Author here. Would love the community's security skills to investigate and diagnose the vulnerability in more depth. Can provide additional information via PM.
"If a company took this to the logical extreme - making the employees the consumers of the product/service - then it would cease to be "work", and would instead be a "hobby/internship/volunteer/education/experience"."
Tangentially related, but an early strategy of the Ford motor co was to double the standard factory wage of it's employees, so that the purchase of one of its automobiles was within reach and seen as the bonus of employment. It did wonders for their introduction of the automobile to America.
The pessimist in me wonders just how altruistic the intention behind the wages in the Ford example was. If that were a modern example, I fear the rationale from management would not be about putting the vehicles within reach as an _optional_ bonus, but rather that it would be an unwritten rule that employees are expected to purchase one. Not buying the company's product? Enjoy your status as an employee who doesn't "fit the company culture".
Realization: I have become extremely cynical in my middle years with all the crap I've seen from employers. :/
I share your suspicious. Before they raised their salaries, they were having to hire 52k workers/year despite only having a 15k workforce, due to a tremendous turnover. And the extra money wasn't free; you had to subject yourself to the "Ford Sociological Department", whose 200 investigators would make sure you complied with the company's rules: be married, keep your wife at home, abstain from alcohol and to ask for permission before making serious purchases (like buying that Ford car).
Very interesting and relevant but under the model where the products of the tech titans are near free its hard to apply this same logic.
Google doesn't really cost the users much (except loss of private data?) so its hard to say they should pay their employees enough to afford a google mail account.
Running a 10 minute stopwatch over the message count (at 8:30pm pt, a popular messaging time I'd imagine), I recorded 43k messages sent; extrapolating, that's 6.2 million messages per day; given that there have been 1,593 million messages sent in total, this is a 0.388% daily growth rate, or compounded a 12.6% monthly growth rate.
I enjoyed the experience of being able to have context and additional information as I read the piece. People read in different ways (I stop and marinate on each paragraph), and being able to explore a bit made the story all the better.
Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed the format! I think I'm like you, stopping on numerous paragraphs to allow those sentences to unlock something or bring something to mind. And ultimately, I wish that more articles included definitions and links to resources the author used or was aware of. I hate when the New York Times doesn't link to the very website they are discussing! Thanks again!
I will never accept venture funding from anyone who has invested in JustFab. Investors are the gatekeepers, and in this case have failed their moral obligation.
Markdown is like Vim -- sure, it might speed up your output, if that's your sole focus. And its not meant to be adopted en masse.
I'm a designer and relatively intelligent person by trade, and I have a difficult time with markdown. It requires me to have a guide open, to be able to write. No "normal folks" I know can decipher markdown.
The trick is to make styling easy -- not to make styling an afterthought. The writer, writing on Medium, should recognize this.
