I came the other way with it - originally used Google Music and had to switch to Youtube when they sunset GM. I already paid for GM so it was easy to pay for YT music since they had (nearly) every song I'd ever uploaded already available and migrated it for me, then getting ad-free Youtube videos was a nice pleasant surprise.
I'm also in CA and lived on Arizona for most of my teens and early 20s. Never saw this pricing. I would have remembered it, especially during the skint college years. It's always been a dollar. At best you'd see 2 for 1 deals.
It sounds like you live in a heavily subsidized market - probably best not to try to draw generalizations about inflation from your specific circumstances, they are atypical.
What urgent outages are you having that can't be circulated with a quick "hey is ___ down for you" in a shared org channel? Also, you still have to get up and walk over to the hubbub to find out what's happening, then walk back before digging into the issue - in that time you could have just read the slack message and been fixing.
You're inventing solutions to a problem that actually worsen the issue.
edit: also, automated alerting solves literally all your problems here - and that should be an investment even if you're at a company with 100% RTO. Your first line of alert will still be digital in that case. If you're waiting to hear panicked seatmates to solve issues you're sure not worried about immediacy.
It would be nice to know every failure mode or possible reason for intervention in advance, but not always the case.
I find it interesting that there is this strong belief that how people organize and work together in certain businesses is generally done wrong. How would you know? A lot of critical interactions might not be tech-tech, but tech-business, for example.
Did you mean "team managers" in-metaphor? As in non-players, non-coach excess staff? Totally agreed if so, didn't want to rebut unless you actually meant 1st-line managers of teams of players (which I'd place as "coach" in this metaphor).
Increased documentation is a cost you pay no matter what, you just pay it later in other formats when in-office - when the SME you treat as a guru finds a better-paying gig you have to scramble to rebuild their expertise from nothing or hope they are nice enough to do a thorough knowledge transfer. That kills productivity far worse and for longer than taking 30m at the end of your day updating some shared wiki.
All this to say, the trade-off you're proposing doesn't exist. You're arguing for paying twice instead of paying once - twice in the sense that you lose productivity now via random interrupts, and in the future when your siloed knowledge leaves you high and dry. Hope the "other things" you got done instead of documenting were worth it in that scenario.
That again sounds like a problem with your company's knowledge sharing culture, not with the industry at large. Silos exist even when every butt is in an office seat, that's a well-known issue that far pre-dates pandemic remote work moves. The answer isn't "make everyone defenseless to random interrupts from other people" but "learn how to actually document things so you're not a company full of points of failure".
It seems like what you really want is for others to treat your emergencies as theirs. They're not, they're yours. If you can't wait 15 minutes for a ping back without being completely stuck, you aren't planning your work correctly. That's nobody else's fault.
I've only eaten mutton in heavily spiced dishes and it does go very well in those settings - you need other strong flavors to stand up to the gaminess of the mutton, which might be why it hasn't caught on in American cuisine which tends to focus less on heavy spice profiles and more on just cooking ingredients to present their natural flavors.
Definitely getting strong uncanny valley prose vibes.
Hard to tell if it's generated or written in an attempt to be as plain English as possible, but either way feels strangely vacuous for a technical opinion piece. There's no writer's voice.
I think it's absolutely an opinion piece - defining specific items as principles by definition means expressing opinionated ideas about the relative priority of those items over others. Also, imperative mood contains value judgment, which is inherently opinion-based (e.g. "Never expose PII"). Making arguments for why you should or should not do things requires expressing opinions about relative importance, weight etc.
If this were instead an article describing what feature flags are, or one performing a survey of various approaches to building/scaling them, I think the lack of voice is just fine - that's dealing in statement of fact. But this article mandates and implores and exhorts - the value judgments inherent in that pathos are empty without genuine authorship.
Also I'm not saying the lack of voice is bad even for conveying meaning or teaching - more that it is jarring and uncanny to read imperative claims in an empty robotic voice devoid of ethos.
Finally, I also might be biased by my first documentation love, the zeromq guide, which is an extremely-strongly-opinionated piece of docs that does its job exceptionally well. I think when writing about how or why, a strong writer's voice is more compelling. This article stretches past just the what into those other question words, so its seeming lack of authorial authority falls flat to me.
