Readit Newsemotionally charged, bad faith assumptions at the smallest whiff of independent thought.
I'm not at work to make friends, I'm not at work to chit chat. I'm not at work so we can talk about who won the last football game .
I go to work in exchange for currency, which is required to acquire goods and services. All this other crap, all these holiday parties, all of this let's dance in diversity videos, no that's not what I'm here for .
Most of the time coming to the office actually adds a bunch of unnecessary crap that is completely unneeded. If you can't get your job done remotely, what's the stop you from also slacking off in the office. I have to go back to the office for a while last year times were hard and I didn't have another option .
We're just talking to each other, shooting the s**, and it was cool to meet some Junior Devs who were just starting their career. But none of that made me a more productive worker.
If I had to think, I imagine the entire point of RTO mandates is to keep cities sustainable.
If every single office job went remote, what's the point of a city like New York. Who's going to willingly pay $6,000 for an apartment, ride the trains for over an hour a day, if you can just sit at home in a much cheaper city .
However, to quote a famous philosopher, it's a big club and you ain't in it. The powers that be one as many people in office chairs as possible, so they're real estate holdings appreciate in value.
Billy Bob's bagels also benefits from this, although I'd imagine he's not able to have the same amount of pool as the real estate titans
The main important factor IMO is mentorship of junior talent. (I'm speaking for technical orgs)
Viewing the organization as a living organism where an employee is a "cell", then there are material benefits in the "cellular replication" of talent and rejuvenation of the next generation.
It can definitely be true that RTO is worse for an individual engineer but better for the health of the organization long-term. Both can be true.
In my experience, remote only companies tend to prefer a higher ratio of senior employees for this reason. It's plug-an-play.
What would it take to get that capability back?
Manufacturing was always going to move to where it costs less.
It's bad for a productive american economy but it's a prisoner's dilemma so you can't blame businesses or consumers.
The government is the only party that had the power to do anything. it's 100% an economics problem.
Then I gave up. Have things improved?
Microsoft seems to be prioritizing "cloud" on all their developer products (rather than just windows). I don't feel disadvantaged by NOT using dotnet on windows.
That didn't bother me so much because i speak spanish and can read french. OCaml is of french origin. `string_of_int` is a bad english translation—should have been `string_from_int`.
I like F# where I can use the `int` or `string` functions:
let myString = "2024"
let myInt = int myString
let myStringAgain = string myInt
The motiviation and tinkering can be similar to a side project, and results in higher quality work IMO. Obviously there are urgent tasks, but it's an ignored vector in the "weighting system" for choosing work for engineers.
If you wait to assign the task in the next sprint, the excitement for that particular task might be gone.