It's been an odd running theme for me today that I've misinterpreted posts. Up until your final sentence, I thought that the thesis of your post was:

The standard document may say one thing, but what people do in the real world is the real standard. If your software has issues with the world's most popular IMAP server, you need to adjust your software to be compliant with the standard.

I'm personally more sympathetic to your actual conclusion, but it's odd how often a single argument can be used to support two conflicting beliefs.

Yeah, agreed! I titled my guide "Practical IMAP" for reason (and almost called it "IMAP As She Is Spoke"). The standards are useful to a point, but actually to jeffbee's point the internet has evolved a lot since then, and how to actually work with modern email is a pretty underdocumented - including by Google themselves on the Gmail-specific parts.

I'm curious if you count Pass (https://www.passwordstore.org/) as not being "in town" or if it has issues with user freedom that I'm ignorant of.

Eh I should’ve qualified with pw managers that support passkeys.

When I was in the Boy Scouts, a local judge came to speak with us about the legal system. I asked a similar question and he admonished me that innocent people never wind up in court. He explained that every person who is in a trial (criminal or civil) is guilty of something. A judge's job was merely to determine if the prosecution or plantiff was correct about what the defendant was guilty of. He was very annoyed that ignorant people, who had never been to law school, kept spreading this nonsense that some defendants were innocent.

The COM file exploit worked because it is relatively unknown. I remember a worm going around when I was in grad school where you'd get an e-mail with a link to https://giftcard.customerservice.savemoneyonanew.tv/amazon.c.... Users who had been through the phishing training would see the HTTPS at the beginning and the amazon.com at the end and know that this was a legitimate Amazon email. The e-mail instructed them to click the link and "open the PDF file". Users would click the link, down load the COM file, and the open the file, installing malware all over the machine and forwarding the worm to all their contacts.

The truth is that, if a candidate competent enough to work for us, then they can get hired by a firm thirty miles down the road who pays way better than we do. Thus, one line of questioning during the interview process is figuring out why the candidate wants to work for US instead. Usually it's because they want more exciting work or are interested in the work we are specifically doing. If someone just wants ANY job, it's a red flag that they've applied to the wrong place.

Or a sign that the market sucks, so they've been applying for a while.

Or their interview skills suck.

Because I'm not a fan trying to puff myself up by blowing flowery smoke at people, I've previously felt that I should _like_ the one true answer to "Why do you want to work /here/?" to be "Because I need a job, and you're hiring.".

But I suppose a nicer, more compatible answer would be something like "Because our requirements and interests seem to align.". I guess that would sound a little like "interested in the work we are specifically doing" without being some sort of gushing false enthusiasm that anybody would perceive as either an exaggeration or a lie.

I also find this thread interesting from the opposite direction as someone not in the Bay Area. In the past ten years, the longest job interview I had was two hours long. Honestly, most of the interviews I've been in (on both sides of the table) have been closer to half an hour.

Honest question: how often do you do Tornado drills in Japan? A quick look look at the wiki[1] indicates that you do get them, but fairly rarely. I honestly don't know your cultural perspective on them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tornadoes_and_tornado_...

I grew up on the edges of the New Madrid fault area and, while earthquakes were never discussed, we did tornado drills about every two months while in school. After I entered the workforce, that got closer to once a year, but you were still expected to have a plan and supplies. It was basic emergency preparedness, like any sensible person. Granted, big F5 tornados are rare, but small ones were common enough to not even be noteworthy.

Having left that region as an adult, it was a small culture shock meeting people who never had this kind of training. After all, the places I've visited all experience tornados, though not as often as my old home town. Still, the usual attitude I encounter is "I've never seen a tornado - they don't happen here". It's true that tornados don't happen often, just like my birthplace hasn't seen a serious earthquake in my lifetime, but they do happen.

I guess that's why I'm curious about your experiences. I've never been to Japan and I've read enviable reports of your disaster preparedness, but I honestly have no idea how your schools and culture handle tornados.

I just live here, I didn't grow up here, so I can't tell you much about how kids are trained here. I've never heard of any drills for adults. Also I had never heard of tornadoes here either (though again, I've only lived here a few years), but earthquakes and typhoons are pretty common. Your Wikipedia list is news to me, but looking it over, it seems they're uncommon and relatively minor in size, and greatly overshadowed by the earthquakes and typhoons and tsunami.

That said, it is very common and normal for people to keep emergency backpacks that they can grab and take to shelters if there's an evacuation. I have one in the closet next to my front door. The government also periodically gives out free emergency supplies for people to keep. There's publicized evacuation plans and routes, and places seem like they're prepared for big storms: subway stations for instance have huge doors at the entrances to protect against flooding.

When I was young, my father worked for a place where asking for a raise was a fireable offence. The founder had been a pioneer in the modern cattle-not-pets attitude toward servers, except he applied it to developers. When an employee asked for a raise, it meant on of two things:

1. The employee was a vain troublemaker who had over-value what they were worth in the market. Firing them would not only remove an inefficiency from the system (as they were likely not to work as hard if they believed that they were underpaid), but it would also helpfully remind the other developers that they were all expendable.

2. The employee was a 10x developer who was vital to the company processes and could command a much higher salary somewhere else. Even if you gave them a raise today, they could be hit by a bus tomorrow. The best course of action was to simply rip off the band aid. Fire the employee, have security immediately escort them from the building, and begin triage to ensure that the critical systems that they wrote/managed could be handled by the next resume in HR's pile.

The line I will always remember is: Developer are like eggs. They are heavily undervalued, but also will crack under too much pressure. Thankfully, like eggs, you can buy them for cheap in packs of twelve, so it doesn't matter if you break a few.

This is not an ideal way to run most companies however I can see this work under a few conditions.

1) This policy is known and communicated to current and future hires.

2) The company has found a way to pay each person the current market rate and makes efforts to adjust accordingly.

Otherwise why would anyone stay?

Many things about that company were not idea - the founder left his CEO position in handcuffs. However, the policy was not communicated to new and future hires in any manner. So why would anyone stay?

The founder was very public with other companies in the area about both his policy of firing 10x developers and hiring any warm body that could put a resume in his hand. He told stories at local business meetings of the various people he hired who couldn't find a computer and were fired on the same day. So, when you found out what the corporate culture was like after about a month on the job, you had two options.

1. Stay on for a year. This cemented to every hiring manager that you were a 1x developer (because you kept the job), but absolutely not a 10x developer. You might get a junior developer position somewhere else, but never more than that. 2. Immediately quit the job. You now had a one month stint at the firm on your resume. Every hiring manager in town knew that 5% of people with a short stint were good developers and the remaining 95% were people who just finished "COBOL for Dummies". You'd best just leave the gap in your resume if you didn't want your resume in the trash.

Well he's probably right. There should be fixed and immutable company policy for automatic raises and bonuses based on independent quantitative measurements, i.e. inflation, local cost of living, and project metrics. No buts, no exceptions, on both the employer's and employee's side. This is how it works in most government jobs and it makes everything fairer, easier, and more predictable overall.

I happen to work at a government job partially because I saw how my father was treated by the private sector. However, our institution is failing at the requirements that you put forth. The government ministers complained back in 2015 that the independent quantitative measurements weren't accurately capturing employee productivity. As you would expect from Goodhart's law, there certainly were certain employees being underpaid and overpaid, respectively. Thus, the measurements were scraped. However, the bureaucracy has prevented a new set of metrics from being put into place. As a result, I've been working for eight years on what I was told would be a six-month probationary salary because there is literally no mechanism for anyone to receive a raise. Thankfully, recent events are looking like this might change to something sane in a year or two, but the last proposal I saw for someone moving out of the bottom of a salary bracket was: "candidate has won awards from professional bodies in at least three countries across at least two continents".

That's why I argue that eggs should fight back :-).

> It's impossible to plan without an internal monologue

I once had a teacher claim that people who claimed to have aphantasia were lying, because those people have read books and it is impossible to read a book without picture the scene in your mind's eye. Are you citing the same source that she was?

I wish I had such a teacher, because I'd learn the term "aphantasia", instead of worrying all my youth that I'm doing reading wrong, as I could never picture anything I was reading in my mind (and as a result, I found scenery descriptions to be mind dumbingly boring).