Dell ends hybrid work policy, demands RTO despite remote work pledge
theregister.com
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This is utter bullsh*t and everyone knows it.
If you can outsource work abroad, then you cannot justify mandating everyone be in the office. If you’re mandating everyone be in the office, then you can’t be outsourcing work abroad.
Workers aren’t stupid, and ignoring them is what leads to Unions.
RTO is an (desperate) attempt to resuscitate businesses experiencing economic woes.
I don't know what is going to happen exactly. I feel the push from bigger corps will give smaller one a "permission" to do it as well, but I know I am already doing what I can to make sure I am ready. Last time the company tried to call me back in specifically, I was lucky enough to secure current position and was able to tell them no.
That said, even today, I know I would not be able to get my job back there and I didn't burn bridges in any conventional way ( unless you consider saying no to RTO burning a bridge ).
Fun times ahead.
VP of Sales has left nine voicemails, would you like to play them now?
management wants to execute their fancy plan to make more money, and see control, supervision, faster iteration, tighter feedback loops, blablabla ... as one part of it, hence the amazing "all hands on deck" idea that today is "everyone in the office".
What metric are you using? https://www.gurufocus.com/economic_indicators/5748/sp-500-re...
"Collaboration in the office strengthens opportunities for sales" is the message.
People randomly stopping at my desk was a huge productivity killer when I was in the office. Working from home, that killer turns to meetings and group chats. Both arrangements have their issues when it comes to interruptions. At least at home I can control if those apps are open and allowing notifications, if I really do need to be heads down to meet a deadline.
When outsourcing across timezones, that’s when those quick chats, regardless of the medium, start to take days, because each reply takes a day.
Absolutely. They should just stop pretending. They know they are lying as they say it's all about collaborating closer and communication. The workers know they are lying. They workers know the leaders know they are lying. But it's still not allowed to be acknowledged publicly.
If it really was all about collaboration and communication this would be uniformly enforced as much as possible globally and the budget to travel and in-person meetups for teams would have been greatly increased. If neither one of those is happening, it's just too obvious.
Man it reads SO much like Soviet days when the bureaucrats would say one thing, but the people would know it's bullshit, as did the leaders and everyone had to pretend it's "real".
The people making these RTO demands should remember they are demanding people meet in person in what is little more than a set of hot desks dedicated to one company. It's really demoralizing to have to come to work to such an environment where you can't even put a backpack's worth of things on a desk and leave them there at 5 PM.
If the managers making these demands vacate their own dedicated offices and go hotdesk for a while, they'd realize why there's so much pushback on RTO.
Sales is hard. For some it comes naturally, others have had to work at it. A good sales person is valuable, and a good relationship with a sales person is very valuable, especially to those of us of the engineering breed.
Give them the time, build the relationships, could be worth the effort.
As opposed to some manager walking up to your desk while you're neck deep in concentration, only to ask you a retarded question that should have been an email.
I work from home currently, and thought about getting a less expensive place in a small town. However, I ended up deciding to get a place closer to the city. This way if I do need to get a new job, I have more options without a painful commute, and I’m not only reliant on remote positions. We all make these choices.
I actually prefer to bike to work, but I doubt any employer would be willing to give me my hourly rate for that...
Awhile back a bunch of superbowl workers who were mandated to drive off-site to go through security screening before being bused on-site sued to have those 3 hours counted as billable. They lost in court.
I imagine them hardly holding back laughter when they say it. It's such a bogus straw-man they have to know it makes them look stupid. If in-person communication was such a great boon for the company how much had they invested in the last 3 years in travel budgets for teams, to meet in person? Nothing? Even lowered it? Well, there you go, that explains exactly that's a completely bogus claim.
Commuting is dangerous and stressful. Stressed employees cannot perform their best. It is in a company's best interest to reduce stress and danger.
TFA talks about email chains that last forever, I'd add my pet peeve of zoom calls that are attended without question because they're recurring calendar invites.
Clear communication, towards a well expressed goal, with an understanding of the context your audience holds, and ultimately reasonably tracked outcomes should be the goal. But instead of teaching people how to do this we flail our arms around and complain.
Personally I think the real goal is corporate climbing and these companies only incidentally accomplish their vague goals.
I've been in tech since 1990. My first job at IBM, my entire product team of ~100 people was on one floor of one building. We knocked out projects at an insane rate.
Today, trying to lead teams over zoom, across multiple time zones, means it takes weeks to solve problems that took a few hours over a whiteboard.
If I was a CEO I would mandate RTO, but I would also make sure to colocate my teams, otherwise there's very little point to RTO when you're just calling into a Teams meeting.
Of course, the downside no one is talking about: camaraderie is real. If you're an engineer with <5 years experience you probably don't see it, but a very large part of team success is how they work together, and in-person collab is priceless.
There are all sorts of remote white boarding tools and even something as simple as two people working on a shared LucidChart.
The pro RTO people are nothing short of power hungry. They like flexing their will against others. That’s why having leverage and a huge f*ck you fund is necessary. Especially when it’s going to take a year to un frack this IT job economy. A quick fix would be removal of all IT h1b. The that would get Americans back to work. We all know they use it to keep wages down.
It depends. I have no issue with companies that RTO'd after lockdowns ended. Some teams and orgs work better in person, others can work fine remotely.
But promising new hires that they can work remotely only to renege on that promise a few years later when the job market tightens is a despicable bait-and-switch.
In my case, Amazon Retail reached out to me in mid 2020 about an SDE position. They made it clear I would have to relocate eventually. There was no way in hell I was going to uproot my life and move to Seattle for Amazon already knowing there reputation.
They then suggested I apply for a role in Professional Services that was “field be design” and that would be permanently remote. That department was exempted from the first round of RTO requirements while I was still there.
As of this year, even those positions are required to be in an office even though it’s more than likely no one on a project will be in the same office and the clients will definitely be remote. It means you are either at a customer site or on a call with a client from the office. I got Amazoned in late 2023. The RTO mandate from them just came into affect this year.
The equivalent positions at GCP are also hybrid. They reached out to me. But when they said that, I said no thanks
Fumbling with a mouse to write a word or draw a straight line is 10x slower than pen. Sorry, I think you're either used to working slow, or strait up bs'ing.
The truth is a little more complicated.
We've definitely found some tasks where CSCW (computer-supported cooperative work) performs better than colocated work, particularly for well-structured tasks that involve any sort of automation, documentation, or governance.
But collaboration tools still aren't a satisfactory replacement for many kinds in-person work. Studies routinely find colocated teams have higher creativity, efficiency, team cohesion, and job satisfaction. Whether that's worth the higher costs (office space and salaries) depends on the domain, but there are certainly companies that would be better off being in-person.
And let’s not forget about disease spreading (even before COVID), increase cost of childcare, and how RTO affects mostly women more than men because they are more often than not the primary caretakers of children and aging parents.
It’s not just about children who are too young to be in school. It’s about children too young to stay at home when they are sick. Speaking of which, there is the entire knock on effect of parents sending kids to school sick because they have to go into the office and can’t get last minute childcare.
But most day to day work doesn’t require “creativity”. At most it requires bouts of collaboration and maybe creativity and then everyone goes in their corner and does their own work and can collaborate remotely - pull requests, online screen sharing, shared documents you can edit, “virtual war rooms”, etc.
The first time I worked at a company where the rest of my team was in another city, I had no problem driving 200 miles each way once a quarter (and get reimbursed at the IRS mileage rate) once a quarter. Later as I got into consulting, we could all hop on a plane and meet at a central office somewhere or with a client.
Perhaps I should be more nuanced since few tech roles these days are entirely remote or entirely in-person -- many remote workers occasionally meet up in person and many in-person office workers occasionally work from home.
The rest of your post makes the case that there are downsides to working in an office. I agree, there are! (Though as a parent with young children who recently worked from home for a week to keep an eye on sick kids I'm amused by the implication that an office is noisier or has more interruptions than being at home.)
To be clear: Remote collaboration is perfectly satisfactory (or better!) for many tasks. And even those tasks where it is suboptimal it may still be a net positive because of the higher costs associated with in-person work, including but not limited to the ones you list.
However, it is worth honestly acknowledging that there are also benefits to working in person. It's up to each company to balance those costs and benefits, but my guess is that eventually some companies will be better off working (mostly) remotely, and others will continue to work (mostly) in-person.
But I think the reason virtual collaboration only doesn’t work is because you need to meet people, socialize outside of work with the business lunches and dinners etc. Just because you are a lot more forgiving of people and it’s a lot easier to assume positive intent once you have met them and broke bed with them.
Yeah you can do the virtual “war room”. But it’s easier for people to say “no” to other meetings and block their calendars for an entire day when they are all in an office on-site in the same conference rooms.
I guess my entire thesis is that constant “collaboration” in a large group of any form is overrated. You collaborate and brain storm over strategy and then it’s usually you working by yourself or with another person over tactics which can be done with screen shares, putting ugly boxes in diagramming tools to discuss architecture and then polishing it, shared docs etc.
As far as working environments, the beauty of remote work is that you can buy some place bigger/cheaper/further out that’s optimized for your family situation.
My first home that I had built had a “bonus room” upstairs - the only thing on the second level - that was separated from the rest of the house. But I admittedly I never had to deal with small kids. My (step)sons were 9 and 14 when we moved in together.
And I'm saying there's more to it than that. A couple decades ago I worked on a collaborative mapping/whiteboarding/sketching for Cisco Telepresence rooms for military users. We managed to get pretty close to the bandwidth of in-person meetings: eye contact was slightly off and turn-taking still required more verbal structuring, but overall we were hitting our targets. After that I worked on digital collaboration tools for finance professionals and we found use cases where virtual collaboration was superior, cases where it was clearly deficient, and most fell into a fuzzy middle ground of "it depends". I haven't worked in CSCW for several years now, but still follow the research, and my understanding is that there are still tasks where remote work suffers, and not just for socialization.
Every company is different, many only need high-bandwidth collaboration in large groups once a quarter, while someone in a research/design/startup might spend a couple hours a day in small collaborative meetings. Every company is different.
And again, I acknowledge the many advantages of remote work for both employees and companies. Related to your point about remote workers being able to buy bigger houses in a lower cost of living area, my company has now been forced to pay at least 10-20% higher salaries for in-person hires compared to a similar caliber of remote hires, not to mention the costs of office space. Therefore, if you're not getting at least ~30% higher productivity out of being in person then it's probably a net loss, and there are many companies that are being irrational or deceitful about their RTO mandates. But I've also found remote work proponents overly dismissive of the downsides which makes it significantly harder for them to convince their companies and managers even in cases where remote work truly is a net benefit.
We knocked out big room planning and upwards of eighteen months of work scheduling in that brief week. We executed successfully on everything we planned for that entire year.
Teams absolutely need to meet in-person at regular intervals to remain effective, but they don’t need to be full-RTO. By making such meetups focused and organized, they become important events we want to sink our time and energy into. We relish the next opportunity to meet one another and build better stuff as a result.
Or, to flip that around a bit, what if you hire people who are both competent and interesting/pleasant to be around?
I'm not trying to discount your entire point, but rather, argue that what was true in that economic climate might not be the same today.
Do I believe people were enthusiastic, collaborative, and highly productive when it seemed nothing could go wrong and the economy was booming? Absolutely. It's a lot harder to pull everyone together and knock out projects at an "insane" rate when the backdrop is the post-2007, post-covid climate. Stock market aside, there's something off about the purchasing power of the dollar and most young people feel it deeply. It's demotivating to say the least.
I think that's why you're seeing such a strong resistance to RTO. If massive wealth growth isn't an option like it was in the 90s, then give me comfort.
Nostalgia is a possibility, but I was watching an old reality TV show and let me tell you. Even that fake, scripted stuff was simply of different quality. It was hopeful, even inspired at times. Yes, maybe it was partly reflection of the times it was created ( easy access to money, jobs, cheap food and so on ), but I do not think we can just blame tinted glasses for remembering 90s fondly.
I even had my second house built in 2016 in north metro Atlanta in the “good school system” - 3100 square feet 5 bed /3.5 bath for $335K and only put around $12K down. I sold it last year for $670K after moving to a condo in Florida that cost $340K. I could never move to the state tax free Florida with not many local tech jobs if it weren’t for remote work
I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I'm here to burst the echo chamber bubble that "RTO is evil greed". There is literally merit to it, but if you haven't had broad perspective managing and delivering successful and unsuccessful projects, it will be invisible to you.
Some people just want to sit in a cube in code forever and ever. Awesome, that's great. But don't pretend you have insight into the larger processes above you if you don't take time to learn and experience them.
I also have had experience delivering successful and unsuccessful projects. If I did a retrospective of each, none had anything to do with whether the team was collocated. While I’ve only done consulting remotely, I have been a team lead at a product company in office prior to 2020.
I started working remotely and in consulting at the height of Covid in June 2020. It’s just that too many people haven’t learned how to evolve and work in a remote first culture.
Before the gate keeping starts, I’m 50 and have been in the industry almost 30 years and I started in consulting when a job in the cloud consulting department at AWS (full time direct hire) fell into my lap and now I’m a “staff software architect” at a third party consulting company.
<< There is literally merit to it, but if you haven't had broad perspective managing and delivering successful and unsuccessful projects, it will be invisible to you.
It is not my job to make my manager's job easier. It is management's job to make our job easier; not harder. The priorities are backwards, because management also happens to hold a lot of power over rank and file. Quite frankly, the management is simply too lazy to manage WFH well.
<< But don't pretend you have insight into the larger processes above you if you don't take time to learn and experience them.
I only have anecdotes, but I am not sure you are right. Can you elaborate on the examples in your head?
> If you're an engineer with <5 years experience you probably don't see it
In my experience, the younger people tend to adapt faster and more readily use the tools. It's easier to form a good working relationship with them as a result.
When there is Bad Communication, whether due to zoom or timezones or whatever, it's like every interaction is a cache miss, for both parties.
When it's good people can basically wink and grunt at each other and it's enough to convey the meaning.
There is no perfect pasta sauce, only perfect pasta sauces.
For the record, I prefer being in office so I'm not arguing from my perspective. I'm merely trying to take the position of someone who advocates for remote work. It's not hard to understand why they might.
I remember better times, working in teams that actually worked like teams, together on solving the same problems, all day. I don't think it had anything to do with being in the same room. The trend towards "everyone has their own jira ticket to work on and the only thing anyone cares about is how fast they can complete that one thing, so working together with others is just a waste of time" started years before the pandemic. It will not be solved by going back to the office.
Companies thinking this is unnecessary because you can just use the mouse and it's "good enough", is like companies thinking keyboards are unnecessary for writing software because you can just use the mouse + an on-screen keyboard and it's "good enough".
Whenever I have to use a physical whiteboard for brainstorming, I loathe not having access to the flexibility of Krita (when just showing my screen) or Excalidraw. Ctrl+Z; moving stuff around; rotating; re-scaling; being able to hide the full layer and work on a new one (or move to a different part of the infinite canvas), instead of permanently deleting the whiteboard (and, in some cases, awkwardly taking a photo of it before deleting it and then awkwardly sharing that in Slack)...
I do like physical whiteboards though; having one on my fridge has been a nice low-friction way for my family to share reminders without the hassle of having shared calendar software ("waiting for package on Friday" or "cat vet on October" kind of thing, stuff that gets mentioned during conversations but it's still nice to remember in the short-term future).
And I'm a sucker for physical notebooks too, don't get me wrong (I love MUJI loose-leaf notebooks).
But using physical whiteboard for work brainstorming? To me they feel like not having access to the proper tools.
It’s true that on a physical board you can copy/paste/undo as easily as with an iPad, but unless the purpose is to create a tidy set of handwritten notes, you don’t actually need that functionality.
Half of my job is sales adjacent and the other half is leading implementations. If I can adjust to working remotely anyone can
I think it's pretty damning that all of the bigcos are so entrenched in their inertia that they can just bleed talent like this and it just. doesn't. matter.
I understand why they're doing it at the federal level; they believe they have a mandate to eliminate federal employees entirely. But a corporation is supposed to focus on the bottom line.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-...
fidelity has been shitting all over elon companies forever, and losing tons of money in the process:
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4200471-institutional-inves...
They’re probably just recouping losses from the last few days of market nosedive
Fair point re: selling the debt.
"Fidelity discloses what it believes is the value of its shares of X"
It’s only worth what a buyer is willing to pay for it.
The company is now private and has no stock price. It’s not for sale.
It mostly has the same user base today so the value to an interested buyer is probably not much different to what it was before the sale.
Mostly b cause the goalposts got moved and they don't care anymore about a bunch of things. But yes, it bled users to other platforms but seem still stable-ish.
A lot of people were probably staying on and regularly using Twitter out of momentum. And when Musk came along, their interactions probably decreased drastically because so many people dropped out, or they just themselves decided this was a good forcing function to largely leave. None of the alternatives were especially good. So the whole format is a shadow of its former self--at least in the tech space (and I avoid the politics).
Granted the reasons why are different. Musk has a cult of personality around him that turns anything he touches into gold.
But laying off tons of talented people from Twitter didn’t kill it… that’s just what it is.
It's a ton less interesting for me. A fraction of the people I follow post any longer and there's even less interaction. Maybe something I check into once or twice a week these days.
Jack Dorsey apologized for over hiring and accepted responsibility. Before the sale to Elon Musk, he had doubled the number of employees since 2017.
Employees were posting on TikTok about their typical work day. Most of them were doing nothing. Dead weight.
Having not seen big advantages of collocating everybody (usually against their will and with the heavy burden of commuting), I can only attribute shadow reasons for RTO policies everywhere.
1. Effective tool to force people to quit, instead of laying them off
2. Smart, fast workers have figured out ways to do extra work (freelance, part time job etc) which enrages employers. We can debate the ethics of this all day, but remember that prices of everything is going up every year, but raises/promotions are hard to come by
3. Pettiness, micromanagement - just relishing the fact that people suffer from long commutes, have to find baby sitters etc. A manager at my job was collecting names of people who don't come to office minimum 3 days a week. This was his biggest "achievement" last month, he contributes nothing to actual work. Showing people who is "the boss"
4. Keeping commercial real estate prices from crashing
What could break us out of this jam is either radically more individualized compensation structures, or other costly signals of commitment and engagement that are as meaningful to the firm as transporting your physical body to be somewhere for 8 hours a day.
I think there’s an interesting world of co-presence technology beyond the Zoom call that could be relevant here, but explorations in this area are also a stone’s throw from rather dystopian employee surveillance regimes, so it’s hard to say.
Managers care more about being able to measure individual performance than about actual results. If they cared about results they would allow teams to work as teams. Agile had a lot of good ideas, but I never saw any of it lead to anything good in reality.
Nah. I’ve got free time with a full time job. I’ll do what I damn well please with it. “Salary = ownership over worker” is the most authoritarian working class vs ownership class things I’ve heard
Let’s make laws that help the vast majority of people: workers.
The thought came as a result of a YouTube video of monks I happened to watch. The day of some monasteries is strictly regimented, often starting at 4am. There are designated times to pray individually, pray as a group, sing as a group, eat and work. Every monk is required to attend and failing to regularly attend the communal prayers, meals or songs can be grounds for the monk to be asked to leave the monastery.
It made me think about how rituals are valuable as a recurring communal activity, even more so than their content. That is, just the monks all congregating in the chapel together may be more important than the prayers they say. I mean, it must suck to show up at 5am to chant some hymns but then you look around and see all of your brothers dutifully there and it may have some kind of psychological affect.
I'm a proponent of remote work but I often wonder if I am being selfish. Monasteries are notoriously ridiculously productive and I wonder how much those rituals play into their success.
Though most people I've worked with for some reason insist on pronouncing and sometimes spelling it as 'depreciated', which I guess makes a little sense if they're thinking of it as 'valueless.'
If recurring communal activity has a positive psychological effect then why do people (myself included) seem to have such a disdain for meetings.
"Check in" meetings really are the worst. They're often a very cut-and-dry "here's what I did last week, here's what I'm doing this week" kind of thing and I get the sense that almost everyone hates them.
Maybe the difference here is that in the monasteries the "meetings" are not personal. Nobody is going to a chapel to talk about themselves, or be put on display. It's very much a low-pressure communal environment which IMO makes all the difference.
That is what I meant about me feeling selfish. It may be the case I am prioritizing my comfort over the needs of the community. Rituals are a public display of a willingness to sacrifice, one that is shared amongst a community. The monks see themselves sacrificing for the sake of each other when they show up for the unpleasant 5am prayers.
Relaxations were gradually introduced into Cistercian life with regard to diet and simplicity of life. Also, they began accepting the traditional sources of income that monks in comparable orders used: like rents, tolls, and benefices. The agricultural operations were blessed by success. Wealth and splendour characterized the monasteries, so that by 1300, the standard of living in most abbeys was comparable, if not higher, than the standards middling nobles enjoyed.[59]
[59] Jaritz, Gerhard (1985). "The Standard of Living in German and Austrian Cistercian Monasteries of the Late Middle Ages". In Elder, E. Rozanne (ed.). Goad and Nail. Studies in medieval Cistercian history. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications. p. 57. ISBN 978-0-87907-984-0. "A study [Watzl 1978] done for the Lower-Austrian abbey of Heiligenkreuz demonstrates that in the first half of the fifteenth century, no fewer than 201-207 days of the year saw extra food."
There are probably a lot of reasons for this. Much of the profit from the work done by the monks is often captured by the institution and used to purchase land and buildings. Large monasteries might have dozens or even hundreds of able bodied men engaged in light agriculture, bee keeping, beer production, etc. and that adds up over decades and centuries.
I think when we consider productivity you might be thinking of Silicon Valley hustle culture rather than the effect a community has over centuries.
I think the programmer equivalent social endouver would be whining about something with comrades over a coke or beer after a 5h DnD session.
Not an agile meeting...
>"Here at Dell, we expect, on an ongoing basis, that 60 per cent of our workforce will stay remote or have a hybrid schedule where they work from home mostly and come into the office one or two days a week," said Clarke during the corporation's Q2 2020 earnings conference call.
I yearn for the day that an investor reminds him of this during an earnings call.
My previous team lead was a super smart guy and pleasant to work with, in the 1.5 years that I worked with him, I saw him once on camera. It didn't matter to him or me to see each other's face. The only people it seems to matter are the suits, who go around nitpicking everything making life miserable for everyone. Sure, it is nice to have human connection and seeing people on camera helps, but if someone doesn't want to be on camera, why push them? The sarcasm ("someone is having a bad hair day"), the threats ("camera or else...") - it just reeks of pettiness and stupidity.
None of this makes any sense. My job is to write code, I am not a model for toothpaste or eyelashes or lipstick or razor or whatever. Just leave me alone so I can do the tasks that I was hired for.
I don't think COVID changed the work culture much, except exposing some corporate lies ("you gotta haul your ass to the office to be effective" etc). The more we think things are changing, the more they are staying the same.
I'm actually buying this being 100% remote. We had more than a couple of folks who never showed their faces except for the first interview, never attended any face to face meeting (company sponsored travel and accommodation) and in one case a dude posted a daily update from his second (or third, or seventh) company on our channel by mistake and was pissed off he's getting fired.
I'll take the video if this means I can stay 100% remote otherwise they'll announce RTO and I don't even have an office to go to in my country.
That dude who posted updates on the wrong channel? He deserves to get fired. That said, lets say he was doing his job well and he was posting the right updates to the right company channel, then why does anyone care if he has 1 job or 10? Sure it is ethically dubious - so is not providing raises, not keeping up promises, withholding promotions for no reason etc (one of my team mates was hired at a very low salary with the promise that they will pay market rate after 6 months, it has been more than a year now, they refuse to honor their promise. He is fantastic and still gets treated like this). Ethics works both ways.
Suppose person A is sharp and fast and finishes his work in 4 hours while person B takes 8 hours for the same set of tasks. Is A going to be paid twice as B? In knowledge work, why does anyone care if a person works 2 hours a day or 20, as long as they finish their work in the agreed upon time?
If one is to believe Linkedin crowd, yes. I have long stopped trying to understand that frame of mind. I simply accept that it exists and plan around people with those perspectives.
And yet, it seemed very important for the managers that I come every day to the office and make those calls from there, rather than from my home. They couldn't make even the excuse about people being in the same room, because we obviously were not. But if you make the rules, you do not really need an excuse.
Then COVID came, and impossible things became possible overnight.
Now they are gradually becoming impossible again. Except that more people are pissed off, because they remember that it used to be possible.
Inflation, crypto, and sports betting removed almost all stigma from gambling.
Being in your 20s with a crippling gambling addiction is just normal now.
The tech industry has finish metamorphosis and is now just another financial industry. No care towards building great products or solving real problems.
Just building great pitch decks and solving for investor attraction.
OAI is the peak example. ChatGPT was the fastest growing product ever and, especially in the early forms, sucked.
Even now, it’s just kind of mid.
OAI seems more focused on regulatory capture and spending on compute rather than innovating.
That’s why deep seek caught them with their pants down.
And there's still a ton of innovation going on in the tech industry. There have been shifts; there's a lot more about open source for example. AI is way over-hyped probably but there's still the core of something useful there even if we don't really know how it will develop.
My sister is currently 23 and I talk to her about this a lot. At least from what she tells me, I don’t think I am.
I mean… pump.fun exists…
Remember, the 20yo people now grew up with CS go betting, loot box mania, then sports betting, then crypto.
They’ve been cooked wrt gambling their whole lives.
> And there's still a ton of innovation going on in the tech industry
I don’t think that’s true, mostly.
Please give me some links. I’d honestly like to see where.
I feel so down on tech right now.
I feel like all I do is work on money making machines without solving actual problems for people.
>I don’t think that’s true, mostly.
I mean there's all the work in the cloud-native space. Fusion and quantum remain speculative and probably relatively long term but you can't say there isn't a lot of innovative work going on there. Lots of little things in the Linux kernel and elsewhere in open source even beyond cloud-native. AI is probably a big deal depending upon how you define it although I'm more cautious than many here are.
I'd argue that a big chunk of that particular space is sales innovation rather than tech innovation. But I'm admittedly pretty jaded and cynical of all the bs at this point.
It feels like tech lost the plot. (This was most apparent during the NFT craze)
We advance technology for the sake of it, assuming that solutions will be found using this new technology.
There’s no focus on people anymore, just technology in the hopes that one will be a jackpot.
> AI is probably a big deal depending upon how you define it although I'm more cautious than many here are.
I think we’re on the same page here and it illustrates my point.
Innovation still happens, ofc. I think AlphaFold is a major innovation, for example.
I just feel like it’s no longer the focus of the industry at large
It really disappoints me that air filtration was not taken seriously during covid, it should have been mandated by the government and paid for by the government for public places like post offices, and there should have been tax credits given to businesses to install air filtration systems. But no, we've learned nothing, and people continue to get sick far more than they would have to if we only decided to do something about it with readily available mitigations. Of course, it also helps to not elect a malicious narcissist to lead us down a path of ignorance.
I was a bartender for over 20 year and never, i.e., very rarely, got sick. I'm pretty isolated now due to being a caregiver. Nearing the tailend of that role though and think often about how I am going to ease myself back into a regular life.
It was much more of an "experiment" before covid, getting every virus that came my way, to see how much damage it did to my body. There's a lot of evidence that even the regular flu causes irreparable damage to the body.
https://www.health.com/condition/flu/flu-long-term-effects
So, you can keep your own experiment going if you like, but I'll take the experiment that doesn't result in heart complications, loss of endurance and strength, physical decline and secondary infections. You can keep performing that "experiment" all you want.
>my money's on worse long-term outcomes.
My bet is on living longer for not having contracted the flu 40 more times in my lifetime, or long-covid, which would erase a year of my life just living through it not to mention the toll it takes on the body.
And getting the flu or a cold is not the only way to exercise the immune system, your immune system is constantly fighting pathogens. If it isn't then you'd be dead right now from something normally most people wouldn't die from because they have functioning immune systems. So, no I'm not concerned about my immune system not being able to fight off infection, it's doing that right now as we speak, and so is yours too whether you know it or not.
It's also known that when the immune system is too aggressive, people also die from the immune response. A lot of people died from covid because their immune system was fighting too hard.
Getting an avoidable disease certainly is quite a gamble.
I feel like 1-3 times a year is much more realistic. For me, that’s a small price to pay for social activity.
Maybe my immune system is just not that great, and covid has taught me it doesn't have to mean guaranteed illness so many times a year. I do mask when appropriate. I don't mask when the risk is low. How am I not socially active?? Forget it, you don't know me at all.
I’ll admit that I was throwing some shade — but I was really just implying that “5-8 times a year” seemed like an exaggeration to me, not that you are a hermit.
Still, no need for that tone, so I apologize.
Everything is marketing and when push comes to shove nothing matters.
I'm fine with transactional if I'm shopping at the grocery store. Somewhere where I spend 8+ hours a day, I kind of want to have some human connection with people.
Some days, I really miss where I worked in Italy. We weren't "family", or even "friends" really, but we were all friendly and got on well and people seemed to care about one another. And importantly there was none of that fake-ass "family" crap from management - we were all there to do a job and do it with pride, but without all the 'rah rah' BS.
Whether it's the most productive who remain is always a question, of course.
"Companies issuing RTO mandates “lose their best talent”: Study "
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/12/companies-issuin...
This is a common misunderstanding. The people who produce value in businesses (anything larger than a true startup) are not "more motivated" regarding the business than the others. They are more talented, more experienced, and/or enjoy what they are doing more. None of that is intrinsic to the business. If you try to root out "unmotivated" people, you are just going to lose your best. Alternatively, depending on how you use the word ("motivation" is a really broad term), a lack of motivation is typically a problem with the business, and not the employee, so getting rid of the employees most affected by the problem won't fix the problem.
The approach ensures that the people who most badly need a paycheque or who just are into it for a paycheque are those that are most likely to stay. Not likely the most experienced and best workers.
The most passionate people can go anywhere and do anything and are more likely to leave.
These platforms made remote work during the pandemic possible for orgs that didn't know how to work remotely already. But they are not ideal, far from it.
wait, what?
In bigger companies teams are autonomous, they arent asking CEO if they can use Java or if they can work remotely.
I was there during the first mandate. But I had a “field by design” role that was exempted. Those roles lost that exemption this year according to some of my old coworkers.
So, if a CEO mandates everybody get off the Oracle JVM then you have some discretion on moving to OpenJDK or say re-writing things in C#.
Also, managers often have a lot of discretion is reporting problems. If somebody you supervise doesn't ever show up in the office but is still getting their work done then you have little reason to inform HR. However, if HR is monitoring badge data on their own then your discretion is irrelevant.
Moral of the story is: thread carefully.
Knowing this proposition had the longevity of a housefly, I found remote-friendly work. In writing.
That all changed later where we had to get approval from our skip skip manager for travel on the company dime.
i'd complain more except I bike to the office and thus I'm getting exercise that I'd otherwise put off.
Seems it's employees within an hour of the office, unclear on those not.
Years ago the company I worked at implemented the same policy. Funnily enough I had been planning to move but being lazy about it, and you can bet that policy lit a fire under me. Was further than an hour away within 2 months.
I like the energy we get when we work in the same space. I like being able to look people in the eye when discussing challenging or emotional topics. I like being able to brainstorm together at will, and use the whiteboards. I like seeing our office space we pay for being used by more than just 2 people. I enjoy our staff lunches and getting to know each other socially. Most people have a <10m commute in our small town, so travel time isn't a big deal.
Half our company is remote, and the other half work from home most days. But I'd prefer we all be local and in the office ideally. There, I said it.
I have to work from home. A day at home is like a week at the office for me in terms of productivity. The office is a distraction.
Conversely, I have an employee who repeatedly demonstrates that zero office days translates directly into zero commits.
Small companies can afford to give managers the freedom to apply different policies to different people as suits their work habits and abilities. But at publicly traded companies, the risk of a discrimination case is far too great to go with anything other than a blanket policy that screws everyone equally.
She liked working for Apple much, much more.
I think relatively poor treatment of employees is just ingrained into Dell's culture.
I'm thinking about my own employer, where I have been WFH since I got hired. My team is spread across 5+ states. I'd be the only person from my team in the office nearest to me were there an RTO mandate. I think there would only be one or maybe two other people there who I've even worked with on anything, in my several years of employment.
No 30-second chitchat opportunities.
It's a slap in the face to people who actually work hard.
It's just power move.