In such a vacuum, someone always appears who starts doing the work of an engineering manager informally. Usually it is the person who hurts the most, a senior who sees where this is all going. He starts doing careful code reviews. He writes design docs that nobody asked for. He raises architecture questions at meetings. He tries to set standards. He does all of this without authority, without recognition, without time allocated for this work, because officially he is an IC, and his KPIs are closed tickets.

They are watching me.

Projects that have lots of attention and assuming you always compile from source. But someone could easily distribute a binary that is different than the source.

People should do frequent audits, especially network traffic. I had this one file manager that was kinda like Midnight Commander. Someone on a forum said “check out me app” etc. immediately on launch it made network requests…… why? Anyway, definitely don’t use that for long!!

Open source software you don’t code review and build yourself can also contain spyware.

You.

Don’t use chrome, problem solved.

So the struggle isn’t over even after reassignment. No. Fucking. Shit.