Readit NewsI wonder what percentage of people interpret it to mean one way vs. both ways.
Trying to negotiate salary based on value provided is one of the biggest misconceptions I see online and with in-person mentoring groups.
Compensation is not about value provided. It’s only about market rate and convincing the person to stay at the company.
I encounter a lot of people, especially juniors, who are disgruntled because they think their employers are getting more value out of their work than is being passed along in their paychecks. I usually ask them if their employer sends them a bill every time they fail to deliver a project or make a mistake that costs the company money. That usually makes the disconnect between value provided and compensation click.
I say this as someone who worked remote and managed remote teams before COVID: The reality is they WFH is a perk and WFH employees require some additional management overhead due to reduced communication efficiency and higher collaboration overhead. As much as I love remote work and my remote teams, it would be dishonest to say that we wouldn’t perform better or faster if we were in-person in the same building. It may not be a popular opinion or what people want to hear, but in my direct experience with mixed WFH/remote teams it’s always true. In-person is just too efficient to replace with Zoom and Slack and e-mail.
The second reality is that once you open the doors to full-time WFH, you’ve opened the doors to full-time remote, which means you’ve opened the doors to a much larger labor market. It becomes easy to replace your $200K Silicon Valley hires with someone a couple states away who is thrilled to do the same job for $180K or even $150K. Then you start expanding your search and find people who live in other countries who deliver the same results for $100K or even $80K.
It’s not surprising that companies don’t want to pay the highest salaries in the country for people who aren’t actually in those areas for work. Losing only 10% of their high salaries honestly seems like a bargain.
So I agree with the above in that being in person definitely makes collaboration easier. But on the other hand I feel like I personally am more productive when working from home because I have more energy. I always found the commute in the morning draining and by the time I'd gotten dressed and showered, into a crowded train, to my desk, out of my coat, put my bag down, set up my workstation if I had to take my laptop home to have an out of hours work meeting where I might need to demo something, etc. I'm already feeling a little worn out.
Working from home I definitely have found myself stuck waiting to hear back from people and similar things, but... at the office if at the end of the day I feel close to solving a problem I have to weigh up whether or not to stay late and keep working or just spend more time the next day getting myself back to that headspace. I fairly often will just go home because I know that with commuting and everything how much I want to just be home will be higher by the time I get there, plus I'll have more things I need to do at home that I might have been able to do when I get home because I'm spending less time there everyday. Not to mention the amount of chores I can get done during the workday - I've hung laundry while making tea, or done stuff at lunch, etc. At the office I'd still be taking a lunch break or making that tea, but I'd not be getting other stuff done at the same time. I know that those extra house chores aren't productivity in the workplace, but having them done makes me feel more energetic and clearheaded at work
I thought when people said they had an X hour commute they typically meant that they traveled for X hours to work and X hours from work
Reflecting on it I think the main issue is that it works at least sometimes and sending me an email is basically free, so it only has to work on a tiny fraction of recipients to be worthwhile. This is why it is like physical junk mail but in much greater volume.
This is another case where our ability to do things at a large scale kind of make life worse. I swear I see more things like this where the affordability of being slightly shitty at massive scale makes life worse and I have no idea how we stop it without throwing the baby out with the bathwater and it makes me miserable.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/australia/
Is it because socialized medicine can't cope with a surge in illness (Canada was another example) exposing the poor state of socialized healthcare after spending 10's of billions a year in tax payer funds. Somehow the USA with it's private system was able to scale and accommodate massive amounts of patients without collapse while these other countries were invoking the worlds longest lock downs and basically shutting down everything to try and save a healthcare system that barely functions under normal conditions (Canada as an example, visit any Toronto Hospital).
Socialized healthcare isn't the problem. We aren't trying to save the healthcare system we are trying to save lives and stop people getting a disease which often has permanent effects if they do survive it.
Now aside from our COVID response we've become a clown world police state I'll give you that. Our laws about being able to press software engineers into becoming spies for example, or our stance on encryption, or the way the NSW police keep strip searching everyone all the fucking time.
But to suggest we are doing too much to prevent the spread of COVID seems fucking insane to me
Alert fatigue is a big problem for any alerting system, but here the baseline is 911 reports. If they receive a 911 report for a shooting, they're going to arrive after the report. If they receive a ShotSpotter alert before a 911 report for the same incident, then they're probably going to arrive as soon or sooner than they would have otherwise. If they receive an alert but don't receive a 911 report, then any response time will be faster than no response.
Not sure if these are backed by data, but there are many quotes of law enforcement saying response times are decreased. I could paste a bunch of quotes but I know it doesn't really mean much.
This study used "gunshot victim prehospital time" as a proxy; arguably a more important proxy:
>Use of ShotSpotter detection technology decreases prehospital time for patients sustaining gunshot wounds - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31425474/
Some other studies indeed found it did not seem to decrease response time, though.
Another factor is that it tries to precisely locate the source of the shot. It's hard for humans to infer the location and direction of a supersonic bullet's source if they're going just by hearing and didn't see the incident, while in theory an automated system could determine it more accurately. I don't know how helpful this is empirically, though.
So you may be right. I think most of the value probably comes from cases where they otherwise wouldn't have received a 911 report, or only would have received one much later.
I'd like to suggest that it might lead to slower response times in the cases of false negatives: someone calls in a report and the ShotSpotter doesn't make an alert. If ShotSpotter tends to be over sensitive police might assume if they don't get an alert from it something definitely didn't occur and take their time
The paycheck is pretty much all that is getting me out of bed in the morning, even if at this point I can't say I really need it anymore.
I mean also maybe not, but I find it hard to devote time to things I know I am interested in because I work 9-5, 5 days a week. I spend time with my partner of an evening and have housework and exercise to take care of and after all that it feels like there is very little time and like I don't have a lot of energy to learn new skills or pursue hobbies, so what I end up doing is the things I know I like but that are not draining. Ultimately I spend a lot of time reading or playing video games or goofing off on reddit.
Even taking a week or two off isn't necessarily a good indicator, because you won't say, go and buy a bunch of paints and an easel and go "right I'm finally going to get stuck into painting" when you only have two weeks off and know you won't have time for it once they are up
I think there is something fundamentally ancient about it, like how young women braid each others hair and probably been doing it since year one of humanity's existence. Maybe we need others to get things done. Maybe the man would jumpstart his passion if someone shared his thing for restoration.
I dont really know.
I think there is a lot of truth to this actually. Admittedly I'm a little sleep deprived right now in that way that leads you reading a statement and feeling it is incredibly profound in a way you might not otherwise... but still I think you are really onto something.
Working with someone smooths out the edges well when things go poorly (if something goes wrong and you are alone it is easier to be grumpy about it than if you have someone with you to say "oh well, we can do X instead" or "It doesn't really matter"), they make the work feel seen and therefore feel more valuable. I can enjoy cooking for (and especially with my partner) but I can never be bothered to really cook for myself, even if I'd enjoy the meal more in the end it doesn't feel worth the time and energy investment when I could just slap together a sandwich or something.
This extends to hobby projects as well in a big way, perhaps even more. Sure I could spend hours painting a picture and have people say "wow, that's impressive" (this is just an example, I can't actually paint), but it feels hard to justify when I have other things I might need to do. If someone else is working on the same thing with you it makes you feel like you are investing that time in them, which is inherently fulfilling.
Even in your example of you helping your friend, once they've accepted you are helping they will feel like every bit of work they do will make your life easier. It's less intense but they will still feel like they are contributing to your efforts in someway, or at least like they are working towards a mutual goal instead of something kind of isolated.