice applies regardless of your views.
You're playing on hard mode; try using Visual Studio for everything.