> "What's been sacrificed is not reading in the most prosaic sense, but the particular experience of a certain type of reading, perilously endangered among all of us attracted to the alluring siren-call of the smartphone ping."
Product idea: I think it's just a matter of time that the basic e-reader technology will be so cheap that it should be possible to order one with a set of prepackaged books. You can read the books on the device, period. No internet, no word look-up (a dictionary can be a standalone book in the library), no highlighting / commenting, no adding or buying new books, no nothing else except the text of the books in the library. It will be so cheap that once you are done, you can just toss is out.
That seems a bit wasteful? Any time you want to read a new book you buy a whole new reading device? It might be cheap but that's more e-waste we don't need.
Why not a re-usable e-reader that reads books from an SD card? You can order or download books onto the cards, the reading experience can then be totally offline as you describe.
> It will be so cheap that once you are done, you can just toss is out.
Oh no, that’s just… why?
At least with a paper book you can give it away, sell it to a book reseller, or put it in one of those little lending library boxes people put in front of their houses. If nothing else, if it has no more value, you can recycle it for paper pulp.
I mean if you’re a publisher, hoping to cash in on people wanting to disconnect, and trying to evade the first sale doctrine, sure. That is a way to do it. But the environmental consequences are just bad. Maybe have the sleep screen list what books are on the device and make it repairable. At least make it possible to open, and replace the battery.
> The initial advisory list includes Broadcom, Dell, Google, HP, Lenovo, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, Linus Torvalds, and Tim Sweeny.
Two individuals along with multi-billion dollar corporations. Curious why the organizations that these individuals represent were not included instead?
I always thought Slackware [1] was the basic Linux distro which people could use to 'understand' Linux. How does Slackware compare to LFS in terms of understanding the Linux fundamentals?
Slackware is more like a BSD of Linux, to stretch an analogy. A very solid base system, all packaged up as a complete operating system.
LFS is utterly different. There is no installer, there is no base system, there is nothing even approaching the power of Slackware's package manager, as barebones as it seems today.
This is compile everything from source in a separate environment and put everything in the right place essentially manually*.
Of course, `make`-and-friends will usually do the actual lifting, but you're in charge of giving direction, there isn't a distro community patching packages and build-scripts to adhere to a consistent FSH or the like.
Research shows us statistical trends but what we care about most is what works for us. That can be answered only by an individual. In my case, I went from "hurray! work from home!" at the start of Covid lock-downs, to "I miss the white-board discussions at office". Fortunately, the tech industry is now large and diverse enough that you can find work that suites your style.
I feel like this "get ready to be surrounded by peers for the first time" or the related "you aren't used to working hard, but now you will actually have to work hard" speech was given to me in some form at the start of high school, college, grad school, and in many other contexts and intermediate milestones. It wasn't ever completely true, but I think if I went for a PhD it would (obviously) have finally been true.
To be clear, I'm not saying I was always smarter than people around me, I just felt like I never had to work as hard as I suspected even through my Masters program.
Perhaps we should replace this messaging with "You may find that you won't have to work hard to get through X, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't." Educators don't have the time or ability to set up an incentive scheme that makes you "have to" work your hardest, but it gets more rewarding at each level.
Bingo. You can breeze through all levels of education with a combination of personality and picking the right courses. Your faculty tend to be overworked and underpaid for the work they do. You are one of hundreds. They do not exist to make sure you're actually learning anything, just that you can spit back the course content appropriately.
But once you get over the barrier to entry for most white-collar jobs (bachelor degree), what's the point? If you're not getting anything out of the education, you're only borrowing trouble from yourself in the future.
My bachelor's was relatively easy. My masters was MASSIVELY difficult. The PhD was even harder.
A thought experiment, something you may not want to hear. Have you thought of playing along and see if you would actually like going back to office full time? Also, while you are at office 5 days a week, how about try to get to the next level before you switch? Many will leave (just like you are planning to) and hence it will be easier for the long timers to get promoted in an environment where there will be a lot of inflow of new employees at all levels.
I am not suggesting that this is the right way to think about your situation, but that it is 'another way' to think about it. Who knows, you might end up profiting from this adversity. Wish you all the best!
It’s not always that easy. Many people over the last few years have reorganised their life under the expectation of continued hybrid working, and can’t trivially reorganise it back to full time.
I am one of these naive people who expected happy home office forever. It bit me hard, because I bought an old house outside of big city and spent the time I would need to commute renovating it. The return to the office happened, I quit. The other place was weird. It advertised generous home office ruling. But under very special manager home office was forbidden. It was just too stupid to file a complaint to HR and I left. So my construction site was stuck for 1,5 years and it was very stressful.
Found by accident a job near my home. Small company with private office for me and unlimited home office ruling. Use home office only when I am ill. During this period I found out, that I absolutely love my private office and hate daily commuting and open offices.
I remember being surprised during the pandemic just how many people were uprooting their lives and moving to remote locations. Even though there has been a trend towards remote work over the previous decade I always thought there would be a bounce back and some of those people would be stuffed.
"supposed to" depends on the company. The company I was working at announced immediately that we were work from home forever. They canceled leases on over a dozen offices across the world and let us come in and take the old furniture.
But you're not forced to work for a company that wants you in the office, you're free to seek employment elsewhere that matches your remote requirements similar how a company isn't forced to hire remote workers only. You are both free to choose the best options that fit your demands if you can find them.
Jobs and employers aren't for life. If you uprooted and reorganize your whole life based on the circumstances of a once in a lifetime global pandemic expecting things to stay like that forever, you've done goofed.
That’s not a good take. Compare/contrast: “but you’re not forced to work for a company that wants you to work in hazardous conditions without safety gear”. That’s far different from RTO, but the point is that there’s a huge power imbalance here and it’s not as simple as saying “don’t work there if you’re not happy with […]”.
IMHO, yours is not a good take. I get it, I also like to WFH if I can instead of commuting, but working from the office is not the same as working with hazardous substances both legally and as a apples to apples take.
Working in hazardous environments is outlawed (unless proper care is taken), working from the office is not outlawed. If you want working from the office to be outlawed as a health hazard you'll have to convince the government to do that as part of OHSA and labor laws but good luck getting any workers' sympathy that commuting to work in your cushy air conditioned office is not to your taste from the likes of those doing landscaping or roofing.
Otherwise we can stretch the definition endlessly to working with Windows, Agile, Scrum, Teams and Jira is a health hazard and should be also outlawed because I just don't like them, but me not liking something is not enough to make it outlawed.
Yep, those are indeed not the same thing, and that’s why I said they’re not the same thing. The point was that “if you don’t like it, leave” is a terrible reply to any complaint about a working environment. Especially when things like insurance are bizarrely tied to employment, a huge portion of people can’t just leave.
>“if you don’t like it, leave” is a terrible reply to any complaint about a working environment.
Why is it a terrible reply? What should you do if you don't like your job? What's your point here?
Most people on the planet do jobs they don't like, welcome to reality. Otherwise we'd all be racecar drivers, twitch streamers, musicians and painters and get paid for our hobbies, but that's not how it works for most people.
We do a job not because we always like it or like everything about it, we do it to pay for food, shelter and if money allows, to afford hobbies and leisure that make life nice. Venting on the internet won't improve societal issues or issues you have at your job, it's still up to you to change your situation to what fits you because nobody will do it for you.
That's not true - you just talked about OSHA. What did they do before that? They did what you advocate - they left, or maybe lost a hand or two. Then we got this codified and boom! Now somebody else does it for you (thank god).
It's not just about like/dislike. There are real impacts. Thousands of tons of CO2, lives lost in car accidents, countless human lifespans wasted on a commute. These are real impact that you, yes YOU, will face head on.
Friendly reminder that remote work in IT was a thing way before the pandemic. I for one started working from home full time in 2015.
Also your approach seems to be to just accept whatever employers throw at you. Have you considered that they might be colluding (in a sense) to deprive you of options?
I would like to know a rational reason why I should spend so much of my day travelling.
>Also your approach seems to be to just accept whatever employers throw at you.
Where do you see me saying such a thing?
>I would like to know a rational reason why I should spend so much of my day travelling.
Companies say it's for "better collaboration". You would do it if you had no other options if every potential employer would require you to be on site depriving you of remote options, but because the market is in your favor giving you options, it's difficult for you to empathize with the other situation.
Your solution appears to be "choose a different employer" without any hint of "demand more from the current employer".
> You would do it if you had no other options if every potential employer would require you to be on site depriving you of remote options, but because the market is in your favor giving you options, it's difficult for you to empathize with the other situation.
You assume something that's not the case. I am of the opinion that everyone who can, should have this option regardless of the market situation and I think it's terrible people are forced to commute. It's like paid leave or health insurance - an achievement in workers' rights.
>Your solution appears to be "choose a different employer" without any hint of "demand more from the current employer".
That's only what you implied, not what I said. If simply demanding stuff from your current employer would just work then there wouldn't be so many unhappy workers everywhere. But that's not it works in the real world. The only language employers understand is the "F you, I quit" part.
>I am of the opinion that everyone who can, should have this option regardless of the market situation
That's nice but how do you propose that to happen? Did you see any workers rioting on the streets to have remote work as a guaranteed labor right? No? Then you can forget about it.
All rights and perk that labor currently has, like the 8h workday, free healthcare, paid vacation days, paid sick leave, have been won only through blood and conflict. It's not like your government is ever gonna hold a referendum and ask workers how many paid vacation days do you want to have and everyone gets to choose. If you want change you need to fight for it, physically with violent force, otherwise you'll be at the mercy of the "free market" which may or may not be in your favor depending how the wind blows. Perks aren't just gonna fall out of the sky for the working class, ever. The covid years were a fluke.
>If you want change you need to fight for it, physically with violent force, otherwise you'll be at the mercy of the "free market" which may or may not be in your favor depending how the wind blows. Perks aren't just gonna fall out of the sky for the working class, ever. The covid years were a fluke.
Which I think is very unfortunate, because working from home is a huge benefit to people who want to, while not being an actual cost to employers (in my opinion, not in theirs).
The part I'm struggling to understand, and please be honest here, is you almost sound a little smug that people are being made to return to the office. Maybe you have a good reason for that, or maybe I'm misreading your tone?
Not sure why you're being downvoted. Unless the employee has hybrid working in their contract then the decision to reorganise their life around it is their own responsibility, not the company's.
Pardon me but this is a stupid argument. If OP is working at amazon they’ve already been going three days a week. If they did not like going three days a week why should they like going five days a week?
“Hear me out, what if you might like sticking your hand in a blender?”
I genuinely miss seeing my pals at work and eating lunch with the gang. I genuinely do not miss the commute, the struggle to get things done with a million distractions around me, not having my dog sleeping in her basket underneath my desk in my home office, and seeing my kids before and after school.
There, thought experiment concluded. I didn’t like it.
Hand in the blender can be healed for a few tens of thousands of dollars and a year of rehab probably. Commute to office takes approximately one full month of human life every year, unpaid and uncompensated. So that's actually a very reasonable comparison. It's just most humans are terrible with estimating long term costs and benefits, so they tend to ignore the ridiculously insane cost of commute over whole career.
It's actually not, if you stop and consider the true cost of working and commuting to an office. It's just we're conditioned NOT to consider the true cost, so we externalize a bunch of the costs.
For example, you don't consider the CO2 from your car, or the time spent driving, or the risk of death. If you factor in just the time spent driving, suddenly smoking a pack a day is better for your lifespan than being in an office.
but subtlety is usually lost at the folks here and this comparison will at least be understood. then again - the thought of having to go back to the office is evoking a feeling not too different from anticipating something quite painful. too many colleagues are just unbearable and the waste of time having to commute unpaidly ... maybe i'd prefer a quick blender session for another year of home office even.
Thank you. Sure it was hyperbolic, but it was in response to the notion that maybe we’re all too shortsighted to see that we’d like full time RTO if only we’d try it. There are certain things I don’t need to try before knowing that I won’t enjoy them. I’ve worked in offices enough decades to have sufficient data: I strongly prefer WFH. “Maybe you’ll like it this time!” is weak sauce. I’m not a delicate flower who couldn’t RTO if situations demanded it. I would not help me do a better job for my company, though, and I don’t want to.
This is academic for me. I have an amazing job at a company all-in on WFH to the point we just downsized a physical office we were underusing. I hate seeing my colleagues get dragged back to legacy offices for no compelling reason though.
It is not "uprooting your whole life" to go back to working in the office, unless one was so foolish as to move away from the city their job was in. And yeah in that case it sucks balls, but I don't imagine most people did something that foolish.
Making decisions is not foolish, even if they disagree with your idea of how they should be made. I quit my previous job over RTO, leaving a great team at a cool company. It was a conscious decision with pros and cons carefully weighed.
One of the tendencies I see in reviews is that the reviewer focuses on the wrong stuff. For e.g. when reviewing the design document, they focus on the validity of the requirements and they may even stray into commenting on formatting and grammar in the document; when reviewing code, they focus on design; when reviewing test cases, again they focus on reviewing requirements; when reviewing deployment scripts, they focus on the choise of infrastructure. Basically, people tend to pay attention to things that are already past the decision stage while ignoring the matter at hand.
Product idea: I think it's just a matter of time that the basic e-reader technology will be so cheap that it should be possible to order one with a set of prepackaged books. You can read the books on the device, period. No internet, no word look-up (a dictionary can be a standalone book in the library), no highlighting / commenting, no adding or buying new books, no nothing else except the text of the books in the library. It will be so cheap that once you are done, you can just toss is out.