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Tech CEO applauds an employee selling their dog to accommodate return-to-office

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Re: Tech CEO applauds an employee selling their dog to accommodate return-to-office

#81
post #66
post #3

This title doesn't do it justice- I hope his rant about how working moms aren't fair to the company gets him sued.

I know these are dangerous grounds to tread on, but I do struggle with working parents sometimes. I understand having children does take time, but I've experienced a parent that ends up being available around 4 hours a day while they are the linchpin in a certain part of the process that prevents a job from being completed. They're slow to respond to messages, emails, and calls and sometimes async responses are just…

Your anecdotal story is kind of bullshit though. More than half the people I currently work with have children and their performance is similar to the ones who don't. I'm sure that one case was annoying for you, but your sample size is garbage.

Re: Tech CEO applauds an employee selling their dog to accommodate return-to-office

#82

Won't comment directly on the strange rant. But it highlights the reality that something has seriously changed since the pandemic. I have multiple employees that insist on staying home due to their dogs. The amount of discussion around employees' dogs is on another level now, partially due to the anxiety these dogs have when their owners go into the office. It's all very different than prepandemic, I for one never he…

Fortunately workers can now say “I want to work from home because I like it better than your shitty office environment” and if the employer doesn’t like it they can go pound sand and find other workers. Honestly this works as a very nice filter bubble for me. You want me to be on-site because you don’t trust me to be productive unless you can see me? Boy, I bet your Jira hygiene is a lot of fun to be subjected to. I’…

I've been remote for over 10 years, so pre-pandemic, and I'll never understand why they need software engineers, specifically, in an office.

Every single thing I do is logged and timestamped. Every line of code I check in, every PR request I approve, every work item that I close, every time I log into a server, every email, chatting in groups on Slack/Teams, etc.

They can never accuse me of slacking off, because it's all right there. They can easily see what I've been up to all day down to the millisecond.

I don't understand the accusations of people "quiet quitting" who aren't even logging in. If that's true then they should obviously be fired. I get my work done more efficiently working remote, without the distractions. And I can work when I feel the most productive.

Re: Tech CEO applauds an employee selling their dog to accommodate return-to-office

#83
post #81
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know these are dangerous grounds to tread on, but I do struggle with working parents sometimes. I understand having children does take time, but I've experienced a parent that ends up being available around 4 hours a day while they are the linchpin in a certain part of the process that prevents a job from being completed. They're slow to respond to messages, emails, and calls and sometimes async responses are just…

Your anecdotal story is kind of bullshit though. More than half the people I currently work with have children and their performance is similar to the ones who don't. I'm sure that one case was annoying for you, but your sample size is garbage.

I never claimed mine was a study. Just an observation. No need for a hostile response like yours.

Re: Tech CEO applauds an employee selling their dog to accommodate return-to-office

#84
post #71
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think there are fewer sociopaths in tech than marketing?

I tend to view marketing as an industry where it is easier to 'fake it til you make it' versus tech or software engineering. But I definitely can see some arguments otherwise. I just view being able to sustain oneself purely on "bullshitting" other people as a bit harder to do in tech only because, typically , tech businesses have to output an actual software product. But I realize there are a handful of counterexamp…

This might be true (and I agree!) - but there are plenty of forms of sociopathy that are not bullshitting and “faking it until you (maybe) make it”.

Re: Tech CEO applauds an employee selling their dog to accommodate return-to-office

#85
post #43

Seriously, are any of you "increasing output" with AI? I get like 10 good lines of code a day from Copilot. I don't even try ChatGPT anymore, as its only useful if you're writing boilerplate. Everything thats actually hard about my job requires the full context of the rest of the codebase, within repo and without, and architectural knowledge of the problems we're trying to solve. I read another post here yesterday th…

my productivity has increased tremendously with chatgpt

For example, I was getting an error that a method x was missing on var of type MyObject. In debugging mode I could see that they type was MyObject and the attribute x was there. I paste the small snippet of code and the error and chapgpt immediately identified that the method call was actually returning a collection. I just didnt notice that the variable was a collection of type MyObject and not an actual MyObject.

When Im looking at other people's code I can paste it in and chatgpt will give an opinion on what is happening with the code.

I was creating UI components from scratch the other day and needed a word wrapping algorithm. ChatGPT was able to write one that didnt quite work, but was most of the way there.

When I looking at unfamiliar APIs it is much faster to ask chatgpt than to do google searches.

Even for things like how many police officers did austin have in 2008 are much faster with chatgpt. Ill ask for the reference (always broken) but enough of the reference is correct that I can google and get to the reference.

Lately chat gpt has been disconnecting forcing me to reconnect if I go idle for more than about 5 minutes, that has been annoying.

Re: Tech CEO applauds an employee selling their dog to accommodate return-to-office

#86
I work at a tech company that purports to build the metaverse. Initially they allowed people to go remote. Now they are walking back on it and asking people that don't want to return to take a package. A quite sad story of someone who has a few months old baby at home. They moved to a different city since their manager approved it. Now they have to be back in the Bay Area 3 days a week (in the middle of the week) since their remote application got denied. Literally forcing a parent to be away from their baby (or be jobless).

Re: Tech CEO applauds an employee selling their dog to accommodate return-to-office

#87

Won't comment directly on the strange rant. But it highlights the reality that something has seriously changed since the pandemic. I have multiple employees that insist on staying home due to their dogs. The amount of discussion around employees' dogs is on another level now, partially due to the anxiety these dogs have when their owners go into the office. It's all very different than prepandemic, I for one never he…

When I worked in the office I drove home during lunch, let the dogs out, scarfed down food for ten minutes, then headed back to work. I know others that just cage their dogs for eight hours (which I would never do to my dogs) or took them to doggy daycare every day, which the average day-rate around me is $40/day per dog (and I have two dogs, so it would be $80/day, or $1600/month).

My new job is downtown and at least an hour drive away, so I couldn't feasibly drive home during lunch anymore. It would be a significant inconvenience for me to start going to work every day (or at least it would if my wife was also forced to go back to work, she currently works from home also).

It's also inconvenient for many other reasons, including a 2-3 hour commute, but yeah, having dogs complicates things, and pre-pandemic, there were very few remote jobs, so people just had to deal with it. But it still sucked.

Re: Tech CEO applauds an employee selling their dog to accommodate return-to-office

#88
post #73
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because marketers don't make a product. They're just locked in a zero-sum game for attention. Most tech companies at least start with the goal of improving the world in some way.

Most tech companies post 2000 are marketing companies in disguise, whose only goal is to enshitify products in service of recurring revenue and spy on users to harvest data. They might have a public statement of “improving the world”, but this is usually a brazen attempt to hide their actual goals.

[deleted]

Re: Tech CEO applauds an employee selling their dog to accommodate return-to-office

#90
I watched some of that video and the guy seems burnt out.

He was in the same sentence saying one thing and then the complete opposite. He also seemed far too emotional about things to be a CEO. People questioning his education is because his degree is in Geography. He could have a reasoned response to that for example that he's a business man and the reason he is CEO is because of his business experience not his education but he totally whiffed and just started getting upset about the personal attacks.

Some of his points were salient and others where unhinged rambling nonsense. He's a serious danger to the company and the exec board have a fuditary responsibility to stop him doing anything reckless (like this).

If the board was sensible they would get rid of this guy, he's a major liability.

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