> love working from home but it’s easy to get distracted with side projects, feeding birds, germinating seeds etc.
For programmers at least “productivity” comes from writing leveragable code, not by working more hours. Watching birds, gardening and generally being relaxed and rested will increase the quality of the code you write. It may even allow you to envision solutions impossible to come up with under the daily grind of commute->stand up->lunch gossip->meetings->commute. I think managers that understand how to develop good software are few and far between.
Productivity aside, your routine sounds awesome and everyone who can should try to achieve something similar without concern for their employer’s productivity. I assure you the concern for well-being is not bi-directional.
There are also plenty of programmers who are just lazy and don't want to work a lot. Check out any of the dozens (hundreds?) of comments on Blind of people working 15, 20, 25 hours a week. Total.
"I'm sitting on my porch drinking a beer and watching birds but trust me I'm totally working right now" doesn't take you very far.
I've had weeks were i worked 60 hours of crunch, but most weeks, even if i was at the office i work barely more than 25 hours. Between reading tech news, gossip, researching a bit on this totally new tech that seems nice, trying to justify a POC to my n+1/n+2 and preparing slides on "why leaving Jenkins totally make sense", i did so much false work that honestly would annoy me if i was a manager. Now i'm leaving my computer for 30 minute pauses, it is far healthier for me, i'm more effective at my job and i stopped wasting my time and the time of my collegues on meaningless presentations. I still do somes on "clean code" or "how to rework your commits to prepare efficient code reviews", but it is for the benefit of the team, while the one i did pre-covid were for my entertainment.
That depends, though. How many people reading this thread would say, "I'm sitting in my cube surfing the 'net, but trust me I'm totally working right now"?
The best code I’ve ever written was when I was only working 10 hours a week. Hours worked has no positive correlation with quality of code written. Good managers know letting their devs watch birds and relax will result in a much higher quality of output then forcing them into the office and dropping by their desk to prod them.
Well wining and dining has taken management folks quite far and writing same-old CRUD app thousandth time by hand is not gonna take developers very far.
That's lovely. I work in consulting and every hour I get distracted I have to make up at some other point in the day. usually late at night after my kid is asleep.
I have no problem with people doing nothing and collecting UBI. There are tons of rich people doing nothing today and they're taking in a lot more money than UBI would provide.
The difference being you can't opt to be wealthy. I lean towards UBI myself but "a few rich in society can do it today" is a supporting argument against class division not for why UBI is a sustainable for society as a whole.
The universal nature of UBI is what makes it appealing. That currently only a privileged few are free from a life of labor is a societal problem that UBI helps address.
It doesn't make sense to worry about a fictional labor shortage when there is an excess of profit being captured by the wealthy. If a labor shortage actually existed that differential wouldn't exist, because it couldn't afford to.
Agree it's what UBI sets to solve and the reason UBI is appealing but neither of those were in question.
You're referring to 2 different "labor shortages" at once there. The proposed labor shortage in the question "what if UBI were available at a life sustaining level" and the labor shortage caused by the current wealthy being able to opt out of labor. That the latter hasn't caused societal labor shortage issues is true but as you say it has been capturing a portion of the profit in a negatively impacting way and it's also on the order of 100x fewer participants than UBI would have. With that in mind it doesn't seem to be unreasonable to ponder what negative impact expanding such a concept 100 fold may have.
I think it's a false assumption to make that there would be devastating, society stopping labor shortages with UBI. I will contend a lot of jobs today are useless (or worse, actually harmful). Many things can definitely be automated as well. I'm sure we can come up with janitorial robots, we just haven't because it's cheaper to exploit people.
The goal of society should be to become post-scarcity. All of our technological progress has led in that direction. We currently just live in a period where the majority of the gains have been captured by very few people and that has allowed them to exploit human labor to enrich themselves vs. building a self-sustainable society. Engineered or not, I think that's the inevitable end game of continuing humanity.
I also think elimination of busywork, automation of work, and similar things that make "We rely on people's work to get materials, build and heat homes, grow and distribute food. Society is built upon contribution." an obsolete statement are definitely the path to sustainable UBI. Generally this falls into the techno-utopianism viewpoint.
Apart from needing those technologies to exist before being able to claim them as reasons there won't be a labor shortage with UBI this is still completely independent of rich people existing today without causing a labor shortage. Perhaps it's a funding source to prove out things like automation by redistributing said wealth but the existence of said wealth in the hands of a few is not prove lack of labor in all is sustainable. To do that you must actually prove the alternative means of production out - regardless if the wealthy exist.
The thing is that the unnecesaary work isn't "busy work" but is work that primarily delivers value to the employer by winning in zero sum competitions. Advertising, legal services, lots of software development, lobbying, plus all those services that enable high productivity for zero sum work.
The problem is that we are dependent on these zero sum games to regulate our economy and as a result these zero sum games end up consuming all our our productivity gains and making up a progressively larger share of the economy.
It's completely logical to not want a career when executives capture all of the profits. It's irrational to work when the execs at your company make 10-100X what you do and the non-working investors capture even more value than that.
There is no labor shortage and there never will be. When exec pay equals worker pay, then all of the levers will have been pulled and we can maybe start to talk about a labor shortage. Much of which are jobs that shouldn't exist (ad sales), or things that can be automated.
Executives making too much is not a problem with people having careers and specializing.
Executive pay will not, nor should it ever, equal worker pay. I am not going to pretend multiple millions in yearly compensation is reasonable. But there is a bit more responsibility at the executive level than there is at the bottom.
Non-working investors are assuming risk. It is a different class of contribution than a worker. And don't forget, those "non-working investors" also include your average folk who are saving for retirement.
> That people reject taking on a career and being productive members of society is troubling. It also displays a ton of ignorance.
I’m saying it’s not ignorant at all, opting out of a system stacked against you is highly logical. I would find it far more troubling if people just ignored the inequality in their own companies and blindly worked to make others rich. That is the real problem.
Yeah me stacking shelves for 15$ an hour so that my boss can get rich providing goods and groceries all across the country is definitely a real problem.
I really don’t think there are many people making $15 /hr stacking shelves. Yes, that is a huge problem. How much are the execs making in this company? That’s money that could go to workers and customers. The system is broken so millions-billions get captured by those at the top with no benefit to anyone else.
Firstly: Is the system actually "stacked against you" or does it provide better quality of life for everybody? Yes, there are people with disproportionately more, but even the people at the bottom are better off under this system than many others, including communism.
Secondly: are people at the bottom, whose skills include things like "putting stuff on shelves" and "asking if you want fries with that" actually building a career? No.
Thirdly: those people all have the freedom to start their own companies. Unfortunately, what people will find is that it's a lot of work and a lot of risk. So they don't. And then complain about inequity.
Lots of complaining, very little effort into actually improving their own lives.
This isn't to say our system is perfect, cause it ain't. But by and large people aren't complaining because their life sucks, they're complaining because someone has more than them.
The system is absolutely stacked against everyone but those with money. Janitors can start their own business? With what capital?
> But by and large people aren't complaining because their life sucks, they're complaining because someone has more than them.
They are complaining because life sucks. Housing, healthcare and education are either unobtainable or will sink most people into a life of debt. That’s not complaining because someone has more than you. That’s asking for the bare necessities to not take a lifetime of labor to pay off.
It sounds like you’re talking to people who have no experience working from home. Information sharing and documentation is far better when everyone is remote. I’ve worked dozens of places, in person and remote and “happenstance innovation in the hallway” is a myth perpetuated by poor managers, sociopathic execs and those looking to turn the office into their social circle. All constituencies that negatively impact quality of work.
>>“happenstance innovation in the hallway” is a myth perpetuated
hmm I experience it every day, where I over hear something in the hallway that another team it working on, that impacts my team.
This is especially true for IT depts who are often the last to know about something when they should be included from the Jump...
but sure just deny my 20+ years experience and insert yours as more valid that mine...
I am sure what you experience is true for you, and I am sure as I said in my original comment my experience my not be true for a company that has been WFH as primary for years, or from their formation.
However if you work for a 60+ year old company that until 2020 never had any WFH then just try to graft on WFH, that is going to be an issue
> hmm I experience it every day, where I over hear something in the hallway that another team it working on, that impacts my team.
If this is how you are finding out about things that impact your team, then your company’s communication and planning is broken and work from office is a bandaid enabling that. Wfh forces good process as it’s not sustainable without it.
When you go 100% remote, you have a massive potential workforce, orders of magnitude more potential employees than those that happen to live within commuting distance to the office. The reason you go 100% wfh is because then all of the systems and relationships are tuned to remote work, which when done right is far superior to the daily office grind, middle management hell, “how was your weekend” small talk, documentation via dropping by someone’s desk…
Wfh will ultimately win here because it’s far better suited to information work than being ever present physically in a pseudo-factory.
I think over a longer timescale (~a decade) I would tend to agree. In the short term, there are too many people addicted to face-to-face work environments; often I feel that this is more down to office politics than productivity, but it'll persist for as long as it is effective in giving a career advantage.
For a long time, it’s been true that the internet can help your career far more than whoever works in your office. Open source contributions, emailing people asking for advice, engaging people on social media… all the way up to raising money. The future was already here, it was just unevenly distributed. COVID forced some who were holding out to face reality of a global, distributed work force.
All fine for Big Tech workers, but let's not forget about the large array of others who work in more "pedestrian" parts of the IT industry, ie those working for enterprise shops who are still working through the early stages of cloud adoption.
If you want to progress your career, networking on the internet is far more effective than trying to grind the way up the chain in an old school IT company via in-office schmoozing. That is a dead end with or without WFH.
Again, depends heavily on the industry. Also, I'm not entirely sure this is a good thing; I see a lot of "Twitter famous" people fawning over each other at the moment in something resembling a white-collar version of the US tipping culture, but I don't think that kind of behaviour should be allowed to take root more than it already has. One of the other positives we should be taking from a remote-first culture is greater appreciation for the practices of other cultures (since they are now so much more accessible). I hope we're not sliding towards a world where American fake niceness dominates and more reserved modes of interaction are sidelined.
Documentation via dropping by someone's desk is much better than no documentation at all, which is what I have observed the effect of WFH to be (perhaps this isn't typical though).
Is it really so bad having small talk with coworkers? I don't know where one is supposed to find friends in this new society that prefers talking to strangers and aliases on the internet over talking to the person sitting right next to them.
It’s not a blindspot for many people. It’s open source and open protocols vs closed source spyware. SCP is far better than Dropbox if you value privacy for instance.
A lot of resistance to things like Dropbox come from the experience of being screwed over by closed source software. If you look at the state of Dropbox today, those initial comments look pretty spot on.
I am actually surprised as it seemed that with IBM, Yahoo, and various other companies dragging everyone back to the office in 2017-2019 that remote work was in retreat.
I always interpreted digital nomad to be a Tim Ferris type person working 4 hours a week and living off relatively passive income or some kind of online self employment, not employees.
Alternative take, people didn’t like Dropbox because it was the repackaging and close sourcing of existing solutions. It was more polished and financially successful but that doesn’t mean it was good for tech. It’s corporate software, yes it became valuable but it definitely represents an anti-user trend that actually would best have been resisted. You should never give closed source software root!
> Alternative take, people didn’t like Dropbox because it was the repackaging and close sourcing of existing solutions
It wasn't. Even the famous comment just pointed it was possible to replicate with existing tools. And apart from one person the thread was actually pretty welcoming.
That comment was just a grandfather of the very popular "Why should I use this instead of [completely different solution]?", that is also so very often also used against open source projects themselves.
I think it’s more that many of the “leaders” of this community are investors and entrepreneurs who have vested interests and use this site and community for promotion or strategic purposes. This site’s contents and commentary are mostly ads, thus not good at prediction.
There are risks to all of us when we let millions of children act as a breeding and mutation substrate for the virus. I would think that would be blinding obvious to anyone with even a basic grasp of biology.
It’s also completely unknown what the long term effects of the virus are.
Edit: Disappointed but not surprised by the amount of anti-science on this site. I feel like a lot of people have let politics destroy their ability to think critically to the point of near suicidal ignorance. Sad.
The other user was suggesting lifting restrictions would be equal to "fuck the kids". Clearly that is not the case.
As for the risk of new mutations: if we were truly worried about that then perhaps the priority should be vaccinating the populations of poorer countries instead?
> As for the risk of new mutations: if we were truly worried about that then perhaps the priority should be vaccinating the populations of poorer countries instead?
Vaccinate everyone, there’s no shortage of vaccine. Remember when Bill Gates fought to stop the manufacture of vaccine in other countries? People like him are the enemy to a fully vaccinated population.
Given global vaccination rates, it will have abundant and plentiful opportunities for breeding and mutation forever. There is no vaccinating the entire globe for coronavirus. Certainly not in our lifetimes. And not given the declining effectiveness of the vaccines.
I agree that the whole globe will not be vaccinated and that will continue to be a problem. That doesn’t negate what I said though, unvaccinated children are a huge part of that problem.
> And not given the low effectiveness of the vaccines.
I have no idea what this means. It sounds like you’re under false impressions. The vaccines are quite effective.
I meant “declining.” Revised simultaneous with your comment. If the vaccine immunity does not persist and requires boosters, we will never reach global here immunity. The parent article is on point.
For programmers at least “productivity” comes from writing leveragable code, not by working more hours. Watching birds, gardening and generally being relaxed and rested will increase the quality of the code you write. It may even allow you to envision solutions impossible to come up with under the daily grind of commute->stand up->lunch gossip->meetings->commute. I think managers that understand how to develop good software are few and far between.
Productivity aside, your routine sounds awesome and everyone who can should try to achieve something similar without concern for their employer’s productivity. I assure you the concern for well-being is not bi-directional.