13 karma · joined December 27, 2019
The argument that other workers need to make up for the slack left by parents does not really make sense; you just add tasks to your backlog, and do them when you have time. You should be in control of your own schedule, and don't let your manager just extend your workday. If your manager does not respect your time and is overworking you, quit. As engineers, we are not punching a time clock. If you are, take issue with that, not the flexibility some other coworkers are getting (flexibility that they need).
If you also want more schedule flexibility, push for it. Talk to your manager. Organize with your fellow employees. Organize with other engineers. Start a union (gasp!).
Work-life balance is always a balance. Our jobs should take note of what we do outside of work and how that affects our ability to work. We are people, not mindless, identical worker bees. Our life outside of work is most likely more important to us than our life at work.
Having children is very much unlike most other activities in that you cannot quit. You can quit a side hustle, you can quit a sport. But you can't quit being a parent. So when a parent turns to their boss and says "I need more flexibility", the manager has to give that flexibility or the worker is going to have to find a new job that does give that flexibility. Usually capitalism will extract as much time from a worker as possible, forcing the worker to give up many things in the name of work. It's impossible to give up your child though, so obviously capitalism has to yield there. But with better labor organization, capitalism will yield to other things too.
If we all want schedule flexibility and more time so badly, let's unionize and get that. Not resent our working parents, who most likely have more on their plate and less free time than non-parents, even with the flexibility.
I even use Linux on my personal laptop. It's a Thinkpad actually. Yes, the touch pad on Mac is better. But Linux is just so much quicker and lighter, and really the only major annoying thing I've run into is electronically signing PDFs.
Also, in a blockchain system, any person can connect a node to the network and can see all of the votes that are occurring/have occurred, and can somewhat verify the results of the election.
You could even go so far as to say that people would be happier under socialism than capitalism :)
Yes, mania feels good at times, really good, but at other times, it feels extremely uncomfortable. Your euphoric emotions can quickly turn to anger. Being aggressive usually has it's roots in some emotion that is not pleasant. Even just general speeding is not pleasant all of the time. Sure, there may be a few people who experience chronic mania in a way that doesn't ever feel bad for them. But most manic people experience negative subjective feelings from their mania at one point or another.
To say that mania always feels good, and is a state to aspire to, is dangerous for people who actually do experience mania, and extremely tone deaf and out of touch for those who don't experience mania.
I moved to working at start ups where the code is open source. Start ups move faster, and it's easier to use open source tools than internal/proprietary tools. At the large tech company, we couldn't use anything past C++03 (this was in 2016), due to technical constraints. At my start up, we use the newest C++ as soon as it comes out.
For what it's worth, the start up I work at now is fairly large and has a lot of code running in production. So I get the reward of pushing to prod, but the dev speed of a smaller company. Sure I take a pay hit, but I still make more than enough money, and I get to work on cool stuff.
Sure, if you get a majority of stake in the network, you can create alternative histories. But, as others have pointed out, this is much more difficult than a 51% attack in PoW.
Also, I am an ex division 1 wrestler, and pretty muscular, and I always felt my physique actually worked to my detriment in interviews; I take a lot of steps to not come off as a jock/meathead. I wear glasses to make myself look more like a programmer, than an athlete. Maybe there is a difference though between being in shape, and being a division 1 wrestler.
Or maybe this is mostly a west coast/silicon valley thing. I've been working out of NYC mostly. Regardless though, this article really does not resonate with my experience as a software engineer.