Most guys I know had their housing provided on site. They then traveled home between jobs. Or others had RV trailers with them so they didn't have to go home, if they even had a home at that time.
Some of the best engineers that I've ever worked with have been quiet types who don't particularly want "work mates".
They work fine with people, can parse small talk and bring a positive attitude, etc. But they were out like a shot when the workday was over, and they would never dream of attending a company-sponsored teambuilding event. If they were hired for a 100% remote job, they would expect to never see a coworker in person, and consider it a perk.
Some people just don't want to mix their personal and professional lives. What's wrong with that?
Nothing wrong with it but it probably excludes them from a lot of roles. I’ve been essentially fully remote for years but I still traveled a quarter to a third of the time pre-Covid.
I wouldn’t assume remote meant absolutely zero travel unless that was spelled out.
I would absolutely assume that "remote" means "absolutely zero travel" unless that was spelled out.
Remote means you don't need me physically present at a particular place (outside of knowing my location for tax purposes). It's pretty clear in the word "remote". If that's not always 100% the case, I would expect those expectations to me made clear during the hiring process, not after I've already come aboard.
Do you really think it would be unreasonable for someone to balk if you hired them for a remote role but then asked them to fly somewhere quarterly after they were onboarded?
Yes. I would think it unreasonable. I know a ton of remote people including myself and we all travel quite a bit. Now a job with 25% travel should certainly state that in the job description but if zero travel is non-negotiable you need to specify that up front—and don’t be surprised if you run into issues if managers change.
Remote means you are not assigned to an office period. It says nothing about whether you never/rarely travel or travel essentially 100% of the time eg many consultants.
Obviously people should take positions that align with their preferences however. Just be sure to specify upfront and be prepared to move if circumstances change.
I’ve been involved in hiring at multiple companies with fully remote positions, and all expected travel to a team building offsite at frequencies around once every 6-12 months. From everyone I have talked to at other companies too that is a standard expectation, and for very good reasons - humans work so much better as a team (communication, empathy, charity, etc) with just that small amount of face time.
I've worked exclusively remotely for the past seven years and a surprising number of companies I've worked for and interviewed for "strongly encouraged" on-site meet ups at difference frequencies (quarterly, bi annually, annually).
I never attended any meet ups. I felt guilty about it but like you're saying here, I signed up to work remotely, not in an office ever.
There's no problem with preferring not to hang out at work, there is a huge problem with being unwilling to help your employer solve a huge trust issue in the engineering team. Those engineers are 100% toxic to the business goals that pay their salaries and should be let go immediately if they truly would never dream of attending a physical meeting as you describe.
Someone who won't help you avoid fraud might as well be pushing you into it.
So what happens when your ID gets hacked and reused for fraudulent activity?
Would you have to submit a dispute with the internet credit agencies? Maybe join a class action suit against the entity that leaked your ID so that they're forced to give you a year of free internet identity monitoring?
The same that happens now when somebody stills your identity and ruins your credit history. You'll have to live in a bureaucratic hell for the next couple of years. And yes, as a compensation, you'll get the $6.99 worth of services from the guilty party. If you win the class action suit, that is.
Exactly. Why on earth would we want to replicate such a terrible system online?
We should be reforming our current credit agency system, not empowering it with a new mandate of judging somebody's social or political creditworthiness.
Then you need to deal with levels of rate-limiting that are fine for individuals but make it not feasible for spammers.
Keeping with the cloudflare topic, if Cloudflare only permits you 10 requests per second (HTML + JS/images) that's still usable for web browsing, but someone running a cloud of hundreds of bots would be effectively shut down. Similarly with email, an individual probably doesn't need to send more than one email per 10 seconds but email spammers wouldn't find any ROI at that rate - business needs being different might necessitate a different registry or something in that case.
There's a pretty good movie which lampoons the modern office and explains why people "quiet quit". It's called Office Space, and it was released in 1999.
>It's not just about me and my dream of doing nothing. It's about all of us. I don't know what happened to me at that hypnotherapist and, I don't know, maybe it was just shock and it's wearing off now, but when I saw that fat man keel over and die - Michael, we don't have a lot of time on this earth! We weren't meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about about mission statements.
All well and good, until someone decides to lob a missile at a satellite and make a little Kessler syndrome, or launch missions with no reentry plans from a nation that hasn't signed your treaty.
I don't think it's a bad idea to be proactive about space cleanup, rather than reactive.
The effects punch below their weight in those games, though. I like to call it "Unity Syndrome", but it applies to any widely-adopted engine.
Well-made video games focus on the experience of playing them. Visuals, audio, setting, gameplay, user interfaces, they're all made with the same goal.
In a fast action game, you'll want menus to get out of the way quickly, dialogue that can be delivered while the player is moving, particle effects designed more like fireworks than sparklers, etc.
In a slow-paced story game, you'll have more leeway to let players stop and smell the roses. You'll want to pay attention to different details, make cues last longer, etc.
Open-world games need more attention to dynamic level of detail and story progressions. The list goes on.
When people wrote their own engines, these assumptions were baked in from the start and the engine was developed and tweaked according to the game being made. When you shoehorn your idea into a general-purpose off-the-shelf solution, you end up making more compromises on things like performance and verisimilitude.
You can see it in the default shaders/effects that many modern budget games use, but my favorite example of this is actually The Witcher. The first game in that series used Bioware's Aurora engine, which was designed to simulate d20 games like Dungeons & Dragons.
Probably about where we are with pedestrian/cyclist safety.
In NA, lack of safety regulations is resulting in massively increased ride and hood heights, which is going to kill a lot of people over the coming years.
Well, it prevents you from communicating with the sort of people who will blithely participate in these sorts of destructive systems.
More seriously, it's like an act of civil disobedience. If everybody acted similarly, we would not have these problems. Most people won't wise up until their kin are personally harmed by one of these massive unaccountable institutions, and until that happens to enough people, you have to recognize that acting in accordance with your principles will not always be the most convenient path through life.
Also, sunk cost fallacy. Any reasonably complex COBOL application has lots of lines of code, which are easily counted and in some cases may have even been originally paid for per-line on expensive contracts still on file. That gives a lot of "weight" to that sunk cost on the books, even in timelines of half-centuries. "You want to rewrite a hundred thousand lines of once very expensive code?" you can hear the ghosts of bean counters past shouting in the corridors no matter how much you explain to them that they should have better amortized and depreciated those costs decades ago.
Those workers often have to pay out the nose just to eat ramen in plywood closets, the money doesn't go much farther than it would in a dense city.