I really wish journalists & public speaking investors would call this out more.
Though like non-GAAP earnings & adjusted EBITDA, very few care. Those that do are often old, technical, conservative & silent type of investors instead of podcasters or CNBC guests. RIP Charlie M.
There's no doubt it can function as a convenient cover, but that doesn't mean it's having no effect at all. It would be naive to assume that the introduction of a fundamentally new general-purpose work tool across millions of workers in nearly every industry and company within the span of a couple years has not played any role whatsoever in making teams and organizations more efficient in terms of headcount.
Any days defeats much of the purpose IMHO, which is to allow people to escape the real estate cost trap cities and actually build wealth.
If a company said I had to move back to a high cost city, I’d demand like double the salary. Not like I’d be keeping any of it. They should just skip the middleman and cut checks directly to existing homeowners and property speculators.
It helps on both sides too. If a bunch of devs can now vacate the high cost cities, it might make those cities less expensive for the people who actually need to be there or have family ties there.
If you believe in fully remote work, and think that companies should not pay double to have employees in HCOL locations: why would you hire in a crazily expensive market like the US in the first place?
If everyone is remote, why not put your employees in Costa Rica? Or São Paulo? Colombia? Heck, even Canada is cheaper than many places in the US.
And we're only talking about timezone-aligned markets. You can also consider Poland, or India, and now you can hire a lot more resources for the same cost. Sure, it will be less efficient, collaboration tax and all, but 2.5X is quite a difference.
The one thing holding US-based companies from going all-in offshore is the belief that in-person relationships still matter. They would rather pay the extra COL mark up than save 40-70% for a remote employee.
To be clear: the jobs are going to other markets; this is not a either or situation. But at least hybrid RTO has as a dampening effect, and protects the internal job market. We should be celebrating folks like Amazon, not complaining that they don't get it.
In the past we had more demand than supply, which kept salaries stable (read: high). Now there's more supply than demand, and the main thing holding salaries stable is that employers still want warm bodies walking through their doors every day. Remove that, and you get a race to the bottom.
This argument keeps popping up as if every engineer was exactly the same, which is simply not true.
High quality talent is expensive, hard to recruit, hard to keep. High salary is one of many perks a company offers to capture high quality talent. A work visa to live in a first world country is another one.
The company I work for was “coerced” into forcing more people back into the office due to pressure from the city and the local chamber of commerce.
I say coerce, because there are absolutely people in middle and upper management who feel the need to preside over their little fiefdoms and were more than happy to relay this info as a convenient way to deflect criticism. “Don’t blame us, the city would start making things difficult for us if our occupancy numbers stayed so low. We don’t want our taxes going up.”
What is the "fair" share of taxes for a company to pay to local governments? Please quantify and show your work.
Local governments are primarily funded through sales and property taxes. Many tech companies that don't sell products to consumers don't collect any sales taxes. And if they rent their office space then they don't directly pay property taxes, either.
You can do a significant majority of hardware work remotely. Throwing boards in the mail was pretty straightforward until recently and even egregiously wasteful overnighting is a hell of a lot cheaper than a single desk's worth of commercial real estate.
It's quiet layoffs. You agreed to be in their city any time they want in the contract, but you signed it anyway despite the pay being less than the rent in that city. Now you're being called in, you're quitting, so it's technically not a layoff.
Embodiment is 1000x harder from a physical perspective.
Look at how hard it is for us to make reliable laptop hinges or the articulated car door handle trend (started by Tesla) where they constantly break.
These are simple mechanisms compared to any animal or human body. Our bodies last up to 80-100 years through not just constant regeneration but organic super-materials that rival anything synthetic in terms of durability within its spec range. Nature is full of this, like spider silk much stronger than steel or joints that can take repeated impacts for decades. This is what hundreds of millions to billions of years of evolution gets you.
We can build robots this good but they are expensive, so expensive that just hiring someone to do it manually is cheaper. So the problem is that good quality robots are still much more expensive than human labor.
The only areas where robots have replaced human labor is where the economics work, like huge volume manufacturing, or where humans can’t easily go or can’t perform. The latter includes tasks like lifting and moving things thousands of times larger than humans can or environments like high temperatures, deep space, the bottom of the ocean, radioactive environments, etc.
Isn’t this stuff mostly rendered by the GPU, and pretty efficiently?
I remember eye candy Linux desktop stuff like Enlightenment doing stuff like this back in the 90s and early 2000s. Not as pervasive or flashy but similar: lots of translucency, skins, themes, etc. Ran fine on a 400mhz machine, though at a much lower resolution.
It’s not free but I’m curious to see how significant it is. I also wonder if you can turn off the animated stuff.
The biggest gripe I have with the Tahoe shots I’ve seen is thst they seem to show it wasting more space with larger margins, etc. I hate that trend. I have a huge ultra wide monitor and often find myself wanting even more screen real estate while I’m working. Stop wasting my pixels.
Devils advocate: a lot of people I know in the big tech and adjacent VC world are supporters of things like universal basic income because they kind of agree.
Eventually we will have to admit that we have created so much wealth that classical work ethics are no longer humane or beneficial to society. It doesn’t mean people don’t work but it means it must at least partially be divorced from sustenance.
> a lot of people I know in the big tech and adjacent VC world are supporters of things like universal basic income
Does their support manifest in any tangible way? It's a popular thing for tech people to talk about, but it doesn't seem to be matched by any effort or associated behaviours.
I don’t know. Some may have donated to things or to politicians that support such views, but most wealthy people are like most people in general. They often don’t do very much about their personal political views beyond voting and occasionally expressing them. Those who are activists with their money are in the minority.
> If something is made only for money, it is not art, and indeed I can understand why those making it advocate so strongly for copyright restrictions, money being the only thing attached to their art.
How do artists eat?
It is true: art made only for money is usually not very good. But good art can, does, and should make money.
“Information wants to be free” is another way of saying “labor wants to be free” which means only rent extracting owners of scarce capital and assets get to make a living. Everyone else is a serf with 5G Internet.
If you get rid of copyright, you’ll see literature vanish as an art that can be pursued seriously by anyone but people with trusts or other sources of independent wealth.
Ridiculous. I have several friends who are self-published authors. They don't make most of their money from their art; they do it for the fun of it, and the joy of connection with their readers.
It literally costs nothing to write and publish short or long-form literature these days. If you want a physical book, the cost is small.
Writing an actually good novel can take a year or more, which translates to a significant amount of money. It also requires a lot of focus, which makes it hard to do with a "day job."
This kind of out of touch "why do they not eat cake?" mentality is a big reason there's such a deep tech backlash right now. Yeah, we can just land six figure jobs no problem, but other fields? Yeah, they should just do it for the passion. They don't need to get paid.
Of course authors have a passion for it. Nobody would get into that field without a passion, and people tend to not get good at anything unless they like it. That doesn't mean they don't deserve to earn anything.
> If you get rid of copyright, you’ll see literature vanish as an art that can be pursued seriously by anyone but people with trusts or other sources of independent wealth.
This is already the case. The expected payout from one of the big five publishers for a novel is about $5,000 to $10,000 with the author never seeing any payments based on royalties. Millions of books are published each year and only thousands are commercially successful. Being successful as somebody writing literature is essentially a lottery. I don't think copyright works as well as everybody seems to think it does.
You're missing my point: copyright is not an effective solution to the problem. We all wish it were, because it has so many terrible side effects, but it's just not very good at getting artists paid, whether that be art, music, or literature.
What a great question! There is no complete answer, but I've been studying this for years. My position often comes off as anti-artist, because folks combine "I want artists to get paid" with "Copyright should be respected": this is a cognitive error: wanting to solve a problem is different than advocating for a particular solution. I'm particularly prone to criticizing solutions that have proven ineffective.
But to be more substantive: I think copyright laws are woefully out of date. First, the have eaten into the commons to an unhealthy degree. As copyright has been extended further and further, we've introduced a "copyright cliff" where works remain under copyright, but have been abandoned by their owner because the payoff just isn't there to make them available. So the public generally has access to very old works, and very modern works, but there' a big hole in the middle, especially for less popular works. Lewis Hyde discusses some aspects of this in his book "Common as Air".
In addition to the term of copyright, the way copyright is framed is antiquated - it assumes the presence of physical copies, and a lot of trouble stems from that.
William Patry was at one point of a lawyer for Google, but is more well known in legal circles for "Patry on Copyright", which Berkeley Law describes as:
> Patry on copyright provides an encyclopedic analysis of copyright, placing court opinions and statutes in their real-world context. In addition to enumerating a complete legislative and statutory history for relevant provisions, on pertinent litigation issues, a circuit-by-circuit breakdown is provided. The extensive discussion of remedial, jurisdictional, choice of law, and international issues is unparalleled in other legal work.
Patry wrote another book that I read called "How to Fix Copyright", and he dives into the sort of changes to copyright would help. They are summarized in the book description as:
> The task of policymakers is to remake our copyright laws to fit our times: our copyright laws, based on the eighteenth century concept of physical copies, gatekeepers, and artificial scarcity, must be replaced with laws based on access not ownership of physical goods, creation by the masses and not by the few, and global rather than regional markets. Patry's view is that of a traditionalist who believes in the goals of copyright but insists that laws must match the times rather than fight against the present and the future.
It was born when physical books took years to copy, and thus could be sold for a lot of money. It was also often done, like many arts in ancient times, under patronage.
The next step will be removing humans from the loop entirely, a feed of personalized AI generated slop engineered to keep you staring at it.
YouTube and Facebook are almost turning into this organically. YouTube seems to be trying to fight it. Zuck seems to just not care anymore, generally. Eventually one will fully embrace it.
Are there even any social networks anymore? Oddly enough as weird and cringe as it is I think LinkedIn kind of qualifies. It’s business but that’s a form of social interaction that involves real people doing stuff.
I think most social interaction has moved onto messengers, Discord, Slack, etc.
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