For the past few weeks our "water cooler talk" has been almost exclusively about the rising threat of invasion, if not directly about the ongoing conflict in the SE of Ukraine. A number of the team signed up for the volunteer defence force and have spent countless weekends training with the army.
The morning of the invasion I received early morning messages from a few of the members to the effect of "Russia has invaded. We are going to fight."
I have never sent such an emotional and heart felt "Good luck, stay safe" in what is such a vacuous and empty medium (i.e., a messenger client) before. I haven't been able to produce anything since the invasion began because I am constantly watching the news and various social media feeds for updates on the invasion, and it's really hard to pick up a full (now absent, mostly) team's efforts without metaphorically dropping bits all over the place.
My work, and that of my team, it just.. doesn't matter in comparison. My boss is asking for progress updates and I'm just responding "Nothing. The guys are focussing on staying safe, warm, and well stocked right now." (with a small side of incredulity.)
I've brought it up with leadership and they are going to parachute in some agencies from other places and I can't help but feel we are just abandoning my team members. The people I have, on average, spent 5x8hr days working with for the past few years. My comrades. My friends. Just so expendable in the eyes of my employer.
Incredible. I know several managers with employees in Ukraine and their companies are all being very thoughtful about handling the situation.
When I hire remotely (including Ukraine, where we even had a remote office at one point) it wasn’t uncommon to discover entire teams of people being mistreated as remote employees of some clueless foreign company. It was so easy to hire away the entire team and so satisfying to just see them enjoy working for a company and managers who actually cared. This might be a signal for where to go with your career at a later date after the current events are behind us (hoping sooner rather than later)
Like forget bottom lines and corporate greed for a second. My company is small and if we don't hit an upcoming deadline, we're laying off at least half of our staff. I'm in full support of affected people but i also have to do my best to make sure the people employed by this company have a job tomorrow. This post seems to make that sound.. cold, uncaring?
To be clear i don't own the company nor am that high up on the management chain. We're only ~50 people. But still, i think this way. If an employee goes through really difficult times, of which we've had many, we wish them well and continue to pay them as best we can for as long as we can, but the 49 other people still have families, need food on the table, etc. It's just as important to me that the 49 other people are happy and healthy as it is the 1 person is happy and healthy.
I'm a bit confused by the anti-corporate take sometimes. I think the human lives are all that matter, fuck corporate greed - but when everyone is months away from losing jobs due to runway-like funding models.. it seems unfair.
Am i off base? I imagine you're mostly thinking huge companies?
I completely see your point, but I also see the difficulty your employer has. They can't just wait for the war to finish before getting their business going again.
If anything, I would think its the opposite. Its a virtue and sign of strength and selflessness to be able to push past ones personal feelings and to continue to do what needs doing.
After explaining to them my situation (which was audibly bad even through phone) I asked them to postpone for next week. They hired someone else. Turns out there is such a thing as uncaring people who just see you as a cog that facilitates their money-printing company. It is what it is.
If it's fee for service and focused on development, I can see the issue of course. However, now all companies are structured this way.
Your Twitter feed reflects your active choices in who to follow and what to interact with. My Twitter feed has been largely dominated with the invasion since it occurred (though there are a couple other things that are also notable still).
It's also getting the word out really quickly. There's good and bad.
At least it's not getting covered up for years like the last major Russia on Ukraine atrocity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
Not having them can lead to hasty, unwise decisions. They should include prioritising tasks and cascades/durations of fall over.
There's not necessarily reason they mean dropping anyone either. Even if exclusively looking at a financial impact there are costs of switching, costs that might be low for a server needing restoring to high for acquiring knowledge specific to your field or product, or a whole lot in between, for example.
Just have a plan. If you don't, be aware of potential for flawed decisions made in haste.
We're fortunate some of our leadership has quite close ties to the area, so our company's response so far has been extremely understanding.
I was talking with a friend yesterday about his teammates from Ukraine (we’re both outside Ukraine). They said that working is the only thing keeping them sane. This allows them to stop focusing every second at the war outside their homes.
The very least that can be done is to not cut them loose because Russian bombardment has decreased productivity.
I’ve left behind a life and all of my possessions in Ukraine but more than that I feel like I’ve let them down since I’m living comfortably in Georgia while they suffer and could possibly die.
I’ll just do what I can to help keep the project going so we can keep supporting them. The cold reality is that a startup isn’t a charity so at some point some hard decisions need to be made, but that point isn’t five days into a war.
Obviously still paying their wages as long as its possible, an economical hit for the startup but that's the best they can do to help them fight the occupants. Estonian team working more to make it up and the moral is high since their Ukrainians remind them how much worse it can get.
This war did not start 2 weeks ago. It is not the result of 1 man's actions. It's been going on for years but now it spilled into kinetic warfare. We are hardly any better than the kings and queens of yesterday, just look at all the actions being taken from western powers without any citizen input or democratic process.
Our opinions are being shaped on this conflict by our media, even on hacker news - people should be weary of all information they read on here regarding this conflict. People should try hard not to get swept up in tribal narratives and see the world for what it is.
In my opinion, the current system looks like its out of control and it's only going to lead to escalation. It almost certainly will lead to more nuclear proliferation. Confrontation with nuclear opponents need to be more cautious.
There's still a fair amount of BS (both camps are painting their own view) but the feverish theatrics are somehow dying.
Well that's kind of what this conflict is about. Ukraine is anti the pawns and empire thing, Putin is for it.
Thankfully it's mostly dying out - I'm a Brit and we got rid of most of our empire around 1950. Putin's a bit behind the curve.
This is a cold, hard reality.
Good to be aware of it, and work on accepting it, processing it, rather than avoid the truth.
We are expendable. Each and every one of us.
And that’s ok.
I have been thinking about business being business for a long time. Let me tell you a vision of a better future. I am not explaining how to get there, just what is in this future.
Business will not have changed a lot. But people! People have a lot better means of living. Most needs are covered. This changes the power relationship between people and business. Business becomes sort of a game. You can lose but it's just a game.
The main rules of this game are:
1. follow law and mores
2. be bound by contracts to have earnings and spendings
3. earnings ≥ spendings
This rule of business has been in force already thousands of years ago. Barter superfluous stone knives against food, for example.
And today this game can have inhuman consequences as we see here.
Parent's business is trying to work around that they suddenly a team dropped out. Software stopped being delivered. As a consequence they are afraid that earnings can't be realized.
In a strategic game it's clear that something needs to be done or they get booted.
And some people today fail to see this aspect. They complain that business is greedy and inhuman. They ask that companies should be "human".
But it's my conviction that business is a worthwile and important game benefitting the society. As long as business is bound to sensible law like forbidding hurting people (for example by overworking them or exposing them to unhealthy conditions), business should be free to do business.
Therefore we shouldn't change business a lot but give people better means and therefore more power and independence.
If a business fails it's just losing a game round. This can hurt but everybody should be able to get up again and have another chance.
It's just a vision of a better future.
Makes you wonder how they'd treat you if you ended up in dire straits.
I finally agreed to take a couple of weeks out of Kyiv to calm my cofounder’s nerves, sure that I’d be back and we’d have a laugh at how it all came to nothing. So I am in Tbilisi and my team are all stuck in Ukraine.
We’re doing all we can to help We can’t get the men out because the Ukrainian borders guards won’t let any men leave, and most of the women won’t leave their husbands behind. A few have joined the territorial defense forces and are defending Kyiv now. Many others are taking shelter in basements while the Russians shell their cities.
Today, 66% of my 45 person team were online and working. It’s astonishing the grit and commitment the Ukrainians are showing. We’re resolved not to abandon them and to do all we can for them but the shitty reality is that’s just not a whole lot right now.
If anyone can fight their way to victory in this war it’s them. I wish the west had done more when there was still time to make a difference, but now it’s up to Ukrainians to save themselves and make the Russian invaders pay for every meter they take.
I'm know many of your are IT guys, and I ask for your help. We need russian fake news and government sites to be DDOSed.
https://github.com/almerico/bombardier
Thanks forehead for your help. Glory to Ukraine!
https://github.com/insky/vue-gpickr/pull/9#issuecomment-1054...
It was a weird feeling, suddenly something that was so long away on the news suddenly felt much closer. At least for me, the internet and the connections it has given me, have made me much more empathetic to other's struggles around the world.
When my pregnant wife was feeling a bit uncomfortable, I sent a chat message to my Team that I need to pop out and expect to be back within a couple of hours (not giving reasons).
An hour later I messaged to say our baby was arriving 10 weeks premature and didn’t know when I’d back at computer.
EDIT: This is a small scale project and the user waited 19 days before bumping. To me that's perfectly reasonable.
A direct comment is a lot more useful - both because I know it's not a bot, but also because it gives me a touch point for another interested party, who might be able/interested in helping.
ex: "Any update on this" can easily be followed with "Not at the moment, we have a work in progress [here], but could use additional hands" or "We're still trying to understand all the use-cases for this, what are you trying to accomplish" or any number of other relevant and useful things.
Personally - I enjoy having some human interaction as motivation every now and then, and it's easy enough to just ignore if the answer is "I'm busy".
My main reason is to signal "there are still people out there in need of this". My addition always is "What can I do to help move this forward?" (unless that is made clear in the thread already, ofc). To signal that my need is urgent enough for me to put time, effort or funding into it.
https://github.com/fre5h/DoctrineEnumBundle/pull/12#issuecom...
Might have always been like this, I never looked at it until today. But still nice detail.
She is going to start a new (remote) job, where the onboarding was originally planned to be mid-March in Kyiv, because they have an office there.
Last week, her future manager asked in all seriousness, if she would be able to go to Kyiv to pick up her new laptop...
/s
Context sure adds a lot of meaning to these words. I hope you return, too.
I'm getting 6 minutes between comment and reply though, not seconds, and unless the developer was actively fighting they'd still be getting email notifications to their phone but unlikely to be at sitting at home patching Vue. This part in itself doesn't scream suspect, just the catalyst.
Seems pretty common to me. People frequently create accounts on sites just to ask a question or because they need something. This is probably the most common case / the long tail of most activity on social media sites.
I don't think it's fair to assume any malicious intent here. What would the maintainer gain? People are already extremely aware of the situation. It's not a huge repo, there's no ask for financial donations or anything like that.
This all seems perfectly reasonable to me.
I work with @insky (zhbadya on HN) for 8+ years and I have an account on HN for much more than that. Can confirm - this is real, we're fighting.
too bad there's no rollback on real life
God be with you @insky, may you return home safely and victorious.
And it won't happen. Although... the last few days have shown extraordinary events that I never expected. The EU approving 500 Million for weapon purchases for Ukraine, countries supplying fighters after two days delay, officiaks saying that their are fine with their citizens volunteering to fight for another state army (illegal pretty much everywhere), plans to supply troop movement intelligence... That's all just a very small step from active participation.
This is the most significant shift in European politics since the fall of the Soviet union.
We'll see what happens if Russia continues to indiscriminately massacre civilians by using MLRS into dense urban centers.
But after 2-3 weeks of silence? A slight prod is okay, even if the answer will turn out to be, "This isn't a priority and I don't know when I'll get to it."
Ideally contributors would be able to opt into automatically blocking some kinds of comments, but of course that would require a perfect "spam filter" system or manual moderation by other volunteers so that the contributor wouldn't be distracted.
In any other case (unclosed issue, missing changelog) the solution is to step up and help. Mention that you've replicated the issue, found the solution is up, and that the issue can be closed. Or contribute a changelog
There are ways to do it properly of course, and I understand that this kind of pings can be annoying, but people usually have no ill intention/expectations. Take it as a lame way to put a +1 on an issue
have to disagree here - it's entirely possible that somebody just forgot to deploy something and actually might appreciate the ping.
> With another drop not expected for at least another four years…
¹ https://universitytimes.ie/2018/03/why-trinity-prides-itself...
Sometimes people forget about things. I know I do.
It can be annoying, but it can also be someone trying to reach out asking if you'd like any help. Maybe it'd be better if they phrased it as "Is there anything I can do to help progress this issue/pr?"
& yeah prodding after a day is silly. But if it's been a couple months then it can make sense
Anyone who asks for an update can produce one themselves: by creating a PR :)
Right now, it seems NATO strategy is severe financial sanctions while providing arms to Ukrainian forces.
For the record, Russia also said sanctions would be considered an act of war. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Not saying this is what happened here, but there are reasons why an outcome that appears cold can, upon digging, result from everyone ultimately acting in good faith.
After all, everyone know that these companies are in business for the convienence of their (potential) employees. Not to do anythig radical like, idk, be successful or make money.
Again though the claim isn't it must be an impossibility to be anything else just a very suspect set of circumstances around the ping and impossible to prove one way or the other. I don't think it matters one way or another in the message, it's a good message and clearly popular, but that doesn't have anything to do with being staged or not.
Or it could not be and just grew into propaganda naturally but that's why it's "Very suspect, impossible to prove" not "certainly staged, proven". Either way probably a good event but that doesn't mean we know whether or not it was staged just that the circumstances don't allow us to answer that question reliably.
But Russia is ignoring those laws. What Russia is doing is called "war of aggression": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_aggression
"A war of aggression, sometimes also war of conquest, is a military conflict waged without the justification of self-defense, usually for territorial gain and subjugation."
• A startup can crash
• A fee for service company focusing on dev will probably crash
• An established company where development is just done for internal things. Can they pause feature requests and focus on maintenance for a bit? I'm not saying it may not come to having to hire people and talks need to start, but did they even think about the devs? What have they been doing in regards to their devs? Any help?
IMO, it's just the way it's being handled. They have their people fighting for their lives. Here's what looks like a manager or lead not being able to work with all the stress around it. And all that upper management sees is, fill in the chair.
A contract company with customers. The company would likely "be fine", but 5 years ago it was ~6 people. We've pushed for some larger clients recently, which allows us to employ ~50 people. If rolling out to the larger clients fails, that income source dries up and we go back down to ~10 people or w/e. With a sizable failure on our track record, which will be a bit difficult too.
> IMO, it's just the way it's being handled. They have their people fighting for their lives. Here's what looks like a manager or lead not being able to work with all the stress around it. And all that upper management sees is, fill in the chair.
So in our case i imagine we'd attempt to fill in a chair. I'd advocate for it. But again, i want to keep the rest of the staff employed and fed, myself included. However i would _definitely not_ expect to see those employees let go. I'd raise hell and question my employment if they were treated that way. Just filled in while they're gone, hopefully still paying them as long as we can (which probably wouldn't exceed 6 months i'd guess).
Which is partly why these conversations can be difficult for me. My #1 concern is keeping everyone employed, including the people having a tough time. Which can often mean keeping my head focused on income.
As much as i love WorkReform and worker focused rights, i often feel these conversations are adversarial and don't seem to consider what will happen when the company goes under. But they're also framed against massive corps, like Starbucks or w/e, and the reality is much different for them than it is my company.
Talking about my company in the WorkReform context is really odd these days.
Regardless, it might be good to bring it up if the company ever plans to contract people again from Ukraine. Looks like you've found great developers there now and in the past, so it would suck to get blacklisted by devs there due to something like this.
Maybe it's possible to keep them employed and just contract out a company for devs in the meantime? Just something that can be renewed as needed but that would also leave your devs with a place to come back to after.
Good luck with everything. Good luck to your friends and coworkers fighting for their homes and livelihood.
Other jobs, especially like software dev, is literally pointless and not important like at all. One corp will close - another one will open and the world won't even notice it.
How do you think western governments can afford to send aid, if not through tax dollars collected via the production of their citizens? If everyone decided to drop what they were doing out of some grossly mislead compassion then the aid currently being sent to the Ukraine in the form of monetary support and supplies would become fiscally impossible due to the lack of national production.
The problem with this kind of anti-industrial sentiment is that on it's surface it may sound morally righteous and perfectly reasonable but as soon as you begin to devote even a moments worth of critical thinking to the ideas you're spouting it's easy to see how totally they break down.
The very people you condemn for selfishness or greed are the same people who keep the world economy functioning in a crisis like this. They're the same people who make it so that there is still some semblance of a normal world for the Ukrainian people to return to once this war has passed.
I've seen people complain about YouTube for example - they eventually realize that what YouTube recommends is what they watch. If they want better recommends, they need to watch different things.
While it is your choice what to click, what you end up watching is a result of the interplay between you and what is recommended to you and if the recommendation system was different, both what you click and the resulting feed would be different as well
Above all, I much prefer this to people that find my email/LinkedIn and pings me there. That's where I draw the line.
Or maybe they just ran into a case where they need the issue resolved, but aren't sure if they should wait or if it's likely to take long enough that they should find an alternative or a workaround.
If they went to the trouble of creating an account just to bump this issue... they probably care about it. Asking for update is just as often a way to subtly say "Can I pick this up?" or "Is there a way I can help move this ticket?" or "There was a pr, is this not getting merged because you won't accept this changeset?"
You seem to be making a value judgement I just don't get - who fucking cares if it's just some rando - they were all random people when they started the thread...
That aside Russia coming up with it's own reasons for engaging in war with a country is different than Russia having internationally recognized reasons for engaging in war with a country.
Can you explain? Is there another internationality, except UN, which has authority to allow wars?
Kind of. International law is made up of both treaties and customary international law, which is (to oversimplify) basically a distillation of state practice. Think of it as almost analogous to statues vs. common law.
For example, while the U.S. is not a party to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, it recognizes most of its tenets as customary international law. (This is also why it regularly conducts freedom of navigation passages in the South China Sea, to prevent China's ownership claim from becoming customary international law.)
If a large number of nations (say, NATO?) agreed that another lawful basis for the use of force (LBUF) existed, beyond the right of self-defense or an UNSCR, that could become customary international law. The hot topic in this area right now is humanitarian intervention, which NATO cited in its Kosovo intervention and which the UK recognizes as a CIL LBUF. This gets meta real fast, since even though a large number of nations reached consensus on using it as justification for Kosovo, they haven't reached a consensus that there is a consensus on using it. Only the UK explicitly recognizes it as CIL, last I checked.
So what you see instead is this kind of academic song and dance where, e.g., the U.S. de facto is using humanitarian intervention to justify intervention in Syria but de jure relies on a mildly stretched interpretation of self-defense instead.
Having Cold War situations again isn't desirable of course but it's kind of battle tested to not lead to further, direct, escalations.
I do realise the risk of nukes at that point but in the hypothetical situation that nukes remain MAD
Also it is quite clear Putin won't lose his face no matter what, and has reached the point of better dead than sorry.
Very sadly how many has he already taken down with such attitude.
In fact I got kind of bored because I wanted something new and different, instead I just get more videos of exactly the same type.
If I stop watching a certain kind of video it eventually stops showing up on the recommendations.
> The only thing that needs doing during war is be safe and support others.
If a single firm goes out of business sure, no big deal on a grand scale. If ten thousand firms go out of business, then that is a big deal. The position you hold fundamentally contradicts itself. Either nothing else matters, and therefore the entire world should focus on nothing but the war - which would lead to global economic collapse. Or you're wrong and other things actually do matter, in which case businesses shouldn't drop everything and completely forego local production in order to attempt to support Ukraine or Ukrainians.
Ideally of course there'd be some middle ground in which a company would attempt to support its Ukrainian employees, but regardless the company still needs to function and profit if it wants to keep said Ukrainian employees employed. You can't achieve one without the other. You seem to desire both support from these organizations while simultaneously demanding they cease operating in any capacity which puts them in a position to provide support.
Also I never said businesses should drop everything and support anybody. All I said is employees don't need and most won't work in times like these, at least those who are directly affected. No one gives a damn about their job or if they are fired in situations like this. And definitely no one would shed a tear if the company they worked for will go out of business, just like the company doesn't care about the employee it will let go.
That's why you need to focus on actually winning the war.
This is blocked because the primary author is not available to help due to geopolitical issues.
Even if it is just some lazy person who wants stuff done (and frankly - I think that attitude is fairly defeatist - you have no idea who that person is) why are you letting them occupy your headspace if that's what you think?
Basically - even if they are lazy, you making the assumption makes you an asshole. Worse - it makes you less effective, because you take a possible volunteer and snub them immediately. Between the two - I'm much more annoyed by your behavior than theirs.