Yep, I see this in industrial automation. My company is particularly bad about it, since the corporate office is in Houston where you can hire people for the duration of a project fairly easily.
Problem is, my part of the company isn't in Houston, so qualified employees are hard to find. So we need to hold on to people, which is hard when we rarely hand out raises. I do my best to train up my guys, but I know that they're probably going to move on in a couple of years. My goal is to make an enjoyable environment so that they'll come back eventually at a higher pay rate.
My best worker - the one I'm training up to be a lead - is the lowest paid member of the team, and I can't do anything about it. It sucks.
I see your huge karma points and want to oppose. Unions will get better salaries for low performers and decrease salaries for high performers. So there will be 10% salary difference between a guy working 45 hours a week and a guy wo shows up in the office and has all day long coffee breaks. That’s how unions in Germany work. They don’t protect one from being fired. You just get a better package. In Bavaria you start with level 9 salary after university. Jump quickly to level 10, then to level 11 mid career and if you’re lucky to the level 12 which corresponds roughly to 120000€ before taxes. Doubling salary over whole career… I don’t know if that’s a good deal.
My advice is US specific (brutalist labor market), and there is little evidence pay is tied to performance quality [1]. Regardless, I understand your perspective and respect it. The situation in the US is so terrible, we can only go up (imho). I am, very reluctantly, pro union because there is no other option.
> Unions will get better salaries for low performers and decrease salaries for high performers.
As a worker, I simply don't care if other people are paid well as long as I get paid well. This mindset of "it is not enough for me to succeed, others must fail" is absurd.
Generally, employees do want people who are more productive to be rewarded more, but are rightfully cynical about employers' ability to judge who is producing.
> So there will be 10% salary difference between a guy working 45 hours a week and a guy wo shows up in the office and has all day long coffee breaks.
Almost nobody should be working 45 hours a week. Certainly no one in my field.
It's telling that your primary example of performance is "time spent at desk". This sort of terrible mismeasurement is why employees are cynical about employers' ability to judge who is producing.
> [Unions in Germany] don’t protect one from being fired.
That's probably because they learned from the mistakes of unions in the US. Having to work with incompetent or straight-up drunk coworkers because they can't be fired isn't a great experience.
> Doubling salary over whole career… I don’t know if that’s a good deal.
"Only" doubling salary because you started at a higher wage is a great deal. Union workers are paid more than nonunion at every stage of their career, but how much more disproportionately favors people early in their careers.
If you take off the union tinted glasses and read again, you see that these employees are exercising their agency to the fullest by moving to better paying jobs at other companies.
And this is why you don't get job advice on reddit or HN. You'll get unsolicited advice that you should quit your job because you mention you're trying to make your workplace better for other employees.
I get the impression from the parent post that they have no control over compensation and therefore are doing the best they can, with what they have, for the people around them.
There's SXML, which is equivalent to XML but in S-expression form. Seems to have only caught on in the Scheme community, though.
There are a couple standard ways to do dictionaries (a-lists and p-lists). Object systems like CLOS and GOOPS have standard text representations, but they're tied to their respective Lisps.
In 1975, the CIA used Howard Hughes's Glomar Explorer in a bungled attempt to raise a sunken Soviet submarine in order to access the "Gravedust" unit, an occult device that allows communication with the dead. Now a ruthless billionaire intends to try again, even if by doing so he awakens the Great Old Ones, who thwarted the earlier expedition. . . .
Charlie's commented about that before. Last I heard he's planning to come back around and give the Laundry series a proper ending once he's done with the New Management novels.
My guess? There have been a few high profile security CVEs lately and the "why are we still using C" crowd is louder than usual. Ada's a viable alternative for performant system code, and it's kind of the underdog to Rust.
Ada is memory safe if you just work with the stack or avoid Unchecked_Deallocation. Since functions can allocate and return entire arrays and other data structures completely on the stack, you don't need to mess with the heap that often (and when you do, you can also define your own memory pools).
If you have to use dynamic allocation, you could also use the built in container libraries or controlled types for additional safety.
Though if you want the kind of memory safety that Rust has, there's always SPARK (a subset of Ada).
Dial-up is still used for a lot of industrial uses as well. Have a few tanks of Diesel off away from any network infrastructure? Run a phone line to your ground reader and dial into it from your SCADA software. Many ground readers have modems built in.
Works great on military bases where they still use POTS.
There are also the three graphical PLC languages standardized by the IEC - Ladder, Function Block Diagram, and Sequenced Function Chart.
They're used everywhere - anywhere you see a shiny metal cabinet with conduit running in and out, there's a chance there's a PLC plugging away in there.
Ladder dates back to the 70s and I'm willing to bet is the most used graphical language in existence. It looks like the relay diagrams that electricians use.
Problem is, my part of the company isn't in Houston, so qualified employees are hard to find. So we need to hold on to people, which is hard when we rarely hand out raises. I do my best to train up my guys, but I know that they're probably going to move on in a couple of years. My goal is to make an enjoyable environment so that they'll come back eventually at a higher pay rate.
My best worker - the one I'm training up to be a lead - is the lowest paid member of the team, and I can't do anything about it. It sucks.
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