This. While I have come around to the concept of "It's probably better if more people learn to code", I rarely see other parts of the company so eager to share their knowledge.
In particular, I'd like more training on law and finance. For some reason, I have never seen any lawyers or accountants being eager to teach me about interpreting laws, or balancing books.
I'm not so sure every engineer needs to know that. I think the important thing is for everyone to have some understanding of the core business.
If you're Stripe, that's coding, APIs, and finance/payments (that last is the bit engineers should be taught).
If you're Google, that's ads and ad-buying - hence the company practice of giving engineers (and maybe other employees?) some free ad credits so they can see what the customer perspective looks like.
> take home homework and other things that blow up the 2.5-hour mark
I would think "take home" implies you take it home, i.e. do it in your own time. I don't know what your undefined "other things" are.
> The 2.5 hours will also scale up with the number of participants, 20 employees who are committing 2.5 each week (at very, very minimum) is a loss of 50 hours per week.
It is this sort of thinking that is super counterproductive. Even if one of those employees learns something simple, like how to programmatically create CSV files and import them into Excel, they will have saved thousands of man-hours.
You can't nickel-and-dime people's time like this. Philosophies like yours tend to end up with timing people's bathroom breaks and scathing articles in the newspaper; rarely successful companies.
Also, I have a very simple policy: I'm as strict about work hours as my employer is.
You want 40 hours, butts-in-seats, timed breaks? Fine, I'm circular filing that idea that's going to save you multiples of my salary each year because I thought of it at home during off-hours, and you weren't paying me for that time.
I am exactly the opposite. What you are saying (as far as I can tell) is "If management is going to be petty and stupid, then I am too". I think it is smart to avoid being taken advantage of, but I think what you are actually doing is enabling your management's stupid behaviour. If both sides have a hard line behaviour, it will never change.
Instead, I recommend showing the advantages of flexibility. "I worked overtime to give you this thing which would not have been possible under your rules, how about cutting me some slack as a reward?" Somebody has to budge first. Now, if they are only interested in sucking up as much of your time as possible and paying you as little as possible -- then they are being abusive. As in any abusive relationship, your top priority should be to get the heck out of there. As a fall back position, of course, you should protect yourself as much as possible, but having an a priori position of being just as petty as your boss will really only result in unhappiness for everyone.
It's not "being petty", it's "asserting boundaries" in an abusive situation. You clearly decided to read only half the hypothetical -- or do you think a workplace timing bathroom breaks isn't abusive?
Your post reads as an uncharitable brag about how you're better than me, even though you conclude by agreeing with me.
It's not my duty to go above and beyond for people who are trying to abuse and take advantage of economic needs to treat me as a work animal, not a person in hopes they learn a lesson. You can if you want to, but I think that attitude is what enables that behavior, not mine.
Let me put it this way: have you been able to improve the situation using your approach? It's not about a person being better than another person, it's about working in a way that is successful. I'm saying that the other side of the equation thinks that they have to treat people poorly or else people will take advantage of them. Your behaviour will only reinforce their belief. My challenge to you is to find a way show them that they are wrong. If you succeed, then life will be better for everyone, not simply tolerable for you.
It's not going to work all the time. Some people are jerks and there is no way to convince them to work together with other people. They just take everything they can and give nothing back. My experience is that these people are pretty rare, though. The vast majority of people who act like jerks do it because they are convinced that there is no other option. I'm not saying that you are being a jerk, but the attitude that you espouse just reinforces their view. They believe that they must take everything, or there will be nothing left for them. They believe that they can't give anything back because it will all be taken from them.
Give something back for free, even if they give nothing back. How much you give is still under your control. It won't always improve the situation, but my experience has been that it will sometimes improve the situation.
You're extrapolating an extreme hypothetical back to my baseline behavior in an uncharitable way.
You're also taking a single action to generalize to all my behavior -- for example, you're ignoring the possibility that I would both "forget" the out of hours idea, but present them with studies about how treating "knowledge workers" better leads to increased output or other similar "during work" activities that might influence their behavior.
You're also ignoring a slew of other concerns, ranging from my emotional health to my willingness to lock IP up with someone I perceive to be a negative actor in society.
All because you want to brag about how you're better than me and be "right".
You sound awful to work with. It makes me appreciate how lucky I am to work someplace where everyone has good attitudes towards each other and their workplace.
If you honestly think me responding to a terrible work environment by refusing to do work outside of work hours or go above and beyond for the company makes me a bad coworker, I think you have a very distorted view of workplace relationships.
Gotta side with SomeStupidPoint here. If an employer is going to whine about any deviation from the standard working hours on my part, then all extracurricular activity stops. You get the hours exactly and nothing more.
It doesn't matter when someone does their work. It matters that they did it, and did it well. Poisoning the water because someone is consitebtly 10 minutes late every morning is a signal to me that it's time to move on.
I will bet that most of the comments in this thread are from people who have never lived in rural India.
I have, and will tell you the real reason. It has little to do with literacy or education. It is because (warning, this is going ironic) Indian people are incredibly disgusted about shit and want to not think about dealing with it.
I'm Indian myself. For example, we think toilet paper is a horrible idea. You just clean your shit with...paper...and just leave it like that? That would not fly, even in any of the villages you mention. They have to have water to clean their shit, usually supplied in a small bucket or vessel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lota_(vessel)
Now think about temperatures. The current temperature at many places in India is more than a 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Your average restroom or shovel pit or whatever is going to smell incredibly bad and be full of flies and a horrible smell. That is why some people prefer the river, and don't use the toilets that are built for them (links elsewhere in this thread).
Solutions? It's a usability problem. Bidets for poop washing that can be filled up instead of using piped water, super hydrophobic coatings, really large pits (so you don't smell the waste) –- things like that are going to be the solution. Unfortunately, no one approaches it in that way, and prefers to go the route of "Let's teach these uneducated savages not to shit where they eat." This is very unfortunate and I hope it will change in the future.
AFAIK no one poops in the river either (that would be one tricky feat); they poop on fields adjoining the banks and wash up afterwards.
In places like Haridwar one gets screamed at for as little as putting the footwear in the stream.
Then again there are sewer dumping into Ganga all over the place (though this was/is being challenged) - starting in fact from a few hundred meters down from Hari ki Paudi.
I don't know.
Since Indian literature (and with it the languages) have essentially become comatose, perhaps the country has lost all ability to make logical deductions [1], that'd be necessary for any level of consistency.
[1] No, I know Sanskrit deals very much with logic and reasoning and grammar. I don't see so much as a vestige today, however. May be since it was/is practiced by a tiny minority that may not be all the surprising.
Yeah, the difference is that "positive psychology" is scientific field, and they haven't discovered that "thinking positive" helps with being more successful. I changed the title of the sub-section.
I agree the titles sound obvious, but within each section we have lots of actionable advice (e.g. books to read about specific decision-making advice, the best tips we've found on how to save money, ideas for specific cities to move to), so I disagree these are not actionable for most people.
> The interesting thing with Remote is that most companies these days "allows remote" as part of their package.
This question goes for the original post too -- but how many of these are truly remote? i.e. I can work for the majority of the year remotely, with maybe one or two visits to the company main office, if that.
Asking because I see far too many companies these days trying to brand themselves as remote-friendly, when they really mean something with far less freedom, like “We'll maybe allow you to work from home two days out of five”.
Well, when they mention "allows remote", it is mostly not remote (work anywhere, wherever you like, just get things done) from what I gather. This is from a British company in London, "because we love family, and are a family company, we will allow 2 days a week for you to work from anywhere." :-)
To me the most important binary distinction is whether it's "remote friendly" meaning you can work from home if you give an excuse, and remote friendly meaning it's expected that you'll be working remotely on a regular basis.
Once you're in that second category there's range from "work from home one to several days a week" and "never set foot in the office again"
Which makes me turn down most headhunter's offers as they think “We'll maybe allow you to work from home two days out of five” is good enough for home office.
Somehow they don't understand there are things more relevant than plain salary or having access to a company car.
You can't demonize robots, they are non-living. If anyone is being demonized, it will the corporations who are moving from human to automated labor in order to cut costs. If 670,000 manufacturing jobs since 1990 have been shifted from humans to robots, it seems only fair to point that out.
> None of these publications ever run with a solution to the problem.
Probably because it's hard and involves ideas like guaranteed basic income and 'robot taxes' that are very unlikely to be popular in the US due to social attitudes. Perhaps such articles will lead to the change of those attitudes.
How do you impose a "robot" tax? Do I get taxed every time a neural net tarts up a photo on my Nexus?
I'd say the real problem is a massive defect in what we imagine the goals of education should be. I read a novel once, I can't remember the name, but basically the galaxy-wide standard for being considered an adult us building your own spacesuit.
Step 1: tax all income equally (not flat rate, just not favoring particular forms), rather than having disfavorable taxation on labor (which basically amounts to a "robot tax subsidy".)
Step 2: if step 1 isn't enough, and you need to encourage hiring human labor more than eliminating the tax disincentive does, provide favorable tax treatment for labor income. (Which isn't exactly a robot tax, but has the same practical effect between robots and human labor.)
I do agree, taxes on labor income should be lower than capital gains, rather than higher as it is today. But the division is between those who own capital and those those who don't. The lower capital gains tax favors those who make money by investing, rather than producing. Laborers are producers, but so are manufacturing companies. A person who buys himself a robot or two and produces more with it is more productive, but he's still going to pay the labor tax rate, not the capital gains rate.
IMO, the answer to taxation is to tax capital gains highly (significantly higher than labor), and also have very strong progressive tax rates for both labor and capital gains. So, some laborer saving his money in an IRA will (eventually, when he withdraws it) pay taxes on the capital gains, but not that much because he probably didn't save that much anyway. Some laborer investing a few $k into some stock and doubling his money will pay higher taxes on that gain, but again not that much because it's still not that much money. A billionaire making a huge gain in stocks OTOH will pay a much higher tax rate on that gain, and a lot overall in taxes. A millionaire who owns a privately-held manufacturing company will pay a much higher rate than one of his laborer employees, however he won't pay as much as a millionaire who just lives off of investments (unless he sells that company).
How long did you have to live within the space suit and what was the test environment like?
Did any tasks have to be performed with the suit worn?
Was there a bonus for including a "head" in the suit, at least for the shorter term functions?
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For a generally less risk filled and short term exposure environment, a skin tight pressure suit with a helmet might work out. I recall reading about such a suit in one short story, but I don't know if an actual engineer has commented on it. It could be useful as an emergency life support suit.
> How do you impose a "robot" tax? Do I get taxed every time a neural net tarts up a photo on my Nexus?
It would have to be a balancing act. My guess is "probably not", because mass-producing modified photos wasn't a big source of jobs done by humans in the past.
Manufacturing industries where you could show a direct "1 robot replaced these 200 humans" causal relationship would (hypothetically) be the ones to be taxed.
That's a good question. We'll have to talk about it - may be it doesn't have an obvious solution. May be we can start with taxing only robots which are employed commercially and not for purposes like photos on Nexus.
Could anyone in the know comment on whether their invite-only nature contributed to this? I have wanted to have Deck Network ads on my sites forever, but there was no real way to do so. They seemed to be restricted to inviting only Apple-themed blogs and sites, plus maybe their peripheral network.
I wonder if having a somewhat more clear and easy vetting process would have helped expand their reach somewhat.
This is an argument that I have yet to see being addressed to my satisfaction.
If recent raises / salaries in the tech industry outside of Silicon Valley are any guide, companies love to save money on salaries. So I honestly have no idea why all the men I work with haven't been replaced by women being paid 95% or whatever the claimed pay gap is. And remember, this is in the US, where you can legally be let go because your boss doesn't like the color of your shoes.
Because there aren't enough women applying. At my previous job, I interviewed 50+ people, and fewer than 10% were women. For the record, I advocated strongly for most of them, and contributed to several being hired, including one of the best engineers I've met. Companies have a hard time hiring enough software people in general, and there are many more men applying for software jobs than women. If there were some untapped pool of female engineers all looking for jobs, believe me, that pool would get tapped. It just doesn't exist.
There are ways to filter content without breaking user privacy. For example, you could restrict access to the Internet altogether, and suggest that your users only get what they need from your internal corporate network. See how incredibly productive that makes your staff?
What these "enterprise environments" want is to leech off the Internet's knowledge while keeping a firm chokehold on the privacy of their own employees Sadly, it looks like Google is caving in to their pressure.
> Sadly, it looks like Google is finally caving in to their pressure. Maybe someone like Mozilla won't.
All browser vendors provide the necessary bits for properly implemented HTTPS MITM, and have done so for ages (which are fairly simple, basically "allow local trusted certificate roots and ignore key pinning for them").
> What these "enterprise environments" want is to leech off the Internet's knowledge while keeping a firm chokehold on the privacy of their own employees
Because one size really does fit all, and all environments have the same needs?
In particular, I'd like more training on law and finance. For some reason, I have never seen any lawyers or accountants being eager to teach me about interpreting laws, or balancing books.