I question the competency of any CEO that enforces people return to the office on a whim.

We have crossed the rubicon on remote work. The shift has been well and truly paradigmed.

To choose to restrict your candidate pool to a small geographical location, pay relocation, pay higher salaries, have a lower employee NPS, have higher company carbon emissions, whilst your competitors have a much larger non-geographically constrained talent pool, with more attractive, flexible, family-friendly working conditions and pay less for those employees, making their companies more competitive.

It’s a no-brainer. The status quo has completely shifted. Any CEO that doesn’t yet realize that should consider quitting.

Hybrid work is the worst of both worlds. Can't move out of a HCOL and now you have to co-ordinate with your co-workers to reap any "benefits" of being in-office.

What would be really cool is reconceptualizing hybrid work as quarterly retreats, where the company provides housing and other amenities for 1 to 2 weeks every quarter. This gives everyone time to bond and work on harder problems.

I get this wouldn't work as well for those with families because being away for that long is tough, but this would be great for say juniors and seniors with greater flexibility. It also solves some of the other issues, ie I could move to an MCOL and just fly in once a quarter to work together with everyone. The "retreat" aspect of it would also incentivize more people to be there.

On the company side of things, instead of leasing out a building for a long time, they can just rent short term and use the money they are saving to make the retreat more fun and productive.

Money laundering, gambling and stock trading for kids of all ages.

Also the whole rug-pulling game has been an impressive transfer of wealth from VCs -> influencers.

This will not apply to all companies, but for our hiring decisions certs have an adverse effect. If someone puts many certifications on their resume my expectations are lower and I likely won't consider them for interviews. It's a negative signal in my experience. Your time is better spent working on side projects, contributing to open source, writing a blog, etc. I.e. do real-world stuff instead of wasting time on artificial tests that require memorization and exist largely as a revenue stream for certification providers.

> Strongly agree, but it's not just clients. Sales people, for example, love to use Slack because it's a backdoor channel to circumvent management and go straight to the engineers.

And that's bad because?

It never is one or two hours though. It might be if you designed the thing and know exactly how to get there and handle all the corner cases. Oh and also we always underestimate.

I have yet to see a 1–2h take home test actually be doable in that amount of time. It’s more like 8–10h to get going, have something meaningful, and code that isn’t inscrutable.