throwaway55421

Barely any mention of contracting outside of "the crusty old legacy developer"?

That's pretty much the #1 route for people I know, get out of the full time lackey game and chill.

Anecdotally a _lot_ of people I know have become significantly less civic minded as a result of the way that coronavirus has been handled.

Basically, they figure, well, the law became insane (lockdowns, business restrictions, silly rules, general kafkaesque atmosphere) - why should I give a toss any more.

If it's illegal to visit your mum and you break the law for that, suddenly a lot of previously verboten activities are open.

Homelessness in Western countries is not about money, the people on the street are mentally or physically disabled or do it by choice.

It is essentially impossible to genuinely be homeless in the UK for more than a few weeks unless you just can't be arsed. There are huge job surpluses at the moment and the minimum wage is twice as much as is needed to rent a room even in London.

The median income and the homeownership rate, particularly outright homeownership.

There are lots of super poor people, those aren't the ones quitting.

Google is a company, it's not comparable. Companies almost by definition seek to gain at the expense of others, if not initially then a few years in after the honeymoon.

I agree that decentralisation is the whole point of the WWW and I use it in that manner, I think people who spend all of their time on one or two centralised platforms are bizarre.

The majority of people, at least in the UK, have far more money than required for basic needs.

Particularly if they live with parents, share with friends, or move to a cheaper area, or just go to 3/4 days a week.

Minimum wage zero savings workers aren't doing this for the most part.

The entire point of cryptocurrency is to bypass this stuff.

If you're using a regulated exchange, just go and buy Apple shares or use a bank instead. It really is almost completely pointless.

Sometimes people just want a medium density city.

I like my medium density neighbourhood and I like being in a city that has them.

If I wanted to live in a tower block I'd move more centrally or to another city.

I also don't think that people who don't live somewhere, or are temporarily staying somewhere, should have a say in this over established families.

I agree, don't pollute.

False equivalence.

We can talk about carbon taxes and renewable energy if you'd like, but if we're going to go down the path of "any energy use is sin unless I approve of it", then I ask again; do you not bore of telling others what to do?

So don't use it. Done.

Do people not get bored of telling others what to do?

What next, "The Case Against Popcorn"?

Reddit is one of, if not the single least reliable source of information on the Internet.

You are looking at algorithmic feeds which propagate only information which has the majority vote. Not only that, but a majority vote of a community which becomes more radical as any opposition or moderates are pushed out.

Point a microphone at a speaker and crank the gain. That awful feedback noise is Reddit.

Yeah, no.

Having literally every indoor space be freezing cold is not reasonable.

In the UK this happened earlier in the year (no-one cares any more) and generally everyone would huddle in the most sheltered part of a venue to make up for it.

And no, we're not installing magic new tech in every building.

Projects get reassigned over time regardless.

It's not as if this is some strict 1:1 relationship, we obviously had more than 1 person with knowledge of / working on a codebase.

It would have been an issue if 2-3 working on the same thing left simultaneously, but for more reasons than just on-call.

Er, what? On call for an entire week at a time?

Does this actually exist? It's like an... anti-holiday. Insane.

I don't follow.

Most jobs I've had were high trust, this was the weird exception. I didn't need a union to fix that.

I'm jaded about the entire industry, it feels like we've invented everything genuinely useful and now we're just doing make work.

I'm more bullish on technology in general and some of the software that can enable that (e.g. fusion research, CCS, self-driving cars).

But general purpose computing? The open source scene and people tinkering is cool. The commercial side is just pointless, I can't think of anything _useful_ (as opposed to merely being addictive) in the last ten years.

Whenever I speak to software developers in real life now I get the sense that they're just "not my people". No, I don't want to talk about social media VR, or advanced data mining, or facial recognition or whatever.

Even the more mundane stuff is like... okay, so you work at Amazon. Cool, I like to shop on my high street, err... let's talk about something else then.

No, because in that case you are responsible for other people's systems you have no idea about and there is no incentive to fix them.

I am always on call to secure my own house, so I have a good alarm system, cameras, locks etc which means I hopefully don't have to do much. It doesn't keep me up at night when I'm on holiday because, well, it's overwhelmingly likely that nothing will happen.

If I were on call for the neighbourhood or general area once a week, I'd probably have to physically be there patrolling it because otherwise I have liability for things which are outside of my control.

You think about that when you design it.

I used to work on trading systems which were managed in real time by a rotating team of traders (i.e. mathematically oriented people as opposed to software engineers).

You design the system so that if it breaks there are at least workarounds that anyone can employ without needing to write code. For example, a big stop button, manual adjustments, manual trading, etc.

Maybe it stops printing money overnight and you take an opportunity cost loss. That's fine, post mortem at work, fix it.

In the worst case if you're not available then someone with ownership steps in like a CTO/founder level (who are of course always on call almost by definition, though they generally have the executive power to say - sod this, we'll just leave it down for a while).

Most jobs I've had there was an implicit expectation that if your shit breaks, you fix it. This resulted in systems which didn't break because, well, that keeps work to working hours.

A few years back I took a job with no mention of on call and then was told there would be a fortnightly 24 hour slot, which later turned into ~weekly as team members left.

I left too.

I have no idea why they felt it reasonable to not mention this before I joined, they effectively just wasted a few months pay on me on a gamble that I had no life outside of work.

They seemed to find the idea that I don't take my laptop to the pub, or up a mountain, or on holiday, some sort of bizarre way of living. Sick system effect? Who knows.

Why not?

I don't know the stats in the UK, but anecdotally, everyone I know who regularly goes to the theatre (as opposed to occasionally e.g. once every year or two) isn't far off financial independence.

Poor people will just watch it on TV.

Sure.

I don't mind taking a 0.5% risk to avoid 1% of my life spent in lockdown.

Neither does my mother or grandmother.

It is not an axiom that an increase in death rates at the population level is bad, because people are willing to put their lives at a small risk in order to preserve some semblance of meaning in them.

This is a point lost on essentially every lockdown proponent as far as I can tell. They are fundamentally unwilling to accept differing value systems and seek to enforce theirs.

Yeah, I don't do any of that.

I left the industry, only software development has really gone all in on it.

I just left the industry. There are other fields which are not doing WFH to the same extreme.

Most office jobs aren't even going as bonkers as software dev.

If you see me saying "software development left me behind" as a humblebrag, that's on you.

I had a job I loved, and propaganda deleted it.

Thank you.

I honestly find these people to simply be trolls. The views espoused make no sense.

Imagine if I suggested that they just video call their children from the office as a replacement for watching them grow up.

You want A, I want B. We can have both, it ain't even hard.

Right?

I would find it amusing if these guys weren't so _serious_ about it.

It's a religion.

False dichotomy, lockdown is a choice.

I will never lock down.

I consider that to be theatre too.

Frankly I just don't interact with corona-obsessed people in real life any more, which they probably prefer. Everyone wins.

Your entire post is based around me fitting my round peg into your square hole.

I have left the industry because of WFH. I have no interest in compromising, it was fun, and none of what you have described is fun, so why bother?

I wish you the best in front of your screen.

I can do all of that now, I live in the UK which has no restrictions.

You talk about being "forced" to be in an office but ignore the other side of being "forced" to work over video calls.

I mean, neither are forced, like I said I just left the industry. So it goes, life moves on. What a shame to have wasted so much time on a dead end path, though now I'm having great fun doing other stuff. :)

Also we'd need to vaccinate those bats with something which actually kills off corona rather than just reducing its' effects a bit.