CydeWeys

People taking calls from cars (and thinking it's OK in the first place) is exactly why we're going back to 5 days in office. People are simply taking too much advantage. You're being paid to work those 40 hours a week, not do whatever the hell you want to during the day and try to cram in work while you're driving from one errand to the next.

The managers will bring it up because they have pressure on them coming from higher up to have their reports all be compliant with the work-from-office policy, and in extreme cases, they would be expected to manage out the people who are flouting it. Not doing these things could easily result in an unsatisfactory performance rating for the manager.

The thing is, when it's taking millions of dollars in equipment to fit out a lab, many engineers are all sharing that equipment. It would cost many tens of millions of dollars to buy duplicates of all that nice equipment for every single engineer to have at home, plus many of those engineers won't even have space for the equipment at home anyway! I live in a relatively small apartment with my girlfriend. We struggled during the pandemic because we don't even have space for two proper work desks. We definitely don't have a bunch of extra space for lots of lab equipment.

It's crazy how in the US we make our cashiers suffer by forcing them to stand up all day for no reason, while meanwhile in Europe, they're mandated to have access to seats by their unions.

It just doesn't happen, and chatting over VC isn't the same as meeting people in real life anyway. In the office, I'll randomly bump into people I've known from years back and have small chats, but I never in a million years would have specifically scheduled to do so (sometimes I don't even remember their names, just what they look like!).

> In many cases it may just be managers who need to justify having spent all that money on their office spaces.

I find this argument uncompelling as everyone can obviously see that things changed since February 2020, and sunk costs do not justify throwing more good money after bad. It could easily have been the correct decision to acquire more office space years back and it could just as easily now be the correct decision to divest that office space if more workers are remote, and it's not anyone's fault for not having seen into the future that there'd be a global pandemic.

Not sure how that changes anything I said.

I bet if you asked those people who were winning those life-changing amounts of money, they would say they felt the opposite of exploited.

Again, more overwrought language. People are doing this out of their own free will, and benefiting substantially from it. If you truly care about people being exploited in uneven financial situations, you would do well to put all your effort towards enacting a higher minimum wage, removing part-time and contractor classification for all low-paying jobs, etc. Because complaining about fun YouTube videos paying people six figures for not all that much time ain't it. And if you really think that people who don't have lots of money can never consent to doing anything, well god isn't that a paternalistic approach that infantilizes adults.

We're speaking English in this conversation, not Latin or French. The word "exploit" clearly has a significantly negative connotation that is not appropriate in this context.

Man, this is overwrought. We're just talking about a YouTuber here for Christ's sakes. He makes silly videos of competitions with admittedly grueling conditions for entertainment, but people sign up for it voluntarily and they can leave at any time. This is not a serious ethical quandary.

Except crucially the pay isn't very good for tellers, whereas it's better for proper bankers / branch managers / etc. I think "does the job pay well" and "is it not manual labor" are both more important aspects of what white collar means than literally what you're wearing to do the job. I'm a FANG SWE and we mostly dress like slobs, but it's absolutely white collar despite the literal attire because it's a highly paid job in an office environment.

I don't know if I would classify a bank teller position as being white collar. It's more of a service industry position, like being a cashier. And as such, hourly pay is appropriate as they aren't making enough to be exempt for salaried (hourly pay is actually better here as they're mandated extra pay for working overtime).

I kind of blame consumers for some of this stuff? Good options are still out there. Now, admittedly, I do have a full beard, so I only shave my upper cheeks and lower neck, but I've been making do with a Merkur long-handle double-sided safety razor (the model 23C) for about a decade and a half now, and those blades feel like they last forever. Plus, I bought 100 of the blades for like $10 on Amazon a decade ago, and still have the vast majority of them left. I think this supply might outlive me!

So, yeah, good options are available out there for lots of things, it's just the consumers aren't picking them (or don't do research and thus aren't aware of their existence). And the manufacturers and retailers are understandably interested in pushing the products that make the highest profits for them, just like the consumer should have an interest in getting the best deal for themselves. But I don't know what the alternative would be.

The point is, the stock would likely be down at least 5X, so if you wanted to be a long-term investor, you could take the cash that was forcefully cashed out and re-buy in now and get over 5X the share of the company. Selling high and re-buying in low is a very good strategy if you can actually do it, and you have the opportunity to do it!

But you certainly don't want to be the bagholder who held it when it was high (the price Elon was willing to pay for it) and then rode it all the way down to the bottom when it cratered.

> Replace Boeing with Facebook/Google, and it still sounds strange to feel bad for the workers at those companies when the executives make bad decisions like chasing profits over all.

I don't understand this sentiment at all. I know quite a few people who worked on the Google Domains team. It was a good team, a good product, and it sadly was all blown up by some senior executive decision that didn't make any sense.

Why can't I feel bad for the workers I knew whose product got deleted out from under their feet?? Some of them are in the process of getting laid off now!

> The only thing I'm mad about is I owned some Twitter stock, but when Musk bought it I was cashed out against my desires.

You got lucky. Twitter's revenue is down 80% since it went private, and your shares would correspondingly be worth a tiny fraction of what they were originally worth if you still owned them. Musk has succeeded with other companies but his Twitter acquisition has been a total failure. He simply doesn't understand how to run a social networking company.

Agreed on your first point, not on your second point. Lots of tech companies did over-hire during the pandemic in a way that had entirely foreseeable results, but everyone simply got caught up in the FOMO.

On the contractor front though, you aren't going to remotely get the best and brightest by going that way, not unless you're actually contracting with industry leaders who are going to be charging way more than FTEs will cost you (and there aren't that many industry leaders). There are so many good tech companies out there offering FTE positions, so a company offering a lower-paid, lower-benefits contracting positions is simply not going to be competitive in the labor marketplace.

The built-in screens in cars are much larger and easier to use while driving. Using a tiny phone screen for navigation is simply not as good.

And the ones that remain have terribly reduced morale and lose productivity.

Those are like its most basic and widely used functions, and I've never seen an implementation that's lacked then. Have you?

Highly doubt it. That would increase their labor costs; they were already set up well with having those SWEs in Michigan.

Android Auto is really useful for navigation and playing your own music/podcasts. I don't own a car but every rental car I've had over the past decade has supported it and I don't know what I'd do without it, it's that essential.

Large-scale layoffs almost never means better software though.

Right, but obviously it's something that plenty of people do care about, and is a big driver of keeping me on the upgrade cycle.

And "there is a big difference but not everyone cares about it" is quite different from "there isn't a big difference". The latter is clearly false.

Picture taking and video recording have gotten unbelievably better over the past decade. They were not remotely sufficient for many use cases ten years ago and even now there's still plenty of room left for improvement.

The semi is such a failure that I completely forgot about it. As far as I can tell, it's shipped around 150 units in total. It's basically a complete non-factor for a company with a valuation of $600B.

Nobody cares about minor model refreshes or yet another iteration of a driver assist technology. Tesla's only real release in many years is Cybertruck. They were supposed to have the Roadster out by now too, but that's years late.

But if Tesla is really doing so well as you claim, why has their net profit significantly decreased two quarters in a row now? Why is their stock back at levels from 4 years ago? Why has it underperformed the S&P by 17 percentage points sinc ethen? https://apnews.com/article/tesla-earnings-second-quarter-sal...

You could start by looking at stock price. TSLA is flat since 2020, and their only release in a long time is the Cybertruck which is frankly terrible. They've also lost a huge amount of marketshare. Oh, and Musk's outspoken political opinions are toxic to most EV buyers and have massively turned off a large part of the fanbase that originally propelled him to success.

Twitter is a complete dumpster fire (revenue down 80% since he acquired it, and is now making only around 10% of the money required to even service the debt from acquisition). Basically every company he's involved with is doing terribly, except for SpaceX, which fortunately has Gwynne Shotwell at the helm. But even SpaceX isn't doing so well with their latest rocket, Starship; the upper stage is simply way too big and heavy for most uses, and will require up to 15 (!!) additional refueling in-orbit refueling launches to fully refuel a single Starship for missions beyond LEO, like the upcoming lunar missions. This is a huge liability that casts doubt on the overall architecture. Contrast with the Saturn V, a smaller rocket that could nevertheless do an entire self-contained lunar mission with a single launch.

I was a huge Elon fan for many years, but everything he's been doing recently has been a swing and a miss.

No. He's legitimately done a terrible job the last few years across most of his businesses.

Nah, it's way more than 1% housing. Even many drug-addicted people can still manage to not be homeless when housing is cheap (especially SROs), and a lot of the drug addiction is downstream of becoming homeless and hanging out with drug addicts all day.