They're clearly putting on an air of authoritativeness, but yeah exactly. I read this more like a very extended Glassdoor review. You're getting one person's perspective. Interesting interview, big grain of salt.
This seemed like a fairly normal level of knowledge to me, honestly. There's a lot of public information about the company, and you work there so you want to learn and know more - from both internal/external sources. Anything you found particularly surprising?
Didn't mention distributed/remote work. Not sure if that's because it's so obvious a trend as to be boring?
I think he's early on the plant-based diet prediction, but correct in 20-30 years. Actually a lot of these seem like trends that might take more than 10 years, but have a high chance of being correct eventually.
Distributed work will continue to be a minor thing prevalent mainly in tech circles. Human nature doesn’t change on 10 year timescales. We’re tribal beings who organize around work and family.
Best Buy’s pullback from it for their office staff is instructive.
Yeah I've been doing remote 95% of the last couple years and it takes a toll not being able to be around people at all. Even as a mostly introverted person who needs quiet alone time for solving harder problems and general flow state. There's something about social interaction that helps with motivation that I find hard to get over chat and video. This is assuming the people are not toxic somehow.
See my post above: there are reasons to be optimistic remote social presence and shared spatial awareness for many contexts will be solved this decade.
I see my employer becoming remote-friendly, and remote-first on a team level.
On teams vs companies...
I've been putting together a list of the biggest distributed companies https://www.amursoftware.com/biggest-distributed-companies. What I realized is that big tech companies where some employees are distributed like e.g. Microsoft, Dell probably have a lot more distributed employees in total number than any company on my list. Like by a factor of 10x.
Do you think the journey for most employers will be to become remote-friendly first before becoming remote-first, rather than jumping straight to remote-first?
That's a very interesting insight and probably brings a lens of reality to actual extent of the movement towards remote. To the end that remote-friendly is the first step towards remote-first (and that the big tech companies already have some employees that are distributed), it'll be interesting to see whether there will be a step-change in the volume/percentage of remote-first roles once any of the big tech companies make the leap...
I think it probably happens gradually a lot. And I think many companies will go by team or by function like e.g. support, dev
Companies that want to hire remote or offer it should publish numbers on percent working remotely. Good marketing and helpful for the industry if you think remote work is net good.
I helped run the infrastructure for a reasonably large site. Occasionally while debugging an issue I'd be looking through our outbound delay queue -- sure enough, there'd be at least a dozen typo variations of gmail, yahoo, hotmail sitting there waiting to time out. And these were for customers who'd made an actual purchase and entered their email address twice.
Definitively proving that 'please confirm your email address' fields are not nearly as effective as the designers thought it would be.
On an unrelated note, fuck those fields. That is all.
edit: OK that's not all. Anyone else who's sick of websites interfering with your copy/paste operations, find dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled in about:config and set it to false. HTH.
I don't think I've ever seen one that wasn't paste-disabled, though my knowledge is way out of date since I found out about the aforementioned config setting.
It was definitely a case of a PM coming up with a quick and cheap 'fix' to the problem of getting so many people typing their email address wrong the first time.
We (from the tech side) put together a bunch of options, including validating the domain and giving the user feedback if delivery doesn't succeed immediately.
But it was put on a backlog of 'nice things to implement' and never delivered.
It's crazy to me that modern adult life is nothing like a traditional classroom format, and yet we spend 18 years preparing our kids for it by having them sit in a room and get talked at. Sure, there other kinds of activities but lecturing takes up such a huge chunk of the time spent in the educational system for most people.
Alternatives or complements like apprenticeship that can teach in a different way are really interesting and exciting to me.
A lot of adult work are fairly similar to the classroom in the sense that you're sitting at a desk doing stuff, usually with computers, usually shleping information around.
It would be nice if both had less of this quality. But still, a lot of education is a bureaucracy teaching people to be bureaucrats. If we are to have a bureaucracy, traditional schooling is certainly a training ground for that.
I don't know, I've been in plenty of meetings where the best action for my career was sitting still and shutting up for a few hours while someone talked.
Kidding aside, I totally agree that it's quite silly. I hated school when I was in it but as soon as I left I couldn't stop learning - there are so many opportunities for knowledge online now (and in real life too) with MOOCs, Youtube lectures, free software tools to play with, etc.
It’s worth keeping in mind that ‘education’ as we practice it was Roman, passed through cathedral schools for priests to the British Empire, (becoming) what we know of today as academia.
I'm a physics and computer science high school teacher, I think lecture takes up about 5-10% of my classes. This is not unusual in high school. (I'm in Los Angeles)
On the other hand, when I was a student in college it was about 95% lectures.
That's awesome to hear! I'm recalling history, math, science lectures, english classes. Just thinking back to both high school and college there was a lot of lecturing.
