This[1] says humans make up 34% of mammal biomass, 64% is livestock, and 4% wild animals. Another stat[2] says we kill more than 63 billion chickens each year. I like my steak and fried chicken, but damn if it's not horrific. (Imagine if an alien race farmed and killed 60 billion humans, each year...)
I wonder how many wild animals would be killed and eaten yearly in a world without humans. Are those deaths horrific too?
Would the earth itself be a horrific hellhole given it would be sustaining billions of deaths, each year?
I have never understood this argument against animal farming. I'm all for humane treatment of livestock, but we can't fool ourselves into believing that the corresponding biomass in a completely "wild" earth would be having a better time, or a better death, than our cows and chickens.
> Open source development has been running on remote work forever and it’s doing great.
One bias is that most open source projects are people solving their own problems. They have a deep understanding of the issues at hand and the developers working on a product are also the one using it. This is also why the open source community produces a lot of developers oriented tools. It is also why a lot of remote companies are working themselves in for the tech sector.
Compare that with a company that produces software for other industries. The developers working on a product are not the one ultimately using it. One of their main challenges is to ensure that the problems/goals faced by the users are ultimately properly understood by the product teams and developers. This is far more complex and requires far more communication the further away the dev is from being an expert in the target field.
There is a difference between software development and running a business. As in, "hustle to figure out this complicated operational problem or die running out of money in a month", vs "a grab bag of nice-to-have tickets for the next year or so". Besides the fact that many open-source projects like Linux also had a ton of corporate contribution from in-office workers.
Ayxa (axya.co) | x10 Openings | Full-time | all Remote | HQ is a PO box in Montreal Canada
We are currently 25 all-remote employees, got our seed funding of 1.5M earlier this year and we are on track for our next raise at the end of the summer.
We are a fast-growing technology start-up company. Our product is an online platform that connects buyers and suppliers working in the metal manufacturing industry. More than 700 companies in north america use the Axya platform.
Open roles:
◉ Senior Backend Developer in Python/Django/Django-Rest-Framework
◉ Senior Frontend Developer (x2) in Javascript/React
Man, sorry for that it seems that you got into a toxic startup culture. My startup was a bit like this 10 months ago, the other founders were all about making sacrifices and working 999h per week. However, nothing was working out properly.
I've made some drastic change to our culture to be more empathic, transparent and based on trust. Since then its way more enjoyable for everyone and we are way more productive. Salary for our employee are still under market, but we increase them whenever we have the chance and the financing. We aim to get to 10% above market value so that everyone is confortable. Also we've cut the 80h per week bullshit. If someone is working that much he is most likely doing a crappy job and needs to prioritize his day properly.
Here is a series of concept/book I've implemented that drove the change:
- Objective and Key Result: the only work that matter is those explicitly tied to the objective. There is a good book on that.
- The book Drive, it helped us understand how to create a motivating environment for our employee.
- The book Traction, it gave us a set of tools to make the business run smoother.
- Effective DevOps: It gave us a blueprint on how to structure our technology developement and team interaction.
- Peopleware: This was one of the best book that we've implemented. We moved to a remote-first company based on trust, we don't track time anymore and we don't care when people work. All that matter is objective attainement and the wellbeing of our employee.
Be careful with the combination of a ruthless pursuit of objectives, no explicit time tracking, and Peopleware-flavored advice not to interrupt people who are in maker-mode (which can easily be misunderstood as advice not to communicate). You have the makings of a culture where people bust their balls for 18 hours a day in order to meet their objectives and don't tell you that they're spending 18 hours and not 8 hours, because they don't want to rock the boat.
Yes, meeting objectives matter. But setting the right objectives is a conversation between the business's wish list and the constraints of the resources that the business actually has. Trust is a two-way street; too many managers talk about trusting their workers but they don't talk about what they do to earn their workers' trust.
That sounds like a great set of initiatives. But there is part selection bias for those posting on HN, they are probably on the nicer and more logical end of the spectrum.
I’m not in a place to make decisions, so unfortunately can’t change the culture from within. The founder isn’t a bad guy, I just know he’s going to screw me in the end, so overworking for him doesn’t make sense for me.
For me it sucked that I was lied to in the interview (if I had known that two of the senior members left, I would never join), but once you are roped in, it’s not that easy to get out.
That said, I don’t think my experience is particularly unique — honestly I think finding a good company is more rare than working for a bad one, but when we are in good roles (like I was in previous jobs), we do assume we can always be in good situations.
Pandemic didn’t help - worst time to be an employee looking for a change!
I doubt, the people from the "Nouvelle-France" have diverged a lot from their France counterpart integrating the culture of the native within their own. Most likely France would have lost control like England.
