librish

The debate around this usually turns pretty unproductive because many of the people who are pro-WFH are unwilling to entertain the idea that working from home is just a net negative for the company. Any pushes for WFH gets blamed on either middle managers who have nothing better to do than micromanage you, or Big Corporate Office who has millions on the line.

I agree that there's no good data to back this up, it seems really hard to collect. Unless you have a rock solid idea on how to measure productivity? The rest of your post is essentially "I hesitate to ask, but are you bad at your job?"

No, it's more that when you're venturing outside your usual territory it can be so much quicker to ask your teammates who are area owners.

If I'm modifying widget X that John built, and I encounter something non-obvious, I can spend an hour figuring out why that was, or I can ask John sitting next to me, and he can usually unblock me in about 30 seconds.

When I help people get up to speed in code I've written I usually say something along the lines of "if you get stuck and you've spent 5 minutes trying to figure it out, please ask me about it".

What do you work on and what % of the day do you work on tasks that complex?

Hours is an incredibly long time. I'm not against people blocking off specific time when dealing with an especially gnarly bug or planning out a major feature, but for day-to-day tasks the cost of an interruption is usually a "right, where was I" once it's over.

"So you're saying that your ability to get work done is dependent on forcing time with your co-workers on your schedule instead of theirs? This would be rude even if in the office. I've had the complete opposite experience of being able to get co-workers to respond in chat and jump onto meetings when needed."

I'm saying on average, everyone's ability to get stuff done is higher if everyone can interrupt everyone.

There are a lot of companies making remote work work for them, and for a lot of people's lifestyles it's a huge boon.

My personal experience has been that WFH has lead to an absolute grinding halt in productivity that requires any form of collaboration. A lot of people will often not respond to Slack for several hours and any video conferencing is usually scheduled for later in the week, instead of in 20 minutes.

I know a lot of people here really like the idea of several hours worth of undisturbed work, but my (again, personal) experience is that that leads to a much lower overall productivity for a team compared to one where people can easily interrupt each other to get unblocked.

The biggest surprise to me is that it feels like there wasn't very much guidance or mandates on _how_ to work remotely. Instead we were all set free, and when the first iteration didn't work out it's back to the office for everyone.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree, that's not my experience.

It's not abundantly clear to me. The author probably enjoyed those nine years a lot more than someone who adopts a mercenary attitude would have. Human beings love belonging places.

What did this emotional investment cost him? Slightly more pain when the relationship ended (and it seems like they're already excited for what's next)?

In the context of this post what does "But never forget they're co-workers, not family." mean?

What should the author have done differently and how would that have changed things?

Staying emotionally guarded for 9 years is a bad trade-off with having a layoff feel less bad.

It's OK to be taken advantage of a little bit.

Reading the responses to some of these posts it feels like the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction in the "the company is not your family" discussion.

Yes, if you expect corporate America to always treat you fairly you're going to end up disappointed. But spending 9 years at a place and not even giving a little bit of yourself to the company seems even worse.

It's OK to think that your boss cares about you as a person, it's OK to make friends at work, and it's OK to believe in the company mission, as long as you don't overdo it.

The point is that when people say calories IN they normally refer to what you put in your mouth, not how much your body absorbs.

You said:

> I pay about half in rent what my neighbors do.

I assumed that most of your $4,000 a month was going towards rent, which would mean your neighbors are paying close to $8,000 a month. That's a very large number so I asked about that.

This was apparently wrong enough for you to want to correct me (without saying what your neighbors actually pay). That made me then try to understand if you have really high fees. This also doesn't seem to be the case.

For most people if they're paying $4000 a month the majority of that is going towards rent. Utilities, insurance (for a renter), ISP will rarely be over $500 a month, but maybe one of these things is really expensive in your location.

Do you not expect a certain level of professionalism?

How large / where is is your place if your neighbors pay $8000 a month to rent it?

This isn't an accurate description of most peoples' lives in San Fransisco.

What is the measurable difference after controlling for what the OP listed?

Is the actual view rendering done in webviews? I've struggled with that because the compatibility between different Android webviews can be very janky, and lead to some really obscure bugs, plus on many phones it just feels "off".

> Exhibit A of why not to take your day job too seriously. Be professional — but that’s as far as it goes.

People spend 8 hours + lunch and commuting every weekday on their job. It's almost 50% of the time you spend conscious during a week. Most people want more out of that than just a chore that needs to be done.

If person A's lies have clearly and demonstrably hurt person B's reputation, relationships, livelihood, and personal safety, should they have any recourse?

There is almost no one who's actually for completely unchecked freedom of speech, so it's all a matter of deciding where along your sliding scale you draw the line.

Would you suggest that things like murder threats or libel should be legal? Otherwise you're advocating for conditional or contingent free expression too.

Yes, I'm asking within the demographic of say 20-50 how are you coming to the conclusion that the risk is not worth it?

At no risk for what?

What makes you think that? Serious events for regular covid was heavily skewed towards the elderly.

I'm looking at your link but I can't find anything about serious events controlled for age group (to make it a fair comparison to your covid hostpitalisation number). Is the data in there somewhere?

What constitutes a 'serious adverse event' in this data? Do you mind linking the source? Having a 1 in 3000 chance of getting so sick you need to be hospitalized seems quite bad.

My question wasn't about public policy or mandates, I'm asking what data an individual is looking at to come to the conclusion that not getting vaccinated is the right choice.

COVID is much less dangerous to younger people but there are still very real risks involved, especially non-lethal ones. Assuming a 25% probability of catching it, how are you coming to the conclusion that the risk of the vaccine is higher?

A question for vaccine skeptics:

For it to be a reasonable choice to not want to take the vaccine wouldn't you need to balance the risk of death / complications from the vaccine against the risk of death / complications from covid multiplied by the risk of getting covid?

There seems to be a lot of "aha I knew it" whenever any side-effect of the vaccine is found, but aren't the side-effects of covid well established, on average more severe, and much more common?