I read an article recently that said that left turns are terrible for traffic. One of the best ways to improve traffic is to ban left turns all together.
As an individual that attended an ivy league school, this article seems absolute nonsense as to the causality of the authors inability to bridge the class barrier. My "elite education" is not the sum total of my life experience. My encounters with other people, be it other ivy league educated or high school drop out, is a learning experience and always has been. Judging them from a class perspective is simply unwise. Judge them by what they say and their actions. Are they true to their word? Are they willing to negotiate or state succinctly what their position is? These are what human interactions are about. The elite attitude that is attributed to "elite education" more likely a lack of interaction with "lower class" individuals from early in childhood.
This is a good critique and I think the class focus of this article is its big weakness, but nevertheless I think the are many valuable observations that make it a worthwhile read.
So why isn't this an environmental/climate change issue. These corporations that want employees that can work from home to burn fuel and emit CO2 in order to travel to the office unnecessarily should be shamed for their lack of compassion and vision. These same corporations claim to be driving toward carbon neutral while simultaneously pushing for CO2 increase via their employees travel.
Not to mention the lost time of everyone commuting. There is likely hundreds of human lives worth of time wasted every day due to commuting, then there are the actual lives lost in traffic accidents... driving is one of the most dangerous things we do.
My team is fully distributed across the globe yet they are tracking my badge swipes to an office an hour away where no one else works. The environmental impact of this just drives me nuts. Not to mention the danger to my personal well being and the cost.
They don't know how to track performance here either so I know they aren't making data based decisions.
the market is really tightening up. people love to say if you can't find a job it's b/c you're not skilled blah blah but if your making good money it may be hard to find another job at that income level.
If you're reasonably polyglot then finding a well-paying job isn't too hard - the market is already swinging back towards favoring talent and open positions are climbing (at least according to an interview I listened to the other day [1]). Of course, if you're coming from the likes of Amazon then I'd be inclined to agree: 400k+ is a rarity - but you'd probably be able to pull it off by migrating to another MOFAANG.
Edit: in addition, if you are 400k+ you'd probably enjoy the privilege of skipping the interview and even having a position opened for you.
The first reply was concerned about the pay scale and 300-400k are scarce but usually available. So either you are in the < 400k camp where jobs are typically available, or you are in the > 400k camp where you don't have to worry about job availability.
Overall, if your opinion is that jobs aren't available with your pay scale, have you recently searched for one?
>400k and fully remote is still not easy. Most of the obvious high payers in big tech (e.g. Meta) have required days in the office, and I can think of very few high-paying companies that don’t have N days RTO at all levels (literally only Netflix off the top of my head).
It is also not the case that such people get in without interviews. Senior+ (though largely staff+) is generally when you can make 400k and there are definitely still grueling interview loops at those levels.
Sorry, I didn’t remember the start of the thread by the time I got here. But in later comments you said “in addition, if you are 400k+ you'd probably enjoy the privilege of skipping the interview and even having a position opened for you” and “or you are in the > 400k camp where you don't have to worry about job availability”, both of which I disagree with and provided counter examples for. So, one being in the 400k+ camp does not make it any easier to find an equally well-paying job, hence toleration for being treated like a child.
Agreed. Finding remote jobs seems easy, the challenge is finding remote jobs that are interesting and pay close to my current salary.
I'd accept a 10-20% salary hit to skip my 20m commute 3 days a week, but so far the only options have been for 40%+ lower salaries or work that I am less interested in. For me that tradeoff is not worth it.
Same here, I commute 3 days a week to work in an office alone. There is not a single person I work on a project with in the office. Everyone I work with is distributed from East to West coasts and larger cites in between.
What's the alternative? They don't want to pay a full team SV or NYC wages that's for sure. There's not many places they can just layoff and re-hire what would be tens of thousands of people. Total headcount is north of 100k. I'm not sure what it would be including contractors. Are they gonna pay support roles like scrum masters and admin assistants NYC wages too?
We have offshore resources on the team too to maintain a 24 hours global presence. Europe and India. So are we onshoring to night shifts too?
Any large company is going to have a lot of locations, both to take advantage of wage disparities and because people are often resistant to packing up and moving. Teams can sometimes be colocated but, especially with so much location-independent hiring over the past few years, the norm is that people are scattered all over the place and it's pretty hard to but the genie back in the bottle absent massive organizational and people changes. So, to the degree you communicate in real-time, you're going to be on Zoom a lot.
They already have work locations allowed per department. Mine has 3 in the US and 4 abroad, but we work with others in far more. I could see them trying to move the number of work locations allowed down by shuffling people around or laying off but that'd just be a horrendous undertaking.
I don't know what your personal situation is, and you don't have to go into any detail, but how/why is coming to the office affecting your personal well being?
driving every day is more dangerous than not driving every day. job is basically saying take a small chance to be injured every day that we don't have to insure to keep your job.
> driving every day is more dangerous than not driving every day
Can't disagree there. Do you also do thing like having groceries/shopping delivered to your place of residence, to avoid having to leave the house. Or do you still walk/commute/drive/travel to things that most would consider part of everyday life?
of course i drive/bike/walk in daily life. the risk is proportional to miles traveled. adding 10-50 a day compared to 10-50 a week is quite a bit. is that snark
eff your personal well being but don't take it personally it's just your part of some cohort the elite have dictated must return to the office. you see we've calculated out that we sell the building at a loss of x dollars if we attempt to sell right now, and our other buildings have a couple years left on the lease and can't get out of that, plus we already pumped y dollars into renovations in this building plus we received tax breaks to come to these communities to offer you poor slobs jobs and now the mayors and governors are threatening to take back those tax breaks if we don't get buts in seats soon. Now we now some of you will leave and we've factored that into our calculus. The math says x% will leave which is totally acceptable and way cheaper than breaking leases or pissing off governors and that sort of thing. /sarcasm
I asked this question. They told me RTO is carbon neutral. They had complicated models but the gist of it was that the efficiency of heating and cooling one office is less carbon than everyone at home doing it for themselves and that people at the office are forced to run errands more efficiently resulting in an equal number of car trips.
They weren’t interested in counter arguments about how with the other people at home the house has to be heated/cooled anyway.
I think their carbon calculations also assume that nobody closes those now nearly empty offices. If they do... then there is no way for it to be carbon neutral. RTO is the clear winner.
This is really what people should be hammering home. These companies are so worried about not appearing carbon neutral or sustainable that they will go to great lengths to prove they are whenever they can. Hitting them over the head with this is the only way you’ll be able to embarrass them enough to affect change.
It’s an issue about this for sure. But also affordability, time to commute, rearrange lives, etc and other burdens to go into an office that the C-suite doesn’t contend with.
RTO/WFH becomes kind of obvious given a certain distance to the office.
If I live 10-20 mins from office, I probably go all the time. If I live 90+ minutes a visit to the office upends my life.
Only a small subset of people live close to offices. In part because cities have been poorly designed and housing costs are insane right now.
My company is forcing a one day a week RTO (badge scan requirement). I have been firm with them. My day will not be any longer and travel time is coming out of it. At home I get on at 8am and sign off at 5pm. So on my RTO day I leave home at 8am, travel to the office, scan and take a meeting or two, then head home. I still sign off at 5pm. All told, they lost an hour plus of productivity from me.
All around it's so obnoxious. Ya, my CEO doesn't mind RTO because he has grown kids, has a driver, has a home chef, etc...
I always find it fascinating the amount of large scale time waste corps are willing to commit themselves to just to prove to themselves that they are the ones running the show.
Ammoral out of touch douches like this deserve all their workers to quit and show them they are nothing without us making them all their money.
Because claiming to care about climate change is greenwashing bullshit that sounds good in PR statements and self important fart smelling events that CEOs attend, but in the end is a box-ticking exercise.
No one measures the environmental impact of unnecessarily forcing office workers to the office, the press doesn’t ask corporate leaders about their hypocrisy, so leaders just force workers back the consequences be damned.
Remote work necessitates bigger houses by needing a separate room for home office. People also tend to gravitate to suburbs, exurbs or rural areas and buy bigger homes. So I am not really sure how the equation works - you gain the carbon saved in commute, but you lose the carbon due to the higher footprint of larger homes. Would love to see a scientific study here.
Are employees who work remote taking more vacations and having a higher impact because of air travel? As long as everyone is getting paid just as much, it seems like the environmental impact would be the same.
Amazon offices are typically located in transit-accessible places, aren't they? People choosing to live in places where they need a car to do anything are the "problem" here...
Amazon, like other big companies, hired people during Covid telling them it was a fully remote job. Now these companies are telling the same employees to now come into the office.
Did they tell them it was fully remote indefinitely? Sure, I guess if people believed that then that can be unfortunate for them, but if they lived out in the boonies,they most likely they have a huge CO2 footprint anyway unless they never leave their home, making the climate change argument seem slightly disingenuous to me...
> Did they tell them it was fully remote indefinitely?
Yes. I was hired during COVID and the recruiters kept telling me that the job will be remote forever. They also told current employees that they can feel free to move and work remotely and to let them know if they change states for tax reasons.
I asked for that in writing and they gave it to me in writing.
Have you actually taken a bus into Seattle? It's not much of a choice between the $1.5M house near the office and the $350k house twice the size 40 minutes away.
I've only been to Seattle a few times (though I did ride the bus downtown from the airport before the airport Link was built). My understanding is that Seattle has a robust suburban commuter bus and ferry network (though admittedly, a lacking commuter rail network...).
I hate to point out the obvious, but expecting vision and compassion from the guys who make their workers pee in a bottle and work their factory workers to death is like expecting COP28 being hosted by oil sultans to focus on actual climate change policies.
They want you in the office, overworked, overcommuted, no time to think for yourself. They want you tired and in a constant loop. How dare we ask our corporate overlords for their reasons and for data? We are supposed to postpone having a life, free time, friends, family, and spend hours of our days traveling in air polluting metal containers to an office to do work that we can easily do from home. If that demoralizes you, you aren't hustling enough.
Corporations brought to you the great Pacific Garbage Belt, global warming, alcohol and smoking marketing, the opioid crisis, the cost of living crisis, at least one or two wars, and possibly the end of mankind.
We should not be astonished by these greedy amoral husks of humans' lack of vision and compassion. We should hold them accountable for their evil and bring them to down their knees and remind them that without workers, they are nothing.
Because the Democrats are the party of climate change mitigation and their fantasy is everyone being forced to live in an urban shoebox, renting everything, utterly dependent on the state until they die.
It isn't very hard to find instances of false positives when the sample size is so large. For those false positives, the cost and effort is no doubt a waste and potentially could distract from a real instance.
But what is the big picture here and the overall cost benefit?
Can we find true positives where the crash victim is better off because of the alert?
Are there more or less of these than the false positives?
Have any of the true positives saved a life? How do you measure that?
The algorithm no doubt does not have six sigma accuracy, but it that the bar that must be set before we save some lives?
As a 61 year old programmer, that knew this is what I would be doing since my first exposure as a junior in high school, I can say his insights aren't too bad. But 20 more years on, things start to hit harder. My best advice is to learn to coach, even if you aren't in a coaching role. Find that young 10x team member and teach them the subtleties of the abstractions that make a difference. Don't be offended when they rewrite your code to their way of thinking so long as it did not obfuscate the lesson, that's how they will learn.
Titles have to be short, and as such they can't hope to represent the contents of the article completely accurately.
If you wanted to do that you would have to make the title equal to the article's contents.
Based on the parts which I've read so far, a more accurate title would be 'Why some currently hot parts of AI not well understood, and some parts of Physics well understood?'
I think the original title is an ok approximation of this.
> Just as a sports team wins or loses together, so too should the engineering team be treated as the fundamental unit of success.
A sports team has a play book, does your team? A sports team practices together, does your team? A sports team works as a unit, does your team?
Too many times I have see engineering teams as only a team on the org chart In reality they solve tickets as individuals with only a small interaction from pull requests. Otherwise they might as well not even know each other. They are a team not as in basketball or football, but like golf where once you get to the tee, it's you and only you to get the ball in the hole.
> A sports team has a play book, does your team? A sports team practices together, does your team? A sports team works as a unit, does your team?
This is why I like XP. Their teams really are teams like you say.
Though I think in many dev shops you can be team like. Someone might like refactoring and cleanup. Someone else is good at rapid prototyping. Another architecture. Sometimes a great dev is just the one who can take the unglamorous tickets and get them done at a sustainable pace. Or someone who is good at devops, teaching, or morale building. Sometimes just communication.
Everyone has different strengths. No one would ever say "who's the best (American) football player?" because you'd have to ask "who's the best kicker, tight-end, defensive lineman". They are all different roles.
To think that football would have the level of awareness that it cannot be measured as a single dimension makes it sad and laughable that people reduce programming skill down to one most of the time.
The military get this (usually) and place a lot of emphasis on training a team as a whole. In a tank, for example, the individual crew members train in their specific functional areas (e.g. commander, gunner, driver, loader) and when they have qualified in these, then go on to conduct team training as an integrated crew, which must be passed before the individuals can progress in their careers. In some armies, the individuals get a qualification that shows that they can work in a team context, and then can be flexed into actual operational crews as required. In others, the team is considered to be trained as a unit, and must be retrained when someone leaves / joins.
The military often go beyond team training in a way that very few other organizations do, and conduct 'collective training' that involves multiple teams. Collective training itself has multiple levels - e.g. at the lowest level, two or more tank crews working together in a tactical task (e.g. when four tanks encounter an enemy, which one should engage it?), gradually adding other functions (e.g. infantry, artillery, etc) so that all of the different tactical 'trades' have formal training in how to work together. At these higher levels, the feedback and qualifications are aimed at the units rather than the individual soldiers.
The military are also conscious of group dynamics, for example the 'storming, norming, forming' that occurs when team membership changes, and the effect of 'churn' on a team, as individuals join and leave.
Not only that but as every sports fan know the compensation in sports team vary tremendously, even for similar "roles". People in tech would be shocked (with reason) if that were the case in the IT world.
> but like golf where once you get to the tee, it's you and only you to get the ball in the hole
How many times a golf player has demonstrated an idea that upturned the whole field? But this is common place in engineering because it is essentially a creative task.
