thatsamonad

> Right, and in my experience urban retail is often high cost, low quality. Some of the dirtiest stores/restaurants you see are in urban centers.

This may depend on your area but this hasn’t been my experience. I used to commute into downtown Portland for work and we had a great selection of options for lunch and happy hours, a plethora of food cart options which were great and affordable, and a number of decent bars where you could meet a friend for drinks afterwards.

Now I work from home in the suburbs and, while I wouldn’t trade being remote for anything, the food options here mostly consist of bland fast food and chain restaurants. One of the things I miss the most is grabbing a decent lunch with a coworker and breaking up the monotony a bit.

My spouse bought me a Chemex coffee brewer years ago. It makes significantly better coffee than a standard drip brewer and I use it pretty much every morning. It’s not as easy as pushing a button or using a K-cup, but there’s something slightly meditative about the process.

I’m also not in that age group (I’m late 30s) but I’ve been watching TV and movies with closed captioning enabled since I was a kid and have found that it helps my comprehension of what’s going on with plot lines, etc, immensely. Maybe I’m just a stronger reader than listener, but I’m at the point where I vastly prefer to watch movies at home rather than at a theater because I can have CC on by default.

I’ve also always had CC on for my kid and they’re an excellent reader. I don’t have any concrete evidence for it but part of me thinks their strong reading skills are partly due to that.

The Walmart near us has a set of EV chargers in its parking lot that offer free charging for up to 2 hours. I bought my first EV earlier this year and I’ve definitely visited that Walmart more than I ever would before because it’s convenient to get a quick charge in and grab a few groceries, etc, I might need anyway.

We recently started letting our 9 year-old walk down to a nearby park alone to meet and play with friends. It’s helping them build independence and confidence and I have no concerns about kidnapping, etc, because it’s only a couple of blocks away and we live in a safe neighborhood (they also have a phone they take with them and know to call/text us when they change their plans and go to another nearby park).

What I DO have concerns about, however, is overzealous adults who see a kid playing alone at a park and decide to call the police or child protective services.

I’ve been remote at least some of the time for the last 4-5 years and fully remote since the start of the pandemic (which is what I intend to do going forward).

I totally understand why some people would rather be in an office, even those who are “just” writing code. But I’m just not a very social person and I value time with my family over in-person social interactions with my coworkers (despite my current coworkers being very nice and awesome people).

There’s also just zero need for me to be physically colocated given the work that I do, so any benefits are greatly outweighed by the commute and lack of flexibility that comes with a requirement to be in an office everyday.

I would add that it’s not only expensive financially but also in terms of time.

I grew up very poor and was fairly poor as an adult until about 6-7 years ago. I constantly had to make time trade offs. Do I exercise or evaluate and cut coupons to make my meager grocery budget last longer? Do I meal plan to make my money stretch further or spend that time investing in a skill? Not to mention things like not having reliable transportation, which meant taking the bus to and from work which tends to be a 2-3x longer commute. And if the bus was ever late, minimum wage retail jobs don’t really care so you get a “mark” on your record and potentially written up/fired if it happens too many times.

I consider myself very fortunate that I was lucky enough to find myself a tech job and pull myself out of my previous financial situation. But I get the sense that a lot of people here haven’t been through that so they underestimate just how much more difficult it is to be poor, at least in the US.

This is one line, posted out of context, from a very large codebase. I don't agree that you can learn much about the culture at Twitch from this snippet.

In my case they didn’t. My former boss and I basically met up for lunch, talked about it, and then a few days later I got a new offer letter. I did have to do another round of background checks just to make sure nothing had come up in the months I was gone. They also hadn’t fully backfilled my role (they had hired a couple of contractors during my absence) so it was still technically an available position.

Another thing to note is that when I left previously I did so on very good terms and gave plenty of notice. I’m sure that played a part in how willing they were to have me come back.