In any case, you would need Amazon to actually enforce it.
While they do have more money for legal fees, they would risk a big PR issue if they tried to prevent some guy from working at Walmart after quitting Amazon. Also, the first guy with such a problem wouldn't have a lot of trouble finding someone to help them with legal fees, if only for the publicity.

This is probably just a scare tactic, to discourage people from leaving them, it is unethical, but not really enforceable.

Does that manual encourage bad code ?

The second one should also include "immutable". If it's hard to understand it will evolve easily to non working, and time spent on improvements can start to creep up very fast.

I have worked in very clever, solid code, but not easy to read. It was then maintained and extended by average, but competent programmers down the road, and turned into a big mess, only because it was so hard to understand.

In my experience, good code is easy to read, above all. That will make it easy to extend it coherently, find bugs and stuff. Also, if it doesn't work OK, it's easy to find out why. The single metric that saves time, money, and improves quality down the road is readability. Eveything else should be suject to that.

And, about the last point in the "article", "efficient", it's nonsense. Premature optimization is the root of all evil. You should _always_ follow the second rule of optimization (see http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RulesOfOptimization ).

PHP can be good or bad, like any other code. Lately it's getting better.
As an example, do you think this looks bad? Looks pretty good to me.

  https://github.com/symfony/sym...

I have some awful, unreadable examples I could share in Java, PHP, Javascript and even C, but chosen language no longer forces you to write bad code. Maybe Perl, but I haven't seen it lately.

"OS" mentality is that it will be done when it's _done_. Not when it's _right_.
And it's tautologically true. You don't need management to change their mentality, only to _accept_ reality, and act accordingly. I know it might be too much to ask for, but it's not too much to ask.

While it does make sense to have a roadmap, release dates for new software are too often wrong. It's a good thing to keep yourself honest about expectations, and drive the development process, so you can get quality stuff, in reasonable timeframes, providing the greatest possible value.

Unrealistic expectations and pressure on estimates won't help you get there faster, or better. Being realistic will help your team improve estimations, and also help you complete stuff faster, and better.

You are right in your assessment, but there should be a solution for that.

Time and materials contracts can take care of the issues you are talking about. You can reject a pull request, but still pay for the hours.
It's a lot cheaper to pay for the hours than to fight over them. If it's an employee, help them get better, refine your specs, or maybe move them or replace them, if they are not fit for _that_ project. If it's a contractor, change contractors if they are bad.

If you are contracting software development, it's always better to assume some risks yourself, because that keeps your providers focused on helping you reach your objective, and not contract stuff. If you don't want to take risks, you shouldn't be developing software in the first place, but buying ready-made solutions.

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I don't know whether what he says is true, but beggars are not a typical sight in communism.
In a communist state, they would either not get much gain by begging on their streets (think Cuba, at least when foreigners are not involved), and or be thrown in jail by doing it (like what they say happens in North Korea)
Also, political leaders enjoying luxury goods and meals is the norm in most countries, communist ("real" or not) or otherwise.

It's not that common for companies to have principles to begin with, tough.

Currency black markets are not "unconfortable", they are _illegal_. I'm sure there are examples of censorship in Venezuela, but that's not one.

The latency to where?

Latency to Venezuela can be good.

My city, Montevideo, an oldish city, with some similarities to Havana, was also wired by a state owned telco with fiber. Also most of the urban country is already fibered.
It's taking a bit over a couple of years, most of the city is covered, and the smallest plan is 30 dollars (or free if you a single Giga per month is enough for you).
Of course, 35 dollars in Cuba might be expensive, but also most of the cost they had here was labor, construction salaries are high. They wouldn't have that problem over there. They could even have you dig the ditches yourself if you want internet, dammit.

Anyhow, I would go with LTE. It's probably a lot cheaper, and flexible enough.

"It has so far been tested only on light-insensitive retinas from embryonic chicks, "

OMG!! They are called ladies, not "chicks".

Why would the Chinese government pay for something western governments get for free?

Networked is not the same. Internet connected or something like that might be better.
Also, networked _might_ imply wired for some, while IoT is more in the line of wireless, standalone.
Internet enabled is good, but already means other old, unrelated things.

It is a new trend, that is actually gaining some momentum right now, cheap systems on chip, BLE, and stuff, and it needs a name, so others what you are talking about. IoT is as good a name as any other. It doesn't really bother me, even if it's silly.

No reason to keep whining about it. There are possibly tens of thousands of tech people reading this today, if you have a better name, descriptive, not stupid, or whatever, please share it, below the line ----v , we might like it, start using it instead of IoT, and it just might catch on.
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They are identical on paper, but not for a person.

It's a lot easier to get energy from doughnuts than from broccoli.

It's 5 medium doughnuts versus 5 broccoli bunches. I'm pretty sure I can have 5 doughnuts in a sitting, but not 5 broccoli bunches.

There's a lot of fiber in broccoli, so even if you manage to have all that broccoli, you will have a hard time extracting many calories from it. In any case, it will be slow, so at least it keeps you full for a longer time than doughnuts.