creepydata

Complete and utter nonsense.

Business and personal relationships can most certainly be separated, it just takes the right mindset and the willingness to set personal boundaries. However, if you are telling your employees "come in in shorts, drink beer, don't leave the office, we are all just friends here" you're intentionally putting up barriers to forming that mindset.... You don't have the same sort of relationship with your dad as you so with your spouse as you do with your best friend as you do with your good friends as you do with an acquaintance as you do with a stranger. This is normal.

Learning to work well with people who you don't particularly like is a skill. One that is learnable. Children have problems with it but adults should know better and if they don't know better they should be fired and replaced with people who can act like adults. "Working well with others" is something one is taught in kindergarten, it is mandatory for the workplace.

There's plenty of people I don't particularly like that I work with, that I know I wouldn't get along with on a personal level but I don't have issues working with them. People who I hold very, very different core values from me and people who have fringe political beliefs. But I don't have issues with them at work. I wouldn't want to socialize with them though.

Avoiding offending someone is easy, it's called avoiding saying offensive things or things "considered offensive," otherwise known as "being nice to others." Once again, we learned this in kindergarten.

If nobody is helping you with business problems unless you are friends or have "common ground" you have a very, very dysfunctional organization and it needs serious help. Even worse if everyone underminds each other. Not being friends with a coworker is not an excuseable reason for undermining them and at that point you are dealing with an office full of psychopaths and children. Forcing them to socialize with each other isn't going to fix the larger core issue.

What about customers? Do you need to 'get to know' your customers personally before you can work with them too? I'd imagine that would be a huge barrier to new customer acquisition. "Sorry, we can't give you a quote until we 'know your motivations(?)' and get to know your pets names. Meet at the pub at 5?"

The toxic workplaces you have described have nothing to do with a lack of coworker socialization.

Have you seen your doctor about this problem? There's quite a lot they can do.

Here's the FDA summary report - https://www.fda.gov/newsevents/publichealthfocus/ucm173146.h... - and the actual report - https://www.fda.gov/downloads/drugs/scienceresearch/ucm17325... it's not "deliberately opaque"

And um, yes, the supplement industry is essentially unregulated and is notorious for doing exactly that - putting random shit in there that hasn't been tested for safety and isn't listed on the label. That's up to and including controlled prescription medications.

https://www.livescience.com/40357-herbal-products-unlisted-i...

https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/21/dangerous-dietary-...

Nor did I ever say, or even imply, we should stop selling e-cigs or any other product for that matter.

I mentioned in in another commend but Pacman crashes at level 256

http://pacman.wikia.com/wiki/Map_256_Glitch

This is an fairly easy mistake to make for a novice developer to make. It even has a specific name - integer overflow - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_overflow

The original Pacman crashes at level 256 for the same reason. - http://pacman.wikia.com/wiki/Map_256_Glitch

>we don't say "men nurses", ya know?

It's much worse! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murse

But the manufacturer doesn't have to disclose that information if there's no regulation compelling them to, or they can downright lie if nobody's there watching them. Or just put random shit in there that hasn't been tested for safety.

http://www.webmd.com/smoking-cessation/news/20150218/e-cigar...

>The results of one FDA review of 18 different e-cigarette cartridges found toxic and carcinogenic chemicals in some but not others. All but one of the cartridges labeled “no nicotine” did, in fact, contain nicotine. The authors suggest that “quality control processes used to manufacture these products are inconsistent or non-existent.”

> Flavorings: Goniewicz says hundreds of flavors exist, including cherry, cheesecake, cinnamon, and tobacco. Many of those flavoring chemicals, he says, are also used to flavor food.

>“These are the big unknowns,” he says. “When we eat them, they are safe, but we don’t know what’s going on when we inhale them.”

You start out with "the whole notion of 'work' is flawed." but then you admit that people have different opinions than you. So it's not "flawed" to some people.

In other words, you have hobbies.

First you claimed "until relatively recently, the terms "gender" and "sex" meant essentially the same thing and could be used interchangeably" which is objectively incorrect and you've ignored that I pointed it out.

You also claimed that gender is some sort of scientific concept, which is also objectively incorrect.

If someone asks you to call them by "him" and you call them "her" instead, you are just being unnecessarily mean. This is not a hard concept to understand, be polite to others if you don't want to face problems in your personal life and career. Refer to people as they wish to be referred as. Asking you to do that is not "vocal, vicious and vindictive... [people] ...enforc[ing] their own cultural taboos" and quite frankly I find it disturbing you think is it.

And I can say "people who take offensive to being called 'Sugar Tits' by their coworkers are giant, throbbing dicks" but that is completely irrelevant because we live in a society where that's not appropriate behavior. There can be consequences for violating social norms, this isn't a difficult concept.

This isn't new, being needlessly rude has always destroyed you personally and professionally. I know a guy who lost his job for calling a coworker "Sugar Tits." I would not describe his boss as "vocal, vicious and vindictive" for firing him.

If you are polite to others and "respect the wishes of people who want to be referred to in a specific way" you will have no issues.

If you're being a dick you can be expected to be called out for being a dick, we live in a polite society, this is how these things work.

>Until relatively recently, the terms "gender" and "sex" meant essentially the same thing and could be used interchangeably

Um, no, absolutely not, it's literally the opposite, the term "gender," was essentially introduced to be distinct from biological sex. Its entire purpose for existing is to be different from "sex."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender

>Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity. Depending on the context, these characteristics may include biological sex (i.e. the state of being male, female or an intersex variation which may complicate sex assignment), sex-based social structures (including gender roles and other social roles), or gender identity.[1][2][3] Some cultures have specific gender roles that can be considered distinct from male and female, such as the hijra (chhaka) of India and Pakistan.

>Sexologist John Money introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in 1955. Before his work, it was uncommon to use the word gender to refer to anything but grammatical categories.[1][2] However, Money's meaning of the word did not become widespread until the 1970s, when feminist theory embraced the concept of a distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender. Today the distinction is strictly followed in some contexts, especially the social sciences[4][5] and documents written by the World Health Organization (WHO).[3]

>If someone wants to hold the unscientific (and IMO weird) view that, for example, "otherkin" is a gender, that is perfectly fine by me.

Gender is not a scientific concept, it's a social one. Gender categories and concepts are not uniform throughout history or cultures.

Even biology isn't so clear cut, there also exists people who are intersexed to varying degrees. Is it "unscientific" to call someone who has female sexual organs but has a Y chromosome a women? Maybe, but it makes sense on a social level and if she wants to be referred to as a woman.

I think it's the opposite, I think informality leads to much less effective communication, not more. It's hard to have "tough conversations" when personal relationships are on the line. Telling Steve he needs to start carrying his weight is much more difficult if it means endangering your friendship with Steve.

10 hours a week on teambuilding seems extremely excessive.

The thing is, many people don't want personal relationships with their co-workers, they want business relationships with their co-workers. Forcing employees to socialize with each other means you are excluding those people who don't want to socialize with their co-workers and those who don't have much in common with their co-workers, or even those who don't like their co-workers on a personal level. This seems pretty obvious, but only in retrospect.

I also don't understand what "understanding motivations" means.

No it isn't, "work" is what I do because I have to and "life" is everything else.

I have no idea what sort of response you're looking for.

So you're saying you want to make your work your life? How about "my work is my life," or "I'm married to my job?"

>Yesterday, I had a wide-ranging Slack conversation with some very nice people who patiently allowed this privileged white male to repeatedly touch the third rail of diversity and inclusion.

Read this three times and I can't understand what it means. Can anyone "translate?"

On the overall topic, it seems really obvious in retrospect that removing formalities in the workplace turns the office into a social club and those who don't want to socialize are excluded. Its certainly an unintended consequence though.

I can certainly see the benefits of formality in the office now that I'm older.

I guess it is not really that different than the parking area being really far away and you have to spend time either waiting for/taking the shuttle or walking.

I take it you are young and don't have a family?

Most people over 25 want to go home at the end of the day to their friends/family and don't want to live in dorms.

Why not just wash your hands?

I heard exactly this from someone who practiced either Ju Jitsu or Taekwondo (can't recall which one) - he got into a motorcycle accident and was thrown over the handlebars totally uninjured due to instinctively landing how he learned to in martial arts.

Yes, absolutely. Tenantancy is usually established after around 30 days of continued occupancy and once they are tenants, even if they aren't paying rent, you can't legally kick them out without going through the proper legal channels.

There's even been cases of people posing as fake real estate agents to "rent" apartments. If your dealing with a real estate agent then ask for their ID like you would a landlord, and the license number, and look up their real estate license online.

This was posted here the other day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497237

Most people outside of the startup scene, including myself, especially those over 35, are only in this for the money. That doesn't mean we can't find both personal and professional success.

People who have careers in tech are likely to read an internet forum whose readership is directed at people who have careers in tech. So we aren't going to get much "people who don't have careers in tech" side of the story.

Hypothetical example: Say only 1% of coding bootcamp graduates find the program to be a "success" for them. All of that 1% read hacker news and zero of the 99% read hacker news. If you ask about bootcamp on hacker news you'll only get HN reader's perspective, then you'd believe bootcamps are wildly successful whereas the real number is the opposite.

Um, you really should be loading that sort of text/data from an external resource rather than embedding it in source code. Those sort of text blocks really don't belong in source code.

That's actually really good advice considering that finances are one of the biggest stressors in romantic relationships. Getting your financial life together makes the romantic life much easier and more natural.

You honestly have to ask why you shouldn't include a five year old in scam baiting?

If you're only going to be living there for six months it doesn't really matter.

I once rented a shitty apartment that I knew was shitty and could see was shitty. I needed some place to live right then and there and they weren't asking too much for rent. I wasn't planning on living there more than a year. Ended up living there two years due to medical issues delaying home buying but still don't regret living there at all.

Plus, you reserve hotel rooms sight unseen.

Just touring somewhere isn't going to help, you have to make sure the person who is showing you the apartment owns the apartment, look up real estate records and ask their the landlord's ID. I say this because there is plenty of cases where scammers will break into vacant buildings and "rent" them as long as possible. Heard of a story where a guy was living overseas for a few months and came home to a family living in his house which had been "rented out" by a scammer who broke in and changed the locks.