0xRusty

You start with a hypothesis and then you test it.

> Do not let yourself fall behind.

That hit home. I'm afraid I was one of those lazy math undergrads who struggled with a few of the first year topics, didn't get help or put the hours in and never really recovered. I will maintain I think the teaching was very poor in places (lots of "just trust me" handwashing and "this is obvious so I'll leave it to you to complete" which for an 18 year old frankly sucks). A system that lets you get 30% in "analysis 1" and then just marches you straight into "analysis 2" next semester and expects you to just pull your socks up isn't much of a system to me. Honestly I'm afraid my time at university doing maths was miserable. I should have done something more applied like engineering or CS probably.

Someone once told me "If you like biology at school, do psychology at university. If you like chemistry, do biology. If you like physics, do chemistry. If you like maths, do physics and if you like philosophy, do maths". I should have listened.

I felt much the same way. I wish I had more creative energy at the weekend for these kinds of things... But then I remember that I actually have a much more creative job than most people and my creative energies are spent from 9-6 Monday to Friday (I work in movies). I've found MUCH more peace and pleasure in my "consumption hobbies" like watching tv, reading, playing linear story games that don't require me to be particularly creative and learned to stop being so hard myself for not having a hobby where I'm actively producing something like writing a book or making a game. Weirdly when I have a quiet period at work and am not so creative for 2-3 months I get the urge to pick up creative hobbies again. I've come to realise for myself that I have a measureable amount of bandwidth to create and a measureable amount of bandwidth to consume and they seem to be seesaw'd together.

I feel a new Dan Brown novel coming on! Probably is a coincidence given these countries were basically at war the whole time so getting agreement to even start a project like this is unlikely. Very interesting nonetheless.

I don't know much about fonts and typography but just want to acknowledge the huge amount of work that goes into putting together an article like this on something relatively obscure. Enjoyable read!

Strap it on? Haven't you heard? The vison pro 9 will be a chip grown on your retina.

I also couldn't think of anything more embarrassing than using a friend this way. Could you imagine having a conversation along the lines of "hey can I use you as an insurance company, if I'll pay you $10 will you pay me $100 back if I'm Ill for a meeting?". Frankly I've never heard anything quite so ridiculous.

As a boss of quite a large team, I think it's ok to not have everyone be hyper productive 5 days a week and I don't want people cramming 5 days of work in to 4. I want a little slack and room to pivot for my team during the week. I need people to have a spare few hours in the week that they maybe feel is unproductive in order for them to be able to pick up a couple new things that crop up. I'm not able to schedule 40 perfect hours of tasks for people to start on from 9am Monday. Where are as a team Friday 3pm looks very different to where we'd be Thursday 8pm if everyone was nose to the grindstone the whole time.

Also if youre a business that is basically a team for hire to a client who works 5 days a week, what do you tell them when they come up with some valid but urgent request during "normal" business time and that key person isn't there because they've already done their 40 hours. "Sorry we'll have to pick that up next week" very often doesn't fly with them ("what do you mean that person only does 4 days a week, we need that thing done today" is not a conversation I want to have). I cannot always afford to hire more people to cover that unicorn 10x team member who wants to work 4 days.

Because Apple leak it all summer to build up the hype!

What I don't get in all this is the at the beginning of the pandemic, HR, management etc made it very very clear that this was all a temporary situation and remote work would be allowed (enforced) for the short duration of the pandemic and then everybody would be expected to return to the office. I'm sure everyone was given a letter to that effect by HR. What is now going on with this "surprised Pikachu face" where everybody thinks that they can just stay remote for all time? It's ridiculous.

If you decided to sell your house or give up your rental in a good (perhaps expensive) location in the city near your place of work for a "better life" outside the city in new accommodation, well under the knowledge that after the pandemic offices might very well return to work and are now complaining about things like commute and quality of life is frankly laughable. You took a hell of a risk doing that and it's now not paying off.

The thing about being in an office is it's not about you, it's not about what you want and how your life is better being away from the office. It's about what you bring to everybody else, what you bring to a team of people more junior than yourself and what you can do to help other people. It's extremely hard to find new talent in a junior team working remotely - in fact I'd say it's almost impossible.

Pulling up the ladder behind you now that you've got yours and a comfortable life outside the office is frankly selfish. I can see that managers often get the blame here with comments like "they just need people to manage in the same building" I think that's very unfair because actually what they are trying to do is to manage a team of all skill levels and seniorities and by having a remote, or even semi remote, workforce that job is made much more difficult. Covid started about 3 years ago so anyone with less than 3 years of professional experience has probably never ever seen a real working office, just remember that.

It's so easy to blame management for these kind of things but the day to day designers have to take some responsibility too. New reddit is dreadful, literally unusable. You're telling me all that is the fault of "managers" and the people constructing the code are blameless? There could be no other way to solve the problem management set them? This "don't blame me, I'm just doing what I've been told to do" attitude stinks and the faster these passenger devs get replaced with AI the better

Trouble is I LOVE my job and the company I'm in. I know our processes like the back of my hand (I designed half of them) and feel very valued and enjoy it all. I don't want to leave just to get money. I just also dont see why people coming in to "junior" roles are paid $50k more than I was on at that level of experience just a few years ago (I understand inflation, this is something else). It's nuts.

I find it kind of sad that's all you get out of your job to be honest.

It's not easy for people promoted into manager roles either. I'm a new manager who the first time is now exposed to salary details of my, now direct reports, former co-workers. For the past couple of weeks I've been walking around thinking "how the hell does he make that much?! When I was at that level of experience I was paid $40k less".

It's really affecting me to be honest. I'm seeing people in different light and resenting their pay. I'm resenting people being paid in some cases almost double what I was on a new comer to that role with no experience, we used to pay about 80k hour for a new starter in the role I now oversee, we now pay over 140k. That's barely less for a brand new starter than I was making a few months ago with 10 years more experience in the role.

Salary matters suck for everyone, I hate dealing with this aspect of my job. Everybody just wants wants wants and act like children when they don't get.