iguanayou

At least they stopped putting "My" in front of everything.

Where's the data behind that infographic about the leaf blower vs driving a pickup from Texas to Alaska?

Awesome!

My theory: workers are capable of performing focused work for only a fixed number of hours per week.

If productivity is essentially: work done divided by hours worked, then a lot of the things the article mentioned changes the denominator, not the numerator.

Productivity goes up, but the amount of work being done doesn't change. Might as well let people have that other non-working time to themselves.

I taught high school for five years but have been a software engineer for the past ten.

I'd love to teach again - but sadly that would mean going back to a one bedroom apartment in a not-great part of town. Where I'm at now, I have a nice place in the country and the means to pursue hobbies that I couldn't before.

Hear, hear. There's a lot of us in this same boat. These asocial, sedentary IT jobs + hectic lifestyles are out of sync with our biology and psychology.

I like Windows 11!

I've got the same type of deal here. I just worry about skills getting outdated since I'm only working on an in-house system and doing mostly maintenance. But perhaps that fear is overblown.

I could easily hop to a gig with more responsibility and more opportunity for increasing my skills - but also more stress.

Taking longer to get up to speed and setting up a development environment: I'm not sure that's a function of age. It's more likely because development environments truly have gotten larger and more complicated over time.

I've been programming for 20 years - the amount of environment / config / tooling stuff to deal with just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

Exactly. Making the whole "I don't trust the government to do something smart with my money" argument moot. It has been proposed, voters have seen the proposal, and it has been voted down.

1. Carbon tax 2. Cap and trade

The problem is NOT that there have been no good proposed policy solutions. The problem is that voters don't want them. This is why I'm pessimistic on the environment.

Very, very common.

Agree

Or you could build actual things in an actual shed? This is the same impulse that drives people to build furniture, boats, and model train layouts. To me, the real physical objects are much more fulfilling.

This is a great book! Just finished reading it.