It’s also negligible if you block EU access. The people that own the content get to decide which approach to take.
I for one am a little tired of EU citizens telling me something doesn’t have compliance costs when I’ve been in the room when outside counsel couldn’t agree if a brochure ware site was compliant because the logs contained IP addresses.
You may wish that the regulations didn’t make the choice of blocking EU citizens the more palatable but that doesn’t make it true.
At quick glance their page does have a login button, which you can't implement on a static site. It also has social network buttons. These are probably all useful features for them and their audience
Indeed, though that's extra work. One can also just send people to the social media site when they click on the site's button, afaik they all have dedicated pages for sharing content (they want you to share stuff on their platform). Don't need to import their javascript and run it on every visitor's system just to have links to their sites.
I wouldn't be surprised if a high number of us is now really doing 3-4 hours of real work a day, filling in the rest with stuff that we'd have been ashamed to do in front of our colleagues (or called for) in the pre-covid world.
This is a good thing. The pre-covid world was mostly a circus in that respect.
As long as the 3-4 hours of daily deep, profitable work are still there, we're good.
Edit: this comment does not apply to small startups where your productivity as an engineer is much higher and it (sadly) makes sense to work for 8+ hours a day.
I've read about the FIRE theory time and again. For some reason, I don't buy it. I fail to believe in the plan that consists in building enough FU money to then "be free".
Free to do what? What was the plan originally?
I think the real meaning of life is to do what you care about today, _with the constraints you have today_.
(I think) very few people intrinsically want to work for someone else, in pursuit of someone elses goals, for monetary compensation. Most people do that because the monetary compensation allows them to meet their basic needs and pursue their own goals in turn. In this context, 'be free' means chopping out that extra step and removing the need to work for someone else - You have the necessary means and can now pursue whatever goals you personally have independent of needing continual financial input from an employer, for which in return you must dedicate 40+ hours of each week.
For some people, they might start their own business and be their own employer. Others might still go for part-time work in something they enjoy but couldn't support them financially. Others might remain in full-time employment because knowing they can quit at any point removes a large stressor and makes the work itself enjoyable. Others might move to a shack in the woods and spend their time growing food and posting drivel on the internet.
Edit: I've missed out here people who genuinely want to be a small cog in a large machine, working towards a greater collaborative goal e.g. someone working at spacex. That has to be a pretty big motivator for some people in some sectors.
Firstly, being able to walk away from a job or career with your income secure can be psychologically valuable even if you never do it.
Secondly, what I really want to do is exactly what I'm doing right now, except for three days a week while still supporting a family. That means supplementing income with investments and owning a home to cut down on expenditure.
The opinion that the meaning of life is to be laser-focused on a single goal for a hundred hours a week is common, but I disagree with it. I don't think I'm productive or happy working even 40 hours, while in 32 or 24 I get much more done and can take better care of myself.
Being free might mean that you take a traditional full-time job, if doing so is the best way to "do what you care about today". But the great thing is that you can take that job without all the normal financial stress that goes with it, and with the knowledge that you can just quit if you don't like it or end up with a bad manager.
Aside from that, though, I really think you should step back and try to reexamine "life". Why does life have to revolve around "work"? Why do people define themselves by what they do professionally? The world is very rich, and I personally don't find it very hard to find meaning outside of a job (traditional or otherwise).
I get that a lot of people who go the traditional route end up retiring at 65 or whatever, and then have no idea what to do with themselves for the rest of their lives, and that adding another 10, 20, or more years to that retirement period sounds scary. I think of this as a result of societal brainwashing. From a young age we're asked what we want to do when we grow up, and then during much of our teens we are pushed hard to pick a university, pick a major, and pick a career. And this is right while our brains are still developing; the focus on employment fundamentally affects the shape of our minds for the rest of our lives.
Free to do what, you ask? Literally anything. Learn how to play an instrument, join or form a local band, and play at coffee shops, bars, whatever. Learn new languages and travel (or just travel!). Get involved with your community, whether that's youth outreach, volunteering to help homeless people, or whatever you like. If you're a software developer, get involved with (or start your own) open source projects. Attack that ever-growing stack of books you keep telling yourself you're going to read but never seem to find the time. Find and grow new hobbies, whatever they may be, especially those that have nothing to do with your former job. Commit to improving your physical fitness by doing something (running, lifting, a martial art, etc.) for a certain number of hours per week. Go back to school and learn things you thought were too impractical to make a living off of back when you were 18. If you're a parent, you can spend a ton more time with your kids (raising a child is more than a full-time job anyway).
There is enough in this world to fill multiple lifetimes, and restricting yourself to spending 40 hours a day drawing a paycheck is a very small part of the possibilities. Relying on a job to define ourselves and fill our time is the easy way out because it "automatically" takes up half of our waking hours (or more). I get that it can feel like a daunting task to figure out what to do with all that extra time, but I can't believe it wouldn't be worth it to do so.
I'm glad you found it helpful! One thing to add that just occurred to me: filling your waking hours with a job is "easy" because a full-time job usually takes up a large amount of our free time (half or more!). If you don't have the job, it might be hard (or even impossible) to find just one thing that fills up your time to that degree.
So when a person who is fully employed might in addition have one or two other activities that they use to fill up the rest of their time, a person with no job might have to come up with 10 or 15 other activities. I can get why that might seem daunting... the can be a lot of mental overhead just deciding what you want to do, and then some overhead around organizing that time and keeping up with your various activities. So I can see why that might be a little off-putting as well. But to me, I think it's worth it. And with a larger amount of smaller things that you do, it's probably easier to stop doing one and find something else if you decide you're tired of it. Much easier than changing jobs, at any rate.
It could be learning mathematics, physics, playing instruments, composing, writing, walking, meditating, making films, going to museums etc. It feels like endless possibilities for me. I think having the freedom to do something that you want to do rather than contractual obligation is one of the wonders of life. It may be different for many and luckily if you live in a place where you have the freedom to choice, those who wish to work can work and some of those who have the privilege of FIRE can do so too.
The 4% rule is wildly optimistic. You're assuming that there exists an investment that:
- is 100% liquid
- will return 4% consistently over decades
- every single year
- post-tax
- post-inflation
Good luck finding that one.
So that's why I am saying that the FIRE theory is a theory. A much more realistic number is 2% (and I am still being optimistic here). That means that for someone who needs $5K/month (not insane if you want to have kids), you need $5K x 12 months x 50 = $3M. To get that sum post-tax, you need roughly $5M of income somehow. The set of people who make that amount early enough in their career is very limited.
You may want to look into it more. You don't need consistent returns, you need 4% yearly returns on average over a long time period. Looking at historical returns for a broad index fund (like VTSAX), this is very achievable. However, 4% may still be aggressive. This is why I am personally targeting closer to 3%.
Sadly, the "good" solution is much harder to accomplish than one might think.
One way to address it is to take it from the People perspective. Are there people you've really enjoyed working with? Go talk to them, see what they work on, etc.
This may get you out of your current (deep) local minimum. Doing this on your own is really, really hard.
I am with you on most of your points, but definitely not on the "normal and mostly acceptable".
The truth of our domain is that you can get great work done in 3-4 hours a day (I am referring to deep work here, not meetings). In fact, most of us become much less productive beyond that. The remaining hours can/should be spent on useful meetings, reading, learning new things, chatting to people about things, etc.
Coasting from a standup to the next with zero work in between is definitely not normal (_if done on a regular basis_) and the sign that something is not right in your current situation.
You may find it OK right now and for years on end. But you're likely going to pay a hefty bill for this many years down the road. I am not saying you should live Elon's life. But finding something meaningful to do with your life should be a goal, I believe.
> I am with you on most of your points, but definitely not on the "normal and mostly acceptable".
The "normal" part is easy to disprove: If everyone was doing near zero work and lying their way through standup about it, nothing would ever get done. That may be normal in certain zombie organizations, but those organizations can't last forever without people doing actual work. Somebody is doing the work, even if the OP isn't.
> Coasting from a standup to the next with zero work in between is definitely not normal (_if done on a regular basis_) and the sign that something is not right in your current situation.
The part about doing nothing all day and then lying their way through standup stood out to me.
Like you said, we all know that programmers aren't hands-to-keyboard programming for 8 straight hours every day, nor do we expect that. However, we do expect that everyone is putting in similar amounts of effort to their peers.
I'm surprised how many comments here are justifying the zero-work behavior because the manager hasn't caught on yet. This doesn't mean the work disappears. It means the person's teammates have to pick up the slack and carry the project forward without the OP.
Working with a deadbeat teammate is an awful experience. If you need to get anything done, the only way forward is to plead with them to get some work done, or just do it yourself. More often than not, the team ends up doing it themselves.
We've all been stuck with deadbeat team mates, from group projects in school to the workplace. It's not okay to be the deadbeat teammate.
> However, we do expect that everyone is putting in similar amounts of effort to their peers.
I think there's a distinction here between two types of "work" (at least). Work that moves the product/business forward in tangible ways, in addition to just adding features (decrease down time, reliable repeatable deployments, reproducible, easy to understand configuration, fast bug remediation) and work that doesn't.
I think we've all experienced teams who switch frameworks and libraries at a whim, or worse yet, adopted entirely new languages "just because". They usually don't ask permission, or if they do the sell the decision makers on some hula balu about "increase productivety" or whatever when they really just want to use new cool X. Or howabout the frontend teams that switch naming conventions, and never rename the old stuff before starting another naming convention?
The point being there are a lot of developers who waste a lot of time "working" on things that just don't matter. The business never asked for it, it serves no purpose or real need other than to scratch someones itch (or build their resume). I maintain if wasting time doing nothing is "stealing" from the company, then so is this.
>Working with a deadbeat teammate is an awful experience. If you need to get anything done, the only way forward is to plead with them to get some work done, or just do it yourself. More often than not, the team ends up doing it themselves.
I've never had this issue with the projects I've managed.
Create a doc/Jira for the project, including timelines and tasks. Allocate tasks to all teammates. Daily/weekly go through those tasks, updating progress. If timelines are being held back by someone, I'm going to make management aware because I'm not taking the fall. If they're not then I don't care.
This isn’t about dead beat team members, this is about not having enough work to do which can happen for various reasons. Sometimes companies just want redundancy and don’t care if that costs real money. Other times a team is built and just gets less work than expected and or people are simply more productive. And of course, if you actually want to make important deadlines you want be conservative in how much work the team takes on.
Finally if you get a 10x person but don’t have 10x the stuff to do they often spend a lot of time twiddling their thumbs. You could keep giving them a larger share of work, but that’s hardly fair and you don’t want to reduce staff in case that person quits.
I would beg to differ. While I agree that some of your reasoning is valid enough I read the OP as what I would call a dead beat developer.
Its not easy to distinguish sometimes because we all know from our own experience that it just happens that you get a task that happens to have 10 pitfalls hidden in a row and what looks like an easy peasy fix is a day of debugging. Sure.
What usually is the case though is that if this happens 10 times in a row it isn't particularly bad luck. It is very very likely something else. Such as what the OP described. And especially if the manager is also overworked then distinguishing the two cases becomes even harder. Then even a manager that wants to do something can't because you don't want to fire someone that doesn't deserve it based on incomplete information.
Some managers are also just afraid of the organizational hassle, the emotional toll on themselves, might fear the overall consequences for morale too high vs. the morale impact of co workers noticing the slacking or simply couldn't care less since they are doing the same thing just one level up. What's another dead weight at a company the size of GE or a large bank or insurance etc.
I definitely say something. Many others say something as well. But we aren't the majority especially in large orgs. Usually it's known which people you try to keep away from your projects and that's as far as everyone goes.
If you really have a 10x person, there's no need to lie on stand-up 3 days in a row.
I agree that 10 hours per week is rather extreme, but I have been in similar situations. The difference is I tent to say something because boredom gets old. I see less confrontational people say stuff that everyone knows is BS, and then just add the aside about being available if something is more important/useful/pressing.
In the most extreme version of that I once had absolutely nothing to do for months at a time and my manager was completely aware of that fact. Their response, “Look you’re fully billable so if the client is happy I am happy.”
Indeed. Also, you have plenty of time do to both. Start as an engineer at 22, write code for 15 years. Switch to management at 37. That still leaves you with 15+ years to climb the career ladder.
