This whole thread makes me think that we all work too much. People are upset that those with children are given more schedule flexibility than those who do not have children. It seems like straight up jealousy. Instead of resenting parents, resent your manager and ask for ( or demand) what you want.
The argument that other workers need to make up for the slack left by parents does not really make sense; you just add tasks to your backlog, and do them when you have time. You should be in control of your own schedule, and don't let your manager just extend your workday. If your manager does not respect your time and is overworking you, quit. As engineers, we are not punching a time clock. If you are, take issue with that, not the flexibility some other coworkers are getting (flexibility that they need).
If you also want more schedule flexibility, push for it. Talk to your manager. Organize with your fellow employees. Organize with other engineers. Start a union (gasp!).
Work-life balance is always a balance. Our jobs should take note of what we do outside of work and how that affects our ability to work. We are people, not mindless, identical worker bees. Our life outside of work is most likely more important to us than our life at work.
Having children is very much unlike most other activities in that you cannot quit. You can quit a side hustle, you can quit a sport. But you can't quit being a parent. So when a parent turns to their boss and says "I need more flexibility", the manager has to give that flexibility or the worker is going to have to find a new job that does give that flexibility. Usually capitalism will extract as much time from a worker as possible, forcing the worker to give up many things in the name of work. It's impossible to give up your child though, so obviously capitalism has to yield there. But with better labor organization, capitalism will yield to other things too.
If we all want schedule flexibility and more time so badly, let's unionize and get that. Not resent our working parents, who most likely have more on their plate and less free time than non-parents, even with the flexibility.
Why do we care if China censors things? Don't US social media companies censor large swaths of content? The reddit bans just happened. You can call it hate speech, but some disagree. Yet those communities and posts were still censored. What is the difference if it's a business or a government doing the censoring?
As a C++ backend/distributed systems engineer, I cant imagine working on anything except Linux.
I even use Linux on my personal laptop. It's a Thinkpad actually. Yes, the touch pad on Mac is better. But Linux is just so much quicker and lighter, and really the only major annoying thing I've run into is electronically signing PDFs.
I tend to start work early and get a lot of work done in a short amount of time. I drink bulletproof coffee right when I wake up, fast until 1, and finish work by 430, when my kid wakes up from their nap. I am lucky to not be pulled into a lot of meetings, so I have large blocks of time dedicated to only coding. I try not to do anything else during work hours except work, and maintain a flow state for most of the time.
A database is a central point of failure. Nothing stopping a sysadmin or a hacker able to get shell access from just deleting a bunch of votes, or taking the whole system offline. A blockchain system over a p2p network is way more fault tolerant and available than a database.
Also, in a blockchain system, any person can connect a node to the network and can see all of the votes that are occurring/have occurred, and can somewhat verify the results of the election.
Idk about UBI, but I think we can conclude that better social support for the working class has a positive impact on mental health. The support doesn't have to be UBI, but any form of financial empowerment and stability for the working class. Universal healthcare would help, universal childcare, better unemployment benefits, more affordable housing, etc.
You could even go so far as to say that people would be happier under socialism than capitalism :)
This is article is borderline offensive for people that actually experience mania. The author cherry picks symptoms to say that chronic mania always feels good for the manic. This is definitely not the case for bipolar mania, and a quick Google search shows this is not the case for chronic mania. In fact, many chronic mania patients are characterized as dysphoric.
Yes, mania feels good at times, really good, but at other times, it feels extremely uncomfortable. Your euphoric emotions can quickly turn to anger. Being aggressive usually has it's roots in some emotion that is not pleasant. Even just general speeding is not pleasant all of the time. Sure, there may be a few people who experience chronic mania in a way that doesn't ever feel bad for them. But most manic people experience negative subjective feelings from their mania at one point or another.
To say that mania always feels good, and is a state to aspire to, is dangerous for people who actually do experience mania, and extremely tone deaf and out of touch for those who don't experience mania.
Thank you so much for saying this. Bipolar disorder is badly misunderstood by the general population, but one of the most common misconceptions is that mania is the opposite of depression and therefore good. For me, mania was hell on earth. The risk of self-harm is a lot higher in mania than depression and doctors are far more concerned with stopping mania than depression, to the extent they won’t treat depression if the risk of mania is too high.
One source of this misconception is the stereotype of people creating art while manic (probably hypomanic). Another is that bipolar disorder is a big spectrum and many type 2 people having hypomania with some euphoric aspects. But I don’t think I’ve met anyone who isn’t type 1 or knows someone who is that has a good understanding that mania is very often a nightmare. After my last manic episode finished I pretty much laid in bed for 6 months doing nothing but fantasizing about killing myself and I’d much rather relive that then relive the mania that preceded it.
>>(Often in these case studies the euphoria is punctuated by irritability, but not sadness or depressed mood.) Now, most of the examples we know of these prolonged euphoric states are undesirable. They often come with reckless or harmful behavior, delusions, and cognitive impairment.
But I agree, I think most of the manic episodes described should probably be called euphoric hypomania.
I worked at a large tech company, not a FAANG though, and experienced much of the same as you. It took forever to get things done, and a large part of that was due to the dev environment. There were numerous internal tools that were not well documented. Etc.
I moved to working at start ups where the code is open source. Start ups move faster, and it's easier to use open source tools than internal/proprietary tools. At the large tech company, we couldn't use anything past C++03 (this was in 2016), due to technical constraints. At my start up, we use the newest C++ as soon as it comes out.
For what it's worth, the start up I work at now is fairly large and has a lot of code running in production. So I get the reward of pushing to prod, but the dev speed of a smaller company. Sure I take a pay hit, but I still make more than enough money, and I get to work on cool stuff.
