This whole discussion reminds me of the beautiful design of UTF-8. They used the lower bits to be ASCII which made backwards compatibility so much easier. It also reminds me of the failure of Intels Itanium and the success of AMD x64. Engineers often want to abandon backwards compatibility to make a new "beautiful" design, but it's the design that has full backwards compatibility that's actual impressive.
It reminds me of python 3. Basically, a huge chunk of people (in my case, scientific programming) get an enormous mess and nothing at all of value until... 3.6 maybe (the infix matrix mult operator). Stunningly, people weren't enthused about this deal.
It would maybe be okay at the router to break some things, but ffs even in software I have to choose? Why do I need both ping and ping6 this is stupid!! They really screwed up by making it a breaking change to the OS and not just internet routing.
They didn't screw up. They made it a breaking change to OSs because it had to be a breaking change to OSs. If anyone screwed up here, it was the people who made v4, not the ones that made v6.
For ping, I think it originally had different binaries because ICMPv4 and ICMPv6 are different protocols, but Linux has had a dual-stack `ping` binary for a very long time now. You can just use `ping` for either address family.
How about I look at actual unions in software, like the NYT tech union that immediately started undermining merit, making illegal demands, and discouraging high performance.
Every actual tech union that exists is a great advertisement for not unionizing.
Would also note that sports' (and Hollywood's, to a lesser degree) models rely on tightly controlling distribution to a near-monopoly degree. Which, as it happens, describes big tech to a tee.
> Your entire focus here is compensation, which wasn’t my focus in everything I listed.
It wasn't your focus in everything you listed, but it was in two out of the four of them... which certainly isn't nothing:
> - Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.
> - The incentives for engineers who want to go above and beyond will disappear, because compensation, and everything else, becomes standardized. Instead of an environment where you can negotiate and prove your value, it becomes about fitting into a collective agreement. Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.
What was the #1 argument against WFH before COVID? It was fear of productivity drop, that the company simply can't function with WFH. Then COVID happened and companies worked fine for three years with WFH. At this point, it shouldn't be called RTO, it should be called STO (Switch To Office), because WFH is the default existing state. And the companies that want to STO, they admit there's NO DATA to support this:
The hypocrisy is obvious, they were all so against WFH before COVID, demanding data that it would work. Now it's working fine for three years, and yet they switch to office with no data, a simple "gut feeling" argument. It's indeed bullshit.
> Then COVID happened and companies worked fine for three years with WFH.
I don't think we have good data on that "worked fine" part. Personally I saw a significant degradation of our team performance during COVID remote.
Some people slacked a lot (difficult to catch, though), many people worked hard (perhaps even harder than in office), but the bad communication reduced the overall team productivity a lot.
Where's the data? Before COVID, there were plenty of anecdotes from remote companies about how it helped their hiring and productivity, but that wasn't enough to convince the vast majority of companies to try WFH. They stubbornly said the status quo of in-office was enough and no further discussion was allowed.
Now where's the data to change the status quo from WFH to the office? Amazon admits they have none. If the other companies forcing in-office had data they would be shouting it as much as they could, but when asked for data, it's just silence. Companies have had record profits and quarters with WFH, so clearly the financial data shows no issues with WFH.
Again where's the data? All we hear are anecdotes, that wasn't good enough to change the status quo before COVID, why should it be enough now to change the status quo away from WFH?
> Before COVID, there were plenty of anecdotes from remote companies about how it helped their hiring and productivity, but that wasn't enough to convince the vast majority of companies to try WFH.
I think there's a bit of a selection bias. I believe many people can work effectively remotely and these likely applied to remote companies. But many people are less effective remote and these wouldn't succeed in remote companies. In the end I certainly think there's a space for remote only companies, but I'm not sure if it's a model useful for the whole IT sector.
> All we hear are anecdotes, that wasn't good enough to change the status quo before COVID, why should it be enough now to change the status quo away from WFH?
In the end it doesn't matter. It's the managers calling the shots and carrying the responsibility. If their guts tell them office work is the right direction, it's their bet.
Talking to lots of middle and upper management, the primary complaints I hear are hard to measure - poorer communication, less alignment, less innovation, etc. None of this reduces the number of tasks being done, but reduces the utility of those tasks. Measuring directly is hard, but ultimately you'd expect it result in lower growth - which many companies are seeing (but it's hard to disentangle this from the macro situation).
I think the hard reality is that companies need to make a thesis on the level of flexibility in remote/in-office work and commit, then 5 years from now we'll get an idea of what works well.
* Less sick employees since they don't spread their germs in an office
* Much lower attrition and retention of institutional knowledge
* Lower rent costs or possibly zero rent costs for office (actually this one is very easy to measure)
* Able to hire from outside local metro area
None of these was enough to move companies even an inch towards WFH pre-COVID. And yet now vague issues due to lack of water cooler conversations is enough to shift everything back to in-office?
Pre-pandemic, why would you risk testing out an unknown style of work and management that almost no one had experience with?
Now there's a significant portion of the labor market that expects WFH, companies need to produce a policy on WFH/RTO instead of treating it as a non-decision.
Data gives no clear insight into which is better, which makes this a judgment call, and everyone with >5 yoe has enough experience in both modes that they feel qualified to make that judgment. Many think requiring some in-office time is superior. You can try and dismiss those opinions as "vague issues due to lack of water cooler conversations" but that's not going to actually convince anyone with the power to effect these decisions - even if you're right! You need answers to concerns like "virtual communication is too low bandwidth to build alignment on strategic shifts that are necessary for the company to grow to profitability" (quote to me from a director at a company with >1,000 employees).
My argument is basically: if you could have addressed those concerns, it would've happened during the pandemic. Manifestly, those concerns were not addressed in a satisfactory way. Therefore the only real resolution now is to wait 5-10 years to see if RTO/WFH is a meaningful differentiator for companies.
Wouldnt it be more likely that current Middle management isn’t familiar enough with a chat environments to maintain team cohesion.
I worked as a volunteer in an online team before the COVID years. I was FAR better at ensuring a team was cohesive online, than I was in person. You can make out whats going on based on how people talk, you can have one on ones, and diagnose issues.
"Far less noticed was a revised version of their paper, published in May by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The boost to efficiency had instead become a 4% decline."
This line from the article "...in the number of calls handled per hour by employees of an online retailer that had shifted from offices to homes.." shows that this study is about a call center. A few points on this:
* The discussion here is about tech workers, not call center employees
* Here's another article from 2014 that showed a 13.5% increase at a different call center https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-emplo... So study vs study, which one is correct or better? This isn't good evidence either way for software engineers.
The data and evidence we need is from the loud RTO companies (Google, Amazon, etc.) in the software industry pushing for RTO. These supposedly heavily data and metrics driven organizations have NO DATA supporting their RTO efforts. Some random study about call centers is irrelevant here.
>* Here's another article from 2014 that showed a 13.5% increase at a different call center https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-emplo... So study vs study, which one is correct or better? This isn't good evidence either way for software engineers.
1. The article in question cites 5 other studies that also found negative results for remote work.
2. The Ctrip study mentioned in your hbr.org link is probably the Trip.com study mentioned in the economist article. The article mentions issues with that study:
"Call-centre workers for a Chinese online travel agency now known as Trip.com increased their performance by 13% when remote—a figure that continues to appear in media coverage today. But two big wrinkles are often neglected: first, more than two-thirds of the improved performance came from employees working longer hours, not more efficiently; second, the Chinese firm eventually halted remote work because off-site employees struggled to get promoted. In 2022 Dr Bloom visited Trip.com again, this time to investigate the effects of a hybrid-working trial. The outcomes of this experiment were less striking: it had a negligible impact on productivity, though workers put in longer days and wrote more code when in the office."
>* The discussion here is about tech workers, not call center employees
>The data and evidence we need is from the loud RTO companies (Google, Amazon, etc.) in the software industry pushing for RTO. These supposedly heavily data and metrics driven organizations have NO DATA supporting their RTO efforts. Some random study about call centers is irrelevant here.
1. Some data is no data. Sure, maybe doing the study with office workers will show different results, but until then assuming the positive unless there's evidence to the contrary is just intellectually dishonest.
2. Call center productivity is far easier to objectively measure than tech workers. Given issues above with studies on call center workers, I suspect that even if there were a study showing negative results for tech workers, there's going to be some many ways you can wriggle yourself out of that one that it's not going to meaningfully change the conversation.
Not saying that you're wrong, but I'm interested in how you're able to measure "overall team productivity." I've found that to be a near-impossibility at any organization that I've worked at.
For many people it’s really just a gut feeling. That’s the issue with this debate; there isn’t really any data on either side of the aisle. Regardless, team productivity is both more important, and easier to measure than individual productivity; and most proponents of remote work are only focused on the latter.
Isn't bad communication a management issue, not a team performance issue?
Some articles have pointed out that the major driver (from executives) to return to office is simply underperforming real estate investments. In short, the attrition, decreases in performance and morale, and environmental impacts are simply not worth the massive losses that would be incurred from the innumerable empty office parks.
And how may of those people slacked a lot in the office, and you just never knew because they were good at looking busy whenever anyone was nearby?
And how many people were much more productive because other people didn't keep popping over their cubicle walls and interrupting them? "Easy communication" can be a double-edged sword, and Slack/Discord/email can be silenced for specified periods of time.
> And how may of those people slacked a lot in the office, and you just never knew because they were good at looking busy whenever anyone was nearby?
Some of them sure, but I believe less so. In my opinion, most slacking is not a result of very intentional attempts, but more of an environment / opportunity enabling it.
> And how many people were much more productive because other people didn't keep popping over their cubicle walls and interrupting them?
My intuition is that the trade-off is worth it. Larger projects lose the most productivity on information-sharing issues. Wrong things are being worked on, with focus on wrong aspects, which then again creates more useless work. Things are being reworked constantly because of wrong assumptions, people not reading miles long specs and thus missing or misinterpreting some details. People talking to each other frequently is IMHO critical for the success of the bigger organizations.
Sometimes you need uninterrupted time for deep thinking, but that's in my experience a smaller part of the work. In such cases I either go to meeting rooms or home.
> Sometimes you need uninterrupted time for deep thinking, but that's in my experience a smaller part of the work. In such cases I either go to meeting rooms or home.
That's great until you are forced to come in on "anchor days" and there are no free meeting rooms left.
I say this out here whenever this comes up…but if we are truly being honest there really is no hard data out there to support that WFH benefits the organization. All of the arguments and anecdotes I hear are specific to the individual. If you can’t support your argument with data against the people who get to make the decisions where you work, you can’t really blame them for going back to a historical work environment that made them successful in the first place.
I always caveat this idea with the fact that I love WFH and do not want to RTO, but I can’t make an argument why it’s better for my organization.
Don't know about Amazon, for all I know about their disfunction they could be actually running the company without any performance statistics. But, say, Goldman definitely has these statistic since they pay bonuses based on them and it is pretty aggressive in RTO. I imagine Amazon has statistics too but they just don't want to publish them, afraid (rightfully so, IMHO) of what that will do to their stock price.
Disregarding data from one of the most profitable companies in the world just to ply an argument that makes no sense in the context and disqualifies based on an entirely fabricated and unmeasurable dimension — that’s called:
Sorry, I don't follow. The GP said that Amazon has no data and I argued that they probably have but don't want to publish it. But even if you are arguing against the GP your bringing up "No true Scotsman" makes no sense in this context.
Amazon has no data to prove that rto is effective and have admitted it was a gut feeling — thats a data point to the point further up the thread about “companies willing sacrifice productivity for control”
So yes that is a data point: Amazon can’t find data saying their workforce was more effective in the office.
You employ no true Scotsman by discarding g this data point and saying “they don’t matter because I suspect they are in productivity trouble”
Which has no basis in reality as the CEO just admitted they could not find data to support that point — otherwise they would say “people are more productive in the office based on our studies.” Your refutation is a no true Scotsman under the sense of invalidly discarding the counter example given based on your suspicion which is actually disproved by the comments of the CEO himself.
Also Goldman Sachs has maintained a buy position on Amazon for this entire time — so your suspiscion about Amazon being unstable and Goldman being stable doesn’t really hold water.
There is no evidence that Amazon has no data showing decreased productivity during WFH period. The statement from the management is carefully worded so Amazon won't get smacked by SEC for misrepresentation: the stated "gut feeling" is about the RTO mandate, not about the productivity metrics. Amazon having or lacking performance statistics is a speculation, the CEO hasn't proved or disproved anything. But even if we agreed that, indeed, Amazon not having performance data is a fact, how is it "True Scotsman" again? Bringing up a counterexample against a claim "All companies have no data and do RTO out of spite!" only appears as a fallacy to you because you might be emotionally invested in this. A counterexample is is the proper way to refute a false assertion like that.
"True Scotsman" is, in fact, a fallacy of trying to invalidate a counterexample, interesting that you brought it up.
Your misrepresentations of my argument and assumptions about my feelings aside the no true Scotsman is this in quotes:
“Don't know about Amazon, for all I know about their disfunction they could be actually running the company without any performance statistics.”
The counter example you are discarding is the fact that the Amazon ceo said that it was simply a gut feeling and not based on any data and they are a successful company who is willing to do rto based on control with no consideration for productivity (all of your speculation aside those are the facts we have to work with). You are trying to disqualify this data point based on your assumption that something is wrong with the company and no “non dysfunctional” (or no true company) would allow wfh. You then point to Goldman Sachs as a “true” company that did rto and should therefore be considered in place of Amazon. This assumption is not supported by your example (Goldman sachs) which actually has research supporting the opposite but that’s beside the point of you attempting to protect the assertion (companies will not do rto for purely aesthetic/control purposes while it may decrease productivity) by discarding the example of Amazon which is just that: a company pursuing rto without (as far as we know) knowledge as to how it affects productivity whether negatively or positively; it was done based on a gut feeling of management.
Nice set of assumptions about someone you don’t know though, I’ll be disengaging now.
I see, you believe that the statement "Amazon goes RTO even though it has no data about productivity impact from WFH" is a counterexample to the assertion "No company does RTO despite the data showing increased productivity from WFH", this makes your arguments more rational for somebody who accepts that, indeed, Amazon having no data proves that it acted against the data (which it did not have but, I imagine, in some philosophical sense it's also "data", and if you really, really want it, that "data" also shows WFH increased productivity by the virtue of not showing the decreased productivity, even though it also does not show that e.g. not putting employees in front of a firing squad for missing some KPI bar would decreased productivity too).
You failed to capture both the meaning and actual words of my argument and the way you have re-worded it doesn’t make semantic sense so I can’t really understand what you are trying to communicate. The continued misrepresentation of my argument does not actually prove your point.
Why would I even try to capture your actual words? It's all there already, you can re-read this thread. And I definitely did not try to reword anything you say, unless now you are saying you did not claim that the Amazon is a counterexample to the https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37614850 ? Well it's either that or your "True Scotsman" accusations make no sense, pick either, I don't care.
USB 2.0 is a missed opportunity for bringing Stage Manager/screen mirroring feature from iPadOS to iPhone. This is already possible with iPad and a USB A + HDMI -> USB C adapter (plug keyboard/mouse into USB A, monitor into HDMI, and USB C into iPad).
California has CCPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Consumer_Privacy_Ac... Could this be used to force these companies to delete all personal data? It would have to be done periodically since after deletion the data would accumulate again. It seems like there's a potential business idea here of automatically sending out CCPA deletion notices to companies on a schedule. While this wouldn't stop the collection of data, regularly interrupting them with deletion requests could make storing personal data costly enough to at least reduce whatever profits they would get from it.
EDIT: Looked at a few privacy policies and the CCPA link is often hard to find. Keywords to look for: "CCPA", "California Privacy", some examples of links I found:
Something interesting I found is also this: https://www.honda.com/privacy/CCPA-Metrics which shows how many requests Honda received. It seems not many are aware of CCPA rights and this number of requests is not enough to deter companies from gathering personal information. These metrics need to be orders of magnitude higher to make a difference in company behavior. It seems like an automated service to send these requests and more public awareness of CCPA could help here.
EDIT2: A lot of these forms ask whether you're submitting the request for yourself or you're an authorized agent doing it for someone else. I found more details on "authorized agents" on the CCPA FAQ: https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa. Maybe an organization like Mozilla or EFF could setup a service where you can authorize them to do this for you? Then you could just select a checkbox of companies that you want CCPA deletion requests for and it would be sent on a regular schedule (quarterly? yearly?). If such a service became popular, it could really disrupt the personal data gathering of companies.
I was thinking about a similar idea while reading the HN discussion on NASA's Deep Space Network issues. For the Artemis moon mission, instead of wasting precious DSN bandwidth, wouldn't it be better to simply store video on a hard drive and send it back to earth? That would even allow recording in full 4k. Same for things like the James Webb telescope. The latency is certainly much higher (a few days for hard drives to return to Earth and get sent back on rockets), but it seems the orders of magnitude higher bandwidth would be worth it
People in this thread are really talking past each other. I've been to the nice Asian mega cities with great and clean subways and buses. And I've lived in the American suburbs. You can't make the American suburbs like the mega cities by just making them walkable.
Everything in a mega city works together to make transit work. Those tall buildings? They provide great shade no matter how sunny it is which is critical for walking to bus stops and subway stations. Also, the walk itself is so much more interesting, random stores to stop at and places to eat and go to. Density makes transit work.
You can't just put random stores in a suburb and make it "walkable" and expect the same thing. Just as everything in a mega city works together to make transit work, everything in a suburb works together to make cars work.
We need to give up on the mass transit solutions that work for dense cities (subways and buses) for suburbs. It's a waste of money and completely the wrong solution. It hasn't worked for decades and never will.
Shut down bus systems for suburbs and use the government funds to give out ride sharing (either Uber or government run) credits for everyone to use (low income can get more credits). That's what a suburb is designed for, point-to-point travel such as cars. And invest massively in real protected, useful bike lanes and stop trying to kill e-bikes with regulations (which a lot of cities are trying to do). e-bikes are finally a real alternative to cars in suburbs, it has just the right amount of travel speed and ease to challenge the car, but it's already under attack. Ride sharing credits and e-bikes, these are the solutions for suburbs. Stop trying to fit a square peg (buses and subways) into a round hole.
