211–220 of 263 posts
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Buses also are useless. Thry routinely waste you hours due to their slowness and inconsistency. The choices really are two: subway (or any dedicated rail thing) or car.
Buses are only slow and inconsistent because of cars.
We'll be writing about why this is for years. COVID gave people or in many cases made people re-evaluate what's important to them and many people concluded that their work-life balance placed too much importance on work. People had been thinking, what parts of their life were they willing to give up for work, but now the question of what parts of work are they willing to give up for their life is considered a valid,…
I feel like a lot of this could be solved with a month long holiday like they do in Europe. US workers are lucky to get a few days off in a row without interruption. Open office is also just horrendous.
Remote work for developers is a viable option. We are rapidly moving the majority of our software development to India, and only keeping product leads in Europe and the US.
Why the move?
It shouldn't take me an hour and 30 minutes in congested, underbuilt roads to drive 20 miles into the office. Cities and their wealthy politically-connected commercial office building owners have had decades to fix this problem. No sympathy.
The problem is your office is 20 miles from your workplace. 20 miles is more than the entire length of Seattle. Heck it is more than the entire width of the Seattle Metro area (western most tip of Seattle heading straight east until it turns into farmland). There should be sufficient housing stock such that people don't need to drive 20 miles to work!
Public transport is key, especially trains that can bypass traffic at high speeds. In my city in Australia I live about 25km out from the CBD, but I can get there in under 30 minutes via train if I ever need to - it works very well and I don't have to live in a tiny shoebox on top of 100 other people.
Why would US companies continue to pay US wages for people at home when there are remote people much cheaper in south America and Europe ?
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> For the longest time, we tech workers have convinced ourselves we're special Because we are. In the sense that we own the means of production: our education and experience are the tools we take with us wherever we go. We own the process of (for example) software development like the craftspeople of old used to own production processes of material things. We can dictate terms, because when we walk away, we take our…
It's an asymmetric relationship between companies and (your example) software engineers. One side, the software engineers, can withhold their labor or sell it to somebody else. Nobody is irreplaceable. Large companies in particular have spare capacity to replace you if what you do is actually important enough. A lot of the time, withholding your labor is simply an opportunity cost to the employer. The employer on the…
This is where your script falls apart. We generally have the ability to start our own business with our skills.
I would be interested to hear from Indian, Philipino or other off- near- shore locations. Is this “give me WFH or give me death” actually just USA/European entitlement and Chennai Devs will gleefully work in air-conditioned offices (hopefully not open plan cubicle hell but nicely designed “WeWork-like” places) and discover the turbo-charge of a co-located mission locked team? Are we Western Devs about to learn a very…
We have at least 2 maybe even 3 full decades of businesses offshoring to cut costs, then the quality of the work they receive doesn't just plummet it burrows a hole through to the center of the Earth and keeps going. Then they onshore again, and everything eventually returns to normal.
Offshoring is a meme perpetuated by MBA's, and misery factories full of the "best and brightest" like ValueLabs - it doesn't work and we have decades of lived experience to prove it.
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Buses can be very dependable and cheaper than rail if they run in dedicated bus lanes. You’re right that they aren’t much use if they get stuck in the same traffic as everyone else.
Not many places have room for an extra lane that is only used a tiny percentage of the time
Every bus lane you build is ~800 cars you don't have to deal with in traffic, assuming an approximately two hour rush hour
Quite a lot of companies are thinning the herd for the past months and it is set to continue for I have no idea how long. I might stop tomorrow but I highly doubt it. The more places get rid of workers the more the pendulum swings giving more power to the companies over their employees and who they hire. A lot of tech worker primadonnas who have not seen the ugly politics of downsizing, right sizing, and outsourcing…
Lots of people have been saying this forever, but the truth is much more nuanced: tech workers are incredibly valuable IF interest rates are low.
Look at the revenue per employee figures of most tech companies. The difficulty is that the value of tech workers tends to be speculative until they've delivered something, and the low rates give them more time to deliver.