ilyanep

People need to stop with this whole "only commercial real estate supports working from the office" nonsense. Some of us simply want our job to provide us with a space where we can work that isn't 10 feet away from where we spend the rest of our day, the same way that our job provides us with other tools we need. Not that I'm necessarily defending forced RTO but I hate this framing of the issues.

Also if your vision of WFH is that everyone sprawls out then it doesn't solve some of your other issues: people will still need to use their vehicles to get places (because unless we solve the root issue of 'too few homes' then those people will be spread out from each other or services to not create more cities with too few homes) and their sprawled out suburban communities will not suddenly become more walkable. They'll just drive everywhere.

I don't understand why I'm supposed to be outraged here.

As a customer, I get the experience of a cashierless store. I don't really care how that's accomplished.

As an investor, I might care that I'm being sold snake oil, but I doubt that I chose to invest in Amazon solely over the Fresh stores.

As someone working in the industry, it might certainly affect my perception of what's possible or feasible, but I'm already used to the fact that most of what's being sold as "sophisticated AI" is snake oil.

It just feels to me like this article strikes a bizarre tone about it all, not to mention the fact that other comments in this thread have offered up equally plausible explanations.

I'm 31. I was under the impression that it was mostly a big step change in your mid to late 20s and then mostly remained stable.

Also if the issue here were age, I assume that GP would also pay more for an ICE car.

What in the world? Are those USD?

I pay $1200 a year to insure my Tesla Model S at the max liability coverage, with comprehensive and collision. Admittedly, I've filed that I drive a max of 6k miles a year and I have the highest deductible set on both comprehensive and collision, but I have strong doubts it'd quintuple in price to insure if I went and set those to more typical settings.

A large number of my larger edits are fixing up voice / tone to make an article read more like an encyclopedia and less like an excited blog post.

I love how in the US, instead of building all these services and offices near each other and walkable from people's homes, we insist on ideas that force people to drive dozens of miles to get a walkable and convenient experience.

Who's going to pay for me to upsize my apartment so I can make a home office? Working from the same desk I use for my personal computer / gaming is really taking a toll on the ol' mental health? Also who's going to pay for my extra electricity use, etc? I also used to get free food at the office, would I be getting a raise to cover that as well?

My commute was a pleasant 25m bike ride I could use to listen to podcasts (which is exercise I've now lost, so losing the commute didn't exactly give me a bunch of extra free time). Seeing coworkers in person was a really nice way to not only get some social contact every day but also build a rapport with my teammates. The office was also going to be a great place for my dog to get some socialization with other dogs.

Yes, I was annoyed at the moves to more open spaces and with regular frustrating interruptions, but with those mitigated, an office with my actual coworkers (with at most 1 day a week at home) is vastly superior to what I'm doing now, regardless of how much processes change. Not to mention, employers sort of implicitly assume that any time you gained back from not having to commute or whatever are just going to doing extra work.

I've been working at the same desk I had set up for my personal computer since quarantine started and it's mentally a disaster when the difference between personal time and work time involves zero physical movement (not to mention it's harder to have all of the personal equipment I want + work equipment I need to fit all on one desk and I haven't exactly set up my apartment in a way that really fits two desks in here without giving up on some other hobbies).

One reason (among many) why I'd be very resistant to permanently working remotely is that nobody is going to be paying me extra to move into a 2br apartment so I can have a home office, despite the fact that all the employers would hypothetically be saving a killing on their real estate.

It seems to me that someone with this philosophy has never tried to change or refactor a subsystem of a very complicated legacy project. Sure, sometimes your tests fail because they're poorly written and test implementation details, but other times they catch the fact that you didn't know about case X that had been discovered years ago and required a minor non-obvious tweak in the code to make work correctly.

Oo that's very good to know, thank you! I give it a 50% chance I try it out and hate it but very glad it's an option.

Since we're on the topic of the Airpods noise cancellation, does anyone know why Apple doesn't let you enable noise cancelling with only one Airpod in? Is it just that they're worried about the pressure imbalance causing discomfort?

Gas taxes are already not-that-high of a fraction of what funds the roads anyway: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/05/debunking-the...

some days we need to hide it because he's particularly fixated and getting him to bed time becomes difficult.

Do you have a device that supports night shift? I wonder if using that feature could work to your advantage in re bedtime. (I'm just a childless person speculating, but wouldn't that be grand?)

Interesting. I'm in a similar boat as you (5 years of professional experience) and I had decided to pass on my co-workers' reading group for this book, but based on your review I'm now reconsidering!

Thank you for taking the time to write up this long response. That's definitely a lot to think about!

But...am I accomplishing those things, or am I going to a lot of meetings about how to make the customer feel good about the things we accomplished?

I realize this isn't really the main point of the article, but it's something I've been thinking about a lot recently: Can someone explain to me why I should want to become good at management? I think most people on here (but sadly few company structures) would agree that engineering and engineering management are two nearly orthogonal skillsets, but for some reason we insist on "promoting" people who are good at the former into positions that require the latter.

As someone with about five years of experience as a professional software engineer, I'm really still looking to level up my IC chops, along with a healthy dose of mentorship (mentoring interns or new hires on my team) and what I'd call "tech leadership" (advising on engineering reviews, making technical decisions about how to best build things). I would basically worry about stunting my development as an engineer if I switched to focusing on management, and I'm not even convinced my role models for career development are really in primarily "managerial" roles (I'm thinking of both famously very good backend devs both at my company and at the big SV companies).

Separately, I have relatively little interest in being in a role where my output is judged as the output of a team of people who aren't me. I get that that's the best way to judge managers, and that managers do very valuable intangible things in unblocking their team, but I'm skeptical that I'd be able to feel satisfied by this. If anything, it kind of feels random: at an equivalent level of my unblocking the team and being a good manager, if I have an amazing 10x engineer on my team then the output is just going to be higher than if I have an average engineer. So in less clear-cut cases, how can I tell if I just did a good job at unblocking or if my engineers are really good? (This is not to say that I don't feel satisfied doing mentorship-style things or architectural advising-style things, but that feels separate to me. I think I prefer empowering other engineers by leveraging knowledge and writing good platforms/tools/APIs rather than doing the organizational empowering thing).

I write all these things, because it really seems like a foregone conclusion of both this article and the industry as a whole that an engineer will eventually become a manager. Is that what I most likely have to look forward to in my career if I wind up working at the well-established/mature companies?

EDIT: I'd also just appreciate being told if I'm thinking about everything entirely wrong or something here.

EDIT2: This also isn't to knock people who _do_ enjoy doing these things, but it's not for me and I imagine it's not definitionally for every good engineer.

-----

Unrelated to the above, point 8 feels a little bit in contradiction to point 1. How does one keep learning their craft without direct experience?

It's happened before:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen

There may very well be people who are getting away with doing it now, but the leaked data eventually winds up being used which is how you get caught.

For what it's worth, we let bridges crumble, communities sit without clean drinking water, and are intentionally bankrupting our postal service in the hopes of being able to privatize it. So I would say the Internet is being treated about the same.

I think to whatever extent it's possible to get buzzword poisoning, this article would do it.

Am I missing something or is your link making the exact opposite point that you made?

Yup, the fingerprinting portion of that was what I had in mind.

Wasn't there some website where you could pull a relatively small number of easily accessible prefs from the browser (OS, list of fonts, browser, etc.) and get a nearly uniquely identifying set of facts about someone?

I've set the group policy and still come home to find my desktop having rebooted

It's really more like getting a Ford vs third-party part for your car, which yes, every car manufacturer will recommend. It's not like Apple is trying to sell you Apple electricity.

Regardless, this is a pretty low-effort attempt to make a point.

I'm not the person you're replying to, but I'd rather make the active decision that I want notifications from an app than passively deciding an app is allowed to until it annoys me.

A while ago I went from default allowing new apps to do notifications and badges to default not allowing them (with fewer apps being allowed to display badges than notifications) and now looking at my home screen is a much less stressful experience.

Actually, this is a great reminder to go audit my current settings again...

It's like 80% according to the article:

- $230m from "already-vested stock-appreciation rights"

- $190m from "Aetna common stock he currently owns"

- "Between $60 million and $85 million" as part of a "change-in-control package" which is paid out if he's terminated as a result of the sale.

One of my biggest pet peeves regarding reporting of executive compensation is when the headlines pretend that CEOs are being paid hundreds of millions of dollars in cash, when it's mostly coming from stock-based compensation, which is arguably the most fair way to pay a CEO (if they do poorly leading the company, they make much less money).

I'm pretty sure there is a very small intersection between the group of Americans who would travel internationally and be annoyed by this and the Americans who support policies like this.

If the problem is that the data is there but people don't understand it, then you'd see consumers flying a shitty budget airline like Spirit once and then going back to another airline. People will regularly come back to these budget airlines. I really do think that consumers' revealed preferences are just not what most people think they should be.