Readit NewsThis perfectly illustrates this broken mental model that leads to endless frustration.
Unless you put the car in reverse, you are still making forward progress. If someone merges in front of you at 30mph then you traveled hundreds of feet towards your destination in the time it took them to do that. Chill out.
Jokes aside, I've played around with Campfire and it's very, very simple, but pretty nice to use and easy to set up: https://once.com/campfire
In the reimbursements example, the goal shifted, by design. The environment moved from high-trust to low-trust as the department grew, and the aim moved from "keeping people happy" to "spending less money"/"not being taken advantage of". Not defending it -- I hate paperwork like this -- but it seems almost inevitable as groups of any kind grow large enough and you actually can't assume good faith anymore.
Do most engineers find this to be true? For me the balance switched within a few years of being a senior (nearly a decade ago). Writing code is easy, negotiating over what code to write takes time.
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Does your argument still hold up?
>”employees are making the actual thing that inflicts harm while consumers' actions are completely diffused and many steps removed from the harm they cause.”
“employees are making the actual thing that inflicts harm while consumers' actions directly cause deadly harm.”
I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t be voting with our wallets and supporting these people but your initial argument is flawed. They produce goods precisely because consumers buy them…
Can you explain why you think it wouldn't?
Tons of principled engineers choose not to pursue opportunities at military contractors, for instance, and this is not widely seen as unreasonable.
Billions of people don't use todo list apps so they're useless; just remember what to do.
Billions of people don't use post-its apps so they're useless; just remember what you're going to write down.
Billions of people don't have cars; just walk.
You can dismiss any invention since industrial revolution with this logic.
You can still make an open source printer with some extrusion and stepper motors, same as always.
There is an amount of baby cash that would work. But we're talking enough cash to hire a competent housekeeper/nanny until the child is old enough to take care of themself.
If you wanted to pull a purely financial lever, you'd have to give couples enough money to offset one partner's income plus a lifetime of lost income due to the years spent outside of the job market.
IMO this would be perfectly fair and reasonable, considering they are raising a future lifelong taxpayer, but that kind of long term thinking is challenging.