I can’t speak for YC or FAANG management but as a regular software engineer I totally get where they’re coming from. I worked at a FAANG company through and after covid, the difference in teams productivity was noticeable. Not in the remote working favour.
I understand some people are more productive at home but I’m yet to see a _team_ that is more productive being remote. I lack the experience working in remote-first companies like gitlab though.
Depends on the project type and part of the lifecycle. Also depends on the team composition and office structure.
In my career I've generally been on teams spread across 3 continents and sit in open floorplan offices surrounded by other loud teams. So I commute into the office to be collocated with at-best 1/3 of my team, surrounded by unrelated noise.
In some ideal state where we were 100% in the same city, sat in a dedicated pod area without so much commotion & distraction, in-office might be great. I've never experienced this.
Even in that ideal state, it may likely turn out ideal team productivity happens at 3-4 days in-office, as there's time for coordination and then time for deep quiet work.
The top-down, C-suite level dictates are not based on what's most productive.
Oh, I've seen a team get completely obliterated by moving back to in person, even though everyone really did live in the same city and with reasonable commutes.
This was a startup, that had one big problem: a CEO that believed he was better than any and all of his workers at what the workers did. He also believed that collaboration was important, as through discussion, everyone would agree that he was right all along. You can imagine how unhealthy someone like that can be.
In a remote world, dealing with problem people is easier. The amount of acting one has to perform lowers. The lower visibility also allows people to self organize: Ignore coworker A as much as necessary, yet pair all day with coworker B, who is useful. Is someone very loud, or getting into other people's business? Being far from each other can help!
It didn't take 8 weeks in-office for all the coping that people were doing to become clear to everyone in the company. A CEO that was manageable via short interactions became an unavoidable thorn into the company's side, as remoteness covered their weaknesses. An open office didn't help matters. Everyone that wasn't a founder knew this was all untenable and quit.
So a team can definitely be far more productive being remote, as remoteness mandates far less gelling. Local conflict often has explosive results. People you dislike become far more tolerable. And really, every company ends up getting people like that, and sometimes chooses them over those that are team builders: I've seen my fair share of horrible managers that cost a company money in supposedly high performance, well known companies, and I have yet to see one getting a Pip out of it.
Sure. I have neither proper data nor a solution that would satisfy everyone. I left my comment only to show a dissenting voice in the HN engineering crowd. Someone reading HN might be under the impression WFH is universal choice of engineers. It’s not, some of us hate remote work.
I dunno, this thread seems to be a bunch of RTO hardos & CEO apologists. It does feel like some have begun to enjoy the taste of boots now that the job market has turned, but thats just my opinion.
That is the opposite of the truth. The common law position is usually: "If it's not forbidden it's permitted". You're confusing common law with civil law used in most of Europe
In what way? From mini skirts to punk rock to gay liberation to extinction rebellion to pro- and anti-brexit protests, we seem to be comfortable with challenge. Citation required.
> The dominant paradigm is "if it is not permitted it is forbidden".
Oh gosh. It’s the exact opposite. The a principle of Common Law is ‘everything which is not forbidden is allowed’ (the US for example has done reasonably well on that principle).
As iOS and macOS user, I always subscribe directly through the app developer if they allow this. I stopped trusting Apple subscriptions when I called them asking to reimburse the subscription I forgot to cancel (just a few days later) and they said “no”. I never encountered any internet service declining this kind of requests.
Yes, but parents can turn on content filtering within iOS onto Safari, as well as allow or block websites individually. Other browsers do not implement this filtering.
I know you said "can't" but just to confirm, is there no iOS API to get parental control info to block stuff like this? If not, I wonder why Apple doesn't provide that option.
o/w, "Safari supports parental controls" argument is BS.
Probably the same reason why other browsers can't use adblock addons while Safari can or why other browsers had crippled JavaScript performance until recently. Apple is afraid of losing Safari market share, so they're making preferential treatment to it whenever possible.
My approach is to take their weekly magazines (paper or digital) instead of browsing through the home page. Weekly editions still include an article or two on US politics, but in general are significantly more diverse.
The irony is that bettermotherfuckingwebsite is worse in almost all ways. I wonder if that was what the author was going for. I don't know what's truly satire anymore!
The "better" site looks mostly better to me, but there are two things I don't like about, and what I like even less is the authors assertions that his ideas about those are absolutely and obviously and undeniably better.
My pet peeve is line length. Too long lines are not comfortable because it's difficult to find the start of the next line, that's true. But too short lines force you to find the start of the next line every couple of words, and that's annoying too. There's a middle ground somewhere, and I think it's not the same for everyone. The 650px used on the "better" size is certainly too short for me. I can't count the number of sites where I open the style editor in dev console and go hunting for max-width or whatever to set it to a more comfortable width. So just respect the width of the browser window, which anyone can choose to their own liking. Some margin left and right is OK, perhaps even preferable.
The other thing is font size. Browsers have settings for font size, and in modern browser you can change the size with ctrl+ and ctrl-. Why override that choice?
I like overview: being able to not just see the sentence I'm reading, but a whole lot of context. Short lines, large fonts and large line-heights all work against that.
What I do like, I think, is #444 for the text instead of pure black. Looks less aggressive that way. And some amount of margin left and right. Something like the original page plus "body { margin: 40px 100px; color: #444; }".
Admittedly most is just personal preference but the line width thing is the cardinal sin. Forcing huge blocks of whitespace on either side of the text for nebulous "readability" reasons is just wasteful. Too many web sites ape this pattern too. Look at John Gruber's website [1] on a nice wide 27" monitor for an extreme example. The content takes up less than 1/5 of the width of the screen.
While it is wasteful, I think the readability gain is far from nebulous. If you look at newspapers, they break pages up into columns. If books exceed a certain width, they get broken down into columns. Journals often break their articles into columns.
Now, a fair follow-up to this is that why don't we make text on the web into columns, so instead of big sidebars of white space you fit multiple columns of text on the screen? I'd say this is probably because the web uses scrolling instead of pagination. If there's more text than can fit on the page, it's faster and easier to just scroll down than it is to load a new page. But if you have a layout with columns, you'd have to scroll down to read, then scroll back to the top each time you finish a column, which is a hassle. So just having one long column requires the least user effort.
All said, of course some people might have different preferences. I'm sure some people find it easier looking from side to side with full screen text than scrolling down, or easier to click a next page button than scrolling down. But I think the trend for fixed width single columns on the web is one that's meeting many if not most peoples' preferences.
I took several graphic design classes in college, and the rule burned into my brain is "between 8 and 13 words per line" for maximum readability. This was a guideline for print, but I do think it matters on the web as well, and it's very easy to exceed!
I find it much worse that so many sites nowadays expect users to have their browsers maximised. Noticed how most books aren't wider than an A5, and how any publications wider than this use relatively narrow columns? Because reasonably narrow text is easier to read.
Because once one site starts needing X px, most users will just keep their browser at least X px wide. At some point X became so close to the monitor's resolution that not maximising the window is just extra work. I'm not happy about having to maximise my browser, but I would be less happy about having to scroll horizontally.
There are definitely some people who just maximise everything out of habit, but I don't think there are enough to have created this trend of ultra-wide webpages.
Thankfully modern webpages being responsive at least somewhat fixes this issue, even if many sites still manage to screw this up.
No, I actually don't think websites have much of a problem with this. I generally keep my browser around 1,000 pixels wide (more or less depending on what I"m doing), and websites generally work fine. Responsive design helps a lot, as you say.
What surprises me is how many users seem to keep their browsers maximized at all times, particularly on desktop-sized displays! I'm pretty sure I see people doing it more on Windows than on Mac for some reason, which makes me wonder if it's a UI design problem (of the OS, not websites).
Interesting. A number of websites don't display correctly for me if I use just half of my 1920 horizontal pixels. Keep in mind that many users still use 1366x768 or similar screens.
As for maximising, Mac OS X never had a conventional one-click maximise button, the green button originally did something like resize the window to an optimal size (IIRC), and now it makes the app fullscreen on a separate "virtual desktop" of sorts. It might well be a habit from the times Windows didn't have Aero Snap.
> the green button originally did something like resize the window to an optimal size (IIRC)
Indeed, it's called "zoom". Fabulous when it works correctly, and one of my favorite features. You can still get at it with Option-Click (on the green), when the application supports it (not all do). Double-click on titlebar might also work, but I can't really check atm.
I do it only for pdf, because pdf is written in small text and the only way to fix it is to zoom the entire thing, but it can't reflow text and zooms like a picture, but browser just reflows text according to its size.
Because window managers. Windows 7 and before definitely didn't make it obvious how to make a window half a screen, Windows 10 makes it a bit more obvious I think, but you're still limited to 2 windows side by side. Ubuntu's default window manager has the same behaviour as W7 and Lubuntu's doesn't have keybindings for this by default at all.
You can of course resize windows manually but it's tedious compared to a 2 button shortcut, especially having to hunt the 3 pixel wide resize button with wrist issues.
If only it was simple to configure my user agent to act as my agent and format things readably. I prefer moderate line widths. Even at half-screen on my 29" widescreen monitor, unformatted text is too wide.
Yes, this would be the best. Web site provides the content and the browser (user agent) decides how best to render it, potentially different than how the web developer would want it.
I remember users setting their default font sizes to 30px, then complaining when they hit the one piece of text on a website with an undefined text size.
User-defined formatting hasn't worked since CSS was introduced.
I used to think this, but after really trying to assess the difference in some examples I made myself, I was converted.
Have you seriously tried yourself to read two identical blocks of text, one at full screen width (I tested 100% zoom Wikipedia on a 1440p, 27" screen at standard DPI) and one at a width of about 55 characters on the same screen? Have a go.
I find it easier to locate the next line after finishing one, which gives me a quicker reading speed.
Short lines can't be read in one glance, they are too short to be meaningful, so when you see it in one glance, you get no information from it. The worst case is when the line stops in the middle of a word, now you can't even see individual words in one glance.
