Neither, really. They didn't eliminate jobs so much as make new rules that mostly eliminated the "Tech Lead / Manager" (TLM) role.

There used to be a lot of software engineers (people on the software engineer job ladder, as opposed to the engineering manager job ladder) who had 2-3 people reporting to them and were considered TLMs. These people divided their time between engineering work and management. Google made a new rule that every manager has to have at least 5 direct reports. This rule has flattened the hierarchy by mostly eliminating TLMs, who all had to decide whether to lose the "TL" part and be a pure manager or lose the "M" part and be a pure SWE. Well, "pure" is too strong. Some SWE managers still keep their hands in the code but they generally don't have time for significant projects.

Is this an improvement? Dunno. There are pros and cons. The TLM role has some significant benefits to a company. It enables the existence of small, close-knit teams where the team's manager is also the pre-eminent expert in the area. Being managed by the expert has a lot of advantages for the reports, especially when it comes time for the manager to defend the team's performance ratings or promotions, because the manager deeply understands their work. It has advantages for the company, too, because in a small team led by the project expert it's impossible for low-performing employees to hide their low performance or blame it on others.

On the other hand, TLMs can end up overwhelmed by the administrative overhead. This can cause them to be less effective as managers because they don't navigate the system on behalf of their employees as effectively. Some of them may not be very good at defending their reports' ratings and promotions because they don't have the skills to do that, even though they deeply understand the team's contributions. It can also definitely make them less effective as SWEs, and these people were generally top-performing ICs (individual contributors) before taking a manager role. Some might argue that any time they spend on management rather than engineering is a waste of their talents.

Pure engineering managers can be and often are better managers. Better at helping their reports develop important non-technical skills and knowledge and better at working the system for their reports. And some top-performing SWEs are such excellent managers that even as good as they are at building stuff, their positive impact as managers is larger yet.

From the upper management perspective, there's another advantage: Fewer managers to train and manage. Managing managers is harder in many ways than managing engineers, because the output of managers is harder to measure and evaluate. Also, managers are officers of the company which attaches greater legal and PR risk to their actions. Having fewer of them to manage is beneficial.

(Saving money isn't really a benefit, at least not the way Google does it. SWEs who also manage people don't get paid any more than SWEs who don't, holding all else constant.)

On balance, I don't think either approach is ideal, and the best strategy is probably a dynamic balance between them that mostly favors managers being managers (though with the rule that all managers must have been highly competent SWEs) and SWEs being SWEs, but with plenty of scope for exceptions where a project needs a small team of 3-4 people and there's a clear leader with deep technical ability and good people skills.

Anyway, Google has pushed the pendulum away from TLMs and as a result there are many fewer managers, and each manager tends to have a larger team.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google. I used to be a TLM but opted to switch back to an IC role years ago, before the rule change.)

It isn't just buzzwords, it's jargon with specific meaning... but your comment highlights the problem, because you didn't understand it.

One part you didn't understand was "bandwidth", which in the management context means "available work capacity". This means it's a discussion about resource staffing and constraints. Also, "align" means there's going to be some two-way negotiation, in this case to figure out whose employees are going to take on what part of the work based on their availability. (Well, probably. "Align" could have been used out of politeness, implying a fictional intention to negotiate when in reality the speaker does plan to dictate.) In addition, the use of "workflow" implies that the plan to be developed isn't just for one project, but for an ongoing effort.

Try translating all of that nuance to standard English, and you'll convert a ten-word sentence into a paragraph or two. Like all jargon, its purpose is to increase communication by compressing a lot of detailed information into a few words that have context-specific meaning that goes beyond their normal English definitions.

Of course, the downside of the jargon is that it prevents those who don't understand the contextual definitions from understanding, causing them to come away with interpretations like "Let's meet after this and make sure you understand how I want that to work."

In fairness to you, I have to point out that often the users of business jargon don't know what it means either, and are just using it to make themselves sound "businessy". That's less a jargon problem than evidence that the company isn't hiring the best people.

not a good look

Cite?

That seems extremely unlikely.

All of the other strategies for responding to Trump have failed. Outrage at his antics (which is, granted, the most sensible response) just encourages him and his supporters. Ignoring his behavior just normalizes and enables it. Mockery works best, but direct mockery hasn't been very effective because the GOP leadership and his supporters simply pretend that his comments and language are normal and that the people making fun of him are being elitist. What Newsom is doing actually does work, because they can't ignore either the message or the mockery, but they also can't really attack it because that would obviously and implicitly criticize Trump, too.

The only other option I see is passively waiting for Trump's bad policies to convince the voters that he's an idiot. In fact, they're not going to be convinced until they see the results, but the Democrats need to do something to make it clear that he is an idiot with bad policies so they're positioned to capitalize on souring sentiment, and the normal ways of doing that aren't working. Voters are getting quite angry about Democrat passivity. Ridiculing Trump in this way is working, at least for now, similar to but better than Walz' comments about how Trump and Vance were weird. The effectiveness may fade, and Newsom will stop. Or maybe it'll keep being effective as long as Trump keeps posting his incoherent rambling, which isn't going to stop until Trump himself is no longer relevant. But either way, it will stop being effective, and continuing after that would just make Newsom look like an idiot. There is no way Democrats are going to adopt Trump's style as the new thing, though I hope they will take the hint to move away from repetition of carefully-wordsmithed and thoroughly focus group-tested talking points and toward something a little more authentic.

I may or may not be to the right of you. I'm a classical liberal, what some call a neoliberal, and I usually describe myself as a pragmatic libertarian.

Indeed.

And yet they never seem to see the humor in it!

I think a lot of us are just waiting for MAGAts to realize that the corrupt, fascist, populist regime they've chosen is really not what they wanted. They won't listen to us until they come to that realization on their own, and until they do, the GOP is just going to continue its slavish devotion to Trump.

Uh, no. I, for one, am writing a lot of emails and letters to my (GOP) representatives, trying to remind them that the Constitution they've sworn to uphold really matters and that they shouldn't just let Trump walk all over it. They're ignoring me, and I'm sure they'll continue to do so until their constituents wake up. I'll keep sending the emails and letters, though.

Newsom isn't turning himself into a clown show, he's just playing, to shine a light on how big of a clown show Trump is. As soon as everyone stops ignoring the Trump's illiterate and incomprehensible posts, Newsom will stop, because for him it's just a performance to poke fun at Trump. For Trump, it's who he is.

Newsom's posts say nothing one way or the other about whether he can beat Trumpism, nor whether he would be a good president. But he's doing a public service by highlighting the way Trump gets sanewashed by the media and his idiocy ignored by his followers.

Welcome to my Foe list. Not because you disagreed with me, heck you might even have had some good points. But you chose ad hominem rather than productive engagement, which makes you not worth talking to, so I'll just have /. hide your posts from me.

How about a one-year study instead?

Seems like there might be some downsides to that. We should probably understand those first.

Put your route in while you have Internet. It'll continue providing directions, including to charging stations if required, without Internet. Many areas I drive regularly don't have Internet. Works fine. Alternatively, this is the one case where you might actually have to plan recharging yourself. Unlike with ICEVs, where you always have to do it yourself.

But, yes, if you regularly drive 500 miles, without stopping, through an Internet desert, uphill both ways, then an EV probably isn't for you.

Nah, both are concerns. Neither is actually a large problem in most cases, but both are actual concerns. If you don't have a good way to get a charging cable out to where you park your car, the home charging concern is actually the bigger one. For those with garages, or even driveways, it's not really an issue.

Somewhat, though you don't actually need 240V. 120V is sufficient for most people, as long as there's a fast charger in the area for the occasional top-up when they have a few consecutive days of heavier-than-normal driving. 8 hours plugged into an L1 charger will put ~40 miles into the battery, which is enough to cover 280 miles per week of driving. That's quite a bit more than most people do when not taking a trip. Those who drive more than that on a regular basis need a 240V L2 charger.

So it's more about whether they can get a charging cable out to the car at all, not so much about whether they can specifically get 240V out there. If you're parking on the street you probably can't run an extension cord over the sidewalk, even an ordinary 15A @ 120V cord.

The pinching shouldn't be a significant problem. Garage doors should have a bottom seal that can deal with 3/4" or so of variation in height and still be able to seal well. Just make sure the cable is stout enough (most L2 cables are plenty strong), and if the garage door springs are correctly adjusted it shouldn't have to take too much weight anyway. If counterbalance springs aren't mostly offsetting the weight of the door a typical 1/3 or 1/2 HP garage door opener won't be able to lift it anyway.

Really, if that's the way you want to live, I say have at it. Other people having the option to live differently isn't going to stop you. It'll be decades before it starts getting hard to find gas stations, and by then EVs will have more range than you can handle.

An ICE maybe requires less planning if you can't charge at home, but the driver has to do that planning. With an EV, what planning must be done is done by the car, so it's less effort. Well, the driver does have to get into the habit of using the nav system so the car knows where you're going. For daily driving my car is really good at predicting where I'm going so picking the location is two taps, one to open the destination list, one to pick the top item in the list (or one button then speak the destination aloud). And doing that has additional benefits because the car has real-time traffic data and can route around problems.

For people who can charge easily at home, an EV requires far less planning than an ICE. You plug in when you get home, you unplug when you leave. No thought required. The battery is just always full, you never think about refilling. It's still a good idea to use the nav system for optimal routing... and so you can completely ignore the charge state, letting the car manage it entirely.