Suburbs can be, see suburbs built pre-WWII which typically had a train line connecting them to the nearby city industrial center which was used for daily commuting of workers who walked or biked to the station.
291 karma · joined January 30, 2014
I'd say there are far _less_ phone calls as a remote employee than in office because there is an expectation in my remote employment that work is conducted asynchronously so Slack, E-mail, and written documentation is highly prioritized.
When I worked in-office stakeholders called me all the time, because they expected me to be at a desk and accessible by phone. It wasn't like they were going to come over from another floor or office complex just to talk with me. In remote, those kinds of phone where expected to be a Slack message or an e-mail.
These days, I pretty much expect 0 spontaneous phone calls in a work day. Phone calls are scheduled in advance, with agendas, plenty of time to plan out what I'm going to say. There's a high bar to pass to force everyone involved into a synchronous timeline and yank them out of whatever work they're in the middle of.
I guess my anecdotal experience with owning laptops from the early 2000s to today. An early 2000s laptop I expected to last between 18-24 months before it was shot. I don't think anyone made it through my college on the same laptop from Freshman year to graduation regardless of manufacturer.
Laptops in the last 10 years? All of those went at lest 4 years, and my 2014 MBP is still running fine. So it seems to me like things are improving.
The suburb was built within a decade of the end of WWII and during the Korean war. So it was a safe bet that most households had a member who was a Veteran or related to a Veteran who could wave them in.
As time progressed, less and less households in the neighborhood would probably qualify. So its no longer a community centerpiece.
I went back to the Cleveland suburbs for a grandparent's funeral several years back and I could definitely see how in the 1950s the structure of the suburb would've been great for the large Catholic families that lived there.
It was centred around the VFW, several parks, and a school. Children could play in the streets. Parents could socialize at the VFW and walk home. Each corner had a shopping complex with a grocery, gas station, barber etc. It was never more than 1/2 mile to all your commercial needs -- and a safe sidewalk walk if you sent kids to go get milk or eggs. If you were working downtown there was public transit to take you from the suburb to the city center and back again. I could see how this would be a very nice set up for where my parents grew up.
Today this doesn't exist. The corner shopping complexes are entirely vacant. Grocery is now only available at bigger box-stores requiring an hour of commuting in traffic on roads that don't have sidewalks. The school closed. The VFW is no longer culturally relevant.
Where is my home office (I guess people are calling them "home labs" these days) going to be has probably always been my top concern since my first apartment and long before I started working from home. Having at least a dedicated room to set up my equipment and hack on side projects is always my top priority since that is where I'll be spending most of my free-time.*
* Granted since I work from home, I now really would like _two_ home offices so I can properly context switch between work work, and side projects. But I guess that is excessive.
I ask because I've been doing remote work web development for 9 years now on a 10mb DSL line, and honestly haven't really seen much any need to go faster. Not at least work-related requirements.
I have a domain whose only public facing service is just some picture I took. Am I using that domain? Yes, sure. It hosts all kinds of intranet services -- a few are whitelisted to other external IPs. Could I set up my own DNS on my network for those services and not own a public domain for them? Sure. But then I need to make sure anyone joining the network is first configured to use that DNS, instead of just joining the VPN and now the services all publicly available to you.
As far as Joe-public is concerned, I'm just squatting on that domain and not using it.
I'm not a regular hours kind of guy. I want to put in a couple hours at 2 am. I want to sleep in. I'd like to go for a couple hour walk in the afternoon. Maybe chores or something personal was stressing me out that needed to be taken care.
Once I came to terms with just letting the two blend together, so much stressed came off my shoulders. Now, I'm available 9-5 on my cell if the team needs to chat -- but I get tickets cleared out when the I'm at peak motivation for that kind of work.
I'm far more productive then when I was trying to force myself to slog through unproductive afternoons. I got the hours in, but not the work. Now, I feel much more balanced between work and personal affairs.
The main reason that I wouldn’t want to be using an email address is because I want the account to be disposable.
Just make it that if I don’t have a second factor for recovery, there is no recovery.
Much better to look around and find the product/project that is actually going to spawn revenue for the company and get on that team. When layoffs come, you've a much better chance of weathering the storm.*
* No guarantee that management won't do something stupid and lay off the golden egg under some stubborn belief the money sink will someday take off.
If cat's get into my traps, they just get dumped at the pound. Their owners can go pick up their little invasive darlings there.
But they usually don't get near my yard due to the hounds guarding the chickens.
Already worked from home.
Didn't really go out in public much before the pandemic, other than a biweekly grocery run.
I can make a better meal, spiced to my particular tastes better than any restaurant. I have enough books, movies, and games at home to fill a lifetime with entertainment (not even counting the internet). Friends have been scattered to the wind for decades -- phone calls and messaging are sufficient.
The wilderness is still open, so my solo backcountry hiking has remained unchanged...
If anything, I've been taken by surprise to find that people find going into public a necessity for their mental health instead of a detriment.
I don't actually play role-playing games at all anymore. But it's an entire genre of work (made up geographies, bestiaries, etc.) that isn't really served outside of games very much.
Reason being taxes and labor relations laws (PTO requirements, health insurance isn't going to extend to your country -- or really any of the benefits package).
I've been with remote employers who will go a step further and also restrict individual states (e.g. no California) or only hire in states where they have existing employees to reduce the load on HR.
They'll need to register in each State they've got employees. If they're taking on employees internationally, they might need to set up some kind of legal entity in that country. Which if it's a country like China, oh boy, that's a lot of paperwork.
Employees don't need to be aware of the backdoor if they aren't the one's listening.
At least, I assume Whatsapp is already compromised by some state actor and Facebook is getting some kind of funding to look the other way.
You want a static IP address for at least one on-all-the-time box to route all traffic through and get a domain pointed at it. You don't want to have to deal with an ISP that thinks they can determine which ports you want open.
Myself, I tend to buy paperback, read and then donate. If the book was good and I want to keep it for my personal collection. I track down a hardcover copy.
I worked for a company at one point where there was two teams. One team was maintaining the company's main product which was consistently making positive returns to the company year after year. The second team was working on green field projects whose value was entirely speculative. I started on team two, and quickly switched to team one.
After a year when the layoffs came, which team got cut?
Maybe the Lobster rolls are bigger?
It seems more like it's those doing the hiring who are slacking on their responsibility than the school.
I keep reading about AMP on HN, but I have yet (professionally or personally) actually come across AMP in the wild unless I intentionally went looking for it -- or am I consuming AMP and not even realizing it?