programmertote

You can build your network by doing a great job at your current work even if it is remote. I worked remote for my previous two companies--the last one is Amazon. I left both with great contacts. In fact, I was referred to Amazon by one of my previous coworkers whom, I had only met in person once. He knows the quality of my work because we have sat in meetings, and worked on projects together.

The point is you don't need to be physically present together to create a solid *professional* network. If your aim are more about building personal network (like making friends), then yes you need an in-office job. To me, I draw a very distinct line between professional and personal life, and in my 15+ years of professional life, I never got into sour relationship with my coworkers because of that.

It includes lunch break at 12pm-1pm. I can confidently tell that most of my former coworkers (since RTO mandate) have been taking it slow/easy more so than they used to be.

$5250 USD (not including the bonus at my new firm, which is expected to range from $5K-$35K; higher cell phone reimbursement; 50% internet reimbursement and $350 yearly allowance for equipment, etc. at the new company). Most importantly (for me), I get paid twice a month at the new company. All in all, I'd say the TC is about the same.

The important caveat is that we ALMOST ALWAYS need to do Chime meetings/Slack chats because our team is split across three cities -- Seattle, Arlington and Chicago. 2/5 of the team is stationed in Seattle office; 2/5 in Arlington; and 1/5 in Chicago. Not to mention that a bunch of folks from Hyderabad in India that we have to continuously work with. On top of all that, folks who are returning to the office can pick one of any weekday to go into the office (the other two days are agreed upon as Tuesday and Wednesday), so some folks are in the office on Monday, some on Friday (nobody choose to go in on Thursday from my limited observation).

I left Amazon a month ago (voluntarily) for a fully remote role because they asked me to move to Seattle/Arlington. When I joined them, I was already in a different state because of my wife's work. So I told them, I cannot join if they don't give me remote exception; it took them ~4-5 weeks to get the sign off for remote exception from the VP. I took the job and 9 months in, Jassy decided to force everyone back to the office.

A few of my coworkers (3 out of ~15 people team) have/had left when RTO mandate was announced, and I know at least 4 people are thinking of leaving as soon as they have a chance. Since the RTO, a lot of my colleagues have started working at 9 am and log out at 5pm pronto. Before RTO, they would be working until 6-7 pm and will be logging in around 8 am. Sometimes, coworkers would even log in late because they were commuting. I wonder if Amazon would check the Slack+Chime logs to see how the activity drops before and after RTO mandate. Based on my observation, I would bet that the activity/productivity drops significantly more.

Glad I left Amazon. I have been programming for 15+ years (have been in a managerial role for 6+ years), and I firmly believe I am (and my team are) more productive working remotely. I will never work for a non-remote companies even if they are big names.

A bit tangential but also related -- I grew up watching 'Adventures of the Gummi Bears' back in the late 80s and early 90s. Recently, I came across it on Disney+ and re-watched it. I was pleasantly surprised that some of the episodes are teaching kids good (again, subjective) morals and behaviors. The language is never crass even when the characters are upset (meaning it's a good thing to teach kids). I liked it so much that I re-watched all of the six seasons twice.

Now that I saw this article and discussion, I'll be trying Bluey next.

It is Buddha telling the traders that they shouldn't trust whatever is told to them even if it comes from the so-called experts/gurus, family/friends, teachers, traditions etc. He told them that they should try to reason out the things being told to them, give these a try in their lives and only keep them if these suggestions/advice works for them. A more simplified version can be found here too: https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/personal/buddhist-pract...

Hope it helps. :)

Thanks for sharing the cartoon author's name. I have seen that before and didn't realize that Gavin is most likely a descendant from Burmese parent(s) -- his last name 'Aung Than' is distinctly Burmese. I immigrated to the US from Burma and it always brings me joy/pride when I see my fellow country people (or descendants of them) are doing something that contributes to the humanity/society. :)

Very good article and I hope more people read it. Over my career of 15 years in software (data management), I have learned exactly that. One other thing that really helped me was something that I learned in my Theravada Buddhist upbringing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesamutti_Sutta

> The Kesamutti Sutta states (Pali expression in parentheses):[5] Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing (anussava), nor upon tradition (paramparā), nor upon rumor (itikirā), nor upon what is in a scripture (piṭaka-sampadāna) nor upon surmise (takka-hetu), nor upon an axiom (naya-hetu), nor upon specious reasoning (ākāra-parivitakka), nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over (diṭṭhi-nijjhān-akkh-antiyā), nor upon another's seeming ability (bhabba-rūpatāya), nor upon the consideration, The monk is our teacher (samaṇo no garū) Kalamas, when you yourselves know: "These things are good; these things are not blamable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness," enter on and abide in them.'

That advice is something that I found very useful in life even though I have become an atheist since I was in 8th-9th grade.

What kind of washers if you don't mind sharing. I want to avoid buying that brand. My guess is Samsung because I have had really bad experience with Samsung stuff over the years.

Yeah, unfortunately. I work one job and am happy with what I make, and the workload is sufficient for me to fill the entire day's worth of time. But I am only happy because the job is remote. I am worried that if news like this (not even sure how much percentage of the employed folks are OE; could very well be 1%) would give excuses to the employers to stop offering remote options. Like you said, I will not click on such articles because the "journalist" will be encouraged to write more clickbait articles which jeopardizes millions of happy remote workers like myself.

I know a little about that. Programmers in Amazon have to work harder mainly due to the poorly-designed/thought-out (despite sometimes unnecessary process like writing design docs and "discussing" over your solution with various 'stakeholders' until it gets approved) systems and tools supporting their internal development work. Pipelines is their CI/CD platform and boy, looking at the interface wants me to puke.

Every single step you need to implement requires you to look up several internal wiki pages, some of which are outdated and/or poorly written or linking out to another wiki page, and so on. My ex-manager always talk about 'scalability' (because they want to sell it to other teams for visibility) although that tool we are designing is going to be used by like 2-3 people and is processing at most like 500GB-1TB a day (which is not big data in my experience). In the name of scalability and rapid deployment, the manager wants us to use CDK, and we spend probably half of our team's effort maintaining/patching/upgrading that CDK dependencies (like Node.js and others). This is not to mention that when you want to tear down the resources created by CDK, it doesn't do things cleanly, so you are left with lots of CDK-created S3 buckets over time. Oh man, I can recount a few more problems surrounding the tools used within Amazon and how obtuse they are for usability and ease-of-development.

Glad to hear they gave your money back in full. I'm now really concerned. It sucks that there seems to be no accountability in the system. I get that they want to catch the folks who abuse the banking system, but if they do, they (the government and the banks) should at least set up a proper channel to give reasons and allow folks like us (regular Joe's) to file complaints. The current system seems really ripe for abuse.

Sorry to hear your story/experience. This worries me because my mother, who currently resides in a SE Asian nation, is transferring some of her money to me (in the hope that she can use it when she migrates to the US).

Did Chase let you withdraw the outstanding balance in full when they closed your account? The last thing I want is to see my money being trapped in limbo state...

Vanguard has been guilty of this as well. Its recent site redesign has been all over the place, and sometimes leaning heavily toward folks using its phone app (not that its phone app is very user friendly either; for example, checking what orders one has placed by account is impossible). It used to be that the website has a table view that shows almost everything I need to know about my holdings. Now, it takes a few clicks to find that info and even then, the layout is so sparse (mobile optimized) and hard to read.

Maybe I'm getting really old and just like to complain about this because I'm not very much used to this phone-oriented UIs.

I'm on the opposite spectrum. I don't like socializing with my coworkers. I keep a respectful and professionally-friendly relationship with them.

I have college friends (not many, just 3 who I call close), and a family. That and life's chores/errands are enough to keep me busy when off work.

To me, relying on coworkers for companionship is not a sustainable approach because like it or not, we need to switch jobs every 2-4 years (esp. when you are junior or esp. when you are not working at a big tech company for a cushiony/chill role, which might be rare), and there is never enough time to build strong bond with anyone you work. This is also disregarding the office politics, bullcrap/hypocritical things that you see some of your coworkers do once in a while.

Not confirmation bias. I have lived in NYC and NJ (right across NYC); Philadelphia; and SF (that was 15 years ago, so maybe things have changed?). I have also driven in Boston, Houston, and LA. The most difficult (nerve-wrecking) places to drive were Miami and LA. At least in LA, you see traffic police cars every now and then, so people are a bit wary of speeding. Here in Miami, it is lawless (literally almost no traffic police car on the highway leading to Miami), which emboldens rule breakers.

I always drive defensively and I am sick of having to pay rising-significantly-faster-than-inflation-rate (part of it is greedflation by insurers, I think, and part of it is because I live in Miami, one of the most natural disaster prone places in the US) premiums for the last two years. It's worse when insurers claim that after COVID, people drive more recklessly and thus, they are paying out more (again, not sure if it is entirely true, but if it's solely based on my Miami driving experience, it likely has some sliver of truth).

I truly wish insurers have better information on driving behaviors to really punish reckless drivers, but I know that the reality would be that insurers will punish both reckless and defensive drivers because more profit.

Sorry about the rant. :)

I hope that one day, our cars are equipped with outward facing cameras, and the feature to auto-report speeding and dangerous driving behaviors on the road to the authorities and/or the insurers.

I drive in Miami proper and EVERY TIME I'm on the road (especially when heading into/out of Miami), I would encounter at least two cars that drives very dangerously (not just speeding, but like cutting across you--driving in the center lane--very closely from the right lane; not signaling and making a sudden right turn into a street in a crowded street; etc. I had to buy up a front and rear facing dashcams, and I sometimes wish I had a button on my steering wheel that would send the last 10 seconds or so of the dashcam recording to the insurance companies or the traffic police.

Your question is very legit. I have been researching on that too and the best I found is this: https://finbox.com/NYSE:CHD/explorer/gp_margin

BUT, we don't really know how these gross margins are actually calculated (meaning, the reporting is all done by these corporations with very complicated accounting methodologies). All things considered though, 41.9% gross profit margin for 2022 is still pretty good. With the supply chain easing, I am very curious to see how that profit margin looks like in 2023.

My totally unsubstantiated guess is like this: labor probably got a 10% bump since COVID; raw materials and oil/gas (for transportation) probably also had like 10-20%% bump in total. Then the remaining 5% (from 35% increase in just the price, NOT including the profit from shrinking) is probably going toward the extra coffers of the corporations.

The old one is 195 loads and the new one is *supposedly* 200 loads. I never really paid attention to those load numbers because in the end, I just use the measure cup (that comes with the container).

Thanks for raising this subtle point though. :)

The worse combo is shrinkflation with significantly increased price. I used to buy Arm and Hammer detergent (250 FL OZ) from Costco for ~$11 about a year ago. Last week, I went to Costco and saw that they have reduced the size of the container (in a very subtle way so it is hard to notice) with 200 FL OZ and charges $14.89. That is like double rip-off.

My salary did not increase 35% between this and last year. For Church & Dwight (Arm and Hammer brand manufacturer) to not only increase the price by at least 35% with shrinkflation, I wonder where the extra profit are going toward.

When I just immigrated 20 years ago, I used to be in awe at the size of commodities and food portions in the US. Nowadays, things are shrinking noticeably and eventually, stuff bought in the US would look just the same in terms of size as what's available in Burma (Myanmar), which is my home country. That observation makes me feel like the US (and probably all of the affluent western nations) is approaching the end of the era of abundance, and life for the future generation would be tougher. Pretty sad/concerning to think about it.

Same thing. I am always good with flossing twice a day, brushing teeth twice a day (in fact, I spend ~10 mins brushing teeth gently and carefully every day). But the dentist in SF I visited 10 years ago "saw" 4 cavities and he showed me the X-rays, which I didn't know better I should have looked at carefully. But I got 4 fillings. Credit to him, those fillings never had any issue for the last 10+ years.

But I went to a new dentist in FL a few months ago, and that guy told me to refill them because according to him, they are starting to crack (not sure how he saw them in grainy X-rays; he tried to show me one, but I couldn't see it) :D Anyway, I agreed to have them refilled since it's been a while and the cost was reasonable. Now one of the fillings he redid in my molar makes me feel uncomfortable when I chew things with it.

I wrote up a more detailed experience about this in another comment in this post. I hope people see it and learn from it to not trust their dentists easily (esp. the ones you are visiting for the first time).

I went to a new dentist after moving to FL. Pines True Smile is their name. The dentist and cleaning hygienist keeps selling me this Invisalign despite me being 40 years old with teeth in great condition (I have two front buck teeth, which are just 3mm ahead of others around them). The hygienist even said because of those two front teeth, the air gets into my mouth and the rest of the gum will be eroded by bacteria more (kind of like a scarce tactic to make me go through with their Invisalign procedure, which would cost me $2-300 out of pocket). I refused because I never had any issue with my teeth and have great set of teeth (my previous dentist and hygienist in NY would always praise how well I maintain my oral hygiene). I even joked them that I'm happily married and don't need to look dapper anymore. Then the dentist (who's the owner of that clinic) started giving me an attitude.

He then told me I need to extract a wisdom tooth that never came out. I saw the X-rays and it is not touching/hitting other molar like some of the nightmare wisdom scenarios that I've seen on the internet. It just didn't come out of the gum and it wasn't hurting me for the last 20 years of my life. So I refused saying because it never give me a problem, I'll leave it at that. My worry was that once it's taken out, it would give more space for the molar and other teeth nearby to start shifting, and my teeth spacing will become sparse (thereby, needing Invasilign for real). Then he started talking to me impatiently.

Finally, he suggested I redo the fillings, 4 of them total, that I had done ~10 years ago in SF. I never had any discomfort and there is no stain or sign of old-age in these fillings. The dentist didn't show me any picture of these fillings and why they need to refilled. But given that I have read about fillings needing to be redone every decade or so before, I said alright. Then he did it in 20 mins. Now one of the molars that he refilled has been giving me some uncomfortable sensations occasionally when I chew something with it.

This is not to mention that because I mentioned that the last time I went to a dentist was 1 year ago (I was busy from moving to FL), they suggested me to a deep cleaning. Turns out, that deep cleaning was quoted to be $2592 on paper and cost me $237.80 out of pocket (plus $569.20 paid out by my dental plan). The fillings cost $384 on paper and $36 out of pocket (plus $225 paid out by my dental plan). The worst was that the "deep cleaning" they gave me was EXACTLY the same that I got every six months from my NY dentist, who I had been seeing for 4-5 years.

Basically, my conclusion is that the dentist and hygienists decided to extract (pun intended) as much money out of me as possible because it was my first visit and my teeth are in good condition, so they realize if they couldn't scare me with mis-aligned teeth, closeted wisdom teeth, etc. then they might as well make up some excuses to charge me as much money as possible for "deep cleaning" and refillings. The clinic still made $237.80+$569.20+$36+$225=$1068 for a total of maybe 20 mins with the dentist and 25-30 mins with the hygienist.

Needless to say that I refused to schedule bi-annual (every 6 months) visit with them this July. The point I'm trying to make is that in this day and age of profit-oriented healthcare, we, as patients, cannot trust doctors and dentists without questioning (yet, some doctors and dentists don't like us questioning their judgment/recommendations because they are the ultimate authorities).

I read a comment here saying that they didn't like Progressive Snapshot, so they switched to Geico and cut their rate in half. This is my most recent anecdote as a different experience.

I was paying $620 (for 6 months) with Geico while letting them monitor my driving via my cell phone. The premium never went down although I had 110 scores in their EasyDrive app (In driving for over 11 years in the US, I never had an accident and never filed any claim car insurers; I always drive defensively and never got any ticket either). What I found was EasyDrive app is always punishing me for bad driving practices like running red light (again, the same experience some has mentioned here with Progressive) in fear of registering a hard-brake event; and worse, slowing down excessively to turn the corners (basically, surprising the cars behind me and risking them bumping into my car) because EasyDrive thinks ONLY IF you go below 15 mph then you are doing the cornering right. I guess these EasyDrive developers (or rule makers) never drove on a real road, and found that usually 20mph is the safe way to go about turning on the right corner.

Regardless, I got 15% premium bump in the renewal despite having 110 EasyDrive score (I think Geico raised their premiums by a very high percentage in CA as well; I live in FL and have been using Geico for all the years I've been driving in the US). That pissed me off and I explored other options, and finally got Progressive for $570 for six months. The sacrifice I have to do for this lower rate is to subscribe to their Snapshot program. I used my phone and have been driving for over a month. The relief (good thing) about using Snapshot app is that it doesn't monitor your cornering score. However, like some mentioned here, it still promotes bad driving behavior like running yellow/red light in fear of hard-brakes. It also seems to be a bit proactive in determining what a hard-brake is (again, I'm using their phone app) because I registered 2 hard-brakes (the only two hard brakes that I have recorded so far in about 1.5 months of driving) on my grocery trip. I swear I didn't do any hard brakes (or maybe at most once) because I know the road pretty well and I usually do grocery runs in early mornings on weekends when there are very few cars on the road.

I know I got much cheaper ($570 vs. $710) rate from Progressive now just because I am a new customer. I am pretty sure come next or next, next renewal, they'll jack up my premiums like what Geico did, and then I'll have to switch to yet another insurer like musical chair game. I wish that the car insurers actually have a more accurate, realistic, non-intrusive tech to monitor the driving habits (e.g., the ones who don't use turn signals when turning right/left or changing lanes, which really could cause accidents) and ACTUALLY give discounts to drivers like me who are very careful with their driving (plus, my wife and I drove a total of 6050 miles in the last year). This is all to say that the risk-reward distribution system with car insurance companies is still inefficient.

Yep. I went to Rick Case for annual check up to have a feel. I signed up online for a regular oil change (I have 6K miles on the car because we don't drive a lot) and tire rotation. The online quote was $90. When I arrived, the guy (expert consultant or whatever they call them) said he recommends me to do wheel alignment (and the quote was $110 without tax and other fees). I pushed back and said I only want tire rotation and oil change. Then he started looking a bit displeased (as if I dare challenge his authority). So I decided to go for it (in case he put a secret note on the paper to let the guys in the workshop know to do/not do something to my car).

Then I swore myself I'll never go back to Rick Case again for regular maintenance (I'm going to have to find a good mechanic though, which is kind of tricky, but I'll do it out of my hatred of Rick Case). I had a horrible buying experience with them too (their finance guy trying to sell me $2600 'umbrella' insurance package, which when I pressed him, didn't specify anything it covers. I didn't end up taking it and the finance guy looked pissed (but I didn't care because the amount of money, $2600, is non-negligible).

Owner of a CRV 2022. On my recent 200-miles trip, the tire pressure sensor lighted up. I pulled over to a station and filled the air (and before I filled the air, I measured the pressure on each tire and it was fine). It didn't go away. Had anxiety the whole trip about whether there was a leak in any of the four tires.

After the trip, went to the dealership's workshop (btw, if you live in FL, NEVER EVER buy from Rick Case; they are scammy as hell in terms of pricing the cars as well as the maintenance fees). They said the pressure sensor sometimes got triggered and it needs the electronic reset to make it go away.

I think these electronification of cars is going too far and I'm really afraid in the future, I'd have to go to the dealership's workshop to get any minor glitch fix.

Newbie Mac user here. I just did what you suggested (I believe it's basically what's suggested in this article: https://9to5mac.com/2016/03/17/how-to-remap-windows-keyboard...), but I don't think Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V works on browsers; I still have to use Alt+C and Alt+V to copy paste when using Chrome/Firefox browsers whereas Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V works in PyCharm.

What am I missing? Thank you in advance for your suggestion/reply!

People saying things that they don't really mean (seen it with RTO, 100% unit-testing coverage, 100% going all in for microservices, and all kinds of trendy stuff that I came across in my 14 years of professional programming). That is one of the reasons we haven't made human life easier/simpler.

This RTO thing is b.s. and I'm not afraid to air my grievances in front of my colleagues. In fact, I started looking for fully-remote jobs so that I can leave soon and can write a letter to that VP, who said he likes working from office better, asking him to come to the office often. :D

It is not hivemind. People are simply split on this and I believe (no data to back it; just an assumption) that a majority of us are pro-WFH. I work for FAANG. Even the middle management folks, who said something along the lines of "I went to the office the other day and it was nice to quickly chat up with a coworker to agree about something" a month before RTO was mandated, don't show up the minimum required 3 days a week at the office these days. One of them has been using excuses like "childcare emergencies"; another one has been using excuses of feeling unwell (I wonder why they said what they said ~2 months ago). In the meantime, the head of the division (the VP) is nowhere to be found in the office (asked coworkers who go back to the office reluctantly).

I have a remote exception for now, but I think they will take it away soon and when they do, I'm leaving. I don't want to waste 2 hours of my life commuting either by public transit (less bad) or by driving (really bad because it is very dangerous to drive in the metro area I live). I am 100% productive working alone or coordinate with coworkers remotely (in fact, I spend on average 9 hours a day working when WFH). I will NEVER go back to the office. If the company doesn't have fully remote roles, I'll skip applying for them happily and it is their loss.

Working for a FAANG right now and since RTO was mandated, I noticed that our team have been spending ~5 mins before the beginning of the meetings finding a room and setting up the audio/visual system for conference calls with other teammates across the country. This is for a company that has a lot of office space in its birth town and has HQs in a few other cities. A couple of teammates (out of 8 total) privately told me that they hate the RTO.

I personally prefer fully remote because I hate the distraction in the open office plan and associated pains like having to find meeting rooms, having to share restrooms with others (I admit this is just my personal pet peeve), and not being able to avoid distraction when I am in the zone for working. Most of all, I don't like the commute (I have to commute 1 hour each way, so everyday, I am spending 2 hours; when I worked from home, I started early and end up working an extra hour or two because I don't have to commute; these days, I try to arrive at 8-9am and leave by 5-6pm to beat the traffic and once I get home, I don't do any work). I consider quitting someday soon and am waiting for my wife to complete her training. Once she has done that, we will move to a place where she can find work, and I will quit my FAANG job for a fully-remote one (sure, my income will take a small hit, but quality of work life is more important for me).