... laws that protect minors as young as 14 from being coerced into sexual relationships with adults up to age 23... laws that limit corporate access to public water sources when the state is in perpetual drought... Oops. Those suggestions went right out the window. And into one of those 90% of fires that are man-made. Maybe someone will come by with a 24-pack of plastic water bottles we can dump on the fire, since pulling from the hose will put us over our government-mandated per-person use restrictions and cost us hundreds in fines... or even jail time!
I would prefer that companies follow the law, which is that they are grossly abusing workers' rights demanding the right to use an employee's personal residence as a condition of pay. When you sign on, your offer is, of course, partly based on the locale, but as an employee, you do not have a vote or a decision in where the office you work at is located. By their logic, employers should be required to pay a cost of living differential, which they are not, and rarely if ever meet on initial offering, which introduces the gap observed preceding 1980 that shows striking differences in income growth vs. average living expenses.
I don't care where you work, nor where your office is, nor how often you appear there each week. I care that VMware is demanding you subsidize your own employment costs by returning up to 18% of your annual pay to the company... because the company chose to build where cost of living is significantly higher than you can afford on the pay VMware has already been paying you.
The answer should be an emphatic NO. "No, I will not take 80% of my original pay simply because I moved. Where I live is none of your business, except with respect to securing company data and property while I am employed by you. You pay me based on an already unfair exchange for the value my skills and time bring your organization. You don't get to make me pay you back for the inconvenience of having to employ me remotely." That's what needs to be said. And there needs to be class action lawsuits to recover damages for this as well. VMware wasn't charging $100 less per license for sales to Midwest companies. They didn't slap a $100 Silicon Valley differential on local sales. This is bullshit, through and through.
And I apologize for my rage and language, but damn it. Every single one of these executives built their companies on keeping pay low. I've got friends who got stuck in dead-end contracts at these tech firms. One of 'em has literally been on contract with IBM for 5 years, waiting for some kind of fulltime opportunity that they never have "need" for. Another just got furloughed after two years on contracts at Ubisoft. Had a friend from school who launched the Palm Pre only to get laid off within 9 months of joining the company. No transfers, no options, just a "hey, so our idea for that... turns out no one wanted to buy it! You gotta go." Well, not our problem, dude. We didn't get to pick which product our work went into. We didn't get to make a career-interest decision after watching you present to us that you'd done the market- and competitive analyses to back some likelihood of demand for what you wanted us to commit no-strings-attached to.
It's immature, and malicious and deceitful. And too many people break bread and break their backs to get their Agile and SCRUM releases out the door every 5 minutes. Everyone under the executives and senior management deserves more damn respect than this.
Edit: And Sundar has needed to go for a long time. The guy is an idiot. How do you turn the largest consumer and commercial OS into a dumpster fire of exploits, half-finished ideas (Settings vs. Control Panel, anyone?!?), and have to give it away for free because you lacked the expertise to implement a logistics plan that would comfortably roll all consumers and commercial deployments forward without exposing them to significant downtime? You employ people like Sundar. If the man spent 5 fewer minutes writing verbose excuses for not getting results, he'd have 5 minutes each day to work toward getting results. If he tries hard enough, he may up it to 10 minutes in a few years.
> And Sundar has needed to go for a long time... How do you turn the largest consumer and commercial OS into a dumpster fire of exploits, half-finished ideas (Settings vs. Control Panel, anyone?!?)...
> employers should be required to pay a cost of living differentia
They do pay this. It costs a heck of a lot more to hire in The Bay Area than it does outside, and much of this increased salary goes to landlords and rents.
At the same time conversely companies like Facebook are threatening to lower wages if people move outside the bay area.
I feel like if you're a remote employee they don't need to have a right to know where you are living, they only need to know your timezone for planning purposes. Your location should be abstracted out of the equation by remote work tools.
As far as they are concerned you are just an amorphous existence on the planet that is online to provide skills from some time UTC to some other time UTC and they shouldn't have a right to know anything more than that.
It’s likely companies may have been willing to pay extra for an employee who can colocate in a specific office, and if that is no longer required salaries may go down across the board since they can hire from a bigger pool. It’s odd that FB would resort to a punishment like this. They should just reduce everyone’s salaries and encourage them to move out of The Bay Area :).
Reducing everyone's salaries could temporarily backfire though as long as there are other bay area companies paying bay area salaries (even for remote workers), as those people would leave.
However, it may be beneficial for Facebook to do it that way, as they can then get decent talent around the world at a lower price.
A lot of people before would give the advice that if you come to The Bay Area to get a job or fund your startup, you'll eventually succeed because you can easily take meetings with people, find connections, rub shoulders, schmooze, etc, and this was largely true because being in this locale gave an inherent advantage. We're more likely to hire the guy that made a good impression at an event or house party than a random cold email from an anonymous person.
Once Bay Area tech engineer moves to some far off corner of the world, there won't be much differentiation except for raw talent, and there's plenty of raw talent out there in the world who were born in the wrong place.
Careful not to mix up definitions. "Long-term" in medicine does not mean "extended period of time." It more often means "requiring continuous monitoring or care over an extended period of time." COVID-19 patients are still actively monitored, especially now as we have meta-studies just released this month showing SARS-CoV-2 appears to have some preference to selectively target ACE2 (vasodilation). We don't have concrete alphas on any target yet, but we certainly have longitudinal studies in progress. It's been one year from the first cases appearing in Wuhan. We have traced and confirmed more than a dozen variants originating in post-Wuhan areas. The recent surge in new cases is owed almost exclusively to two variants with significantly higher transmissibility.
Last, I'd like to point out that while I agree this type of virus is relatively new to humans, and the -2 virus is very new, we do have a wealth of longitudinal knowledge from SARS and MERS cases to work with in conjunction with what we are discovering about SARS-CoV-2. So far, it is not the patients with respiratory illness that we need to be concerned about. It is the patients with zero respiratory symptoms, but high risk of other cardiovascular and autoimmune symptoms. I think we're more baffled by how this one virus can go from putting someone on a ventilator to putting someone at a significant risk of stroke in such a short period of time.
That said, I agree with you that these are apples and oranges. The brain-eating amoebas are a panic thing. COVID-19 is not something to shake a fist at. COVID-19 has been found in spinal fluid. Given SARS and MERS do not share this trait, we have a lot more reason to take -2 as a serious threat, regardless of its extremely high short-term survival rate.
Nothing good comes easy. The dozens of hours I'd spend staring at 26 lines in R just trying different ideas to shorten/optimize/improve clarity, and that wasn't something I needed to sell that someone else would depend on for business or personal use.
But I can relate to the pressure to deliver quick results. I found myself burnt out when working on a forecast model around three years ago. The constant "how's it goin'?" tore my attention away from the work, and I'm still convinced I could have delivered a better result.
So, in a way, I agree. In another, I understand the other side of the issue, and I think there are so many less time-intensive tasks going on around engineering that there's often little awareness that something like refactoring a class for better efficiency pays in smaller but compounding ways long-term, with most of the time cost and perceived opportunity cost being immediate and short-term. It's still worth it if you really do the math on the long-term benefit.
"Our business is not a coherent single entity and we don't have the best operational policies that try to remedy that so I won't make any promises about quality while still sounding like we're worth $1b"
"I apologize for having misspoke earlier. The correct quote is: '...while still sounding like we're maybe worth $1b.' We could be worth more than the disclosed amount; however, we aren't sure if or how often, if ever, someone may be counting that number. It's really up in the air on occasion at around this point." - Me, still CEO, now an award-winning CEO.
They're pricey ($150) and heavy (2 pounds, heavy if you're carrying it around all day), making them less than entirely practical. But it tickles me that you can plug your phone into your campfire.
I don't know if you could pull off the charger and plunk it down on the crust of a lava flow, but it would be worth trying out. Assuming you had $150 to burn (literally).
I think the one thing we cannot open for debate, because it is evident given any framework, is the impact of risk avoidance in knowledge acquisition. I once read that given a room with a table and some blocks, the idiot would wait for instructions; the smart person would try to surmise the intent placing the blocks on the table, the table in the room, and the subject (them) at the table; however, the genius would find novel ways to combine the blocks, the table, and the room, often at the bewilderment of any observer.
Frameworks are what smart people use to get results. I believe risk is the tool of geniuses.
It'd be obvious, for example, to add Bold, Italic, and Underline buttons for usability to the textbox I'm typing in. To me, however, the buttons, the textbox, even the text-styling characters are arbitrary constraints. I want to know if this "reply" feature could be built in-line, without a textbox? If I could eliminate the constraints one-by-one, how many ways could you and I interact over this specific topic that would be both novel and, perhaps, more engaging for us both?
I'd like to lovingly point out that your comment notes how a book you read describes how a genius thinks about a situation - and then you wrote a paragraph to demonstrate your similar genius to the comment box. What was your intent?
Your comment (and my comment) strike me as seeking connection and seeking recognition - both classic behaviors on Maslow's hierarchy of needs (a model).
I think that knowledge of the models helps one see both common ground and opposition - and the richest life experience may come from thinking like an idiot, smart person and a genius.
I agree. But I would like to point out that I did not initialize my thinking from Maslow's hierarchy. A discernible connection is coincidental rather than intentional. And that's what I intended to say through describing risk. It is safe to begin with the framework and work within its constraints to achieve a relatively predictable result. However, that also averts any risk inherent to failures along processes that discover novel relationships, test outcomes, compare against known outcomes. That may yield more desirable results, but it's more often riddled with stochastic failure. It's natural to feel repulsion to it, but the ability to persist against continuous discomfort is what separates the Bezos, Musks, Gates, et. al. from nearly everyone else.
On a related note, Bill Gates' recent doubts about the utility of all-electric long distance trucks was surprising. I don't know of nearly any other time Gates just reached into a field he has zero experience in and reacted to his own repulsion of his discomfort with the subject and its context. It was an odd, uncharacteristic move, and one that makes me wonder if his value set has changed enough that he cannot provide value and authoritative influence in consumer and enterprise hardware and software solutions anymore. People change, so maybe it's true. But man, I idolized Bill as a kid. It's hard to not feel like he's the reason people take people like me seriously, even today.
Thanks for your response and agreement. No comments on bill but I'd like to respond to this:
>It is safe to begin with the framework and work within its constraints to achieve a relatively predictable result. However, that also averts any risk inherent to failures along processes that discover novel relationships, test outcomes, compare against known outcomes.
I'm abstracting this to a question about creative process and whether you should use a conventional process or try something new. I think this depends on the organization the process exists in - the answer could be both or either.
You may find the book "Teeming" that speaks to anthropology and organizational evolution interesting as it speaks to creating organizations that have both structure and fluidity.
Forgive me for interrupting. I've been enjoying thinking about your conversation. If you have the time and inclination, I would like to know your feelings or thoughts (even just your gut instincts), if any, about Metamodernism (whatever this word means to you).
100% of the time for me, I wouldn't wipe my butt with a trackpad, let alone use one for work.
It's always fun for me to meet people who do things the complete opposite I do them. It's oddly satisfying, like, I'm glad someone is my polar opposite on an issue or activity.
It depends. For lists, I do spaces. Allows for more levels than a tab would. But for everything else, tabs.
I've also grown to loathe that first-line tab beginning the second paragraph. It makes left-aligned text look wonky.
I loathe centered text too.
I'm not a rounded rectangle person.
I think the colored block UI that's all over Android, sites like HN, etc. looks tacky. We went from semi-transparent glass UI to flat colored blocks, and somehow interfaces got slower and more processor intensive. Now, that's a horse of a different color.
