slykar

turn to the person next to you and whisper a question or look at their notes?

Person next to you has the same low quality notes you do. In my group we designated a single person to take notes and after the class you just snapped a photo, since no other materials were provided. Other people were listening and trying to understand the subject. Taking notes is distracting you from learning.

Making friends in a class of 100-200 people is hard. My friend went to a Berlin university. You are just a number there. I find it much easier to engage in a discussion using a forum.

Meet older students

How do you approach them? You have no idea who they are. You are never in class with them. University is basically the same model as high school here. You are not picking subjects or classes, you have to follow a script. You only meet students of your year.

There are some sorts of after hours interest circles, but they start after your 6 hours of learning.

Peer learning can also be done online or after an online course.

The good parts of university are the ones that can be done outside of it, hence there's no need to visit the building at all.

You need to find a new university

Chances are you will have a similar experience. I'm not speaking about a single professor. I'm speaking about 9 out of 10. I'm not blaming professors tough.

My friends have similar experience at other universities in Poland. Friends who went to German universities have a completely different experience. They actually use some LMS, provide online recordings of the classes and spend 1/3rd of the time at university.

Education is "free" (paid by taxes) where I come from (Poland). Private universities are not very popular.

People shouldn't just accept this sort of thing as normal

It's not "normal", but it's the norm. It's not the fault of the professors, because the truth is they should not teach in the first place, but the education system requires them to.

make a complaint to the course leader that the lecturer isn't teaching you well enough.

There's no such thing here as the course leader. Most of the time you have a prof. responsible for the theory and another one for the practice.

You can complain to the dean (what multiple students did), but there's no replacement or no one cares.

I don't want to put any blame on the teachers here. I see this as a systemic issue.

Coming from a different country I don't really know why remote is not the default option.

Listening to a professor speaking to himself from a distance of 10 meters is an awful experience compared to a video recording that you can stop/rewind. Heck, you can even take some proper notes that you will actually understand!

For labs it's not like you get any help either. You just have to follow some instructions point by point and if you do not understand something, tough luck, the professor has already moved to the next exercise.

The worst part is that you have to spend 6-8 hours a day, 5 days a week like this and then you still need to find online materials to actually learn the thing. Some people have to work too.

Did I mention 2 hours of commute time every day?

I'm not sure what you mean by the universal availability of the email. It has the same deploy/configure/security issues any other tool has. It's even worse, because you can send email to "outsiders" unless certain rules are in place. The UX is bad and depends on email clients.

What company I work for did: start a desktop app on a VPS and make it accessible over a web based remote desktop. The app was supposed to run 24/7, so it was additional plus for the customer, because now they could have a computer running outside their house.

What is considered "working hours" if you have flex time? This sounds utterly ridiculous. It's not like people have Alexa hooked up to company email screaming and flashing their lights at night when they receive a new company email.

I kind of feel you, but those people are new to this (employers and employees). They have no idea what they are doing, they are scared and they want someone to resolve this issue for them. Any experienced person just turns off their phone or snoozes notifications. People have flex working hours and some co-workers send me messages at 1 am. Should they go to jail or what? Everything could be solved with a little bit of education.

Lol. Less transport = less wear on the extra expensive roads. Less pollution, less crowd, less money for oil industry. If anything, people should be blessed and get tax returns for WFH.

There's https://brand24.com/ that might do something similar

There seem to be an option in Windows that let you specify you are on a metered connection. Probably one could check if the "saveData" option is selected to disable p2p.

LTE routers with GB limits. You are connected via Wi-Fi or Ethernet cable.

If I've found out some website is using my upload bandwidth without my consent I would just quit using it.

It's a dick move to utilize user's resources.

It somehow works with dedicated USB dongles that are size of a penny. Look at Jabra Evolve 65T. From my perspective as a customer it's an issue with Bluetooth standard, not hardware. The latency problems are somehow solved when using USB adapters, so why can't we embed those adapters in our devices?

Did your in-person meetings ever had this many participants? If this many people needs to be involved, then I'll argue a meeting is a nonsense anyway. It would be extremely hard even in-person.

You are trying to replace in-person meetings without using cameras? It scales pretty well to a reasonable amount of people. How many people do you need in a meeting? If you have meetings with more than 12 people, then you are probably holding a conference and your meetings suck anyway. A written announcement would work better.

By talking to people on a regular basis?

So it's like keeping data in a RAM instead of a persistent storage. Does not sound like a good practice. I would also say it does not scale.

The advice I usually hear from people running software houses is to have an internal KB. Even experts forget what they told 3 months ago or how the complex process was supposed to go like.

How would you find out who the experts are and where they are?

Team Directory. Write down who knows what and how to reach them. People figure out in small, focused groups who knows what by seeing who delivers. You don't need to do it in a hallway.

You can also use the hand you are born with. It will be even more visible. It didn't feel that awkward in school, so we can use it now too.

Just raise your hand on the web cam. Move it closer to make it visible.

The image I get from this article is that their work is very unorganized? They complain about issued with discussing stuff online, yet they don't use video?

Engineers who worked remotely with the engineers in the U.S. said, “We miss the hallway stuff.” Andrei told me that when he spent time in Houston, he was able to build a mental map of “who knows what.” When he got back to Romania, the map got out of date quickly.

How the hell are you supposed to keep knowlage like this? What if someone leaves the company. Whay if you have someone new? Why would every person need to build this map. Create it once, share it with everyone, make it accessible and editable.

IMO online work often magnifies the issues that are already there.

There are already emission limits implemented in EU. A next step would be to make them smaller and more expensive. This would of course harm the economic growth of some countries. UK wants to ban conventional cars sales by 2030. We could go one step further and ban most combustion cars from driving. Of course I doubt there will be a politician bold enough to move at a rate that would upset the people. In the end, we will get what we deserve.

If you make nuclear available, but it is not competitive with fossil fuel energy, then we will continue to use fossil fuel energy

I'll make kind of absurd argument, but how is nuclear not competitive with dying? You could always tax the shit out of fossil fuels and they won't be competitive. You could also make other laws that punish fossil fuel usage with death penalty since you could argue its a crime against humanity. I mean, law is an abstract construct. This is a live or death situation. Even if we need to abandon 30 years of economic growth for the sake of surviving, then maybe it's what we need to do.

Where do you want to go? Living in a city center right now. It's hard for me to find a thing I DON'T have in a radius of 4km, which is a reasonable walking distance.

Who says you can't take a walk or ride a train just for the fun of it while you WFH? It will be as pointels as before or maybe more fun, who knows.

Or if you still want to pay, then there's MacOS. Never got an unwanted update.

let’s be honest, its actual purpose—is that workers get a lot less out of their jobs than they used to.

Do you really belive there is a collective of business owners who thought "yeah, let's outsource everything, because f..k employees"?

Obviously it's about specialization. Why a software house should hire a cleaning lady? They are not in the business of cleaning, they know nothing about it and they don't want to even think about how you go about hiring someone for cleaning.

Or the other way around. Should a cleaning company hire software developers? They would fail so hard at it. Not to mention the frustration.

World got more complex, business got too.

He better hopes no one will start using it. The biggest cost factor is the bandwidth. 30 people can easily generate a steady 100 Mbps usage. A conference for 15 people is about $3/h on any cloud provider

"But you wouldn't use XLS. Nobody would start with that."

Oh. "Every" sales and business person probably would. Probably.

You forget about the culture, work culture, mentality and education in those countries. I don't see a reason why should I make less for the same job just because I'm from a different country. What if you are a digital nomad? In the end it should be more about who YOU are, not what country you are from. I see a big difference between people from different countries even if the education level and years of experience seem to be the same. You will see difference in education even between cities.

Knowing that the market is getting even more global it only encourages me to ask for more money, not less.

I've picked PHP as my first language instead of Python when I was a kid, because in Python I saw things like `something[3:5]`. In PHP I could see `array_slice` and I knew what it would do without any prior programming experience.

Some time later I did learn Python and I really love it.

Not everyone is English speaking. Mac shortcuts are very easy to remember because they are consistent. I'm not sure what weird symbols are we speaking about? Cmd and Option buttons? They have both a symbol and a name. What about Ctrl and Alt? What's the difference?

I used to hate Mac shortcuts, because I never really spent more than 30 minutes with the system. I think there is nothing to hate - they are just different and IMO better.