avocabros

Would you elaborate your argument? IP protections such as copyright exist for the express purpose of promoting the sharing of information. If patent law disappeared, everyone would keep their inventions private and work to obfuscate them as much as possible.

Killing copyright would essentially do the same - and if you think clickbait is bad now, removal of copyright would destroy the economic incentive to investing any effort into content.

That's because the purpose of code is to be used, not to be read.

The only purpose of the written word is to be read.

This seems like a solution looking for a problem. https://tiller.com/ works great and lets you do whatever calculations you want in a spreadsheet - and, bonus, it's never going to hallucinate.

I don't quite understand the desire to have these verbose summaries that you have to read from LLMs. You'll notice anomalies if you just categorize each of your expenses every so often (easy with Tiller).

The ability to enforce a law doesn't mean it shouldn't be a law. No law is followed and enforced 100%.

Sounds cool and I hope you can make it work; what I don't understand, though, is how to solve for the hidden preferences which are the major barrier when scheduling.

E.g. I'm friends with so-and-so and I don't want to be a jerk and schedule a 4:30PM Friday meeting (regardless of whether this is sensible, it's the reality). Or, I see continuous blocks of meetings on someone's calendar with only one open slot, presumably where they'll eat lunch; I shouldn't take that slot. Except for that one guy who I know doesn't eat lunch. Alternatively, I'm getting on a flight at 3PM and working the last 2 hours from a plane; I haven't actually blocked by calendar (people are lazy), so I can't actually do meetings then. Or, I know there's a conflict but someone told me to book over it.

You can go on with the "hidden context". Perhaps this works in some industries where calendars can be trusted, but I've always found the "hidden preferences" to make scheduling optimization essentially impossible. How do you know, for example, when it's okay to reschedule a meeting? How do you say, well, if X person can't be there but Y can, it's okay, but ideally they'd both be there, but not if we have to move it further than a week out from today, then it's fine; but I'll check with X and Y anyway on that?

How do we differentiate "addictive" behaviors from "non-addictive"? Is it illegal if people like your product too much? There isn't a clear definition here of where free will comes into play.

This is the intention of capitalism - profits go to the companies who can build products that people are most enticed to buy. A company that doesn't work to make their product loved/addictive will not continue to exist.

Another way of phrasing what you've said is that we should prevent companies from building products that people really like and want to use. No one is forcing anyone to use Facebook.

A flaw in this article like every other I've ever read both acknowledges that we don't have good objective data and then also goes to say "remote work works, don't fight it", etc. COVID wasn't this big, controlled experiment that tested remote work - it was the opposite, there was no "control" as everyone went remote at the same.

There isn't good data in either direction, and I doubt there will be, ever - but that's a poor reason to not be opinionated about something. There's limited and conflicting data on whether static vs. dynamic programming languages are more productive, but plenty of people on this site have very strong opinions on that. Remote work is no different.

It is time to stop complaining one way or the other and let people and markets vote with their feet and dollars.

No one is forced to live there? Just because you don't like it doesn't mean others don't.

You can make an argument in the other direction too - prove that WFH is better than RTO, or else we should return to the default that modern society has worked in for the massive majority of our history. There is not reliable data on either side - some of the most important things are also incredibly hard to measure. Will company X do better choosing C++ or Rust? Static or dynamic typing? These questions aren't easily answerable with a study.

I'm certain CEOs of FAANG are looking at stats to make these decisions. And what many WFH diehards miss is that your (or my) individual productivity is irrelevant, because all that matters is the output of the company as a whole. I can work really efficiently on the wrong thing and/or not spend time helping others in a way that my overall output for the company, not myself, is worse vs. in-office.

I've come to the same conclusion - having thoroughly enjoyed remote work for the first ~year of Covid, I realized it was a net negative on many long-term aspects I valued.

I do believe remote work can "work" - so can four day work weeks (probably even three day) and many other arrangements. Companies and individuals can do it and not go bankrupt.

But I think to reach your fullest potential as a team/company/unit, you simply need to spend a lot of time together. If you don't want to reach your full potential, then that's a choice you can make.

WFH is one solution, but it's not free in terms of collaboration costs. There's a reason no one thinks college is better remote, for example. Sure, it's fine for some jobs but it's not super obvious that it's a net positive for output.

People can also live closer to work, or use other methods (biking, running, etc.) to combine exercise + commute. Many studies have indicate that people overestimate the happiness of a larger house and underestimate the daily happiness toll of a long commute

There are plenty of people who do side projects outside of work, train for marathons, etc. That doesn't mean you're atypical - most people don't run marathons, for instance - but I don't think Carmack is this wild, totally out-of-band 1 in a million in terms of energy/motivation

Wat? 2x? You can lock yourself in a conf room in the office and...it'll be effectively the same as if you were remote, right? I don't see the reasoning

Humorous that you're getting downvoted for asking a valid question. It's simple to me - you can emulate remote work in an office by locking yourself in a conf room and never talking to anyone IRL. You can't emulate an office while remote. Working from the office offers more optionality for communication, so there's no downside and only upside vs. remote.

If you simply want to minimize time working, which is an unknown but certainly non-zero amount of employees, it's definitely easier and more fun to do that at home vs. in an office.

There won't be hard evidence for a long time, if ever, on which is better - but the optionality argument makes the decision pretty obvious to me.

I'd guess that most software work doesn't require super-specialized roles. You can get good quality engineers for generalist tasks (web app dev, API dev, etc.) all over the world.

I agree, the end game for remote work for non-specialists isn't an obvious positive for those in HCOL countries

It's worth considering whether that's a positive, or if the extra coordination is required simply because there are fewer and slower information channels available to communicate vs. on-site.

I think this observation is spot on - and you don't have to look far to understand why individual productivity != systems productivity. 100% individual utilization in a system is a negative - manufacturing companies learned this years ago and is where the principles of the toyota system/kanban/lean manufacturing/etc. rose from. The only resource that should be 100% utilized in a process is the bottleneck - and anytime anyone is interrupted to help the bottleneck, that is a net win for the company output, even if individually it feels annoying.

It's really unfortunate that it seems so many people are in the "you can pry remote work from my cold dead hands" camp that it's hard to even have a conversation that doesn't devolve into "I feel more productive remote, so you shouldn't care where I work".

I don't think the jury is resolved on whether colocation matters for success; if anything, it's more common that the most successful companies are forcing RTO (Apple and Amazon), and I doubt they're making the decision on a whim. Google is ostensibly 3 days/week, and Meta has hinted at better performance for certain categories of people (new grads and new hires) when in-office.

Lots of people live to 100 smoking cigarettes their whole life, but that doesn't make it ideal.

Some people (perhaps a lot, even) are also friends with their coworkers, which seems preferable to working with people you are not friends with.