In addition to the benefits above, by storing storing config in version control is 2 party control, presubmit linting, and easy rollbacks. I suppose the trade off is slower rollouts of config and some delay time in pushing out a config but hey, there's no free lunch :-)
When SOX compliance became a thing (remember Sarbannes-Oxley?), many moons ago, I was able to send EY consultants away during their audit for Unix controls, just by showing them that all our (Autodesk Unix team) configs were in SVN, logged, with authors and full change control.
The Windows team had to spend months figuring out something that was not even remotely close to control or auditability.
Frankly, I just assumed that it was the std practice today and I am surprised people are still not doing it.
Nothing preventing you from building a versioned configuration system using a database or similar, especially if you build tools to actually change the configuration rather than hand editing text files.
The key to this is machine AND human readable formats.
That is why the text format of protobufs is such a good approach:
- structured formats
- declared schema
- the parser to read the file is also a validity checker (at least for data types)
There are tools that do similar with JSON but none are as simple and unobtrusive as protobuf tool chain.
PIPs are used as tools to lay people off or get revenge often. It's not meant to be an actual "performance improvement plan." There's many stories of people hitting all requirements within the PIP to still not hit "the bar" due to a constantly arbitrary and changing PIP requirement. PIP is often a cowardice way to do layoffs or for upper management to not admit they have too many resources allocated for their own deliverables.
In my experience, having PIP'd people, that's hasn't ever been the case. It's never fun for the manager or the person or the company. In 3/4 of the cases they passed with flying colours and both sides were glad we went through it.
IME in cases where a PIP is truly triggered by performance, 9 times out of 10 the manager has already tried very hard to address the issues and not seen results. It's unusual there's anything to be done.
I will see that as someone who mentors a number of engineers, some of the PIPs I see are ridiculous. Here's a verbatim quote from the PIP of an engineer at a decacorn: "Employee must not receive more than 3 pieces of corrective feedback on any single PR". That's _basically_ constructive dismissal.
I'm never been PIP'd myself, but I've seen it happen to many -- and it's never resulted in anything good, nor has it ever seemed as if the purpose was actually to improve anyone's performance. It's usually seems like just a thing that has to be done before you can fire them. Even when the PIP'd employee isn't fired, the PIP remains a scarlet letter on them for the rest of their time at that company.
I'm glad there are companies where this isn't the case! I wonder how common those are.
I think it's a last resort for someone who isn't listening to a specific feedback well, it requires the manager (IME) to be crystal clear on what's not working well, and how they can improve it. And to follow up on in some cadence (every 3 days) with notes, laser focused. Giving an amount of time for the person to show they can and want to change.
In one of the cases the person who got pip'd got promoted to Staff Eng from Senior within a year, it was mostly about his attitude, not about his technical skills, and he changed completely. I think that person was just not self aware how people didn't enjoy working with him, even if the manager gave feedback, he thought it was funny or something like that.
It was a real "Am I the bad one" moment when the PIP process started. Another one was about how they always went too deep into rabbit holes and never delivered any value, to change the way they approach problems, etc.
I feel feedback from managers is extra challenging in remote environments OR in places where a person has been for too long and is too used to the status quo, and PIPs can help there.
I count myself luck that I haven't worked in companies where PIPs were used as a tool to layoff or fire people, but I also take some of those reports with a grain of salt.
> think it's a last resort for someone who isn't listening to a specific feedback well
Pretty much this at least when I've used it. What was surprising was I had an employee do a complete 180 when put on a PIP. They had been given lots of feedback, clear guidance, and even a direct, "we've talked about this, and it's putting your job in jeopardy, if this continues you will be fired" conversation prior to the PIP. I honestly expected to fire them and the end and thought I was just crossing my Ts and dotting my 'i's with HR, but to my shock the PIP seemed to shake something loose that nothing else did. All I can think is that putting a clear deadline on it finally got through. When I left a couple years later we were starting to talk about promoting them. Don't know if it ever happened.
I can't assert how other companies and managers use them, but the only time I've ever deployed PIPs is as a "we've talked about this, and this is now your last chance" with the honest intent (even if I'm not expecting it) that if the issues are resolved they are put behind us.
You and aprdm have given me a little bit of hope that some larger tech employers (I assume you're both with larger employers as I've never heard of a small employer that did PIPs) are decent when it comes to this sort of thing. It's good to know. Thank you.
I think it may be a self-reinforcing attitude. When I mentioned to a coworker that I had been on a PIP and transitioned out of it, he was amazed. He'd never heard of anyone being removed from one so he assumed that once you're on a PIP you'll eventually be fired.
I think most people put on PIPs think the same: I'm going to be fired anyway, so why bother doing anything about this?
That said, I am absolutely convinced that the reason for the PIP is that they were trying to get rid of a number of (expensive) senior engineers.
I also think people have a tendency to be unrealistic (with themselves and/or others) about why they were fired. I certainly know that in terms of the employees I've let go, the version of events they've told people that got back to me were pretty far from what actually happened. Maybe some of those people who were fired after being on a PIP really were unjustly let go to cut costs, or maybe it's just more comfortable to tell people/themselves that. And since the manager/company probably isn't talking it's a narrative that generally doesn't get challenged.
I think it really depends on the place. I was PIP'd recently and genuinely thought I was doing something wrong, until it was clear the bar kept moving even though I was meeting all requirements. A few weeks in I discovered I wasn't the only one in that situation (4 others, all expensive senior employees) and the company had a history of using arbitrary PIPs to justify firing with cause instead of having to pay out severance (I'm in Canada)
IIRC, PIPs are literally designed mainly to create a paper trail to avoid unlawful termination lawsuits. By the time you're on a PIP, you're manager already has decided he doesn't like your performance and wants you out.
Depends on the place. I was on a PIP. I met the requirements and at the end of the period, I was taken off the PIP and returned to "regular employment" status.
Any problems where the configuration space is large, and you want to find some optimal configurations to the problem, would in theory benefit since you can directly map the configurations into the entangled qubits. Entangled qubits give you the ability to physically represent large configuration spaces.
The difficult is ensuring entanglement between qubits, scaling up the qubit count, noise reduction between the qubits and the other physical parts of the quantum computer, error correction, and generating the circuit to represent the optimization problem, formalizing a proof that the total time of quantum computation (computation + preparation) is less than to simulate on high performance computers and what not.
There's several YouTube videos where some company has mapped their problem into a quantum circuit and claim it provided solutions to optimization problems that they couldn't have found classically but dunno, I guess it would really require AB testing between classically computing it on an HPC versus a quantum computer.
Once something is released, there's general access given for that particular software/hw but it still needs to be requested. In a weird way, it creates some internal excitement on "secret" releases but obviously makes development much more difficult.
I've never designed such a system, but these are "baseline" solutions. It'd be interesting to see if anyone's actually implemented some of these canonical system design solutions and saw how well they actually scaled.
I think it's a good concept but I think this quote isn't fully accurate:
"Such reasoning implies that money is the only reason why people would do something, which is not true. Science can have its own value, because people want to understand how the world works. That is why they do science, not to make money."
Perhaps money is not involved, but there certainly is status and an general feeling of being "pure" due to being purely academic, and intelligent for being able to discover novel things. There is certainly some self-serving interests in doing science, not that it's solely bad, but it's not purely altruistic and for interest for most people.
If QMs generate a large amount of solutions and these solutions just need to be checked and verified for correctness, it seems more of a statistical mechanical system, where you a large distribution of outcomes may have specific solution, but it's not unfeasible that there's some solutions that are incorrect, and you need to do some classical statistics on how many solutions need to be checked to give you some confidence level on the solution.
The time to check solutions and time cost from possible incorrect solutions is unclear to me. And the time between calculations required to allow the QC system to anneal back to a coherent, entangled state is also unclear.
Communism isn't better; you replace elites with another set elites who control power and those who can produce goods and value have zero incentive to produce. Communism has been tried regardless if people come up with hypothetical governments and assert, without evidence, that these controls would lead to better outcomes for the average person. In fact, tried communism has led to the deaths of millions as there's zero controls to regulate the government when its the only system that contains power.
Production will increase. Only this time driven by robots and AI instead of humans. Therefore there is no need for incentives because there are no jobs left for most humans anyways.
Uh, their reputation took a huge hit with the mass layoffs. If there was over-hiring, that's a reflection of the higher ups who didn't evaluate the economy, demand, etc... Yet most higher ups are still there, without any announcements that their bonuses would be retained or reduced for failure to hit their OKRs (KPIs).
