3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work • Hacker News Board

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#41

Post by sleepdreamy » Tue, Apr 26, 2022, 4:44 PM UTC

theandrewbailey wrote: post #17

Not surprising. How many people have stressful jobs and overbearing bosses who would kill them if things weren't done just right? And when they come home, all they want is to eat dinner, watch TV, and sleep. Should any problem happen to interrupt that, they explode. Go read the story of Potiphar and Joseph in the Bible.[0] Say what you will about it being real or not, that story is thousands of years old, and there a…

We're very much the same animals. If you need a testament, just go drive on any major east coast highway in the morning. People rage, go get ahead maybe 5 feet. Saving what, fractions of a second?

We are animals, the same animals we were 3,200 years ago. Just fancier toys this time around. Serfdom is still largely intact, just a different flavoring this time around.

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#42

Post by prepend » Tue, Apr 26, 2022, 4:45 PM UTC

egberts1 wrote: post #13

Pop-up Blocked by OpenCulture’s own Pop-Up JavaScript. Running Firefox on iOS in portrait mode. Turning phone around to landscape still rendered me unable to press any button much less read the pop up. Only got words like “ad-blocker”. Nope, not running any ad-blocker.

I had similar behavior. I think sites assume that if any of their 20+ trackers and load-ins don’t load then the user is ad blocking.

At least they let me close out of the pop up and read the page.

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#43

Post by adamsmith143 » Tue, Apr 26, 2022, 4:45 PM UTC

amanj41 wrote: post #33

adamsmith143 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope the parallel of SWEs working for Mega-Billionaires is not lost on the HN crowd.

Don't really think SWEs are being taken advantage of the same way other employees at successful tech companies are. (Coming from the perspective of an SWE)

Didn't mean that in general but there is a strong undercurrent of bootlicking and overworking oneself for little or no reward on HN.

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#44

Post by reaperducer » Tue, Apr 26, 2022, 4:46 PM UTC

djmips wrote: post #26

conanite wrote: post #2

> But how well would it fly if you were to plead the need to feast, to embalm your brother, or to make an offering to a god? Vacation, funerals, religious holy-days?

True but it would be funny to actually use those terms in your time-off request.

Me a few months ago: "I need to take a PTO day tomorrow."

Boss: "What for?"

Me: "It's P."

She never asked again.

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#45

Post by adamsmith143 » Tue, Apr 26, 2022, 4:46 PM UTC

omnicognate wrote: post #39

adamsmith143 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope the parallel of SWEs working for Mega-Billionaires is not lost on the HN crowd.

"Billionaire" doesn't need a prefix yet and it'll certainly be a while before we get any megabillionaires, aka quadrillionaires. Probably not long before we start having megamillionaires, aka kilobillionaires, aka trillionaires though. Elon Musk's around a quarter of the way there.

Not that there's a definite standard but someone worth over $100B feels Mega to me.

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#46

Post by rpmisms » Tue, Apr 26, 2022, 4:48 PM UTC

conanite wrote: post #2

> But how well would it fly if you were to plead the need to feast, to embalm your brother, or to make an offering to a god? Vacation, funerals, religious holy-days?

I do this. Recently took some time off for Pascha (Russian Easter), and made a portion of the request in Old Church Slavonic

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#47

Post by mitchdoogle » Tue, Apr 26, 2022, 4:48 PM UTC

egberts1 wrote: post #13

Pop-up Blocked by OpenCulture’s own Pop-Up JavaScript. Running Firefox on iOS in portrait mode. Turning phone around to landscape still rendered me unable to press any button much less read the pop up. Only got words like “ad-blocker”. Nope, not running any ad-blocker.

Doesn't mobile Firefox have built-in adblocking?

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#48

Post by sva_ » Tue, Apr 26, 2022, 4:49 PM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #20

I feel sorry for the poor guys who never missed a day of work and gave their all to building that damn pyramid, 3200 years later nobody even knows who they were.

Maybe we don't know them individually, but we're still thinking and talking about them after all this time, because of what they've built.

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#49

Post by omnicognate » Tue, Apr 26, 2022, 4:49 PM UTC

adamsmith143 wrote: post #45

omnicognate wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Billionaire" doesn't need a prefix yet and it'll certainly be a while before we get any megabillionaires, aka quadrillionaires. Probably not long before we start having megamillionaires, aka kilobillionaires, aka trillionaires though. Elon Musk's around a quarter of the way there.

Not that there's a definite standard but someone worth over $100B feels Mega to me.

I was joking about mega conventionally meaning a million of something [1]. I agree it's certainly "mega" in the informal/Aussie sense.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#50

Post by 0xbadcafebee » Tue, Apr 26, 2022, 4:49 PM UTC

amanj41 wrote: post #33

adamsmith143 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope the parallel of SWEs working for Mega-Billionaires is not lost on the HN crowd.

Don't really think SWEs are being taken advantage of the same way other employees at successful tech companies are. (Coming from the perspective of an SWE)

My vote for most taken advantage of is the on-call Ops people. Salaries sometimes half that of the SWEs, expected to be woken up at 3am, interrupted all day by "urgent" requests ("I can't connect to the server I need access now" -> "whoops it was my SSH key"), responsible for the product running 24/7, respond immediately to security incidents ("patch this asap"), stay up overnight for maintenance or deploys to legacy systems, act as de-facto architects, expected to be experts on virtually all technology.

Wouldn't be surprised if one dude in Texas working 60+hrs/week is singly responsible for every Tesla in the country continuing to get remote updates.