If you are going to quote Jonathan Haidt, I suggest you take a look at his latest book, the Anxious Generation published in 2024. My reading is that reducing face time is definitely NOT a positive factor for happiness.
> My reading is that reducing face time is definitely NOT a positive factor for happiness.
This is an extremely common problem for juniors in the mentoring program where I volunteer: They graduate college, take remote jobs, and then slide into depression while working from home. It takes a while to work with them to get to the bottom of their issues, but often they'll realize that they're much happier in the weeks following company on-site meetings, then they slowly decline again.
Remote work doesn't work for everyone. Many people struggle in remote environments, especially juniors. The way remote work gets pushed as being perfect for everyone can be very confusing for people who discover that they don't like it.
It's even harder because the internet tends to be very hostile to these people rather than supportive. The correct answer, obviously, is that some people do better at different types of jobs. Yet every time this comes up, people come out and try to criticize the person, blame it on their lack of hobbies, blame it on something else, and refuse to allow that some people need face-to-face coworkers to thrive.
It's a real phenomenon that gets downplayed on the internet.
I think -- on the basis of this same argument playing out for years at this point -- it's because the 2 views are talking past each other.
Sure, in office works better for some people and remote makes them miserable. They're real people.
But the side suffering economic compulsion is the remote preferred people being forced back to the office against their will.
If everyone can work how they prefer then great. But that's not the world we live in and to draw a false equivalence between the dominant (at exec level) RTO view and remote workers forced into unpaid commutes and time away from families gets our hackles way up.
> If everyone can work how they prefer then great.
The problem with this is that people's work preference doesn't always match up with the environments where they actually work well.
I've managed remote and hybrid teams for years. I've done this long enough to realize that a lot of the people who struggle to be productive at home will swear up and down that they're much more productive working remote.
The reason is simple: People aren't just expressing their preference for where they work best. They're expressing their preference for where they want to be. When it comes to low performers and difficult employees, they almost universally don't want to be at the office.
That's why it's not as simple as letting everyone work according to their preference.
Remote teams are hard for many reasons, but one of the biggest challenges is filtering for people who can actually work remote. Many people will claim they work well remote, but then you hire them and they're terrible at communicating, can't manage their own time, are constantly MIA during core working hours (a 4-hour window agreed upon by the team, in our case), and so on. It's hard to start removing these people from the company, but it's the only way to make it work.
All of those companies that switched everyone to WFH during COVID learned the hard way that you can't just take everyone and go remote. You have to build the team for it from the start. And it takes more than just asking people what they prefer.
What about based on performance? Pre-covid, my company required ridiculous amount of politics to have remote approved. Eventually, one guy cracked the code ( basically be too hard to replace ) and just told the management he is staying remote. And I can see that management would love to get that carrot ( remote ) back to something that is either very rare or non-existent.
<< Remote teams are hard for many reasons, but one of the biggest challenges is filtering for people who can actually work remote. Many people will claim they work well remote, but then you hire them and they're terrible at communicating, can't manage their own time, are constantly MIA during core working hours (a 4-hour window agreed upon by the team, in our case), and so on. It's hard to start removing these people from the company, but it's the only way to make it work.
It is all true, but it points to crappy management. You want to fire people, fire them. You can't keep them motivated, you failed as a manager. I keep saying this, but management class has gotten really used to easy approach to motivation ( pizza and threat of firing ).
Why not hire people who have proven they have done something by themselves like an open source project or business? Seems like something that's easy to filter for. Asking someone can only tell you things about their judgement not if they actually can do it.
If you have by yourself done something you can assume they can do something else on their own. The on their own is the important pieces.
Yeah people forget that when you graduate college you go from an environment where you're surrounded by hundreds or thousands of potential social contacts who all have lots of free time and lots in common to being surrounded by whoever is on your block, and, if you commute, by your co-workers. I'm a remote worker but the only reason I make this arrangement work is because I'm married, have a family, and have things to do with my time outside of work. If I did this in my 20's I would have been totally unprepared to deal with it.
When I take a junior or mid-level on I try to make sure that we talk about remote work during one-on-ones and that I make sure they have stuff outside of work to focus on or at least that they have a handle on this type of arrangement. In the first year I started doing this in 2018 I tried spending a couple of weeks just working and not leaving my apartment and by the end of it I had gone pretty toasty.
People forget that just as individuals have to work differently to do remote work, managers have to manage differently to do it too. To truly transition will require different habits of mind and a good understanding of what we actually need as people to survive.
That's because the quality of juniors has changed. 20-25 years ago a junior was a self taught senior with no resume experience. Companies would throw you into something and you sank or swam. You were just happy to work with a computer all day. Most of the developers back than were men and you had to leave work to meet the opposite sex. Work was never going to meet all of your social needs.
Is the debate wfh is worse for these juniors or these types of juniors didn't exist before and won't with the rise of llms. Why cater to them now? Aren't they a product of over inflated salaries and expanding the industry too rapidly so quality of candidate drops? Isn't that correction going on right now?
These people should maybe go to co-working places then. Can still work without the butts-in-seats managers over looking every move you make while also getting the social aspect.
I don't want to work next to random people. I want to work with my co-workers. I don't want to have to come in every day for no good reason. I want to be able to come in to a shared space with my coworkers and have a productive day with them. Trying to bring a group of people into a coworking space doesn't work if there are more than 2 people.
Yeah but you can't force people who don't want to come to the office to come there just because you prefer it that way. And in any case, I'm sure there would be more than just 1 person who'd prefer a social aspect / whose home life prevents them from being productive at home, in which case you could most likely band together into the same co-working, no? Most co-workings I know also rent out entire rooms for companies, not just individual desks.
Unless we're talking remote and international, in which case that obviously wouldn't work, but I assume you wouldn't apply to those jobs anyway.
That way you can get your office and some coworkers, and others can do what is best for them, and the company doesn't have to lease a huge office space. Win-win-win?
Ahh, but you see, as a certain communist era anecdote goes:
A: What if people could choose whether they want to live in decadent West or socialist paradise?
B: Problem is, we want those who want to live here and ones that don't.
And that, in a nutshell is the issue with WFH. There are people who think they know better and feel obligated to enforce that view.
I used to commute 1.5 hours each way until I got a car, then it dropped to 1 hour.
10-15 hours per week = 6-9% of my life - including time asleep.
Taking 16 hours of waking time per week, that gives me 112 hours to work with. Now that commute eats 9-13% of my conscious time.
Let's assume a standard 40 hour workweek - 35% of my waking time. Add in those compulsory daily highway joyrides, and conscious time spent on work rises up to 48%. Depressed yet? This includes the weekend. During the workweek you'll spend between (8 + 2) / 16 and (8 + 3) / 16 = 62.5-68.75% of your waking moments on work.
Now consider that car ownership + fuel + insurance could eat up to 30% of an average person's post-tax income.
Fuck all of that, a lot.
Employees can get together at quarterly / monthly off-sites, and juniors should be encouraged to get involved in community activities straight out of college. I'm not sacrificing my life and family time so you can stare at my grumpy face in the next cubicle.
That's a good point. Eliminating commute let me play with my children after school. Even started to have a pizza together for lunch. Started to have lunch almost every day with my wife, instead of my colleagues or looking at our phones in the canteen.
If you’re going to imply the office saves that, worth noting there’s a lot of non-forced organic face time from wfh available from your neighborhoods and communities, and that “Anxious Generation” screen time probably refers to teens and adults piping their lives into a phone, and not the important tradeoffs of staring at a screen in an office park or starting at a screen in your home.
Constantly the office is treated as the only existing socialization source and it really makes me wonder what people’s lives at home are out of work.
Work is half of your waking day 5 days out of 7 - it’s probably your primary source of face time whether you like it or not. You might have more valuable face time elsewhere (family, friends, hobbies) but those 40-50 hours should probably be taken more seriously than they are.
Separating things orthogonally into different functions/silos sounds like how stable and large companies are run. Sounds like a recipe for disaster for a startup.
By most standards, this was a resounding success. I won't have to work again ever if I don't want to. This being my first company, I was obsessed with it. Towards the end, I burnt myself out, I had neglected my wife and kids for years, and I was just so miserable. I used to love programming, but I could not concentrate anymore. I started developing resentment against the entitlement of the software engineers I would hire. My heart was broken every time I would read articles/comments on HN about how working for a start up is a scam that only benefits the founders.
It was time to get out. I was lucky that I sold in 2021, when the multiples were higher than ever. But I have lost my marriage along the way, and I have definitely lost a few years of life expectancy.
I really wonder if it was really all worth it. I know at the end of the day though I had to go through that. I had to see it with my own eyes.
In the end, things worked out for me. I can't even fathom how I would feel if the whole thing had failed. I really came to the conclusion that most of the time, starting a company is for suckers.
> a start up is a scam that only benefits the founders
I've worked for a few start-ups now from early-stages to IPO and it definitely feels like this. Most opportunities for any amount of valuable equity is complete lies. I have been personally responsible for creating quite a few millionaires - without being one myself.
> I started developing resentment against the entitlement of the software engineers I would hire
You probably know this already - but you are nothing without your engineers and they usually know it. I recently worked for a financial start-up which completely imploded just pre-IPO because the founder thought that they were beyond the point of needing an engineering team (!).
I think people today, especially high paid workers, forgot all about class consciousness. People like to think themselves closer to the owners of a company than to the cleaning staff. At the end of the day we're still labour, equity only exists for engineers because we're a high value commodity at this point, but that's not supposed to happen at all. The moment that is no longer true the more we'll look like "regular" workers, with no expectation of a big payout. Just like the line worker at Foxconn isn't getting equity.
i also sold in 2021 when the money flowed easy. i'm not set for life but i could easily go 10 years, longer if i sold assets. eventually the burnout faded, my health improved (knock on wood) and the boredom got to me after 1.5 years and i'm working again. working on personal projects "for fun" is not the same as making money, no matter what anyone says.
buying expensive shit is awesome for a while but it gets old. especially if you already have a home you actually like living in and the 'expensive toys and experiences' itch has been scratched for a while because your business was already successful by the time you sold it. i don't want a huge house and i don't need another car or overpriced workstation computer.
it makes me wonder what drives billionaires to keep going. they're probably just bored when they're not working. it really might be as simple as that.
> it makes me wonder what drives billionaires to keep going. they're probably just bored when they're not working. it really might be as simple as that.
If we're looking at billionaires, it's a very different situation from the rest of the rich.
Billionaires carve out and control portions of civilization. I mean any business or other venture does this to a degree, but when you're working with billions of USD, you're playing a different game entirely. It is about power.
Consider the hypothetical case of a man who can have anything he wants just by wishing for it. Such a man has power, but he will develop serious psychological problems. At first he will have a lot of fun, but by and by he will become acutely bored and demoralized. Eventually he may become clinically depressed. History shows that leisured aristocracies tend to become decadent. This is not true of fighting aristocracies that have to struggle to maintain their power. But leisured, secure aristocracies that have no need to exert themselves usually become bored, hedonistic and demoralized, even though they have power. This shows that power is not enough. One must have goals toward which to exercise one’s power.
Everyone has goals; if nothing else, to obtain the physical necessities of life: food, water and whatever clothing and shelter are made necessary by the climate. But the leisured aristocrat obtains these things without effort. Hence his boredom and demoralization.
Nonattainment of important goals results in death if the goals are physical necessities, and in frustration if nonattainment of the goals is compatible with survival. Consistent failure to attain goals throughout life results in defeatism, low self-esteem or depression.
Thus, in order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human being needs goals whose attainment requires effort, and he must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining his goals.
But not every leisured aristocrat becomes bored and demoralized. For example, the emperor Hirohito, instead of sinking into decadent hedonism, devoted himself to marine biology, a field in which he became distinguished. When people do not have to exert themselves to satisfy their physical needs they often set up artificial goals for themselves. In many cases they then pursue these goals with the same energy and emotional involvement that they otherwise would have put into the search for physical necessities. Thus the aristocrats of the Roman Empire had their literary pretensions; many European aristocrats a few centuries ago invested tremendous time and energy in hunting, though they certainly didn’t need the meat; other aristocracies have competed for status through elaborate displays of wealth; and a few aristocrats, like Hirohito, have turned to science.
'James Q. Wilson, in a 1998 New York Times Op-Ed, wrote: "If it is the work of a madman, then the writings of many political philosophers—Jean Jacques Rousseau, Tom Paine, Karl Marx—are scarcely more sane.'
Thanks to this thread for introducing me to this manifesto. I have heard of it, but I didn't know it was a critique of our industrial world from a "madman" wishing to return to more primitivistic roots. As someone going through the same concerns, without the violence, this essay seems right down my alley.
I don't think it's a mystery; if you want to do a good job, then you'll continue to want to do a good job, even if you're already succeeding at doing a good job.
A lot of people who make money love "making money" most of all. I come from a successful entrepreneurial family and it was the big difference between my parents and most of their peers, my parents did not care about money per se, it was just part of the business. But the other businesspeople they knew, they loved making money. Loved it.
You concede your marriage suffered and suggest the impact on your health was negative, but both of these things could have happened if you were just surviving in a low paid regular job.
Don't be so hard on yourself and enjoy your success.
> You concede your marriage suffered and suggest the impact on your health was negative, but both of these things could have happened if you were just surviving in a low paid regular job.
This isn't really a good way of thinking. Where will it end? You might as well do anything, since any negative outcome isn't necessarily inclusive of the thing you did.
I think it's more useful for second guessing your past choices.
You're absolutely right that it's worth weighing the chances looking forwards because it can guide your future choices.
But when looking back and thinking "if only I'd done this or that differently, everything would have gone well," that's torturing yourself with a imaginary timeline that never happened and for which there is a non-zero chance could have been worse.
While you shouldn’t torture yourself with past choices, you do need to recognize them so you can learn. They were a participant in the past it didn’t only just happen to them.
But they were already a programmer, so "low paid regular job" is extremely unlikely. Probably the "worst" they could have done was mid-level dev at a bank in the middle of nowhere making $65-80k/yr, which is certainly doable as half the household income to have a nice middle class life. The math changes in you're in a big city but the income does too.
It's easy to choose destroying your relationships and risking your health when the alternative is poverty. It's not so easy when the alternative is still making twice what the average American makes working in a cubicle at worst.
From throwaway to throwaway: Would you mind sharing some contact details, or reaching out to throaway33355@proton.me? Am in similar situation and would love to have a chance to reflect with someone who's been through it.
Not OP, but you have to keep in mind that your body is always trying to repair any damages that happen. Be it through actual accidents or molecular mishaps. Stress and other factors can cause the body to go into survival mode, where all resources are allocated to solving only the challenge directly ahead at the expense of repairs. And your body always needs repairs, because there is so much stuff going on at the molecular level that wears down the cells. Our bodies are pretty good at repairs but not perfect.
I worked myself into the dirt for 2 years for a start-up that ended up failing. It felt like I aged 10 years. My hairline receded an inch - my hair started going grey - and I gained 15kg.
I'm undoing the damage now - but I can tell I've been physically aged by the process.
Our physiology is not built to work under sustained high stress and a constrained environment like fast moving startups can have long term health effects.
Maybe, but not necessarily. It's all probabilities. A fatal heart attack in 2 years being X% more likely is one thing - actually having it happen and dying young from it is another thing entirely.
I'm not so sure. Like of financial worries is also dangerous - it can make people uber-complacent and lazy coach surfers, which will weaken the person long-term. Similar to how lack of gravity in space leads to significant loss of muscle mass.
For all of its greatness and (mostly well deserved) praises, the lack of a reasonable cluster index capability (as in data order at storage layer) is Postgres' biggest limit IMHO.
Unfortunately, The CLUSTER command not only "blocks" the table for WRITE ops, but more importantly, it also blocks READ operations [0]. pg_repack helps, but is not always available when using a managed PG offering.
Not being able to control data ordering on disk is a potential deal breaker once the data reaches a certain size.
Starting with PostgreSQL 11, B-tree indexes can store additional "non-key" columns in the index. These are kept in the index alongside the sorted key columns. This can avoid expensive sorts in certain query plans.
It's not perfect. Stale table statistics sometimes forces PostgreSQL to check table pages to confirm that rows are visible to the current transaction. Index-only scans don't support features like expressions either.
It depends on a lot of factors, my unscientific rule of thumb is that if the data doesn't fit in the RAM of the server, then that's when you may start worrying about how the data will be fetched from the disk when you query it (if performance matters).
The problem case is when the data needed to serve an average query is "scattered across the disk". This means that you will need to potentially fetch way more information from the disk (because data is returned by blocks/pages, not by bytes) than necessary to fulfill the query.
A worst case example: say to compute a query, you need to get 5000 rows (with a size of 100 bytes per row, 500KB in net total), if they are "perfectly scattered" (i.e. each row on a different page), you will really need to bring in 5000 pages of 8KB per page (default page size in Postgres) for a total of 40MB. By fetching 80 times more data than needed, you've essentially reduced your throughput by 80x.
Note that the example above assumes that an index (e.g. btree) can be leveraged. The index would point directly to the numerous pages, which is likely still much better compared to doing a full scan. But that index doesn't solve all your problems, only part 1.
It may not be a big deal as bringing 40MB from a disk would go fast, but this will limit 1) the number of concurrent user you'll be able to serve, 2) if you need 100,000 rows instead of 5000, then your query will take longer to process and it may be negatively noticeable by your user.
If you can co-locate the data on the disk (i.e. put them on same or contiguous pages) deterministically, then you would feel much better about your throughput. Cluster Index (or Indexed Views as it's called in SQL Server) is the typical mechanism to sort the data on the disk in RDBMS. MySQL does that by default with the primary key, but not Postgres.
> Cluster Index (or Indexed Views as it's called in SQL Server) is the typical mechanism to sort the data on the disk in RDBMS. MySQL does that by default with the primary key, but not Postgres.
Does that mean that Mysql moves the second or the first half of the table if you insert a row in the middle? I can't imagine that.
I've recently considered clustering multiple tera bytes of time-ordered data stored >100 partitions in a Postgres 12 instance. After careful consideration I came to the conclusion it wasn't worth it. Clustering would have sorted all the rows by date in the table blocks. But that doesn't guarantee anything about the block layer below the filesystem. So it is of dubious value from the standpoint of performance. The other advantage I was hoping for was being able to use a BRIN index. But since, my database has very rare cases of updates of those rows. A BRIN index looses its value very fast. Either I lower the fillrate to leave space in every block for updates. Which allows the BRIN index to stay current but costs a lot of space. Or I would have to force BRIN index updates regularly because they can be lossy. And that is not acceptable in my application. The whole database is stored on nvme disks managed by zfs. That won't benefit from ordering the data on some arbitrary abstraction in the middle.
