Well, dedicated servers (for which you can have private cage, or VISA compliance, or ...) are a markup of say 30% over base cost, which is still 1/5th the cost of AWS. And even Hetzner will just deliver Kubernetes clusters these days.
These avoid all of the costs you were talking about.
From observation my belief is that in-office work selects for slackers as equally as wfh work does, they just slack differently.
One of our well respected product owners was always so very busy, with back to back meetings when working in office. Then we started WFH and all figured out she was a Costanza - all those meetings were her way of looking important, while everyone routed work around her.
On the other hand, some of our more neurodivergent engineers benefited from the rigidity of sitting at a desk where they are too afraid to pick up their Switch and just game.
I would place a much higher significance on the reported mental health issues - it’s hard to get on disability in the US, and if you’re truly on $3k/month because you are unable to work, you have a serious disability.
Otherwise? Totally agree. The worst developers are the ones that make everything they touch that much worse merely by virtue of touching it. I’ll take dead weight, “go write a bunch of printf’s and accomplish nothing” over them any day.
>...if you’re truly on $3k/month because you are unable to work, you have a serious disability.
They're most likely talking about Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). The amount is completely unrelated to the severity of a person's disability.
The reason is in the name--it's insurance for lost wages. Workers' FICA taxes are the premiums they pay while working, and are based on wages as well. So basically: the more one makes while working, means the more they pay in while working, means the more they lose when disabled, which means the more they get paid by SSDI.
The size of the monthly pay isn’t what is significant - having any nonzero amount is. The SSDI acceptance rate is lucky to hit 30%, typically takes multiple hearings/appeals to get a payout, and can be denied if the government can demonstrate the potential for you to work outside the field you were employed in. If you receive anything from it, it is prima facie evidence of a serious disability.
So to my point, this isn’t a story about a bad programmer, it’s a story about a person who is truly so disabled that they can’t program.
When my company did layoffs recently I got to peek behind the curtain a bit. It started with an all-hands video call from the CEO announcing the layoff. HR had loaded emails to send immediately following the call directly to your company email that either said "you are not fired" or "you are".
For those who were fired, infosec ran a script during the CEO call to pull their access packages for production systems, crank the data-loss protection systems on their laptops up to high, boot them from Slack, and prevent them from sending & receiving emails to non-HR folks. After their "fired" email they received an invite to talk with HR to provide updated contact information. Then infosec pushed a new password to their account & force shutdown their workstation.
If it sounds brutal, it was. But the layoffs I was involved at a previous company were handled much differently, more traditionally: CEO announcement at 9am, and then you spent the rest of the day agonizing and waiting if you're going to get a :15 private calendar invite from your manager titled "Employment", or if you'd make it to the end of the day with no news (good news!). I'd almost argue that moving fast was more merciful than this, but that's easy for me because I wasn't fired either time.
When I worked construction and a job was ending, you'd find out Friday if they needed you back.
They'd put your name on a list Monday and other jobs could pick you up if no one did, you'd have someone from HR come by and walk you through cobra insurance and hand you the forms for your unemployment, and then you had 30 minutes to pack your shit and go.
Weeks on end of wondering every Friday if you had a job next week. This was during 2008/10 and all our jobs that we had won got sent for rebid and the company declined to bid on them again. Lost all the work we had lined up and no one was hiring.
I was a real grind, guys expecting kids and hoping to get the baby delivered before the lost their health insurance.
The Helpdesk didn't know until after the RIF happened as some of them lost their jobs too. But every fired employee will get some return-labeled boxes shipped over to them, and are asked to pack up their equipment & send them back. Most companies who do these layoffs still count you as an employee for the duration of your severance, and your only real job requirement is to pack up your equipment and drive it to the UPS store.
Towards the end of their severance time, Infosec will run a remote wipe so if their endpoint ever connects to Wifi it'll get nuked. They tend to wait a bit to ensure there's not something on the laptop that needs to be recovered for the company – or the employee says they had some critical personal things on it. Either way the only way they get it back is by sending it back and letting the Helpdesk pull the data.
Worst case, an employee doesn't send stuff back and we write it off. It's really not a big deal. Mandatory FDE + device wipes when a laptop comes online means any data is protected, which is 100% of what we're concerned about. No one cares if an employee gets a "free" MacBook that's a few years old.
Last company I was laid off from (a few months ago) said they would deduct from your severance (I forget the amount, but was more than the Macbook was worth) if you didn't return it.
In the US I think there are varied state laws on what's legal and illegal in that area. This is obviously complicated by any employee agreement that you might've signed up for when you joined the company.
I think the basic decision was "a 2021 MacBook is now worth less due to deprecation than the time it'd take HR/legal to figure this all out, so screw it and let's mark it disposed for $0"
They send you a box and you send it back basically. Though, the last company I left they made me pay for box and shipping (fine) but are refusing to reimburse me for the ~$200 shipping (no so fine)
if your severance package is "good enough" in your opinion, you mail it back in the box they send you
if your severance package isn't "good enough" in your opinion, you keep it and reformat it...eventually they tell you that your severance will go away unless you return the equipment
most returned equipment will just become e-waste, no one is going to breathe life into my four year old laptop
I see a lot of companies just telling people to keep it and use it as they see fit
some security types freak out about former employees being able to access "confidential" information on their own laptops after being terminated...newsflash: if we wanted to mail this stuff to North Korea we could have been doing it five times a day
First, if you are truly the linchpin, you’re likely working over/above your position. So make the case that you are a rank N employee doing N+1 work.
Alternatively, try the market adjustment route: you are doing more than your role, and you’re already being underpaid for that role.
As a manager IDGAF about these typical asks for raises. It’s part of the job. What I do care about is the “pay me +X or I leave” games - those suck to deal with and are often a card you can play once.
But while we are all worried about job security, things are extra tight for employers right now: if I lose one of my employees, it’s very likely that I’d face an uphill fight to hire someone to replace them because my boss / her boss would claim that as a win for their budget. So you do have some room to maneuver here.
How would you feel about a proposal like, "Because of X,Y, and Z, I believe that my current position doesn't match the value I provide to the company. My opinion is that a good method to fix this would be to promote me to Sr. (current position) or (current position roman numerals +i) and increase my salary accordingly."?
> Also, education is a great way to ride out the current crappy job market.
Don’t sleep on this.
In 2008 I had a few friends go back for higher education rather than stay at/take low quality jobs. They graduated with additional debt, but also with credentials that accelerated their job search and earnings during the recovery.
If your personal situation allows it, it’s a good idea to consider.
And if you can't work due to your injury and are one of the many Americans who does not have paid time off, the best case for you is using FMLA to at least retain your job so you can work - but your absence won't be paid. Hopefully your emergency fund is higher than the American median of $2000.
I suppose that makes sense considering most conflicts involve groups who (accurately or not) wouldn't consider their enemies members of their own race.
