RealityNow

Yea I didn't even mention my prior job. They had a mandatory 9:30am attendance meeting that they called "standup", and if I showed up 5 minutes late my manager would joke about it coming out of my bonus. Despite this I don't think he actually cared, but the President did, and ultimately he answered to him. I quit that job soon after and my only regret is not leaving earlier.

Yes, I was consistently late for a software engineering job where 95% of my productive time was spent in front of a computer and "lateness" was arbitrarily defined by upper managers who moved the standup time 1.5 hours earlier to passively start enforcing attendance. Standups went from being a team thing to being mandated top-down by executives completely uninvolved in the day-to-day of our team's work.

Notice I said "didn't appear attentive in meetings". Yes, I was not very enthusiastic about our 15-20 minute morning daily standups where every employee goes around justifying their own existence and reitering what is already on the Jira board.

Yes I was working from home "too much" in a job where I was working from home 1-2 times/week, and for the first 6 months it was never an issue, but then when a new manager took over (with no involvement in our team's day-to-day activities) all of a sudden he had an issue with it. Not because my/our output was any lower than before, just because some marketing executive noticed that my team was working from home more than the others (made more apparent by an open office), and assumed this meant we were probably slacking.

You sound like one of those nightmare "managers" I worked with who destroyed the company's culture and caused the company's enormously high attrition rate with most employee's only averaging ~1 year before quitting for greener pastures. I'm glad I no longer work at companies with corporate drones like you.

PIP isn't a pink slip at all companies. I once got a PIP when working at a mid-sized corporation. Fortunately my performance wasn't an issue, they just didn't like that I was frequently late to the daily morning standup (which upper management refused to allow us to reschedule to later in the day despite my insistence), didn't appear attentive in meetings, and was working from home too much. I started coming in to work on time and stopped coding during meetings and they took me off the PIP a couple weeks later.

Of course I took this as a sign to gtfo of the company, so I started applying, left for a massive promotion and 40% raise, and now I work remotely at a company where we only have standup once every couple days and it's not first thing in the morning. Nobody's micromanaging my work schedule or nagging me for not clocking in at a certain time, and I'm making way more money especially since I don't have to live in SF/NYC anymore and pay nearly half my compensation in taxes and cut a third of my paycheck to a landlord. Funny thing is that I'm actually more responsive/available now because I value my job more, enough to enable Slack notifications on my phone and respond asap (within reason). Couldn't be happier.

You're being pedantic and ignoring the whole point of the article.

This is extremely disturbing, not to mention so ironic that a self-proclaimed "communist" regime is torturing and kidnapping communist activists.

We can debate Marxism here in the comments, but the fact is that nobody regardless of their political stance should have to worry about being kidnapped or tortured by their government. At that point your government is effectively a gang, of no higher moral ground than a bunch of thugs with guns.

Until China fixes their government, they will never be taken seriously on the same level of other "first world" countries. Unless people passively watch Peking University students (statistically harder to get into than Harvard) get kidnapped by their government and do nothing about it.

I wonder what Chinese people think about the odds of any of this improving.

I think it has less to do with merely growing the money supply, and more to do with preventing and quickly recovering from crashes.

The Great Depression was exacerbated and prolonged by us being on the gold standard and thus not being able to use monetary stimulus. Also with a gold standard, there's a limit to how much fiscal stimulus a government can conduct as well because every dollar has to be convertible to gold.

Essentially, fixed money supply = less control. On the surface this might seem like a good thing, and if money is in the hands of a corrupt oligarchy I'd prefer the fixed money supply. But most people don't realize that only 3% of the money supply is printed by the government (the rest is created by private banks), and economic bubbles/crashes and inflation/deflation aren't restricted to fiat currencies.

Mass transit in America is terrible, period (outside of maybe Manhattan, despite the fact that our subway has been getting worse and is in dire need of upgrading). America sucks at mass transit, but for whatever reason Americans don't seem to care. I think it's because they're complacent, don't know any better, and have this toxic "everybody for themselves" mentality that makes it impossible to improve anything that's in the general public welfare.

Well that sucks. Guess those videos are probably gone forever.

My Youtube account got banned 10 years ago with videos on it I made as a teen that are now gone forever. 7 years ago or so I had tried emailing their customer support which of course didn't get me anywhere. Is there any way I can get those videos back? Unfortunately I don't have any contacts at Google, but if I were to get in hold with someone who works there, is there anything in particular I should direct them to do?

I should be upfront and say that I got banned for uploading a video that was deemed inappropriate. I don't really fault them for banning the account, I just wish they had given me the chance to back up my other perfectly appropriate videos. I know those videos probably still exist on some hard drive on a Google server.

Do what you enjoy, and don't be afraid to venture outside of software development. At the end of the day, not everyone obtains fulfillment out of staring at a computer screen all day fixing bugs and developing incremental features onto a piece of software. That's ok - we're human, not robots.

You're still young, so you can try something else (eg. product development) and easily go back to software development if you end up missing it. Or maybe there's another are within tech that'll interest you (eg. blockchain, AI/ML, game dev).

I will say one thing though - software development is probably the best job for money, work life balance, and ease of finding employment

Calling this a gender issue is like saying "we're raising the minimum wage to help women".

The law benefits male employees just as much as it benefits women. Lawmakers and PR teams just like to spin everything as addressing the gender gap to appeal to society-wide damsel in distress syndrome.

It's absolutely absurd that "arrest quotas" are even a thing in America. The job of the police in most first world countries is to protect the people, not make arrests for ludicrous laws. I don't want my tax dollars funding police officers camping out on highways to hand out speeding tickets or arresting random people for having pocket knives on them. No wonder Americans have such an adversarial relationship with the police.

Welfare is capped at a maximum of 5 years, and unemployment insurance - which you don't qualify for if you quit your job - is capped at even less. Meanwhile student loan payments pile up and can be used to garnish your wages and social security.

The Scandinavian countries clearly have far more generous social safety nets.

I had thought you were saying that American food is better than Japanese food, my mistake. Yea as much as I love Japanese food, I wouldn't agree with the statement that NYC's best is superior to Japan's average.