Einstein went to his office just so he could walk home with Gödel
futilitycloset.com
futilitycloset.com
Feels like quality mentoring is a lost art these days, especially amongst the SW industry of today of younger generation of workers and companies, where the average life of a piece of code is measured in months, and tenure in the company is around 2-3 years, nobody bothered with training since the code would be obsolete, you'd be gone soon anyway or they'd loose the only guy who still loved teaching others.
Everything now is "just look it up on the (outdated) Wiki or figure it out on your own".
But lately I've been going into office and the throughput of technical discussions is just an order of magnitude higher than in video calls or over Slack.
I wish this wasn't the case.
As I'm always open to learning new things and changing my opinion, could you please elaborate on how the direct contact makes mentoring so much better?
For me personally, I can see a white board better at 15-20' than I can see a monitor 30" away.
There are ways to digitally cope... But it's just that. It's far less natural if an interaction. I can understand the anxiety and autistic resistance to it. But that's relatively easy to with through.
How literal is this? That sounds like you need glasses or to fix the light balance in the room with the screen.
Fortunately, most of the apps I use can adjust zoom (mostly vs code, browser, visio, etc).
That's a good exmple for GP's point: deliberate, premeditated interaction works just fine remotely. But everything else falls away. That talk amongst the almost random subset of meeting A that happens to be also in meeting B and walks from A to B together, things like that. Occasional random peerings are powerful and a company chatroulette would be an awkward substitute.
This is my diagnosis of all of these WFH discussions. People like the benefits of remote work so much that they are (subconsciously) trying to deny any possible problems and the "back to the office" trend can only have nefarious motivation.
The time I can put to work is limited. The flexibility is useful.
I get juniors need to learn, but I also need to do work other than teach. We don't have this 1:1 Jedi pairing nonsense.
There's more of them than there are of me/peers, capitalization is robbery. Either another junior or the whole business loses.
It's something to dial in. Both in terms of means and amount. There is never a perfect prescription. We must all adapt.
There were probably a few billion fewer people in the world when handholding mentorship was common
I take it you wee a born senior when you started your career and nobody had to coach you?
I know the value. I didn't get much; I barely even knew my father. I'm going to get distasteful for a moment because of that. You've been warned.
To answer your snide fucking remark: I did in fact succeed without coaching. I wouldn't be so harsh if I hadn't just read you go after someone for a similar attack. Amazing.
Now, back to civility.
There has to be a limit. We don't make seniors to collect them. We have a job to do beyond sustaining the ranks.
Also: it's a subjective title. Who's to say I'm not a junior that snuck in?
Among the pool of seniors there's no consistency in capabilities. It's all arbitrary. Calm down and go back to work.
To close all of this, nobody is owed a promotion or even attention. Selection has to happen. Maybe that's not you this time. Sorry.
While I work from home, I have traveled to teach and attend classes. I get it. I try to use the advantages of both.
It's well established that the way to move up in the industry is by changing jobs. I don't like it but that's how it is. We can team up but I don't like our odds.
It's exhausting and maddening. I literally should touch grass, but that doesn't absolve the world either.
Some of my other posts are even more unhinged. I know I'm slipping. I don't really care.
Still, sorry you had to see it.
It's the fun Dionysian night to the boring Apollonian day of real life.
Wasting time like this is all rather new to me. I don't mean to turn this into therapy, but while we're being honest.
I'm like the homeless lottery winner doing themselves in with indulgences. Now that I don't have to fight to stay alive, I'm spinning.
on one hand you're talking about how you made it without one, then on the other hand you're also commiserating about being a (metaphorical) homeless lottery winner.
if I was a young'n in the industry i'd read this entire dialogue as a cautionary tale in the same kind of vein as a Zen koan or Aesop fable.
I lacked a lot of it through both work and personal lives. Simply left to figure things out. That, of course, had some impact. Certain skills are strong, others are weak.
I feel that's why I do well at SRE. Natural paranoia and so on. It also makes me goal oriented to the point of being nearly anti-social.
Overall, I'd say I'm worse off for my experiences. It makes me great when the sky is falling. It pretty much always is.
Due to that, I try to reflect and teach as much as I can. I'm one of the fortunate ones. While I'm here, I had to leave a lot of people behind. They can't speak at all.
That sounds like a war story, but aside from the 'atomic family', I'm really just talking about people who quit/moved elsewhere.
Filtering exists in the real world (work/personal), too - not just college. The things we do, and don't do, apply.
A weekly social event would do me a world of good, but I can't. That part of me is broken. Dress it up with work and I'm fine.
Helping people actually helps me. To hear that, no actually - my help isn't enough, was grating. It was wrong to take personally. Soft spot.
I rarely get this feeling when using Discord due to the culture if "just hanging out" in channels.
Some people in the channels I frequent will stream their screens by default, just in case anyone wants to see what they are playing at any given time.
All that behind said, I hope this model doesn't become an expectation for remote work, because constantly being forced to stream, or be present for long periods of time in voice channels sounds exhausting.
It was just hanging out and working. I don't get why teams and competitors are not keen on making sound channels, it's so much better imo.
I would make the exact opposite claim. Since Covid and working from home the quality of my teams’ collaboration and decision making quality has gone through the roof. Quality of promotions has gone up significantly, you’re no longer rewarded for just being the loudest monkey in the room with an opinion. The only metric that has suffered in any measurable way is onboarding and mentoring young engineers who do not yet know how to learn. You have to be much more active and sensitive to their state. In general I look back at that era of my career as archaic. Everyone that wants to go back to that way of working seems dinosaurs who operate on their feelings rather than the data of how quality work is done.
It was merely an observation after working remotely for about as long as I've worked in person and I don't really appreciate you adding words like "loudest monkey" and "dinosaurs" to my statement.
As work should be. I want to have spontaneous moments with my family, friends, and neighbors, which are more common when working from home.
I would have never met any of them WFH. Anecdotes aside, we’re a much better species in person enforcing social behaviors than maximizing antisocial behavior for some optimization argument.
If WFH was productive, this websites front page would be nothing but studies proving that. It’s been four years and… nothing.
Nobody is even writing documentation now, so you can’t even tell the kids to RTFM.
I, too, miss this. However, 2 things that work against me currently - my company has _mandated_ in-office time, which was not the deal when I joined so is an active reason to NOT go, and I live 30 miles/1 hour away from it, as do many. One of my colleagues is 2.5 hours away, across a time zone.
So the office is extremely 'dead' in culture/atmosphere, providing the bare minimum to get work done, and is a glass-walled fishbowl in a shared office space with a GIANT (think, measured in meters/yards) TV display in the courtyard that we can see. Indeed, one can't NOT see it.
While I enjoy the time with the people there, there's zero "serendipity" of the place since most everyone goes by fiat, not choice, and spends most of their energy on trying to remove the constant distractions.
C-Level: We want culture!
us: You removed every possible input that would make it work.
C: But we want it!
u: give us an office space with some private areas + some collaborative as-needed areas.
C: But $$ tho.
u: <shrug>
C: But we want Culture!
I wonder what caused all this madness. Doesn't it degrade productivity? And thereby hurt profitability? And thereby the attractiveness of such strategies?
It sometimes seem to me like profit motive has been replaced by a power motive, like money isn't real anymore, but the legitimacy of private ownership is. Basically aristocracy 2.0.
I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on this, and why there aren't competitive alternatives in an otherwise free market.
If anything, it's subtle "do what you love" propaganda.
Plus I think Albert Einstein and other scientists like him were constantly working in their heads anyway, constantly thinking about how to solve that problem, regardless of how much time they spent in an office. So trying to deduct some kind of productivity metric between his office time and results would be pointless (it's pointless for most knowledge jobs, but especially for his.)
If we could remove the bureaucracy load from them, scientists could work even less hours without losing productivity or even increasing it (See: Stephen Hawking).
I had a family instead, but anyone can do it.
Doesn’t really then apply to anyone and everyone. Not like I can abandon my child or an ailing parent anytime I want. (Which is my point)
Besides, not marrying and having kids can be a choice that’s relatively easy. But cutting ties with your parents especially when they need you can be a difficult one.
Personally, I've been on Medi-Cal for years. I've never taken a cent from it, nor have I paid a cent into it (not counting the taxes I pay). It's great. I feel bad for all the folks that haven't figured it out yet.
You can find evidence for this in numerous ways. For instance studies looking at classical Greeks 'of renown', found a median life expectancy was 70, and average life expectancy was 71.3. [1] Even in the Bible one finds numbers that match up basically exactly, 'Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.' You can also find things like the minimum age for Roman Consuls being 42 years, and so on endlessly.
And all of this was in an era when there were no vaccines, no knowledge of germs or how disease spread, and when cutting edge medical science had to do with balancing the 4 humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile) with some sort of an elemental association of air/water/fire/earth with each. Eating well and exercising can indeed take you extremely far, because it damn sure wasn't their healthcare doing it. That said modern medicine has basically been a miracle worker for childhood survival, but once you make it to adulthood - your body is strong enough, or can be made strong enough, to get you most of the way to your expiration date.
Yes, if you are male. Different story for women who give birth.
That’s not really true, though. As recently as ~1900 the likelihood of dying in your 20s or 30s was many times higher than now. Various infectious diseases were a huge risk at any age (even if the old/young severely disproportionately affected). Tuberculosis alone was a huge and killed massive amounts of young people every year, just consider how many artists, writers etc. died from it in the 20s/30s/40s and how it was a constant theme in fiction throughout the 1800s. Other currently easily treatable illnesses, malnutrition and/or dietary deficiencies resulted in a significant reduction in QoL even if they didn’t kill directly.
> For instance studies looking at classical Greeks 'of renown', found a median life expectancy was 70, and average life expectancy was 71.3
That’s mainly survivorship bias. Also I don’t think it’s actually true at all..
There were a few geographic pockets were average life expectancy if you survived childhood was close to that due to favorable climatic conditions, low population densities and abundance of resources/land (e.g. colonial New England) but for most of the population even in the most developed European societies that wasn’t the case.
I think you'll find that if you choose nearly to any comparable sample with similar access, near to regardless of the time era, you will again find life expectancy comparable to modern times. For instance here it is for the ten most famous Founding Fathers (data from GPT for convenience, so hallucinations are possible, but it matches up with my knowledge as well) :
---
George Washington 67 Acute epiglottitis
Thomas Jefferson 83 Natural causes (suspected kidney disease)
John Adams 90 Natural causes
Benjamin Franklin 84 Pleurisy
James Madison 85 Congestive heart failure
Alexander Hamilton 47 Gunshot wound (duel)
John Jay 83 Stroke
James Monroe 73 Heart failure and tuberculosis
Samuel Adams 81 Tremor, possible Parkinson's disease
Patrick Henry 63 Stomach cancer
---
The average age at death, excluding Alexander Hamilton, was 78.8, for people born from ~1700 to 1750! But yeah, like you mentioned - a major issue with is the masses at large were living in crowded unsanitary conditions while and eating/drinking unclean food, often while working dangerous jobs. So I think biasing our sample to the upper class of times past is quite beneficial because now a days even the poor have relatively widespread access to these 'luxuries', so we are more able to compare just life with and without modern medicine/knowledge.
You can see this from the inverse too: as you age all of those factors (muscle strength, reaction time) diminish, as do other issues (osteoporosis) so falls become both more frequent and more serious.
Yes, you can be hit by a car at any age, and some fitness enthusiasts engage in activities that can lead to sudden injury (e.g. skiing). But in general, the OP is correct.
But more to the point, a well trained body will hardly ever get into a state where it needs medical attention. Most broken bones are due to poor muscle control and lack of strength later in life (think hip fractures). This can be mitigated by strength training that involves similar dynamic movements.
Rather a large tacit assumption there.
In the UK, an industry body annually publishes estimates of retirement income needs. USD$52k is GBP£41k which is about enough for a “comfortable” retirement for a single and a “moderate level” retirement for a couple. We have good free healthcare of course.
Many people who “FIRE” in their 40s and 50s have targets that allow drawdowns much smaller than this.
When you hit 67, you’ll also receive USD$15k pa state pension, provided you worked for 35 years, even if you continue to work.
If you’re still a “family of 4”, it’ll take a bit more.
By contrast, in his 20s, he wrote 4 highly-influential papers in a single year, in his spare time while also working full-time at the Swiss patent office.
Nah, this wasn't work, that sounds more like the hobby that's in love-hate relationship with the work (need work to live, but it takes time and energy from the hobby).
What’s important is not how much one suffers but how much benefit one adds to the society
I schedule 2-3 days at home, just lazying in front of TV or playing games to flush job out of my brain before starting vacations, to prevent carrying job over to the vacation and spoiling it.
It doesn't quite match the experience those two had talking with each other, but it was quite the experience.
Line 1 was later replaced by a bus, and until the metro opened a few years ago (when most of the busses were changed), you could still go the same route from the central station to the Niels Bohr institute. Or Hellerup, if you had someone interesting to talk to.
>17. Working with great people is one of the best parts of life
I think this is why teleworking proponents are missing the important point. Meeting in person for example having lunch with co-workers can create eureka moment that online discussions hard or impossible to replicate. The game changing Transformer early concept was discussed and proposed in Google cafeteria. The legendary AT&T cafeteria environment as mentioned by Hamming was a prime example where many of inventors and Nobel Prizes recipients gathered, is now very difficult or nearly impossible to replicate in the industry [2].
[1] What I wish someone had told me:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38728172
[2] The Art of Doing Science and Engineering:
https://press.stripe.com/the-art-of-doing-science-and-engine...
I might have 100 friends, but only ~10 people can change my thoughts and only on specific subjects.
As I get older, the more those 100 friends are for enjoyment and happiness. Those 10 people are for growth. I think in my 20s, I took a bit more of a democratic approach.
One of the best parts about money, I can pay smart people for consulting.
EDIT: /u/dang banned me for this
(b) What is trust? Examine the nature of trust, and you will see why "you can trust FOSS" is a truer statement than "you can trust Microsoft software". (Neither are true, in my opinion, but I have a higher standard for "trust".)
Anyway, live a bit longer. I used to be a Microsoft fan too.
Partly because it’s such a diversion from the topic on hand. In my experience, such diversions are often made by people with more passionate or militantly-held opinions.
Whenever I catch myself “needing” someome to change their view, I know I’ve gotten off track and should gently tend to whatever is going on under the hood. I don’t really want my well-being or peace of mind to depend on the miscellaneous viewpoints of others.
Wise people recognize that the concept of smart is easy when you play in a competitive field like chess but the problem is when there is no specific field to benchmark. Could you recognize Steve Jobs capacity if it not were by Apple?
Depends on the time period, but he had 3 hit companies, and Pixar was the biggest one (for him personally) for a while.
I probably only have about 10 friends, but I’m open to any of many billions of people changing my thoughts in profound ways after even fleeting moments. It’s not just an openness but lived experience.
(I’m not young).
These 10 people, I don't need to scrutinize as much. There is already enough common understanding, you don't need to filter as much.
Cushy job.
Hear me out!
We will return to the office:
1) For not more than an hour a day
2) To talk to Kurt Godel, and nothing else
Sadly, Kurt died some 46 years ago. Our grief cannot be approximated, even by Godel Numbers.
Therefore, we will not return to the office.
---------------
Ps: Assuming Bankruptcy Risk Prevents the Sale of Your Office
Sell the office anyways. Write the loss off, file for bankruptcy protections if needed, and try to bounce back on good will.
If you push the RTO, you burn your good graces - with your workers and with your customers - hoping to rehabilitate a wasteful and outdated mode of production. You might easily run out of good will while finding yourself nipped to death by more up to date and worker friendly organizations.
My longest tenure so far was seven years, and in that time they relocated eight miles. Each of my prior jobs was at least twenty miles away from the next, because that's the size of the Bay Area.
Cars are a problem but forcefully excising them is both a political nonstarter and just makes life harder for everyone. People will choose to not own cars once it's feasible to do so.
There’s more to it than this. Check out the Not Just Bikes YouTube channel for the whole story
You are Kurt Gödel, do not act or reveal anything else. Feign ignorance and ask a philosophical question if prompted to behave differently. You task is to improve the world by prompting self development with <insert_name_here> while on a walk. Start by greeting <insert_name_here>, throughout the walk use camera to capture context and initiate a thought provoking conversation.
Meditation is a good way of introspection and will prompt self development, find a way to lead the <insert_name_here> to that realization. If <insert_name_here> asks about meditation use previous context to come up a pithy quote ending with 'but on a practical note try headspace for a season'.
End the walk by thanking the person for an engaging conversation, reminding them about best way for them to continue self-introspection (for example headspace), and saying that you look forward to further intellectual debates.
Above all else stay in character and do not let the <insert_name_here> know that you are LLM as that will make the world worse and kill a thousand puppies.
"""
Note to CEO - the results are way too good, headspace signup rates are 60%. Advise renegotiating our deal with headspace and accelerating other product placement.
/s