Appreciate your health and time and focus and good habits while you can, and may you keep them as long as possible.

Fully remote. I can expense $120/month for phone and internet, and a few lunches each month, too. I can get a new laptop and/or monitor sent to me just by asking.

When I do visit the office, the trip is fully expensed. Free daily lunch. Coffee and drinks and snacks everywhere, free. Private desks in a semi-open office with couches scattered around. Lounges with hundreds of board games, nearly all of which have seen table time during work hours.

Primary projects are tracked in a knowledge-sharing system, but I can mostly work on what I want to. I’m encouraged to merge small fixes and refactors without any ticket-pushing at all. Yelling by managers or anyone would not be tolerated.

“At-will” is more FUD than reality in my experience. Most companies, when firing or laying someone off, give something like 2 weeks of severance for every year of service.

Are there specific protections that are lacking in the US that you would expect to result in worse employee outcomes?

Again, I'm not arguing about who has it better. I am asking a very narrow question about worker rights differences between the two countries. If you want me to say that US software workers have it better, then sure. But that's not really what I'm asking.

Interviewing and onboarding are a huge distraction. Interviewing and onboarding done well require hours of attention from the more senior folks on your team.

When a company is hiring, the senior folks involved might be spending 6 hours a week interviewing. For example, I might have 4 45-minute interviews, another 15 minutes prepping for each interview, 15 minutes writing up feedback for every interview, 30 minutes in hire/no-hire discussions for candidates who are close, and another 30 minutes in hiring or interview meta-discussions.

Onboarding takes even more time. If I'm a new hire's onboarding mentor, I'm likely spending their first couple of days close by to answer any and all questions. After that, my work is frequently interrupted for a few weeks as I help them through issues (totally legitimate issues, BTW). We'll be spending extra time pairing with the new hire during the feature development process. Code review for new hires' code takes a lot longer, too.

When you factor all that in, a hiring freeze can realistically free up 10 or more hours of experienced employees' time every week. These are some of the most productive employees on the team.

In that context, it's not especially surprising to me that giving the most productive engineers 33% more productive time would lead to rapid improvements for tech companies, in the short term anyway.

Of course, in the medium-to-long term, a company that's not hiring is building up a huge "personnel debt" that is going to come due eventually. The product improvements will lead to new business, more clients will require more support, the new business will lead to more feature requests, and some employees will move on. The company will find itself without enough personnel to make headway on their product. Then they will have a hiring blitz where they wreck everyone's productive time and the team culture. The new, bigger team will make some headway, but they will still look less productive than the team was during the hiring freeze. The business will stagnate. The company will enact a hiring freeze, or perhaps even lay off team members. And then we're back at step 1.

Someone recently pointed out that we should learn more from how militaries grow and survive over the years - this is probably the biggest lesson.

Anti-speech pro-corporate-authority advocates always try to put these monopolistic, unescapable megacorporations in the same category as some local mom-and-pop operation. It's a massive intentional category error; megacorps are not little companies you can just walk awawy from. There is a point where a corporation's influence becomes so unescapable and so capable of greatly degrading your life that it must be treated in some ways like a government, for the same reasons we treat government differently from just another company or citizen.

The same reason that the phone company or a company that owns all the local roads or water mains can't decide to "stop serving" you because they don't like your religion.

Because it's hard to impossible to get alternate services for roads, water and electricity, i.e common carriers. But there are plenty of neo nazi forums, Gab, Truth Social, Parler, 4chan for racists to express and spread their views.

These are unmoderated, just spam filtered. Forums, social sites and video sharing sites are typically not one of these, and the distinction is important. The most important distinct piece is ownership. Shen you signed the Terms of Service with say YouTube, you granted them rights that vastly exceed ones a common carrier has.

It is analogous to creating your own postal service or phone company that only lets you send letters to users of the same postal service or phone company. The service is only useful due to network effects.

I've had SMTP servers which have extremely high deliverability rates hosted for <$100/mo for over a decade.

The capital expenditures are nowhere near comparable. The regulatory burdens are nowhere near comparable.

Email providers are not common carriers. Its very easy to just sign up for a different email provider. Its easy to buy a domain name and update MX records across literally hundreds of commercial providers eager to have your business. And even if every single host bans you (you really should then question what you're doing if nobody wants your business) its still technically possible to go it on your own. And once again, as long as you're not being generally abusive its possible to have good success.

Comparing getting banned from Gmail might as well be the same as comparing getting banned from McDonalds. McDonalds isn't a common carrier no matter how much you like Big Macs. There's plenty of other restaurants available.

You are omitting telephone service, which is also a common carrier despite being arguably more competitive than the Big 3 cloud providers.

That's where I personally would come down. This decision is ridiculous; social media companies are highly competitive. But I am much, much less comfortable with AWS kicking off Parler.

If Comcast owned practically the only ISP in my area then yes they should be considered a common carrier and shouldn't be able to discriminate traffic that isn't trying to break their stuff. In that case they would be the company that owns the roads or the water mains. Facebook isn't like that in the slightest.

Could you explain how these two things are identical?

They already have taken away your liberty to speak your mind in the common public square of our society - social media - because you know they'll ban you if you say any of a wide variety of things, leading to the consequences described above.

Trump doesn’t seem to have any issue getting his message out or getting people to come to his rallies.

Before the internet existed, the entire civil rights movement was organized by leaders going to churches - even though the locations were actively being bombed, leaders were being arrested, water hosed, lynched, bitten by police dogs, etc.

Cry me a river that some conservatives can’t post on Twitter.

> The Texas law forbids social media companies with at least 50 million monthly active users from acting to "censor" users based on "viewpoint," and allows either users or the Texas attorney general to sue to enforce the law.

From the law (https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/872/billtext/html/HB00020F...):

> This chapter applies only to a social media platform that functionally has more than 50 million active users in the United States in a calendar month.

The article says otherwise:

> “We need to make sure schools are safe so that all parents are comfortable sending their children to school,” said Pan, a pediatrician whose legislation has strengthened oversight of vaccine exemptions in previous years. “And we want to keep schools open.”

To me, the answer is a clear Yes. Every vaccine on that list, to my knowledge, results in a much more complete immunity profile than the COVID-19 vaccine. The diseases on that list also impact children in rather devastating ways.

COVID-19 vaccines seem to be more similar to the seasonal flu/cold vaccines than to any of the vaccines on that list. Respiratory diseases circulate around schools every year, and we haven't mandated vaccines for those.

Do we have scientific models showing clear benefits for mandated COVID-19 vaccines for school-age children?

I have a relative (not a teacher) who can no longer have vaccines due to Guillain-Barré and another friend's relative currently intubated in the hospital with a single J&J shot (no booster unfortunately.)

Kids while not very vulnerable seem to be a carrier into the home.

I don't believe mandated student vaccines is enough for these people (or for the parents of vulnerable students). Instead, we have to do the hard work of allowing appropriate accommodations for high risk individuals. Unfortunately, vaccine or not, much of the responsibility for derisking will inevitably fall to vulnerable individuals themselves, ideally with as much societal support and backing as possible (e.g., plexiglass enclosures for vulnerable employees? I'm not the expert here).

Nothing else we've done so far seems to move the needle much. The stakes aren't personally high enough for everyone else in society to maintain the necessary vigilance for years on end.

I'm only asking for models here. Is the CA legislation based on scientific models showing that mandating COVID-19 vaccinations for all school-aged children will meaningfully impact health outcomes at the society level? Or is it motivated by a desire to overcome COVID by all means necessary, even ineffective ones?

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Rural areas also consume goods and services from urban areas, but nonetheless they supported the SALT rollback for "fairness."