Ondrej Brinkel @der_On@mastodon.anzui.dev

#lightpainting #photography #church

Finally it snowed at my place. #snow #photography #winter

Stop using "Zoom" as a general term for video conferencing.
Stop using "Google" as a general term for searching the web.

Musing on my experience of working in tech.

If I could sum up the startup life in a simple phrase, it would be this: the contemporary model that tech start-ups adopt is fucking cancer. Virtually all of them start from good ideas, or at the very least, good intentions. At first, it seems cool to work at a tiny company where everything is scrappy and the future is uncertain, where your first big customer feels like a huge validation of a big idea.

But, at some point, there's this horrific pivot where the startup decides it MUST act like "a business" and, without coherent guidance, copies over the conventions that thousands of other startups have bought into, with little consideration towards their corrosive effects.

One of the biggest, most telling things about my last startup was in what happened to personnel. It's representative of the wider industry: most employees stay for about 1-2 years, then fuck off to some other company in search of advancement in either payment or status, or both. Turnover in tech is extremely high, despite the purported benefits: there's a snack bar! We do team-building exercises once a month! There's yoga and inspirational talks, and a diversity initiative, and all of our messaging focuses on how much we care about you! We're a family, after all!

Deep down, all of these concessions do little to address the more horrific things going on. Someone's fucking the boss. The Diversity and Inclusion initiative doesn't actually do anything. The community outreach program just has the same people coming back every month to leech off the free food while we mindlessly play powerpoint karaoke and interview industry veterans over buzzwords like kubernetes. We pretend to be progressive, and care about people, but we're part of why the rent is going up, and a factor in why that homeless guy is shitting in the street. The poop in the street is treated as a meme - we all talk with a smile about whether that's dog or human poop, then bring up whether the problem will ever get better, as we mosey down to a sandwich shop to pay for our $15 lunches without the hint of irony.

Dear web developers and admins,
please stop embedding Google's hideous #ReCaptcha into your websites. Its algorithm is faulty, forcing regular users to click dozens or even hundreds of fire hydrants, bicycles, or traffic lights each day. It puts a 'suspicious activity' flag on users who won't obey to Google's business model - such as people who don't sign into Chrome, use anonymity VPNs, or use browser extensions to suppress common tracking mechanisms. Enough is enough. Stop it.

So when you got onto the fediverse where there any hashtags or anything you tried to search out to find other black folks on here? Wondering if there is any consensus could use to try and signal beacon to other folks. Or maybe I just need to start something and hope it sticks? Like they have #BlackTwitter i've seen on posts so maybe #BlackMastodon or #BlackFedi ?