Having worked in ecommerce on both merchant and SaaS side I can explain why they may have and as a customer you will basically never see it applied.
From an engineering point of view, yes you can save so much packaging for the company and optimise for a delivery to be in fewer boxes, which is a fun problem to solve.
From a retail operations point of view the cost of packaging and shipping is negligible and why it’s so often discounted. The real costs though are labour.
Your pick and packing staff are basically all judged on throughput so if someone spends 5 minutes to pack an order in 1 well fitting box they will be fired if everyone else can pack 5 orders in the same 5 minutes.
Generally speaking your packer station is set up so they either have a terminal showing their packing list, a tub of goods to pack for one or more orders, and stacks of different sized boxes.
The stations usually get messy quickly with papers etc all over the place. It’s not a place for precise work and speed is valued above all. In describing the work station I didn’t even mention scanning, taping and labelling of the package that has to happen in the same space too.
Some may argue it’s possible to be both fast and precise, but I would argue it’s not sustainable over an 8 hour shift.
Finally, similar to why potato crisps/chips have so much volume is that inefficient, or spacious, packing is generally better for transport as you are less likely to have goods damage each other from being too tightly packed together.
That’s why IMO generally things are packed sub-optimally from a space use perspective but actually optimally from a convenience and speed perspective.
"Not all retail" - for the place I worked at (doing "optimal" box packing), "box opening experience" was a big thing since it generally got shared on social media, etc. Hence there were constraints about not packing things on top of the feature item, all items had to be label upwards, "best-fit" box to look snug in photos, etc.
(but this place wasn't doing tens of thousands a day, I don't think)
Pop is one of my favorite founding stories. Slack acquihires a multi-cursor product, kills it, never builds the feature. Noncompete expires, original acquihire founders use their acquihire money to buy a $1.5M vanity domain, bootstrap a replica of their old acquihired product, feature freeze, and just provide a stable and reliable product - one that we use every day. Pop is amazing.
Is there a way to use Pop solo across multiple machines, so I can drive Xcode on my Mac from my PC, or drive Visual Studio on my PC from my Mac, and also sometimes have others join in?
Does that still work in a remote-style scenario (where the other machine isn't necessarily next to you and you want to remote join your own session without needing to manually click a button on the other machine)?
While it's likely not the answer you're looking for, I've had a colleague walk their in-law through starting Pop on their home machine while traveling, so they could remote in!
Part of the problem is discoverability. As the library gets larger, without adequate time invested into docs or standardised naming to enable faster code-based search, people can end up writing their own functions when one already exist. Often these are not discovered unless PRs are reviewed by someone that either wrote or has experience with a reusable function.
I think the topic of having/not-having children should be treated like politics and religion in polite conversation, to be avoided.
Unfortunately there is quite the philosophical, ideological, and even dogmatic schism between the two sides.
Like another post I read, if you do have to enter a debate about it, it's probably a more useful exercise to ask each other what it would take for their stance to change.
Saw a post on reddit today that basically had a restaurant laying down the law:
Absolutely no food shall be taken home at the end of the shift this includes: Messed up food, no-shows, and PAID food that you buy yourself. (Probably because of the employee discount)...
For restaurant workers who probably struggle putting food on the table, this is just a slap on the face. They can definitely afford to feed their workers dinner and even their whole family back at home nightly and not lose much. I used to run a restaurant back in 2010 and would let my staff at least take home some food a few nights per week, esp when we had a good week and good profit returns. We were on a tight budget but they were happy working there!
The reason these rules exist is because otherwise there will be abuse.
I worked at a large retail store before. And they also forbid taking anything home even if it’s broken. Because there are of course cases of people purposely breaking things to take home.
I also worked at a large retail store before, which also forbid taking things home if they were broken.
We had a that was damaged from being a display item, but only cosmetically. They wanted us to throw it in the trash compactor, instead of donating it to a coworker had a kid at 19, single mother, and made 7.50/h.
We snuck that crib out the back and hid it behind a dumpster while my buddy came to pick it up for her.
Possible abuse isn't a reason to have shitty policies.
I have similarly varied background and I have not had candidate employers put it through that lens.
If anything I find people tend to look upon varied experience as proof that you can add value on multiple fronts and across functions within the organisation, which should make you a slightly less common cog in the machine.
I have found Vimac [1] to be an okay alternative to mouse keys. Unfortunately I find that it's still slower than just grabbing the mouse. Performance can also vary depending on the number of clickable elements on the screen.
I kind of just rely on Vimium and Vim mode in editors/IDEs now.
From an engineering point of view, yes you can save so much packaging for the company and optimise for a delivery to be in fewer boxes, which is a fun problem to solve.
From a retail operations point of view the cost of packaging and shipping is negligible and why it’s so often discounted. The real costs though are labour.
Your pick and packing staff are basically all judged on throughput so if someone spends 5 minutes to pack an order in 1 well fitting box they will be fired if everyone else can pack 5 orders in the same 5 minutes.
Generally speaking your packer station is set up so they either have a terminal showing their packing list, a tub of goods to pack for one or more orders, and stacks of different sized boxes.
The stations usually get messy quickly with papers etc all over the place. It’s not a place for precise work and speed is valued above all. In describing the work station I didn’t even mention scanning, taping and labelling of the package that has to happen in the same space too.
Some may argue it’s possible to be both fast and precise, but I would argue it’s not sustainable over an 8 hour shift.
Finally, similar to why potato crisps/chips have so much volume is that inefficient, or spacious, packing is generally better for transport as you are less likely to have goods damage each other from being too tightly packed together.
That’s why IMO generally things are packed sub-optimally from a space use perspective but actually optimally from a convenience and speed perspective.