Sounds like a great personality type for a platform engineer..

Yeah I agree, something like that. Honestly though I think it's more than that, I like building "toys" that are fun to use (and help with productive work). I don't think anyone's hiring toymakers, I might need to go solo myself if I'm determined.

And of course my deep fear is I'd find that perfect job and nothing about my habits would change.

The only real "trickle down" that actually exists, heh. Invent cool stuff, protect yourself from having it stolen, eventually give into the ridiculous sums the giants will throw at you and pivot with that to your next endeavor.

The ceremony just undoes the efficiency in most cases; That's the rub.

You are saying dumb shit.

Probably true!

I think you missed the point here -- people synonymize googling with searching and therefore aren't choosing to google -- they're choosing to search but ending up using google despite having made no conscious effort to do so (it's just there).

All this granular bullshit is entirely too much overhead and an unnecessary layer to "manage" imo. "Tech debt" and handling it should be part of your culture and by default included in the scope of any estimate that touches something affected by it. You negotiate out of addressing it, not into it.

This is tech debt.

Seem being the key word. The messaging is poor, the idea has quite a bit of merit.

False equivalence is an easy fallacy to fall prey to -- this is not the same thing. It is similar and in the same domain, but hardly equal.

Do you wanna elaborate? I am interested

Sure. Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and any other celebrity do not employ the same nefariously data driven agenda on a scale that begins to come anywhere close to that of Facebook; They are not comparable in this context. Scale is a highly differentiating factor. A more genuine comparison would be to the likes of Robert Mercer, Roger Ailes, etc.

The scale argument seems fishy to me. If we agree something is harmful and illegal usually scale does not matter. You can be a local drug dealer or a drug cartel and both are illegal. But my Angelina Jolie example was more about the fact that even without Facebook young girls will compare themselves to impossibly good looking women since our entire culture promotes it: do the actresses in Friends look like real life women? No, they are in the top 1% of women (Phoebe a bit less but she is the "funny" one). Anyways if we wanna make this illegal the implications are huge.

Scale totally matters.

Many places have laws that personal use amounts of marijuana are not a crime, meanwhile selling tons of will put you in prison for life.

I'm sure marijuana laws like that exist, but are you going to argue that they're actually reasonable? A law with exemptions for small amounts of weed sounds pretty stupid to me and serves better as an example of how politics can twist legislation into duplicitous shapes rather than an example of good scale-sensitive lawmaking.

How daft can you be to think that scale makes no difference? You can drink water and be hydrated or you can drink too much water and die. Scale is critical in determining appropriate rules.

Elsewhere at their own expense? Yea that's gonna be a no from me.

"We used to pay for entire buildings to house our employees, but covid made us realize we can pass that cost on to them!"

It kind of depends on the details.

My company has offices that you can go to, but if you want to work remotely then it’s up to you to manage your environment.

The company already has offices. Why would they pay for more just because you don’t want to go to the offices.

There is a one time budget for hardware, such as a second monitor at home, we’ll have to see how that plays out with upgrades in a few years.

Because they don't have to pay for those offices anymore. If the company is allowing for remote work, they can also downsize those offices (subject to lease conditions), saving piles of money. (Commerical space is expensive!) If some of those savings aren't passed onto their employees, those employees will choose to move to a different company that has a more general WFH allowance, probably get a raise in the process, and work with a company that's just generally less obtuse to work at/for.

Once you factor in long contracts, the people who are desperate to go back to the office, and greater space requirements for proper social distancing - they pretty much do need to pay for those existing offices. Hopefully things will re-equilibriate, but I'd guess that will take another 2 years at least.

The cost of outfitting an employee with state-of-the-art equipment for their home office is at most a few months of commuter benefits. It's a comically small price to pay for employee happiness and productivity.

Employers that don't or aren't willing to pony up are going to be losers in the long run. Cheap is cheap.

The equipment is trivial and most tech professionals have it at this point or don’t really care. But you’re not going to get paid to move from your urban studio to an apartment with an office though some companies did pay for coworking spaces when there was no office for employees to commute to pre-pandemic.

Because you are saving pennies but losing dollars of productivity?

To be fair you could put your commuting costs into a piggybank and after a year you would likely have enough for a decent chair and monitor.

It’s always at “your own expense.” Me and my partner who also works full time wound up moving to a two-bedroom unit down the hall. Why would the company pay for this?