Seems like it's a good filter for people interested enough to create an account.
Overall, it's a buyer's market now. So they can maybe afford to miss out on someone who would've been a good mutual match, but who wasn't interested enough at first glance to create a (yet another, probably awful) job application account.
Doctors' profession have artificial barriers to entry and keep the supply limited, in many other countries, but even with those, they won't dream to earn anywhere near 500k.
It's 100% true where I'm from in Europe. The government opens up only a fixed number of residencies positions every year regardless of how many more students graduate (cartel behavior from the national Doctors' association).
My cousin graduated med-school last year and is still unemployed because no hospital had a place for her. Private practices don't fix that issue since they're not designed to be part of the medical teaching cycle. So a lot of young doctors have to emigrate to other EU countries where they can find spots to practice.
This is orthogonal to your GP point which was about salary. There are a lot of issues with the teaching pipeline AFAIUI so it is difficult to comment on n=1 examples.
I wouldn't be surprised if that was directly adapted from the anecdotes of Harry Nyquist at Bell Labs [1].
"""
After crunching a lot of data, they found that the only thing the productive employees had in common (other than having made it through the Bell Labs hiring process) was that "Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell Labs electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. It wasn't the case that Nyquist gave them specific ideas. Rather, as one scientist recalled, 'he drew people out, got them thinking'" (p. 135).
"""
The cynic in me expects someone to read this and come to the conclusion that what they really need is more data to improve their review process. Clearly we need to know who's eating lunch together!
The cynic in me expects people to read this thread and pat themselves on the back for definitely _not_ a being Harry Nyquist OR a poor performer / low contributor!
This by the way is an excellent argument against home office for professions where innovation plays an important role.
I don’t think we’ll ever see a Wikipedia quote saying “the only thing productive employees had in common is that they were hanging out in a Microsuck Teams chat room”.
Did you or anyone else has actually observe any such processes? I mean employees A and B meeting at any place which is not a workplace or any of them (because meeting at workplace means one of the pair has come specifically to another, and that is mostly equivalent to calling that person by phone, on full remote) and there spontaneously talked about work topics generating previously unheard idea useful for the company?
If the and answer is yes, then what was the rate of such encounters per number of employees?
And finally - honestly answer yourself - does this minuscule probability worth the ~30 full awake days in every years of life, of every employee? (2 hours commute per 250 days in a year, then divide by 16 awake hours per day) For me the answer is obvious - it is not even remotely equal in value to such a gigantic time waste. If that super brainstorming even real at all. Personally I've never observed this.
I don’t think about this at all in terms of numbers.
Home office nudges towards isolation and lack of physical activity, while the office nudges towards interaction, moving at least a little bit and face to face interactions. No matter the outliers, the latter are considered universally good.
I’ve noticed that when I am in the office I usually have nice conversations with colleagues at lunch, that are good for my well-being. Sometimes we discuss interesting news from work, or their projects or other technical topics. We’re not Bell Labs of decades ago so the impact is obviously not large, but it exists.
My commute is 15m by bike. Even so I don’t look forward to going to the office because of various factors, but I do usually enjoy it when I’m there.
> Home office nudges towards isolation and lack of physical activity
You say this as if it's a fact, but with an extra 1-3 hours of my day freed up, it's a lot easier to get into the gym or visit my friends and family. Personally, I was more active and less isolated when I worked from home.
I like talking to colleagues in person too, it just doesn't worth 1 month of my life per year. And 1 hour commute was really a median, we had people taking longer commute. Even for me if there was any rain/snow/accident on the route it would jump to 1.5h or more. And that is inside the city, I'm not even mentioning people who commute from the suburbs. 15 min is a really privileged option. Also even if someone wins in the commute lottery, it most likely doesn't transfer to the next job and commute would be much worse.
I think you’re wrong, but in an important way that deserves discussion, so please enjoy an upvote. First of all, innovation and productivity are not necessarily connected, and in many cases innovation is not at all what management wants or the business needs. (Using Jira is a sure sign that management does not want innovation, yet we see it in widespread practice.) Second, the quality of the colleagues males a huge difference. Not every workplace is golden age Bell Labs. Most people don’t have a Nyquist down the hall. I used to sit shoulder to shoulder with a guy who had YouTube videos on his second monitor all day long, to help him focus. Evidently it worked for him, he was a very solid contributor, but neither my productivity nor my ability to innovate were helped. (Like Jira, the open plan office is a sure sign that management values observable units of effort over either productivity or innovation.)
Not entirely convinced. The tradeoff is in-office you need to sit next to someone. Remote you can talk to anyone in the world. But it is the role of good WFH culture to avoid siloing of people.
TBH, I've been on teams where the chat was a constant stream of activity. It works really well and involves a lot of people that might not be involved in decisions otherwise.
I've also seen the room be quiet way too much on some teams. This is always bad, but hard to fix.
The worst is when the team chat rooms are quiet because each member is in several private rooms or group-chat conversations doing the actual work in there.
Regardless of the reasoning, it's toxic to WFH/remote work, even in the short-term. And it's outright sabotage in the long run when it's time for someone who wasn't invited to the "correct" chats to onboard a new hire who ends up needing some context that exists only in someone else's private chat.
In my very limited experience this happens when managers (above team leads) insist on being present in chat rooms. No offense to any manager in this topic, I know that you mean no harm in 99.9% of cases and that you do want to make things better, but honestly your presence creates a chiller effect. Jokes are no go, because who knows, maybe this one will be interpreted badly. Local questions are no go, because you can't ask them during work time (he's slacking!), you can't ask anything which can even remotely be treated as improper. Can't show that you lack knowledge in things which should be obvious, can't banter about colleagues or about work in non-positive way. And the list goes on. We have a chat with 100 people which started as a meme and joke one, a lot of people were posting funny stuff there. Now the last meme picture posted there in mid october, and the second to last was in august. And the only people posting there at all, even sirius stuff, are the 3-4 teamleads very close to the management. Same shit in the chat of immigrants, we have a quite a few semi-permanent relocants on the projects, but manager is not one of them and is still present in that chat room. No one posts there, everyone talks either behind the scenes (because there are a lot of questions for people in new country) or in the independent big chats outside of the company.
And again, it's not like our managers are bad, quite the contrary, they are very good professionally and personally. And we don't have layoffs. But people still won't talk in the presence of even mid level management, it's an instinct of sorts I guess :) .
PS: this is only about informal optional chats. All work chats are never hidden or avoided. We divide them by program, Slack for work and Telegram for fluff.
We actually have a "watercooler" channel that specifically doesn't include manager people. It's where all the non-work stuff gets posted and it seems to work out pretty well.
Do we work at the same company? Don't forget the constant stream of meetings where noone takes meaningful notes, and everything just gets stored in a context-free diagram, or someone's head.
It looks like literal sabotage in the long run. Of course, the ones that have the info in their head are more valuable in such a system.
In a past life the room all the programmers was in was quiet as a library. Anything above a whisper seemed like yelling. It was terrible for collaboration and communication. We ended up going for walks in order to talk about stuff, which actually helped in multiple ways. Walking seems to stimulate the brain in weird ways and talking freely was very productive.
That said, I would not trade WFH for anything. Those walking times with co-workers was great but it's not worth being forced to go into an office every day.
I've not heard of any research that shows that it's impossible to have meaningful conversations on these platforms.
And please note the distinction between "it is impossible to have such conversations" and "some people (especially less tech-savvy people) have a harder time having such conversations" on these platforms.
Teams/Slack/Discord/etc is just another communication medium. Once our society has, collectively, had more of a chance to get used to them, and once we're no longer dealing with an entire generation who were bad managers before the personal computer even existed (</hyperbole>), I wager you'll see a lot less complaining about the medium itself.
OK: all three of those are specifically about "Zoom fatigue".
None of them in any way address the issue at hand, which is the ability to engage in meaningful conversations over online platforms such as Teams and Slack.
> Except you don’t actually talk (as in have a real conversation) with anyone on Teams.
That is the specific argument that I am refuting: that your experience of not being able to "have a real conversation" on Teams, etc, is universal, rather than just being your experience, which cannot be extrapolated from without gathering significant extra data.
"People get Zoom fatigue from having too many video meetings (especially in the first 2 years of regularly using video meetings after never using them before)" is not the same thing, and does not prove that these technologies are impossible to use as a replacement for in-person meetings on a wide scale.
Did you read the papers? That is literally not what they are saying.
If I have one twinkie, that isn’t a problem - because I have other ‘real food’ to compensate. Same with someone doing zoom periodically.
If all I have is twinkies, that is a real problem, because I don’t have enough real food to compensate. I’m missing some essential vitamins, minerals, and macros that will eventually hurt me a lot. Plus a lot of sugar that causes a lot of load in my body we really don’t handle well.
‘Zoom fatigue’ is exactly because people aren’t having enough real in-person interactions anymore and it’s causing numerous real psychological issues in people because of it.
Because there are actual necessary things in real in person interactions that are not present in video conferencing. And real effects of doing video conferencing our minds don’t handle well.
The insistence on ‘but it’s not impossible!’ is tangential to the fact that it isn’t a good idea to do long term or exclusively.
And depending on the individuals environment or makeup, it could be an immediate major problem, or it could be a slow burn. Everyone will have a different tipping point.
I’m sure there are some 1-in-a-million outliers out there that could stay pretty functional literally eating just twinkies for a decade (somehow).
But either way, having the social interaction equivalent of an all-Twinkie diet is a bad idea.
Near as we can tell.
But ‘this is America!’, with an ongoing obesity crisis, so not like I expect people to just listen.
As one potential mitigation, I’ve consistently had deep mentorship conversations over the phone. For me, I think voice-only is actually much better than in person.
> For me, I think voice-only is actually much better than in person.
This is interesting. Can you explain why? To be clear: I don't doubt you, but I have never seen a comment so specific about this matter. I would like to learn more. For one, I assume you said "voice-only" specifically to exclude video calls, which are a special kind of hell, when compared to in-person discussions. (Staring at yourself and only seeing the other person's head always struck me as a bit weird / artificial / Uncanny Valley-ish.)
I think I am reasonably high functioning in in-person settings, but I suspect I don’t read body language very well. I find eye contact difficult to maintain for reasons I do not know.
On the phone, I feel like conversations can be slower and more deliberate. I feel a freedom in not having to control my expressions and show my interest. I can just focus entirely on their voice, and I feel I have become very adept at this. I love podcasts and audiobooks and such, maybe there is a connection.
My wife describes very differently dynamics. She wants to meet with folks in person to “read” them better. She thinks my preference for phone only makes no sense.
This is a great reply. You are someone who has thought deeply about this matter. Thank you to share!
> I find eye contact difficult to maintain for reasons I do not know.
Years ago, I asked my mother why she always sits next to my father when they go out to eat, instead of across (face-to-face). She told me: "It's less pressure vs face-to-face." To be clear, I would describe my mother as a social normie (not autistic), but it really struck me. Over the years, I have changed my seating style to sit next to people (even when only two of us). For me, it makes a difference. Side by side, you can kind of talk forward or slightly angled and the other person can hear you very well (assuming no hearing disability!), but you don't need to make constant eye contact. That said, from time to time, you really want to make a point, and you tug on their sleeve or turn your head... you make eye contact, but for a short time. (Also: Without dragging on too long about this topic: You can more easily make physical contact -- touch! -- which can really help to connect, even in non-romantic settings.) I'm not trying to run away from eye contact, but my mother's comment was insightful: In-person need not always be constant eye contact.
Interesting. Yeah I quite like a walking meeting for the same side-by-side kind of thing. I imagine meetings over golf would have similar dynamics, but haven't ever tried that.
The effort, intent, and practice (for lack of a better term) required to get the same effect in a remote environment is high enough that it just doesn't—and won't—happen for all but an extreme few.
And there's less of a "rising tide lifts all boats" effect on teams, where the growth of one member tends to level up the rest.
It's just way easier and cheaper to get this effect in person than trying to do it remote.
I have been accused by a number of people who like me of “asking good questions” and of asking difficult questions by people who don’t.
I sucked at school until someone opened up the idea for me around third grade that how the curriculum is taught is just the teacher’s opinion, not a law, or a religion. If you can reframe the material in a way that makes sense to you then do so. I ended up spot-tutoring a bunch of people over the years because I would hear them complain about how the material made no sense and I would swoop in and say, “yeah how they teach this is bullshit, have you tried thinking about it this way?” Which validates their frustration and then gives them a life raft.
That kind of reframing to keep up can become reframing to get ahead. I went from Problem Student to grade school “valedictorian”, to polymath. Years ago we were all fixated on the trap of Expert Beginner and I would half-joke that I was instead an Expert Journeyman - able to quickly get to adequate instead of mediocre in a new discipline. And these days I think that may be what “polymath” is most of the time. Just knowing what the next question is to ask to keep going. The big breakthroughs come from people who become experts in most fields, but these same sorts of people also get pretty good at music or painting or writing as a hobby. As good or better than mediocre professionals.
The first time this happened to me in a professional setting, a coworker was stuck on a SQL problem and insisted I pair with them to help debug it. I told her I’ve never touched SQL, just worked on some bespoke data processing. She didn’t care. Come here anyway. And I’ll be damned if I didn’t help her find her problem by just asking her what this part does and that part does. Why does this work that way? And I started writing SQL a couple weeks later, substantially off of just that interaction, bolstered by what first generation search engines could scrape together.
And the thing is when everyone asks you questions and you don’t break their trust, you quickly learn where all the bodies are buried in the project/org. Which is a valuable asset for someone wishing to become a lead or staff engineer. I became lead by popular vote most times, rather than an actual game plan to get promoted. I just did what thought needed to get done and was within my abilities, which looks a lot like leadership, especially if management doesn’t have that quality. Port in a storm, that’s me.
But I’ve never ever completed the most stories or features. I’ve occasionally fixed the most bugs, the most performance issues, or workflow problems. Is calculated I saved forty man hours a week for the team on code-build-test-push ergonomics and my shitheel boss was still made about my productivity those two quarters. I could not show up to work and still be contributing 8 hours a day, dummy.
Layering is a step in money laundering where layers of legitimacy are added as money moves around. Structuring is breaking larger transactions into smaller transactions in order to avoid detection. Smurfing is also similar to structuring and honestly I don't understand the difference well enough to explain, but they are often used interchangeably in my experience.
Buffalo and Bison are often interchangeable in American English.
I know in Polish, "żubr", which is the European Bison, is often translated as buffalo and the American Bison is known as "bizon" which is understandably translated as bison. I would not be surprised if Belarusian was similar.
In Belarusian it's indeed "амерыканскі бізон" and "еўрапейскі зубр" (American bison and European zubr). In everyday speech these are shortened to "bison" and "zubr".
And buffalo (like African and water) is "буйвал".
I had no idea American English used "buffalo" and "bison" interchangeably.
Doesn't it say it right there in the first paragraph?
> And anonymous payments in cryptocurrencies to wallets operated by providers (hosted wallets) will be prohibited even for minimum amounts without a threshold.
Doesn't this mean that literally all anonymous crypto transactions would be banned?
Women die because they're not allowed to abort nonviable fetuses that would also likely kill them. Seems very unsafe, I wouldn't want to be a woman there.
As a partner with a wife who went into septic shock, sepsis is no joke. I was given a 40% chance of her living through the night, which, thankfully she did. Doctors are understandably hesitant to perform an abortion because they could be held criminally liable if some court after the fact, with months of hindsight, may consider that the mother could have lived even if the baby was brought to term. So this is a no-win scenario all around and a terrible law from a party that claims to eschew any government overreach into personal lives.
you may or may not be aware that a common result of such laws is that doctors refuse to get involved in cases where an abortion is necessary to save the mother's life, because they don't want to have to convince a jury of it. better to take a different patient and not risk going to jail until the trial
Nobody knows the letter of the law in the real world and carveouts like this are meant to appease political opposition and get laws passed, not to be enforceable/usable. It's an effective total ban.
For non-Americans everywhere, disallowing abortion including nonviable pregnancies sounds barbaric. America is viewed as the most advanced nation in the world. But these Taliban-level backwardness is mind boggling.
America was never this regressive and tribal when I went to school there in the mid 80's til the 1990.
Here are some statistics about Termination for Medical Reasons (TFMR):
Pregnancies with major congenital fetal abnormalities: Most pregnancies with a major congenital fetal abnormality end in TFMR. The percentage of pregnancies that end in TFMR can range from 70% to 95% depending on the severity of the abnormality.
Stillbirth: TFMR is almost twice as common as stillbirth. In 2018, Tommy's statistics reported 2,943 babies lost after being stillborn, while the DHSC reported 3,269 TFMR during that same time period.
Down's syndrome: 20% of TFMRs are due to Down's syndrome.
Pregnancies with Turner syndrome: Turner syndrome leads to the highest rate of pregnancy termination (100%).
Pregnancies with Klinefelter syndrome: Klinefelter syndrome leads to the second highest rate of termination (73.9%).
In the UK, over 70% of congenital anomalies are detected during pregnancy and, of those, around 37% will result in TFMR. In Europe, the prevalence rate of TFMR is 4.6 per 1,000 births.
Seven percent of women cited health concerns for themselves or possible problems affecting the health of the fetus as their most important reason in 2004, about the same as in 1987.
It's hard to tell what you're actually asking but the Louisiana department of health claims it's about 1 in 10,000 die from pregnancy complications [0]. University of California San Francisco claims 6%-8% of pregnancies are high risk [1].
The World Health Organization claims a global rate of 4.3 mother deaths per 1000 live births in low income countries versus 1.2 deaths per 10,000 live births in high income countries [2].
Also a parent with similar concerns including book bans, systematic weakening of science, education and library institutions, unstable power during temperature extremes (TX), unrestrained gun violence, restrictions on sex ed, and encouraged intolerance of gender differences. To name a few.
Given Alaska is a 3x outlier compared to the national average, and almost 2x the next highest state, it seems unreasonable to draw conclusions from it alone.
