Buses got significantly more reliable as a result of reduced traffic, more ridership on subways allowed for more police presence at stations, reducing crime.
A book for which literally zero professional archaeologists or anthropologists were consulted and which promulgated more noble savage bullshit as a result. That "life of leisure" picture was based off of the work of one guy who wrote the hours literally spent hunting and gathering and none of the time spent processing food or maintaining tools and clothes, nor the hours per day spent collecting fresh water.
If agricultural life and cities were such a raw deal: why would people all over the world adopt it against their own self interest when humans were basically as intelligent (if not at all educated) as we are today?
>why would people all over the world adopt it against their own self interest
There was no easy going back. Once agricultural societies had settled there would be little if any free land to hunt/gather on. Also, much of the traditional knowledge would be lost in a few generations. Plus, peasants were often kept on their land by force.
Everything has tradeoffs and unforeseen effects and social structure is a slow moving ship. Food security is pretty obviously compelling, and creates a stability that allows a society to scale and grow more wealthy and powerful. The loss in autonomy and flexibility is part of the cost. Individuals see things different ways, but the only vote they get is within a social context that has its own momentum. What wins is not necessarily the society that the individual feels happiest in, but the one that is most evolutionarily fit over many generations and conflicts.
As a fellow infrastructure and tooling engineer with a long tenure on one team: this tracks.
You do occasionally get to scoop up the rare low-hanging fruit to get a shiny win that all the engineers appreciate; but for the most part it's chill, professional, satisfying work at a pace that leaves you with enough sanity to raise a family.
And the employees most likely to quit will be ones with responsibilities that make it difficult to do the commute 5 days a week - kids to pick up from daycare, health issues to manage, a social life in the evenings, travel plans - basically the exact category that a company like Meta would want to replace with a younger, more exploitable bunch.
> And the employees most likely to quit will be ones with responsibilities that make it difficult to do the commute 5 days a week
Or senior people who have a dozen offers waiting in their inbox that they've neglected responding to because they're reasonably happy where they are...until the prospect of commuting.
That's not how the job market is right now. There's like 5 companies in the world that can compete on compensation while allowing remote work with meta.
I would take a lower comp for remote work and a better work environment. They will never pay me the amount that would make me choose 2h in traffic everyday instead of having enough time to cook breakfast to my family, take my kids to school, have lunch with my wife, etc.
I live in Utrecht and despite living very close to Utrecht Centraal, it still takes me 45 minutes to get to Amsterdam where my office is. Count late trains and general rush hour, so for me it can take 2h out of my day easily if I'm unlucky (thankfully where I work we count commute time into the work day, the very first time I saw my manager I saw him sprint out the door at 3PM on the dot because he had a lengthy commute lol)
Long commutes are not unique to the US. I'm spending 1.5 hours one way in the UK. It's depend on your personal circumstances. If you are young and single it's usually possible to rent a studio or a room with reasonable commute time. E. g. if you have a family and/or own a house then moving close to the office in response to RTO mandate may not be an option.
For tech hubs? Because tech hubs tend to be in some of the most traffic nightmare cities. I have worked in DC and Atlanta. My commute for all my jobs except 1 was an hour. The one exception was 20mins because it was a small weirdly placed company that just happened to be in the suburb one over from me.
For all other jobs, I had to commute to a business district I didn't live close to because business district and low price (when young) or great schools (when older) don't mix often.
Yeah, I know the median commute in these areas is low, but they are counting retail workers and teachers. I bet the median for tech workers is pretty high because of the reality of how they tend to be placed.
In a real tech hub, it's definitely going to be a longer commute. Nashville, for instance, is not a tech hub. Yet it has some of the worst commute times for people who have an office there.
Dozen offers to try to go through 5+ stages of recruitment process without any feedback and possibility to be ghosted after each person. How good senior people are with leetcode?
Yeah but RTO takes real time and money. Sure you can earn a paycheck, but if you're commuting 2 hours a day total, you're still losing those 2 hours until they fire you. And that kind of stinks. And that's assuming you don't need to move. Moving for a job you hate is the worst.
Reduce workload, get in a bit later and go home a bit earlier.
Avoid attending meetings involving people dialling in from a different office (that’s not in person collaboration, so it’s worthless work. Sorry, I don’t make the rules) and be present at the meeting (keeping the chair warm it’s all it counts after all) while browsing HN in the ones you really cannot get out of it.
There have never been "company hours" in tech. Until recently (before badge tracking became a thing) asking your manager what time you were expected to come in and leave would be met with blank stares. "We don't enforce set hours here, just get your work done". And conversely "I came to the office and worked 8 hours a day like you asked" is never going to be accepted as an excuse when you fail to meet your targets at the end of the quarter or miss a page in the middle of the night. Heck you can't even work on your own projects after hours or patent your own ideas because the knowledge in your head is company property. Simply put - they are hiring you for your skills and your output, not for warming a seat at an office for 8 hours a day. Tech companies have always treated employees like adults and expected adult behavior in return, and both sides have benefited greatly from this arrangement. Sadly it seems like the new crop of tech leadership seems adamant on making their companies more like a call center.
So you'd think right? Nobody would like anything better than to just get output without worrying about hours or location or anything like that. But if you were in a management position when WFH started, you would've seen velocity go through the floor and stay there. And to be fair, there are absolutely a limited set of employees who are perfectly capable of working remotely with no issues whatsoever. But for the majority.. the feedback we've gotten is there is too much temptation to just do the laundry or dishes or "my wife needs a hand with X", and output just continues to stay low. And while it would be great to separate employees into groups based on who can be trusted to WFH and who can't, it feels too discriminatory and would cause way too many headaches.
So, as I'm sure you've seen in the news stories over the last few years, basically every large organization everywhere has enacted some sort of RTO mandate. I'm sure there are a few smaller startups kicking around who want to keep trying things the other way, but for the most part, the industry has spoken. We can keep complaining about it but short of another pandemic it's unlikely covid-style work is going to make a comeback IMO.
> But if you were in a management position when WFH started, you would've seen velocity go through the floor and stay there.
I spoke with my manager about this. This wasn't true for our team, and it wasn't true for any other team in our (fairly sizable) division. I didn't give a shit about any other group, so I didn't ask.
If your employees are spending their days fucking around instead of working when they're working from their home office, I'm here to tell you that when they were in the corporate-leased office, they were browsing Reddit on their phone or off on yet another coffee break to "get the pulse of the office". Slackers and shirkers are gonna slack and shirk, no matter where they are.
The thing to do is to fire folks who aren't doing enough to justify their pay. That's something that hasn't ever changed.
The practice of an entire working population commuting from an hour+ away to a few buildings in the center of the city, sitting on their ass for 8 hours a day, eating a packed lunch, and commuting back home is at most a couple hundred years old. But sure, go on about your "hundreds-to-thousands of years of history".
Calling out every abrasive comment would take more effort than I'm willing to expend, and would itself be pretty abrasive. So I picked the comment where they called Covid (the event where many people died, had their businesses ruined, etc.) "fun" over the one that mentioned work-life balance.
The person you're replying to asked if it was fun. Consider that my sarcasm was meant to be sort of tongue in cheek and not incredibly serious, which is a very different kind of tone from other comments in this chain.
Honestly, if the bus/delivery driver needed a mid-shift break to deal with some life stuff, yeah by all means, I personally think they should be able to do that kind of stuff (though maybe we start by giving them bathroom breaks?). The business hiring them should adapt.
Looks like you don't know how to properly manage your team.
I had a similar argument with a previous manager I had. Careerist dude started on some bullshit management-speak on measuring workers by ass-to-seat-hours while he had no idea I had a management degree from one of the most respected business colleges in my country. Had to rebuke him with Business Management 101.
Of course, this definitely contributed for him pushing me out afterwards, as small minds can't handle being wrong, and he even had the gall of trying and pushing me an unethical assignment. I got out with a nice severance package, and from the grapevine (it's a small community down here after all!) I hear every quarter somebody quits from his team or moves to a different one.
You think this is the tech job market to leave your job, and then what? Try and get in at someone else about to return to office? Freelance? IDK about anyone else, but I haven’t considered a contractor since AI Coding hit hard, I had poor experience with contractors anyhow, now I’m not sure I see the point of rolling those dice again.
It’s kind of a soft market unless you are working directly on AI models.
So, is this IG looking to cut fat by keeping what they considered the most committed employees? Maybe. Is it because most of us can admit that it takes the right people to work remotely and that isn’t a majority? That’s more my take.
We are observing the most valuable people leaving, because they easily can get a job at place where they care more about value you get to company than the bonus you will get as C-level after firing highly paid workers.
In the cases we know (I have a group of people working in different small and medium corps in Poland and Germany) - the people that are staying are either too lazy to change work or they are just not enough to get remote job.
If you’re the C-suite making this decision without realizing your best remote workers will quit even in this job market because they’re your best employees, you shouldn’t be the C.
If you do realize this, as you most definitely should since it is not rocket science in any way, your projections about short and long term value of institutional knowledge these folks take with them better be accurate.
On number one, sure, take all the risk yourself. It pays off sometimes. And when it comes to hiring people you need to work as hard as you do, you can tell them they can work from home.
Well... It all started from a single-location homelab 20-ish years ago, while I was still living at my parents' place (although I had a 1/4 stake in ownership). Then I moved around but kept the server at the old place and added a second machine. Just because I'm self-hosting my email, and residential connections aren't best in terms of availability I thought having a HA system would be fun and useful - and so it was (although not always fun, of course). Few more moves later, I've ran a bunch of servers on residential connections all around the world. Some were demoted to VPSes for consensus and backups, as I moved out, some are still there.
There's a Wireguard-based mesh (static routing, but declarative centrally managed setup using Nix) with Shadowsocks for traversing hostile borders. Runs a few private/personal services for myself, family, and friends - email, messaging, media library, the commonplace homelab stuff. Certainly not the best design - things never are, there's always room for more and more improvements, no matter how much you work on it, but I'm pretty happy with it overall.
There's no real reason why is it like this. I could've done it more conventionally and probably avoid a lot of downsides - but it's a fun little exercise that allows me to play with various technologies, and I like that the system is truly mine, hardware and premises it's on, all built by my own hands (random fun fact: I was a founding engineer at the ISP that two of my nodes are on).
tl;dr: Had a single home server, moved around and added a few more. No particular reason, it's just a fun geeky toy for me. :-)
Arko wanted a copy of the HTTP Access logs from rubygems.org so his consultancy could monetize the data, after RC determined they didn't really have the budget for secondary on-call.
Then after they removed him as a maintainer he logged in and changed the AWS root password.
In a certain sense this post justifies why RC wanted so badly to take ownership - I mean, here you have a maintainer who clearly has a desire to sell user data to make a buck - but the way it all played out with terrible communication and rookie mistakes on revoking access undermines faith in RC's ability to secure the service going forward.
Not to mention no explanation here of who legally "owned" the rubygems repo (not just the infra) and why they thought they had the right to claim it, which is something disputed by the "other" side.
Just a mess all around, nobody comes off looking very good here!
I can give benefit of the doubt that making a proposal to monetize user data is a poorly-considered, bottom-scraping effort to find a replacement funding source for the on call work. Most of us would not consider it, but I think it should be ok to occasionally pitch some bad ideas, all else being equal and lacking full context.
But messing with the credentials crosses an ethical line that isn't excused no matter how much you disagree with the other party's actions.
I can only assume it is silly revenge seeking behavior. Look at how symmetrical it is:
1. RC takes over GitHub Repository and locks everyone out
2. Arko takes over RubyGems server and locks everyone out.
He was an authorized actor right up until they tried to remove him, but they forgot to revoke his access credentials. I wonder if legally-speaking he was even considered unauthorized.
EDIT: Missed their email notification revoking his production access. Yeah looks like they could have a legal basis.
really disappointing. it's such a huge security concern and privacy/ethical lapse, i am super disappointed in him, despite his contributions to the world of Ruby package management
he's now started a competing gem.coop package manager, and while they haven't released a privacy policy it does make me suspicious about how they were planning to fund it
no single person should have Github owner + AWS root password for a major language's package manager and ecosystem just sitting around on their laptop while they fly around to different conferences in Japan e.g. (as Andre did while hacking rubygem's AWS root account to show off)
“Following these budget adjustments, Mr. Arko’s consultancy, which had been receiving approximately $50,000 per year for providing the secondary on-call service, submitted a proposal offering to provide secondary on-call services at no cost in exchange for access to production HTTP access logs, containing IP addresses and other personally identifiable information (PII).”
I think that if they had been up front and transparent, and cut the PR bullshit corpospeak from their damage-control post, this would have been something that's much less embarrassing for all involved.
Something like:
"Hey all, RC here: with the very real threat of supply-chain attacks looming around us, one of the critical financial backers of our nonprofit org gave us a deadline around tightening access to the Github Account for rubygems/bundler. We tried and failed to arrive at a consensus with the open-source volunteers and maintainers for the best path forward and were forced to make a decision between losing the funding and taking decisive (if ham-fisted) action to keep Ruby Central financially healthy. We think RC's continued work is important enough that we stand by our decision, upsetting though it might be, but want to work out a better one ASAP. We are genuinely sorry for any fear/disruption this has caused."
Something simple that just owns the fact that they screwed up and tried to handle it as best they could. Doing this proactively as soon as they made the changes and broadcasting it would have been even better, but even posting this in reply to the controversy would have done more imo...
Sounds like you should volunteer for Ruby Central to help them with their communications! I don't mean that facetiously: it seems that they could use you, or someone like you, with comms. As the OP readily admits, this is not a strong point for them.
My general take on this:
1) Nerds are often not the best at communicating.
2) People on the Internet can be very cruel towards people they don't know.
We could all do better, especially with #2. The Internet used to be cool as hell. Now, by and large, it sucks.
Could someone with more insight as to the decision-making at Ruby Central weigh in on what's going on here? Between this and drama with the conferences over the years I'm just confused. They've been busy launching podcasts and doing fundraising, email campaigns and all that. Has there been a change in leadership?
Oh wow. I'm absolutely alarmed after reading that. To be honest, I had been wondering if some of the PR disasters this year could be laid on Rhiannon's shoulders, but it sounds like the rot is coming from the top.
Yikes! At least they'll have someone "results-driven, client-focused," and "driving stakeholder engagement", because that's really what a software repository needs.
It feels like funding for conference participation at US companies has plummeted since COVID. Pre-COVID, most engineers I worked with would attend at least one conference a year on the company’s dime. That’s now become uncommon for anyone below staff engineer or director level, at the places where I work anyway.
I built a newish gaming PC on AMD components and flashed SteamOS onto it. It just works out of the box, although it does sort of think that it's an oversized steamdeck.
My previous gaming PC was a 2016-vintage windows machine with a very hacked and lobotomized win10, so nvidia graphics drivers were starting to become a problem what with the lack of windows update and all that...
Public transit got better.
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