> I might spend 10 minutes doing a task with AI rather than an hour (w/o AI), but trust me - I am going to keep 50 minutes to myself, not deliver 5 more tasks
It's wild that you just outright admitted this. Seems like your employer would do best to let you go and find someone that can use tools to increase their productivity.
Show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome. More than once I've had my hand slapped professionally for taking ownership of something my immediate superiors wanted to micromanage. Fine, here I was trying to take something off their plate that was in my wheelhouse, but if that's where they want to draw the line I guess I'll just give less of a shit.
If you actively deny your employees ownership, then the relationship becomes purely transactional.
It's also possible OP is just a bad employee, but I've met far more demoralized good employees than malicious bad ones over the course of my career.
A lot of orgs are bad about giving credit to employees for productivity, what's the point of working 4x harder if it'll just result in a few % point difference in yearly raise, and you're still going to have to job hop to get a respectable pay bump? Might as well work less and spend time polishing your resume/side projects to make yourself as employable as possible. This is 100% the fault of poor incentives on the part of employers.
> you're still going to have to job hop to get a respectable pay bump
This doesn't exist in a vacuum. I do tasks now for future interviews.
> Might as well work less and spend time polishing your resume/side projects to make yourself as employable as possible.
I don't know what jobs you're applying to, but unless your side project is successful, nobody cares. What they do care about is what you did at your last employer.
> This is 100% the fault of poor incentives on the part of employers.
The people who have your mindset are the people perpetually stuck at poor employers.
> 4 seconds after I posted it, it got downvoted. Then 10 seconds later, -2. Because it has the word cryptocurrency. No one can load, read and react that fast. This is getting ridiculous. Turn off the bots based on a word, and engage with the substance.
Because as soon as you said Cryptocurrency, you lost the plot.
Everything you said is literally how freelancing already works. You pay a certain amount upfront, and then pay more based on deliverables.
> Cryptocurrency is the right fit here because you want it to be tied to something the client can’t just mint unlimited amounts of
Can you tell me how to mint unlimited amounts of US Dollars? I would love this hack.
> just another use of cryptocurrency that properly aligns everyone’s incentives and prevents legal disputes through continuity instead of abruptness
How does a blockchain determine whether I built the site the owner wanted?
I normally think pg has been very reasonable in his views, but his historic approval of downvoting things merely to signal disagreement, or worse, being triggered by a word, is a mistake, this norm makes HN much less useful.
It chills speech to the point of not being able to suggest correct solutions to things, or correctly diagnose problems. Well, I refuse to participate in that.
I only downvote if I think the quality of a comment is bad, it is completely off-topic or absurd for example, or in bad faith. Not if I disagree with it and certainly not because it contains — gasp - a word for a technology I would prefer not to see discussed!
And I also refuse to be bullied into silence by some downvotes. I am saying that downvotes within 4 seconds is not likely to be organic, because it requires someone to have refreshed the page at nearly the exact time I posted, magically scroll down to the exact comment, read it first and downvote it. And then 4 downvotes in quick succession after. There is more going on here, I suspect, than mere “losing the plot”.
I could attempt to test this by posting comments with the ahem blacklisted word as a reply to some comments even further down the page, where it would be absurd for someone to scroll to that exact comment within, say, 10 seconds. But I have noticed that a specific set of words seems to produce that effect on HN.
I have no idea what the contract says, what was paid, or any of the other conversations they've had. All I see is someone complaining publicly about a private matter. When that happens, I assume they're wrong.
Normal people don't air petty grievances on the internet. They use the courts and other mechanisms.
According to another comment, the business is dissolved. They don't care if their site goes down. So this guy is looking unprofessional for nothing.
You say that as if the courts are a reasonable solution for most people. In many cases the cost and time render them useless and often cost more than the invoice that is due. In some jurisdictions you may recover this, but in many you can't.
When I had a dispute with a client over coding work my lawyer said: "If this goes to court, the only winners and me and their lawyer. We get to take another vacation this year." I've always heeded that advice.
You say that as if airing your problems on the internet is a reasonable solution for most people.
We have small claims courts in every jurisdiction in the US. It costs $50 to file, and you do not need an attorney. The courts will review the contract and generally reach a reasonable decision.
There's always a cost/benefit to things. I bet the courts have returned more money than Facebook posts have...
> We have small claims courts in every jurisdiction in the US. It costs $50 to file, and you do not need an attorney.
This particular example is in the UK though.
It's even easier here!
You can issue a Statutory Demand (https://www.gov.uk/statutory-demands) which gives the receiver 21 days to either pay or reach an agreement to pay. Failing to do that can lead to them being wound up.
Unlike the US, the fee isn't a flat fee, and is tiered depending on the amount being claimed (still cheap though).
I've had to use both in the past.
The developer in this case really has no excuse for airing dirty laundry in public. If they're hosting and not being paid, by all means suspend the site, but don't deface it so there's a message about not being paid carrying the customer's branding.
I've done tons of litigation in Small Claims in the USA. It's not how you think.
I don't know what state lets you file for $50. It can easily reach $400 or more, especially because you might have to pay the sheriff to serve the defendant.
Most Small Claims in the USA allows the other party to bring an entire team of professional lawyers to destroy you. (Cook County for instance bars lawyers only for cases under $1500 IIRC)
Counterpoint: airing petty grievances on the Internet has proven, time and again, to be a remarkably effective way of getting the grievance addressed by an otherwise inaccessible third party.
Evidence: just about every post on Hacker News about Google breaking that eventually attracts a personal followup from a Googler who reads HN.
If you're angry about not getting paid and your client has given you control over part of their public-facing persona, I can definitely see using that control to make it known that you are in a state of disunion with them. I can even see it being done with no harm to your reputation because other future potential clients know they will be able to pay you.
It looks like the company's owners didn't give a simple heads up to their providers before dissolving it. In my eyes, that's way worse than what this particular provider has done. If the sums aren't large, they might lose money by going to court.
The company owner didn't dissolve it, the registrar did as a penalty for not filing accounts within about 4 months of the due date. The owner might not even know it's dissolved yet.
This strikes me as something like a landlord changing the locks when a tenant gets behind on the rent. In many jurisdictions this is illegal, as there exists a defined process for dealing with non-payment of rent: eviction.
I see it more like when a restaurant doesn't pay the lease on their kitchen equipment and the kitchen equipment company comes and puts giant unremovable orange stickers on the restaurant windows letting the owner and the world know that the equipment inside is their property and must be surrendered or legal action will be taken.
Why are you responding with superficial takes? Are you trolling?
It's not complicated... I don't trust the judgement of someone that behaves this way. I have no idea what the contract said, or who is in the right. All I know is I'm not going to take the chance that they don't agree with the contract and now I'm litigating on Facebook....
How is disabling the account when it's not being paid for illegal? Beyond some grace period, if I'm not paid, I'm not accepting your mail. If I'm not being paid, I'm not answering DNS queries on your behalf either.
I'm not going to interfere with your contract with a different party that handles your mail or DNS if that's how you manage your mail or DNS.
I'm a nice guy so I'll signal a temporary error and if you arrange payment (or at least claim that you will arrange payment shortly), hopefully your correspondents will retry and you'll just have delays and not lost messages.
DNS is generally prepaid. You can't sabotage services because you aren't being paid. For example, a landlord can't disable someone's prepaid internet when he stops receiving their rent.
The remedy for failure to pay is to seek payment or sue, not to sabotage the client's business.
So if you paid me Jan 1 2025 for one year of DNS service and now it's Jan 1 2026 and you didn't pay me again, I'm supposed to keep serving your DNS?
If the money runs out, the service turns off. That's not sabotage anymore than the phone company turning off your phone or the electric company turning off your power. Although phone and electricity may have regulated shutoff procedures.
Table based layouts were deprecated even 15 years ago. It goes against your point that things change frequently.
> do you consider yourself a person who 'knows CSS'?
Sure. They know an older version of CSS. They don't know the latest version. Shrug....
> You will get laughed out of a tech interview for it though.
I've never laughed at anyone in an interview. Can you share some more nuances here? What's the role and expectation? How good is their code? Did they just not learn some modern designs, but can learn it quickly? What have they been working on the past few years?
Both right. Sucking at something is the first step to being kind of good at something. At the same time doing that in a professional environment sucks for your coworkers
> At the same time doing that in a professional environment sucks for your coworkers
The vast majority of what we learn is in a professional environment. I can't build a hobby app with hundreds of millions of active users. We learn at work, and that means sometimes it sucks. But that's why we have blameless cultures, because we all realize you can't learn unless you first do it in a shitty way.
It's also why AI replacing juniors is terrible. Juniors need to make mistakes and figure things out. That's how they become experienced seniors.
but in the same way nobody writes a hello world programming in any language without first reading enough of the language specification to write that hello world program.
on edit: yes, HN cleverboots et al, I should not have written "language specification", you got me! However I challenge anyone of the especially clever people here to go write a hello world in some programming language that you know nothing about, without first looking up how to do it.
That is to say that while hardly anybody "learns the language" to write hello world, they do learn exactly enough of the language to do just that, and continue from there, until they get to some point at which they may feel to get deeper into the language. Thus the parent comment about people not learning the language was not exactly correct either.
I think you would be surprised by how many people write hello world without reading a single character of the language specification! In fact, I would be amazed if it weren't even the majority of new programmers.
+1 my point is that, if you didn't learn it, you need a humble attitude. And in the context of software you're building as part of your profession, not learning it well is a bigger problem than hobby pursuits.
This is a different problem and disciplin. I'm not an artist. I can't design anything pretty. But I can learn a programming language (or CSS) well enough that I can replicate something an artist designs.
We have an entire design org that produces pretty UIs. FE developers are then expected to know the CSS rules to build that design.
The very first thing I teach new FE developers is how to build from Figma designs.
IMO, this particular division of labor (design/specification) introduces a rather unacceptable level of friction.
It is a feature, not a bug, that when the design and specification work is being done by the same person, the designs tend to be ones that are relatively straightforward to specify. It makes it a conscious choice to budget more specification effort towards elments that are more important to the designer.
You could probably even pre-pay the bribe and avoid being charged altogether.
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