I actually think we should only be using labor force metrics for everything, if someone stops looking because their depressed and can live at home - suddenly that's ok? I don't think we should stop counting people like that
The problem is differentiating between those who've given up and who do not want to work (have other means to sustain themselves).
In general, either is fine by me as long we are consistent: they are both proxies for percentage of people needing work and should correlate to a large extent.
Also the US is essentially the only country with failed public transit, outside of Africa. If he thinks he can expand his robo taxi fleet to China or Europe or hell even Russia he's got screws loose
I might typically have 4-5 tabs open for serious work, and then 0 when not.. am I the weird one? I've never once found value with tab groups or multiple sessions
Actual access to reliable healthcare is a massive assumption to make, not everyone has incredible health insurance or lives in a country with sufficient doctors/med staff. Most places are in crisis for lack of resources, I'd rather ask chatgpt or Gemini for something urgent rather than wait 5+ hours in ER for the doctor to say "just take some aspirin and go to a walk-in tomorrow"
Not to mention, going to an ER for something that doesn't turn out to be an emergency carries a high risk of coming back home with something significantly worse.
Last time I was in ER, I accompanied my wife; we got bounced due to lack of appropriate doctor on site, she ended up getting help in another hospital, and I came back home with severe case of COVID-19.
Related: every pediatrician I've been to with my kids during the flu season says the same thing: if you can't get an appointment in a local clinic, stay home; avoid hospitals unless the kid develops life-threatening symptoms, as visiting such places carry high risk of the kid catching something even worse (usually RSV).
There are only two places I still routinely wear a mask (n95) these days: Airplanes from waiting at the gate until about 10 minutes after takeoff when the air handling system has had time to clear things out (and the same after landing), and hospital/doctors visits. It's such a high ROI.
We used to observe that our kid(s) got sick every time we flew over the winter break to visit family. We no longer have this problem. (we do still have kids.) Not getting sick turns out to be really quite nice. :-) Hanging out in the pediatrician's office surrounded by snotty, coughing children who are not mine...
The problem is, if everyone knows it going to curry favour and you're the odd man out - are you in Violation of your fiduciary duty to your shareholders?
The gamble these executives are making is that prosecutors in a different administration will not prosecute them for bribery.
If you watch House of Cards (based loosely on real life), you can see the degree of separation between corporations/lobbyists and Congressmen. These guys participating in building a ballroom are crossing that line. Juries will not have to connect so many dots compared to before in order to put someone in jail.
I've only ever worked remote professionally and I've got a track record, when I apply to a new role there's no question that I can adapt to working remotely at X company.
If I just finished my PhD in comp sci and have never worked professionally in my life let alone remotely, going day 1 remote is a huge risk
I knew this was going to turn into a shoot the messenger (or downvote the messenger) situation.
Look, I also work remote and have for years. This is just the situation that’s happening out there. Having 5 years of remote experience no longer means as much because some companies let everyone work remote and waited until now to start firing and laying people off. We’ve hired some real duds into remote roles who had years of remote experience, apparently doing the same thing they tried to do with us: Work a couple hours a week or maybe collect paychecks from multiple jobs.
Every remote manager I know has stories like this. The remote world changed a lot since COVID and the rise of /r/overemployed and “Four Hour Workweek” junk has only made it worse for those of us who just want to work remote without shenanigans.
> We’ve hired some real duds into remote roles who had years of remote experience, apparently doing the same thing they tried to do with us: Work a couple hours a week or maybe collect paychecks from multiple jobs.
Did you ever hire any duds when you were not hiring remote?
> The remote world changed a lot since COVID and the rise of /r/overemployed and “Four Hour Workweek” junk has only made it worse for those of us who just want to work remote without shenanigans.
A four hour work week is very normal in plenty of countries and in some there are common constructs built around even shorter work weeks.
> Did you ever hire any duds when you were not hiring remote?
Bingo. I had an exec ask me once how will we know people are working if they are remote? I asked back, how do we know they are working now?
Remote work is harder on management and leadership. It’s easy to see if someone is at their desk and seems friendly, it’s hard to really think about what value a person brings.
I've worked at a bank where one of the oft heard jokes was that 'I spend 8 hours per day there but I really wouldn't want to work there'. It was true too. 145 people in the IT department, and absolutely nothing got done.
This was a bit of a let-down for me, all these people, so much fancy hardware. I had a hard time believing it at first. The whole place was basically caretakers that made the occasional report printing program and that based their careers on minor maintenance of decades old COBOL code that they would rather not touch at all.
Something as trivial as a new printer being taken into production would turn into a three year project.
On Friday afternoons the place was deserted. And right now I work 'from home' and so do all of my colleagues and I don't think there are any complaints about productivity. Sure, it takes discipline. But everything does, to larger or lesser degree and probably we are a-typical but for knowledge work in general WFH can work if the company stewards it properly. It's all about the people.
> Did you ever hire any duds when you were not hiring remote?
Of course, but that's obviously a deflection.
In person hires can't physically be in two offices at the same time.
In person employees can't get a new in-person job and then not resign from their last job because they want to extract as many paychecks as they can before they get caught and fired.
In person employees can't substitute in a hired interview taker for the interview and then hope nobody notices their voice sounds too different when they start the job.
These are all real things that we've encountered with remote work (and more)
Saying X can also happen in Y! Is a classic fallacious argument used by people who want you to think two things are equal, when in fact they can have very different probabilities and risk profiles.
When I was working at a hybrid company we even had a few cases where people either couldn't focus at home (kids, family, distractions) or were insufferably combative in chat. Bringing them into the office solved it.
The two environments are not equal, no matter how many times someone tries to deflect with "That problem can also happen in the office!"
That doesn't happen remote either. Unless management is utterly incompetent, another variable a study like this should probably compensate for by increasing the sample size and pool diversity.
I don't know where you got this idea, but this happens all the time. The two most common topics in the remote channel of the big management peer group I'm in are:
1. People cheating on remote interviews (including substituting another person to take the interview)
2. People getting multiple jobs and being too obviously distracted to get work done, or the increasingly common getting a new job and not resigning from the last job because they know they can collect potentially $100K+ in paychecks and/or severance by waiting to get let go instead.
If you don't believe these things happen in remote jobs then I understand your resistance throughout this thread to any suggestion that remote and in-office are different.
It absolutely happens, and often. I don't know when the last time you tried to hire was but things are absolutely brutal right now. The most common is personnel who think they can get away with an hour or two of work a day (whether they're working multiple jobs or just screwing around at home is hard to say). Second is bait-and-switch where the interviewee is not the person who shows up day 1.. after four (!) incidents in a quarter we had to mandate at least one in-person interview during the hiring process which seems to have helped.
To add something similar: I am now at the point where maybe a few times a day I can visualize a glimpse of a memory, but otherwise it is blank and I have no visual dreams.
But it does not hinder the ability to think about complex systems in any way. My day job involves making 2D technical drawings from multiple angles, 3D modelling, and of course to come up with the solutions before putting in the work of drawing/modelling stuff.
For what definition of "visualize?" I have partial aphantasia but am great at understanding the inner workings of complex systems/processes. I used to think of it as visualization until aphantasia discourse, and then I realized it's not really visual at all, though there seem to be dimensional/spatial elements.
If I'm in a quiet place I can walk through the project, and understand where different things fit into place - even for very very complex systems, I can almost simulate algorithms and see where things go wrong without looking at my code. I realized this ability is not normal, and many people even software engineers struggle immensely with fully understanding large complex systems
I was about to write something almost exactly this. However I can "hear something" if I try but definitely not picture something in the literal sense.
Edit: I also have trouble recognising the faces of people I've only met once or twice, and I'm assuming the two things are related. Do you have the same?
