I enjoyed the year I consulted at JPMC, they have some sharp people, and on the surface of it, who am I to criticise the boss of such a successful company? OTOH…
I can see the argument that young people aren’t being exposed to older peers the same way and their learning may be stunted.
But… I haven’t set foot in an office for five years now and I’m as productive as I ever was. Possibly more.
As for his “people are distracted during meetings”, perhaps there ought to be more focus on only holding necessary meetings, rather than dragging people in when there’s no reason for them to be there and nothing to hold their interest? In my experience that’s the cause of a lot of the snark and slacking.
> I can see the argument that young people aren’t being exposed to older peers the same way and their learning may be stunted.
I agree with this, but I didn't grow up with a phone in my hand. I didn't have a mobile phone until I was about 30 years old and I didn't have a smartphone until I was in my 40s. I can't work well with people over remote calls, I hate Zoom and desktop sharing, don't like slack or teams. I find it so much more efficient to sit with another person or small group if there is a group task to be completed or a group decision to be made.
That said, unnecessary meetings are a real thing, have been a problem in large orgs forever, and Zoom doesn't fix that. Might make it worse, as invites are not limited by the physical size of the room.
Counter-perspective, but largely in agreement: I did grow up with a mobile phone and instant messaging and whatnot, and so using Slack (and to some extent, Zoom, as much as I dislike video compared to text) feels very natural to me.
To me, as someone who has deep and meaningful friendships with certain people mediated almost entirely through Discord messaging, which is basically non-work Slack, asynchronous mentorship and collaboration don't seem strange at all. I do recognize not everyone's a fan, and that there is a certain learning curve involved if you're not used to it (gamers, for example, seem to fall into virtual work naturally), but it's absolutely doable and these C-levels who say it's not are behind the curve.
I'm in my 40s. I prefer zoom meetings. I don't think mobile phone usage has all that much to do with it tbh. Some people just really seem to want other people to be in the room with them and at the same time are somewhat oblivious to the fact that we don't care or don't want to be there.
I can, and so can many others. I guess it comes down to preference and personality.
I spent so many years in offices, in open plan offices where whole teams would sit with their headphones on loud, trying to ignore the presence of all other humans, that actually working in my own space has been a relief.
In my 40s now though, I work on stuff I’m interested in, and have a work ethic that doesn’t require oversight. 20 years ago I may not have been so good at it.
And realistically how many times is Jamie Dimon meeting with the entry level Zoomers? Here and there but the CEO spends his time meeting with exec and mid level management.
What is your model? That is, how did you measure this? Productivity and the impacts to it are highly multivariate and most analysis thus far has failed to do show convincing effects in either direction from remote work.
Genuinely, there is too much appeal to emotion from both sides of the argument and not enough substance, so if you have something here I'd be interested to read about it.
Through the number of tasks on the board that staff were getting cleared per month. The results are so clear that we have actually gone further than just reversing the work from home policies enacted post Covid, to actually banning it entirely (pre-covid it was allowed with permission)
Yes, we're making you all come into the office just to annoy you all and cause you hassle. It has nothing at all to do with the effects it had on productivity, and people being discovered running their own side busineses at the same time, or watching television and countless other issues they can get away with without others being able to see their screens
It feels like he's just old and pining for days gone by - in person meetings have people staring at their laptops and phones too. I dislike that as well, but that's not a WFH issue.
> in person meetings have people staring at their laptops and phones too
I've worked at a variety of places with a variety of problems, but I've never seen that kind of rudeness be widespread or persistent. It was corrected in different ways depending on the company culture, but it was corrected.
Some of the games were awesome. I spent a lot of time playing the star wars battlefront game on there. And armored core formula front, wipeout, a few others.
You’re not wrong that a lot of them felt hollow. Like that assassin’s creed game that had virtually nobody walking around on the street and felt like a dead world as a result.
I love the AC franchise and have been playing it* since the beginning. I know it was because of the limited power of the platform that you couldn't have the usual crowds of bystanders etc. I'm sure it was a great game in general, it just felt like a bit of a ghost town :/
(* on and off, I took a break around 3/black flag after a bit of burnout)
As I mentioned in other comments we only had 9 months from zero to finished original game with no source code or help from a very busy Ubisoft other than some reference assets (which were completely redone for the PSP). If we had more time, another year, bigger crowds would have been a high priority!
Which is great for most stuff, but doesn't seem to stop facebook 'reels' from animating. They must do some trickery like loading a short animated image as a 'teaser' before rendering the actual video on click.
After being shaken about, squished up with other garbage and then buried with god knows what for 12 years, I wouldn’t bet on being able to read a single byte from that old drive, even if it could be found.
That exactly what I was going to say: what makes him think that a HDD bought in 2013 and buried in a landfill site since then will work when its plugged in?
Personally I have my doubts - as per Nursie: It's gone mate.
Apple, Deezer, Tidal and Spotify are all about the same price (Spotify is £11.99 in the UK, Tidal is 10.99) and they all have all of those features.
Tidal claim to distribute more to artists than the other big ones, and Deezer claim to do so as well, or have a better compensation model, or something. AFAICT from using Spotify, Deezer and Apple they all have access to the same library, with more or less the exact same gaps.
This is not to say any of them are perfect, but it does give us room to say “Spotify have flaws with how they spend our subscription money, you can choose not to use them” without implicitly or explicitly encouraging piracy. Some artists I like have encouraged people to switch away to the other services because of what they see as unfair practice from Spotify.
Currently I use Apple because I bundle it with other Apple stuff. Plus on top of those features I can also sync my own mp3 collection and use that from wherever (in theory, in practice the sync is partially successful, which is somewhat frustrating).
This is useful info, as Google’s AI summaries have frequently been inaccurate.
Example from yesterday - I was updating my mum’s kindle fire tablet after it had been in a drawer for three years. It was stepping up fire-os versions one at a time and taking hours. So, a quick web search - what’s the latest version of fire os 7?
Google AI confidently answers 7.3.2.9, so cool, it’ll be done soon then. Nope, it kept on going into 7.3.3.x updates.
If you’re going to be confidently wrong, probably best not to try.
The UK pays terribly in a lot of areas when compared to the US, Canada and Australia. In software, the only way to keep up is contracting, preferably in London, preferably in finance.
But my partner also pretty much doubled her pay in retail management when we moved to Australia.
The London financial sector may be losing talent to Europe, but from what I can tell European pay in fintech is not comparable.
I have a friend who teaches at a state funded grammar, and that wikipedia article includes a whole section on Current British grammar schools, which are selective and state funded o_O
It sounds like he is just describing being bullied in school and teachers not being great about it. Far from universal but also far from uncommon, in the UK or any country I have heard of. Bullying is a very common and documented problem in schools.
Even if bullying is common (say, every school or even every class experiences some bullying), that doesn't necessarily make it a very common experience for those who go through school (the majority of children in a class will neither be bullies nor bullied).
I think it's very area specific - how prosperous the area is. Reading that post was like he was at my school, word for word. I was on the "not bullied end" of that arrangement and life was still hell as you had to constantly watch over your shoulder, align with factions for fear of real violence if you weren't in the right place at the right time. A lot fo the older kids were linked to serious crime in the local area at the ages of 15 and 16 only. All in all I would say the goths got the most amount of abuse on a day to day basis.
I’m 35 now, so, millennial; for additional context I was brought up in a city called Coventry which is a city that was in decline during that period. (just like most of the north of the UK following Thatcher’s closing of the mines).
As a consequence of this experience, though, I saw that I wasn’t exactly entirely unique either, as there were other children treated as I was and we sought each other out. So I know that while my experience is not universal: that it is at least shared by a handful of people within my schools alone. - I would hazard to guess more outside of my school have these experiences too.
I know my experience isn't especially portable as I went to a public school in the home counties, but not all of my friends did, and while I understand they experienced teachers with varying levels of competence and interest, none of them has described it in as harrowing terms as yours, and all came away with friends and a fairly decent education, albeit one that they probably had to have a bit more determination to get than I did.
My mum worked in various UK state schools as an assistant from around 2000-2010 and described serious budgetary problems throughout the system, and teachers trying their best in adversity. She also described the many obstacles in the way of getting the bad kids out of classrooms so they couldn't disrupt things so much. I have a friend who teaches at a grammar school, who is fairly intelligent and interested in his subject, and seems to teach well to kids who are interested, though again there seems to be little money to achieve anything.
I'm not claiming shitty, prison-like schools don't exist or trying to invalidate your experience, it was clearly terrible, but I'd be wary of drawing too many wide-ranging conclusions about school education as a whole from it.
I am often left confused by responses like this. I think it would be fair to suggest that some significant percentage of chidren suffer in schools or have harrowing experiences that they are going to carry with them through life until dealt with. If this is the case, why on earth should a conclusion about school _not_ be drawn? I don't believe you are meaning to suggests that the situation as it stands doesn't need change, but that is nonetheless implicit in your statements.
From my position, saying: "I'd be wary of drawing too many wide-ranging conclusions about school education as a whole from it." Comes close to invalidating the experience of another.
Whether school is a net benefit (that can stand to be improved) or a net detriment (a system that needs to be uprooted and upended entirely) depends significantly on that "some significant percentage".
If the percentage is 10% of children suffering through school, that's a horrendous number, but still leaves school as an overall positive experience for the vast majority, even though significant work needs to be put it to fix its problems.
If the percentage is 50% of children suffering, then it's a crapshoot if your child will benefit or be deeply disturbed by school, and the whole system needs to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch.
One anecdotal experience can't help one decide which of these is the right approach. I'd venture a guess that, since most people are not clamoring for fundamental school system reforms, the experience of most voting adults has been largely positive or at least neutral in school.
The author paints a picture of schools as literal prison, as a place where children are forced to go to waste their time and be tortured. They invite the reader to conclude that the entire exercise is worthless and should be abandoned -
"Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education."
"I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work, with exercises designed to keep you busy more than to give a functional understanding. "
> why on earth should a conclusion about school _not_ be drawn?
It depends on the conclusion. If the conclusion is "school as a concept is so irredeemably bad that we should scrap schools entirely because of my experiences", I'm not sure it's supportable because of the lack of universality.
If the conclusion is "some schools have been run so poorly that students are left with lifelong emotional scars and little education to show for it, we need to do something about that", I'm all onboard.
Feel (some) of your pain - was bullied some in school, and actually had terrible compressed nerve problems that made sitting in high school all day terrible. But think what this person is saying is that this probably isn't the experience of most students. And in all humbleness, would have to agree, don't think me and my friends wouldn't say it's was an extremely abuse experience.
Not saying it doesn't need to be fixed, but that like most systems handling large volumes, for better or worse, it caters to the majority:(
Like you, I'm older than dijit and went to school in the home counties, but my experiences were also unpleasant enough for me to question the value of my time at school. I went to non-selective "state" (i.e. public-sector) schools in a middle-class area where nearly all of the other pupils presented as working class. Somehow I managed to pick up a combination of working, middle and upper class mannerisms, which seemed to attract more bullying from authority figures than from my peers. I suspect many of my teachers were bitterly resentful about the (then recent) banning of corporal punishment in the state sector. My secondary school seemed to model itself on "public" (i.e. private) schools, where corporal punishment was still legal. The saving graces of my school days included:
1) My primary school clearly took children's advancement seriously (more in things like handwriting, bladder control and cycling proficiency than in subject-matter knowledge or understanding), so it wasn't all pain and no gain, but that mostly stopped at secondary school.
2) Secondary-school maths lessons were (usually) something of a haven because maths teachers were willing to engage in unplanned reasoned argument and for almost three years we worked independently, at our own pace, from booklets while the teacher gave us each in turn one-on-one tuition (for only one or two minutes per lesson, but it did mean that I escaped being uncomfortably pressured to speed up or slow down both when I was working independently and when I had the teacher's attention for a non-punitive reason).
I think British education would be better if secondary schools had a clearer purpose and treated pupils as stakeholders. My experience was that my formal education started at primary school and resumed at university after a seven-year gap. I never really found out how my secondary school was meant to benefit pupils. Pupils ought to not only benefit from school, but understand how it benefits them.
I think schools should reflect clearer thinking about ability-based selection. If pupils are grouped by age and location only, and not at all by ability, then requiring the whole class to work through the same material, in the same way, at the same pace risks seriously inhibiting subject-matter learning. On the other hand, grouping pupils by "general ability" risks putting pupils in some classes more or less advanced than those that would benefit them most, and permanently disadvantaging those who are rejected from the more prestigious academic path at an early age.
Pupils also ought to lead lives they have reason to value. Corporal punishment even for bullies is a net negative, and there should be meaningful protections against teachers using loopholes, such as turning a blind eye to bullying or perpetrating emotional abuse themselves. We had many teachers like that at my secondary school, and one of them was found to have assaulted a pupil while I was there.
Edit:
I think some important points aren't really clear above. I agree with dijit that school can provide pupils with very poor value for the burdens it places on them, but I consider this a missed opportunity, rather than a lost cause. I also suspect some teachers' toxic attitudes about class and violence contribute to the bullying problem, so we should be careful not to let cognitive biases lead us into doubling down on "discipline" in schools, unless there's good reason to believe that isn't part of the problem. I left school many years ago, but before I did, authority figures bemoaned the "end of discipline" and the coddling of pupils, which was at odds with my experience then, so I'm sceptical of any claims that the problem has since been solved.
As a parent with kids in the UK state school system, I've noticed a considerable attitude change in terms of reducing bullying, acknowledging and supporting learning difficulties (dyslexia, ADHD, autism), and on trying to keep kids happy and engaged, in a way that simply didn't exist during my time in the '80s and '90s.
In the same way, my own experiences at school were a significant attitude change compared to the learn-by-rote and corporal punishment era of my parents.
I couldn't claim that it works for every student or that every school is like that - plus the entire school system is now stretched financially to breaking point in a way that it wasn't when I was there, and there are additional new problems such as social media - but I do feel that in general things have moved in the right direction.
I have some friends who teach in Cov, there are some particularly bad schools in the city sadly. Sorry to hear you went through one of them. The effective postcode lottery of schools has an awful affect on how the part of our lives plays out.
Having said that, your experiences weren't a million miles from mine in the 80's in the crap end of Hampshire. Most of the violence there though was from other pupils, rather than teachers.
However, speaking to my daughter schools these days do tend to be kinder, gentler places than when I grew up. Fights seem to happen never rather than on a daily basis.
40's, male, had a horrible experience at state secondary school in semi-rural Scotland. I now have young kids in primary, and I can see how shit the education aspect in particular is - my kids constantly complain about how boring it is, and one finds everything ridiculously easy. For example, he's been doing addition and subtraction up to ten at school for 3 years!?
Even if it's not hell, it could be so much better. It could be a place that kids actually look forward to going every day. Instead, we put them through 12 years of mandatory low grade torture where nothing they do is connected to the real world, their interest or curiosity, and when they're done they're launched into a world of AGI and ASI where none of what they learned is remotely enough for them to contribute to society in any way.
I can see the argument that young people aren’t being exposed to older peers the same way and their learning may be stunted.
But… I haven’t set foot in an office for five years now and I’m as productive as I ever was. Possibly more.
As for his “people are distracted during meetings”, perhaps there ought to be more focus on only holding necessary meetings, rather than dragging people in when there’s no reason for them to be there and nothing to hold their interest? In my experience that’s the cause of a lot of the snark and slacking.
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