Why not? Because the single greatest threat to Amazon's business continuity is a major quake in Seattle. Vancouver sits on some of the same tectonic plates.
It's likely that this move is, in part, an attempt to address the business continuity risk.
All the top students from uOttawa and Carleton end up going to Silicon Valley or Seattle anyways. A few go to Toronto. What's left in Ottawa are largely mediocre government employees. On top of that, you're going to have a tough time convincing people to move somewhere with -40 degree winters.
>you're going to have a tough time convincing people to move somewhere with -40 degree winters.
But there's all that sweet, sweet Rideau Canal beer and poutine.
Aside from that, Ottawa is home to a [small, but] thriving startup and tech community. Prices as compared to SV or Vancouver or Toronto would be lower, while quality of life remains high. Even if it's less exciting. I don't think it's a terrible suggestion. (And I'm saying that from Toronto!)
Ottawa doesn't have more than 1 million people though. [0]
Ottawa city limits are already huge, so I can't imagine what else qualifies as the "metro area" Kingston perhaps? Or they're counting Gatineau as a separate city but within the metro area?
This is a joke. The latest MacBook Pro redesign is an affront to pro users.
At our hardware/software startup the new MacBooks are unusable due to the limitations of the USB-C ports. Our engineers refuse to engage in the dongle shenanigans necessary to get these computers to work with the displays and the other peripherals necessary to do their jobs.
We just purchased several of the old MacBook Pros to make sure we have enough for new hires and interns arriving this summer.
Your engineers are unwilling to use a dongle to connect to a monitor? Something that is so trivial to set up once and never deal with again sounds more like an attitude problem than a technical one.
Why not? You bought a cable for every monitor you'd ever connect to. The hdmi cable your monitor came with definitely didn't plug into your MBP from 2015.
While true it's beside the point that was made earlier on. The Parent complains about "dongles", but really it's not much different than having to plug a portable computer into all of the accessories that are there already, there's just something extra tacked on. It's not like other vendors and set ups are immune to this; my previous work place had a Dell contract and their desktops came with some stupid video card where there was only one out-put and the only way to get dual monitors was a Y splitter from Dell.
In custom setups, if your card isn't Dual [connection], you use an adapter for DVI or HDMI, and so on.
Apple does have a lot to answer for, and their idea of "dongle for everything" does get tiresome and Apple should be above that. But it's not like it's unique to Apple or even new in the computing world. This has been standard for a long time.
I used to work at a place with a Dell contract, and I had a laptop ...with a docking station.
I always pooh-poohed proprietary docking stations before I had one -- all the cables went to it, dock the computer, done. Best of all, it wasn't having plug something in where you need to set the computer down, then navigate something with one hand -- the dock felt nice and intuitive to set the laptop down upon with two hands, as if it was meant to be part of setting your computer down. Even worked flawlessly with my Linux install.
Sadly the E-series dock was not as intuitive -- I found it easier to manually plug in my headphones as the dock was a different sound device.
It's funny because there isn't a single non-standard interface on the new MBPs and the old ones had magsafe (apple only) and thunderbolt (might as well be apple only)
Cool, so you say it has USB 2/3, HDMI video, audio in/out, and Ethernet compatible with standard equipment, and without the need for dongles, that's awesome! I'll buy one tomorrow at the Apple store right after I confirm that you are telling the truth.
>Cool, so you say it has USB 2/3, HDMI video, audio in/out, and Ethernet compatible with standard equipment, and without the need for dongles, that's awesome!
What's this condescending bullshit for? Fuck's sake man, I never said it had it HDMI or ethernet (the audio situation hasn't changed) and if you had read this thread higher up you would see I was refuting someone who suggested they never had HDMI. They did, and now they don't. They haven't had ethernet since 2012 and for what it's worth they still do support USB 2 and 3, they just don't support those protocols over a type A connector, they support it over type C. Those dongles are standard (you don't have to buy Apple's) and can be had for $10 for a two pack: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01AUKU1OO/?tag=thewire06-20&linkC... Adapters were much harder to find for the Thunderbolt 2 ports on the older MacBook Pro, you basically had to go with Apple for most things. Now you can buy the cheapest one Amazon will sell you and it should work.
But you know they don't have those ports, so I don't know what your deal is. I said all the I/O is now standard including the power connector. You can't say that of the older MacBook Pros much less any other PC laptop.
This is complete nonsense and probably just made up. The previous MB Pro design required adapters for the VAST majority of all monitors. There's nothing new here.
If jonjenk is doing hardware development, I can sympathize. I'll attest that literally nothing in my current bench environment is USB-C compatible. Dev boards, JTAG debuggers, emulators, UART bridges, signal scopes, SoCs...all USB 2.0.
Maybe he's talking about stuff other than charging cables and monitors?
I would be shocked if most USB accessories didn't work with an adaptor. The old macbook only had two USB A ports anyway. I do hardware development and use a USB hub with my 2015 Macbook Pro. I'm guessing USB-C to to USB-A hubs exist and work well.
Yes, ditching physical compatibility with nearly every other connector currently in use, in exchange for a millimeter or two of thinness, is the rational option.
They exist, but if you read OP's statement "Our engineers refuse to engage in the dongle shenanigans" you can also see that they just didn't want to have more hubs to juggle in the course of their day.
In my limited experience, HDMI is the new VGA in terms of availability. Projectors, TVs, screens all support it (even if it can't drive 10-bit modes or the max refresh rate).
If you bring a HDMI-capable Mac to a client and something doesn't work, it's their fault. If you bring a USB-C Mac and forget the dongle, it feels like a faux pas on your end.
Though to be fair, it was an aberration that the last (fantastic!) rMBP had a useful video port. Historically, portable Macs always needed crappy adapters.
Err I have had my 15" rMBP and have never needed a dongle. It supports thunderbolt/displayport and HDMI. I can connect not only to multiple monitors easily without dongles, I can connect to TVs.
The all USB-C design of the new Pros is not very Pro friendly. It should be the base MacBook.
I have a new MacBook with the matched external LG monitor Apple sells. I love the combination. The monitor has one USB-c port to connect/charge the laptop and 3 other USB-c ports, one of which I always keep the $10 dongle to convert to the old USB plug size.
I never think of charging my MacBook because two or theee times a day I plug into the external monitor to work and don't even think of charging anymore.
It allows you to specify additional parameters like backlash, clearance, and profile shift. It also allows you to output in DXF which tends to be more of a standard in the engineering world.
Former head of engineering at Pinterest here. Marty was one of the first three engineers at the company. He is an amazing guy -- smart, personable, fun to work with.
This is a boon for Reddit and as a Reddit user I'm very excited. Fortunately Pinterest has a strong bench and can afford to share the wealth of their amazing engineering team.
I'm curious, does it run on AWS in the sense that when I launch an instance I might be collocated on the same physical machine as an instance doing work for amazon.com or do they have a separate deployment of the AWS stack in a dedicated part of the datacenter?
What you are describing is called "backdriving" the gearbox. Generally speaking, gear trains with high reduction ratios don't like to be backdriven. Small steel gear trains with ratios in the 1000:1 range can destroy themselves when back driven.
This is a pretty shitty apology. The key problem is that ekjp isn't owning the failures directly. Just look at the language in the post...
"We screwed up."
"We haven’t communicated well..."
"we acknowledge this long history of mistakes..."
This type of language shows a lack of ownership and accountability of the author. It's a huge red flag. If one of my employees wrote something like this I would never have accepted it.
A good apology would have started with something like, "I am sorry." Everything that happens at a company is ultimately the CEO's responsibility. The language used in ekjp's apology does little to reassure me that she actually feels like she owns the failures.
Whatever you think of Ellen, she's been ceo since Nov 14. How exactly does that makes her personally responsible for ongoing failures from multiple years beforehand? Did she borrow a DeLorean and order the team around during Yishan's tenure?
If one of my employees wrote something like this I would never have accepted it.
Actually that's the typical corporate apology. The whole team gets the blame when you're playing the blame game! However CEOs and executives like pushing shit downward.
Employee vs CEO is a big difference in status and the type of apology to write.
I guess they had a look to the key performance numbers at Reddit after the blackouts, and finally understand that Reddit with new regime control kills popularity, sub-reddits going black can cause a pretty visible dip in the visitor stats. I guess this happens when you move from community driven to profit driven with a site like Reddit.
I know some of the people who have signed up for this and I can say with confidence that I'd happily take them at any salary.
The fact that some of the best and brightest in our industry have decided to do this work because it's important rather than because it's the most financially rewarding option is encouraging.
There's no excuse for not giving people what they're owed -- never trust anyone that wants to exploit your skills. Whether its by "changing the world" in a startup or being patriotic for the government.
> The fact that some of the best and brightest in our industry have decided to do this work because it's important rather than because it's the most financially rewarding option is encouraging.
There's actually really simple reasoning behind this: the flip side to your statement is "the fact that the government isn't willing to pay for work that is important is discouraging".
You hear about the tremendous amounts of waste in government projects (everything from military contractors to the bay bridge that got built by a FOREIGN company, went over budget, and now may not even be safe). Clearly some projects are deemed "important enough" to be paid for. If your project doesn't command market rate, then either it isn't as important as they're trying to tell you it is (since they've clearly demonstrated a willingness to pay in other areas), or, perhaps worse, it is but they just don't care about it enough.
Its so strange that the patriotism line only applies individuals who can't negotiate for themselves. When it comes to huge corporations, these arguments never seem to come up.
In what world are you owed a Silicon Valley salary? Only at a Silicon Valley company, and even then only if you signed the piece of paper that offered it.
It seems awfully cynical to think there's no tech work that you would take on to justify a little cut in pay. If it's not for you, it's not for you. But there are huge swaths of people who get real satisfaction from working on the problems that government work exposes them to.
It has little to do with patriotism nor the monetary value of your work. People do things for incentives – they can be monetary or otherwise. As someone else mentioned, federal employee benefits can be really, really fantastic for the way some people want to live their lives. Probably not for those wanting to own a Maserati by their 30th birthday, but for those who want a low-risk, comfortable retirement after a consistent (if lengthy) tenure it's not a bad option.
I can name at least one "huge corporation" (in Silicon Valley, no less) that very successfully offers lower salary compensation for a shot at similarly meaningful work. Maybe these arguments never hold up because it's hard to be "patriotic" about the 38th x for y startup to launch this week.
No one is "owed" anything, I'm simply pointing out two things:
1. Be skeptical of offerings that are below market rate in exchange for intangibles, like being "part of something". You often discover that there are certain people on the organization who get to both be a part of something and have good compensation. Now, if the argument is "the package has other benefits like retirement etc etc, then sure, that is orthogonal to my argument about "sacrifice". In fact, if you simply enjoy the work then I also think that's fine. I'm saying don't be convinced about something's importance. Notice in my comment I specifically called out startups and gov.
2. This entity seems to find seemingly limitless pockets for other things, making this sacrifice suspicious.
Fundamentally I believe in treating your employees well. Sometimes amazing tasks require arbitrary salary sacrifices, more often though someone's taking a big paycheck.
If I remember correctly, my benefits when I worked as a subcontractor for the federal government were fantastic. Definitely helped make up for the lower pay.
I have a hard time believing that all of these combined will make up for the difference in pay compared to an equivalent private sector job in New York, SV, Seattle or even Austin.
We all value things differently. I'd rather have more time off than a market salary. I'm not going to lay on my deathbed and wish I had committed extra lines of code.
Some people don't find New York, SV, Seattle, or even Austin to be the utopias that others do. That alone gives strong incentive for some people to take that trade. Never mind the less tangible things like what toomuchtodo references.
> In what world are you owed a Silicon Valley salary? Only at a Silicon Valley company, and even then only if you signed the piece of paper that offered it.
In a world where you are highly sure of getting what you paid for.
You don't seem to complain about Govt paying 800million for stuff that
does not work, but about people getting paid what they would elsewhere.
Those are some logical long jumps. How do you know I don't complain about government waste? And how do you know that I do complain about people getting paid what they're worth?
There are a lot of intangibles in the world, and personal motivation systems are the battlegrounds for them.
Different people value different things. Trust me, that's okay.
What I don't understand is this. The Govt. is rich, and I'm not. I have something they want. I live in a capitalist country. Why not charge them for what I'm worth. This makes no sense. I would agree to not charge money for some foundation that serves poor people, but the Govt? That's plain immature/stupid.
A few things. First, six figures is rich by almost any standard except Silicon Valley. Second, you don't live in an exclusively capitalist country, and even if you did, that doesn't mean you have to be entirely financially motivated by everything you ever do. Are you familiar with charity organizations? Volunteer services? I don't know, basic human decency which goes unrewarded each and every day? Third, these people are charging what they're worth: a moderate salary, good benefits, and problems they want to work on. Fourth, you really don't think a more efficient government benefits the poor?
A better healthcare infrastructure (I'm not saying healthcare.gov is "the answer," but it's the right direction) literally saves lives. What other definition of serving people can you possibly have?
The simple answer here is that government agencies are funded by congressional appropriations and salaries are regulated. The "government" may be rich, but that doesn't imply that it's easy to pay people market rates, and even if it were, there's a finite budget out of which to pay them that could instead be used to hire more people.
In many ways I'm actually glad this situation exists: it has the effect of filtering out people that care more about their market worth than the mission.
If people were concerned about the highest salary available to them, we would not have academics and NGOs.
People are motivated by different things. It is not better or worse to be primarily motivated by a salary that exists in one place, but, if you want a Silicon Valley salary, then perhaps Silicon Valley is the place that you should work.
>There's no excuse for not giving people what they're owed -- never trust anyone that wants to exploit your skills. Whether its by "changing the world" in a startup or being patriotic for the government.
Normally I'd agree with you. However, I would posit that Congress is a pretty good excuse.
>Its so strange that the patriotism line only applies individuals who can't negotiate for themselves. When it comes to huge corporations, these arguments never seem to come up.
Because huge corporations are not loyal to their workers, so fuck them. They have to pay up front.
> Because huge corporations are not loyal to their workers, so fuck them. They have to pay up front.
I think you mistook what I was saying. I meant, the calls to patriotism seem to disappear when the government deals with corporations instead of people. When the government makes a contract with a corporation, its a pretty sweet deal for the corporation, when they make it with an individual, it doesn't appear to be the case. Corporations seem to be able to drive up costs and sell things at ridiculous markups, not be held liable for their mistakes, but individuals are expected to "sacrifice for the greater good" when offering their services to government.
But you don't work for the government, you work for the public, which happens to be a government job. And this changes everything (go ask a Marine about it). "Being patriotic for the government" has no meaning in a free country with individual rights. And it is not because others are getting pork from taxpayer money that it is a good thing that should be praised and encouraged.
The government is composed of citizen who represent all other citizen's interests and have been hired to manage them. It is not a standalone entity and, at least in the United States, is (technically, if not in practice) subordinate to the people, not owning them like a feudal lord his serfs.
Government service is what allows Silicon Valley jobs paying fortunes to exist - both through the maintenance of individual rights (justice, police, defence) and through seeding it with vast amounts of defence research funding half a century ago. Going ostrich on that simple fact of life today in a first world country is a luxury afforded by those who do not and spend their own life dedicated to making yours possible. Regardless of Snowden's status as a traitor or hero, for example, it is pretty clear that he was not motivated by financial gain or the ideological concerns of the enemy (the traditional reasons for moving to Russia in the 20th century). He did it because he thought that risking his prosperity, quality of life and, well, actual life was worth it for the prospect of improving government and defending his fellow citizen's rights.
As a citizen, you have the power to change the way government operates through your representatives (without doing a Snowden); the question becomes, to those who complain of pork, how many of you did bring it up with your elected representatives? How many of you took some action instead of thinking "that slice looks tasty, maybe I should have some"?
This is a separate debate to the idea of civil servants being paid "market rate" salaries or simply enough to have a middle class life (i.e. sacrificing earning capability for the sake of public service). What I am particularly objecting to is your idea that because some people have managed to steal from the taxpayers, your fellow citizen and neighbours, that it is OK for you to do so as well. If I have misunderstood you I apologise.
>You hear about the tremendous amounts of waste in government projects...
>When it comes to huge corporations, these arguments never seem to come up.
>Clearly some projects are deemed "important enough" to be paid for.
What you're calling government waste is some corporation's profits. Nothing is ever wasted. It's simply redistributed. It's not so much a matter of whether it's important enough, but one of lobbying, campaign finance, and quid pro quo. Foot the bill and we'll "waste" some money your way.
Worker-bees don't have this leverage, so they get government rates.
Thanks for sharing. There seems to be confusion, however.
I am not arguing that it's good for society or anyone other than the corporations that profit (i.e. the glaziers, if you will).
I am simply saying that there is a design to the way things currently work. It is not random, accidental, or born of some myopic undervaluing of human capital.
I'm not arguing that it's good for taxpayers or government employees. I think you're forgetting the context of my original comment. My point is simply that these choices--i.e. paying below market rates to employees, while spending exorbitantly on contracts with corporations--are not a matter of accidental waste or the relative importance of projects, as seemed to be implied by the comment to which I replied.
That "waste" is profitable. And it happens that those who profit also tend to have cozy relationships and armies of lobbyists.
The government spends billions on useless new fighter jets. How it is not exploitative to not pay software developers what they are worth?
The government is not a charity and doesn't deserve ours. It is the government that spies on us, runs a war on drugs that has seen countless minorities thrown in prison. The government tortures, commits crimes against humanity and god knows what else. Oh yeah, they still haven't closed gitmo.
There are parts of the government which are different. (Some are better, some are worse, and all in different ways.)
Thinking of the US Government as a monolithic entity with a single culture was probably my biggest incorrect preconceived idea; it seems to be fairly universal to people who have never seen inside.
