> If there are cons to the employer, that means I'm worth less and can demand less salary (...)
During the industrial revolution, some employers saw that there were significant pros in employing children and working them 12 to 14 hours a day for a fraction of a grown man's salary. Not being able to employ children was a significant con.
How did "the market" handled that?
There's more to life than what's convenient to corporations, and the despair of self-hating employees to think that self-deprecarion is a competitive sport.
Government regulation is different because it forces everyone on the even footing, there is no-one to out compete you.
Eliminating competition on the labor side of the market is also different, because while it hurts companies, it also makes employees be in higher demand. That's also a relevant difference here.
So, your analogy is just a poor one...
But while I'm at it, you'll notice that for the kinds of business that are easily shipped over seas (where the government regulations don't apply) and you can be outcompeted by people using child labor and paying below minimum wage (another case of government regulation) that did happen to an extent, see textile manufacturing for instance.
> Government regulation is different because it forces everyone (...)
It really isn't. It just stops unscrupulous employers from abusing their employees. There are already plenty of tech companies that went full remote, and clearly they don't interpret that as a competitive disadvantage.
The lockdowns also showed productivity increases and improvements in the quality of life and work/life balance. Therefore, returning to the office has absolutely nothing to do with productivity or company culture or dedication. At best, it's just lazy thinking enforced by strong-arming employees into positions that is overwhelmingly against their personal interests and quality of life.
> > Government regulation is different because it forces everyone (...)
> It really isn't. It just stops unscrupulous employers from abusing their employees.
If you're objecting to my use of the phrase "forces everyone", fair enough, but the point stands. If you're objecting to the point being made, I'm afraid I've missed your point.
> There are already plenty of tech companies that went full remote, and clearly they don't interpret that as a competitive disadvantage.
Indeed, one imagines that's because they don't see the (total) cons as outweighing the (total) benefits, and they (like me) don't see much use in separating out "benfits to employees" and "harm to the employer"... this is basically my original point (though going in the employee->employer direction as well as the employer->employee direction).
> why am I getting heavily down voted for discussing personal reasons why I enjoyed working in the office?
My guess is that there has been chatter on how discussions on WFO, specially in tech forums, are brigaded by shills to sell the illogical idea that getting back to the office is fantastic and awesome, and the hallmark of these shills is the fact that their arguments in favour of returning to office are simply unbelievable. And quite frankly you post reads like that.
I have to say that I found it very weird, and outright unbelievable, that someone was arguing that commutes were "far more effective for unwinding". To me that makes no sense at all, because when working from home you are free to pick whatever you'd like to do with that time, instead of being forced to sit in a car or public transportation and waste away your life while you endure traffic. I mean, if suffering commutes is something you enjoy then if you work from home nothing stops you from hopping into your preferred means of transportation and go anywhere you'd like. But you can also do any other thing. Is driving to/from the office during rush hour the most pleasurable and relaxing thing possible? I quite doubt it.
So why claim that being forced to do something is more effective at unwinding than actually pick whatever you'd like to do? It makes no sense.
I used to commute ~40 minutes each way by streetcar. I spent the time sardined in with the other unfortunate folk, one hand on a strap, the other on my Kindle. Every day I cursed SFs oversubscribed transit system.
Switching to WFH was way better. But I was reading a sci-fi book a week on the commute, after the shift I was lucky to get in four a year.
In theory I could set aside 80 minutes a day for personal reading, but in practice it feels incredibly selfish to not help with the family and housework.
Do I want to go back to muni hell? No. But I can understand how someone might have enjoyed their (non-car) commute. I will shoot myself before I ever go back to driving an hour each way on the 101 though.
I commute by train. I'm lucky enough to be guaranteed a seat. And it is a very comfortable ride. That time can be spent meditating with my favourite music playing in my earphones. There isn't a rats chance in hell I'd get that same quality time at home with two noisy kids running rampant throughout the house.
Have you considered that perhaps people making comments like mine are not shills, they just have different personal circumstances that you hadn't encountered before?
I wish commute by train would work in London. I had to commute for years out of London (living in Zone 1) and most of the time I didn't had a place to sit. Trains are also crazy loud in this country, and not really reliable and quite expensive.
They charge pricing here that could get me a year country-wide travel first class card in Switzerland.
Regarding London trains: it very much depends what line you go on and how far down that line you are as to whether you get a seat. The reliability and expense problems are very real though :(
By "train" I was thinking more the overground and national rail services rather than starting your journey from zone 1 of the underground. But I guess, technically, the underground is a "train" too
Assuming that your commute is around an hour means you're "only" paying £4k/annum (after tax) for that benefit. I agree there is a benefit to the commute (for me it was the walk/exercise), but I find it hard to rationalize otherwise and that's a willpower thing
> [...] found it very weird, and outright unbelievable, that someone was arguing that commutes were "far more effective for unwinding".
Ex (multi) FAANG engineering director here. I personally find that a 30 minute commute home is more effective for separating work and home than just the clock. The data published (by MSFT) shows employees are working more hours now than ever before.
Now, those pale in comparison to things like on-call rotations, email on Cell Phones, Slack & Team's notifications on mobile, etc. The Amazon practice of "DevOps SDEs are always on-call" that's spread across the industry makes disengaging from work in order to engage with family & friends generally impossible, even on vacation.
> Ex (multi) FAANG engineer here. I personally agree that a 30 minute commute home is more effective for separating work and home than just the clock. The data published (by MSFT) shows employees are working more hours now than ever before.
Current FAANG engineer here. I totally disagree, and the numbers support my case. My organization saw a jump in productivity when switching to WFO accompanied by a considerable increased in job satisfaction.
WFO, accompanied by flexible work hours, allowed everyone in my team to benefit from more personal time and also opportunities to research topics of interest, which already paid off in the product we developed.
> Current FAANG engineer here. I totally disagree, and the numbers support my case. My organization saw a jump in productivity when switching to WFO accompanied by a considerable increased in job satisfaction.
You're moving the goalpost on this. For me, as someone else stated, the separation between home life and work life is a bit easier with a commute. That's not touching on productivity, overall job satisfaction, or anything else.
I'm not even talking tradeoffs here - there's no "I prefer to work from the office because XYZ". I prefer working from home, for a variety of reasons. However, I do recognize that in this one specific area - separation of work/home life, the commute was beneficial.
Were I to list 50 pros/cons of working from home (which I've done), the winner is WFH. That doesn't mean an absence of positive aspects to the "work from the office" column.
> You're moving the goalpost on this. For me, as someone else stated, the separation between home life and work life is a bit easier with a commute.
The point is that separation from home and work life does not require or mandate a commute or even getting back to the office. That position is indefensible. Being forced to endure something unsavoury against your best wishes ever single work day is not easier nor the only effective way to get some separation between your personal and work life. That's something you do, not something that's done to you.
Some people are quite happy with a home office, some people opt to work anywhere. I have a team member that works by the pool, and another team member who worked while travelling through Europe. If you are not forced to be present on a specific cubicle in a specific building for X hours a day then you have quite literally the whole world at your disposal, and your imagination is the only limit.
And you know what? That reflects on quality of life work/life balance, and overall job satisfaction. Your life matters and enjoying how you live it matters. That's the whole point of working, not a whimsical position where a post happened to be moved.
So no, being packed like sardines along with dozens of depressed and tired and often smelly fellow drones in a train or subway or bus, of being forced to endure traffic jams or road rages, is neither the only way to separate work from personal life, nor the most enjoyable or even effective at all. There are far better things to do in life, and you're free to pick them all.
> That position is indefensible. Being forced to endure something unsavoury against your best wishes ever single work day is not easier nor the only effective way to get some separation between your personal and work life
The position that everyone should have to work from home even if they don't want to is also indefensible. What myself and others are saying when we argue the benefits we get from office work is that employees should have the freedom to chose the flexible working arrangement that works for them
There's a real tone on HN lately that everyone should work remotely and anyone who doesn't support that is against them and frankly I find that attitude to be just as toxic as the CEOs saying everyone should come back to the office.
Even yourself are saying all the reasons we like office work can be replicated when working from home -- maybe that's true on some level but it doesn't matter. If some of use want to come into the office then why can't we?
Flexible working is the approach we should be striving for. Those who can work remotely can continue to do so. And those who want to come in to the office can do so. We shouldn't assume that remote work is a one size fits all and that's exactly what comments like the GPs does. Furthermore we should assume that those who do like office work are the unreasonable ones. We're not. We're still happy for you to work from home. We just don't personally want to do that every day ourselves.
This isn't just theoretical. I run 3 teams of engineers and push this rule onto them. Thus far it has been very successful.
I’d never call my old ride home nuts to butts on BART “unwinding” but it certainly created a coda between work and home. Now when I walk out of my office at home I’m still in problem solving “work talk” mode and it takes a bit to get out of it.
> Ditto. I’ve been doing a lot of managery stuff during the pandemic and the main things I miss are the water cooler talk that greased a lot of wheels and filled in a lot of gaps (...)
I'm sure mileages vary, but between wasting a significant portion of my life commutting to be able to experience water cooler talks, and hugging my wife and children once I step out of my home office, you can keep all the water coolers in the world to yourself.
Work/life balance shouldn't fall all the way to the work side of the scale just because some managers struggle with remote work.
I agree. I’m speaking personally. I cut out a three hour commute and I’m never going back, but I lead a team of twelve people and it’s important to me that I also care about their lives and careers, helping them advance and grow is important to me beyond my current company because I hope to work with them again no matter where. To that end, trying to think of ways to improve their professional growth on the remote world is important. The week in the office is something I think leadership should do, I see almost no reason for ICs, except for onboarding/cross team socializing which can be done other ways too, just more work these days :)
Totally agree. I've been getting up to speed just fine at my new and (at least for now) fully remote job.
If you're struggling to fill the gaps or onboard people at a certain point you have to admit to either managerial or organizational failure to adapt. It's called taking responsibility
Just out of curiosity, how large of a company/companies have you been working for?
I’m asking because my experience is largely with <200 people companies (more so with <50) and onboarding and such is always very scant at startup stage and only starts to happen in my experience at stages of intense growth and post series C/D, but I may be in a weird niche.
These things also tend to happen organically at different stages depending on the team but don’t become mandated/invested in until later.
> The central sticking point, and cause cited by many people who recently left, was Smith’s strong push this year for all Blue Origin employees to return to the office.
This is without a doubt about Blue Origin's call to return to office.
> Every time you commit, package-lock.json is different. And when it is not, then I have 26 new vulnerabilities to be fixed by “npm audit fix”. I have zero trust in my build being reproducible, or even working one year forward.
In some of the nodejs projects I've worked, we had allu dependencies with pinned version numbers, and each week we created a ticket to track work on upgrading them. This typically involved a single commit updating package versions and running all tests. More often than not it took no work at all.
If a project just lets their dependencies change randomly and does not invest any work updating them, of course there's bound to be pain and suffering.
I'm afraid that this is one of the expected outcomes of lowering and even outright eliminating preventative measures, such as mask mandates and social distancing, and placing all the chips on the current generation of Covid vaccines being sufficiently effective in lowering covid-related deaths.
If the virus is allowed to run rampant throughout the population then the odds that an unfortunate mutation happens is far higher, as it's proportional to the number of infected hosts, and there is also an evolutionary pressure in favour of strains that aren't effectively countered by the host's immune system and spread more efficiently. Consequently, it's only a matter of time before, just like the Delta variant showed, the wrong kind of strain is developed.
I'd argue that if you're not packaging your software or testing your software's dependencies, either you're doing something extremely exotic that lies far outside anyone's happy path or "dylib error" should not even be a keyword in your vocabulary.
DLL Hell ceased to be a practical concern over a decade ago, particularly given that Windows provides tight control over its dynamic linking search order.
> But that sleight-of-hand hides the fact that many (perhaps even most) security fixes do not break the ABI or API; they are completely contained to the implementation (one obvious exception would be if the security issue was caused by bad API design, but even then often there are ways to fix it without breaking the ABI).
Right you are. I was also perplexed when I read that non sequitur. The author's reference to DLL Hell also suggests there's some confusion in his analysis of the underlying problem, given that DLL Hell is very specific to windows and at best is only orthogonally related to ABI. The author's references to API changes make even less sense, and definitely cast doubt over his insight into the issue.
Differentiating DLL and SO hell is getting a bit beyond pedantic as they are implementations of the same fundamental abstraction. Any substantial difference in merely one of implementation details.
> Differentiating DLL and SO hell is getting a bit beyond pedantic (...)
It really isn't. Unlike linking problems, where the problem is focused on how you need to fight your dependencies to be able to resolve symbols, DLL Hell has been for over a decade a dependency resolution problem that is solved at the packaging level.
More importantly, on Windows, where sharing DLLs is not a thing, you can simply drop a DLL in the app dir and be done with it. In fact, it's customary for windows apps to just bundle all their dependencies.
to be fair though, it can be a hassle to get something on wikipedia - writing a well thought out addition to a page, only to have it immediately reversed out can be disheartening.
I remember making a small edit to the page of my kid's school, to correct an obvious factual error, providing a source with the correct information, and ended up in an edit war over it...
> to be fair though, it can be a hassle to get something on wikipedia - writing a well thought out addition to a page, only to have it immediately reversed out can be disheartening.
It indeed can take work, but that's also the reason why wikipedia's signal/noise ratio is high and often passed as the tertiary source.
Still, I feel that the bulk of the work lies in establishing notoriety. Sometimes people feel that very obscure topics that lack any acceptable source and fail to establish notoriety should be center stage. Sometimes the problem is half-assed nature of a contribution. Still, it's better to give it a try than to simply complain about no one having done any work.
I've noticed that I stopped being reverted as I made more edits. I have maybe 500 edits, total, so I doubt it's people actually remembering me. The two biggest contributors, as far as I can tell, is that your first <x> edits are scrutinized more extensively. That's either informal/by some of the spam rules/etc., or, on some wikipedias (dewiki, for example), a specific feature where your first <x> edits need to be signed off by more experienced users.
The second, and probably more important, mechanism is simply getting better. WP has a rather distinct style in that it allows absolutely zero jokes, for example, no matter how subtle. Compare with even the most respected publications... The Economist and it's silly captions come to mind.
It's not just humor, but any form of metaphor or irony will usually get reversed, as does any interpretation, even if obvious:
"As the judge became senile, his verdicts started to become erratic. Some defendants chose to gamble and not protest his assignment, and some of them probably got away with murder".
That needs references not just for senility and erraticisms. The causality will be challenged, as will the speculation on defendants motives, the imagery of gambling, and the conjecture about random verdicts potentially letting criminals get off.
Unfortunately deletionists have won, at least in my limited experience, and Wikipedia subjectively feels now to be largely a kingdom of those who find it more satisfying/easier to delete information than to create.
It's a quite disheartening state of affairs, and the saddest part is that it was potentially avoidable... but now that the culture has calcified, it seems very unlikely that it will change, since it's something that's been discussed for _years_ now [1][2]...
> Unfortunately deletionists have won, at least in my limited experience, and Wikipedia subjectively feels now to be largely a kingdom of those who find it more satisfying/easier to delete information than to create.
One of wikipedia's tenets is that Wikipedia is not your personal blog. Thus I feel that any baseless accusation of "easier to delete than to create" is disingenuous and more often than not is just a kneejerk reaction motivated by a desire to hit back at Wikipedia for doing the right thing and keeping the signa/noise ratio high.
I've been at both ends of that deal. I've seen plenty of my articles being marked for deletion, and as an anti-vandalism editor I've also deleted an awful lot of articles. I recommend you also invest some of your time doing anti-vandalism work to get a glimpse of the torrent of crap that storms into Wikipedia each day, from puerile vandalism to shills forcing their products/services everywhere, and also of course people posting their own uncorroborated personal accounts citing themselves.
The process is flawed given that it's driven by volunteers and unfortunately there are indeed false positives and false negatives. Nevertheless, I'm sure the experience would be insightful and educational, specially with regards to learning how to write acceptable wiki articles, and enough to stop this blend of petty baseless attacks.
After all, it's easier to whine conspiratorial accusations on online forums than it is to actually learn how to contribute, and more importantly how to work to improve things.
I have no doubt that Wikipedia has to deal with a flood of trolls and vandals, that that is a tremendous amount of work, and that the editors are doing their utmost to follow the standards defined by the community.
I am merely pointing out that the culture and standards as they stand now lead to a situation where a newcomer (or even a long-time contributor) is likely to bounce off after being caught in an edit war once too many times. Saying "Oh, just contribute an article when you see a gap" is an invitation to sink a potentially unbounded amount of time and effort into something that has an unfortunately high chance of being eventually deleted.
Don't mistake me, I love the concept of Wikipedia, and I think it's a fantastic project – I just find it tragic. Maybe it's truly the tragedy of the commons and the situation is unavoidable because of the flood of spam/vandalism, but I wonder whether you see there a problem to be solved at all.
> And my grandfather used to say the longer you look at something the easier it gets to compress all the information of a complex world into a few dots. Basically these artists brains were running highly optimized compression algos.
Christoph Niemann[¹] has an interesting series on Instagram he dubbed Abstract Sunday[²] where he posts Sunday sketches, and it amazes me how much detail he compresses in so few brush strokes. I definitely recommend a click.
During the industrial revolution, some employers saw that there were significant pros in employing children and working them 12 to 14 hours a day for a fraction of a grown man's salary. Not being able to employ children was a significant con.
How did "the market" handled that?
There's more to life than what's convenient to corporations, and the despair of self-hating employees to think that self-deprecarion is a competitive sport.