The ease of making your way across the US into different jurisdictions is probably a contributing factor. I imagine the geographical equivalent of this story would be a person from portugal driving their way across europe and landing in poland where they live out the rest of their lives under a different identity. It’s a lot tougher to do that when you’re crossing into a new country, culture, language entirely. And portugal is small enough that it would be very difficult to pull off within the confines of the country.
There is nothing inherently wrong with highly-processed food. For one, the term "highly-processed" is often loosely used and subjectively defined. This is apparent in the fact you think canned foods are unhealthy, whereas the commenter responding to you sees nothing wrong with pasteurizing food in cans.
For two, highly-processed foods can contain nutritional value, the two aren't mutually exclusive. If the battle is against foods with little nutritional value then then just say that. "Highly-processed" is such a red herring in the nutrition industry.
Even if there weren’t any studies on the harmful effects of plastic consumption (which I’m fairly certain there are at least theoretical mechanistic studies if you make the effort to look for them), it makes common sense to try to avoid that, no?
I don’t think there are any studies on the effects of regularly drinking gasoline or eating toilet paper either, but plastic, gasoline, and toilet paper consumption aren't exactly time-tested foods that propelled civilization forward.
What a silly reply. Yes, there are many studies about the consumption of hazardous chemicals, including gasoline. There are even many about just the fumes -- no need to regularly drink it.
My point: The "hair on fire" comments about nano plastic still hasn't been borne out by peer-reviewed scientific research. I recall on HN someone mentioned that a recent discover was that tyre dust is a large potion of micro plastics in our world.
I am with you on finding the studies that verify these hypotheses, but for newly discovered problems, I think there will not be any long-term impact studies, but we must make a decision today about if this is safe or not.
It doesn't make sense to me that the plastic would be beneficial. It is either neutral or detrimental and I not that no plastic is neutral.
If youre so certain about your ability to find long term studies on the consumption of micro-pieces of toilet paper or gasoline, then surely you can find one on plastic ;).
Not many have their hair on fire. People just want to make a conscious effort to avoid what common sense says to avoid.
I was always under the impression that the purpose of soap isn’t to kill bacteria/viruses as the article implies, but to wash those thing off of your hands.
Yes. If a pharmaceutical company's article (with better expertise in this area than the average HNer) isn't enough to convince someone here's an article from UNESCO:
Confusingly, the one graphic in that article shows the soap binding to dirt and viruses and washing them off and away. It does not show the tearing/destruction of the lipid shells, though the article also talks about it.
The article itself has spelling and grammar mistakes in it. The lack of attention to detail does not build confidence in the content.
I was taught about the hydrophilic/hydrophobic nature of soaps and detergents in university decades ago; this is not new information, and is uncontroversial. As others have pointed out, it’s even easy to observe in simple home experiments.
I have never heard of soap disrupting the phospholipid shell of viruses; this is new and “interesting if true”.
The astoundingly bad handling of government communications during the pandemic makes me automatically skeptical of arguments from authority.
However, the takeaway of “wash your hands thoroughly to inhibit disease vector transmission” has amply been proven in the last century.
It's also important to know the current scientific consensus on how Covid spreads.
We now know that people who are infected with Covid emit viral particles into the air while breathing normally. Those viral particles can float in the air for hours and the people who inhale them become infected.
> The most common way COVID-19 is transmitted from one person to another is through tiny airborne particles of the virus hanging in indoor air for minutes or hours after an infected person has been there.
Previously we thought the only transmission route was that infected people who sneeze or cough spray large droplets that fall out of the air quickly, and the people who touch surfaces contaminated by those droplets and later touch a mucous membrane become infected.
So Covid has fully airborne transmission like the measles, not a droplet based spread like the flu. Hand washing is an effective mitigation for a virus with a droplet based spread, but not a virus with an airborne spread.
The Whitehouse post linked above discusses the sorts of mitigations that can be effective against an airborne virus.
“The border wall. The money was appropriated for the border wall. I tried to get them to reappropriate to redirect that money. They didnt. They wouldn’t. And in the meantime theres nothing under the law other than they have to use the money for what it was appropriated. I cant stop that.”
“Do you believe the border wall works?”
“No.”
The biden administration then proceeded to waive 26 federal laws for the department of homeland security to continue to build the border wall. Let’s break this down for a second.
What would have happened had the administration not waived the federal laws preventing continued expansion of the wall? Unless i am mistaken, unspent budget allocated to the wall would have returned to the department of treasury to balance the budget / return to taxpayers.
So either:
-Biden does not believe that the border wall works, but would still *spend that allocated money on something he does not believe works*, rather than allow that money to flow back to the dept. of treasury…
OR
-Biden does believe that the border wall works, and is lying through his teeth.
At this point, i am not even sure which of these two realities i believe. They are both pretty depressing.
I get the sentiment but this reads more like an angry tirade than anything. I would probably be better off with my five minutes back. But now i feel obligated to respond.
As someone new to my organization and team I’ve greatly benefited from a partial rto mandate. There’s something about being able to quickly bounce ideas or questions off a team that physically sits around you that slack can’t quite emulate. There are productive discussions that happen which simply would not have otherwise happened. Teams become closer as they better understand each other and get to know what motivates one another (not always the paycheck, as in OP case). You become more empowered to take a step back out of your daily work and give consideration to the bigger picture when you’re surrounded by other groups.
I’ve worked remotely most of my life and am a proponent of it. I also think moving someone who was hired as a remote employee, to an in-person role, is a huge dick move. But to pretend like there are no benefits to occasionally being in-person seems like naivety bordering ignorance (For most team based roles which require strategic thinking).
Hiring can become a bigger challenge when your competition allows fully remote work, and companies should expect to increase compensation in one form or another, or otherwise lose talent. For some companies, e.g. mine, those steps have been worth taking. Small price to pay to preserve our awesome culture.
I think too many people are misunderstanding what we're talking about and creates confusion.
It's not about RTO. It's cool if you find it better for you and your team, if your team also likes it better; as others, on some occasions I want to just work and don't want to be bothered by others every 5 min.
It's about mandatory RTO. It's about forcing employees to do something, without asking them, without including them in the discussion, without explaining why the decision is taken ("it's better" is wrong; it's better for some, worse for others. It needs more explanation)
We know why companies don't give explanations: it's not about productivity, it's not about employees working better, it's about real estate and the company not wanting to lose money on its properties, it's about managers who feel useless if they are not seen, it's about the direction fundamentally mistrusting employees.
If it was about work then let the people who actually do it manage themselves: they're grownups engineers, surely they can work it out. But it's never about work, and employees are right to protest the decision and to demand transparency.
> We know why companies don't give explanations: it's not about productivity, it's not about employees working better, it's about real estate and the company not wanting to lose money on its properties, it's about managers who feel useless if they are not seen, it's about the direction fundamentally mistrusting employees.
Do you have any objective elements proving this?
I have witnessed a dev colleague who worked from home. They were unable to document and communicate, and it screwed everyone else. They were really happy to work from home, though, thinking they were doing great, doing all the tickets and all the new tickets that appeared because of how badly designed for purpose their solutions on the previous ticket were. The mess and difficult job they were creating around them was not their problem. When asked to come back in the office, they used exactly those arguments.
I'm sure bad management and bad direction exist, but HN is naturally biased towards devs and against management, and of course, everyone thinks they can manage themselves and that if it does not work, it's the others' fault. I wonder how much grain of salt I should add to these affirmations and if there are more objective analyses of the situation (for example some that acknowledge the two possibilities).
There was a clear difference in output when the dev was WFH or RTO, so even if we cannot pinpoint the exact reason, the facts are just there.
But in fact, there are a bunch of elements that can explain why.
For example, when remote, pressing them to answer was impossible: you ask a precise question on Slack, 15 minutes later, they answer something vague or irrelevant, you refine and refocus the question, 30 minutes later, they repeat what they've said, you ask to have a call, they complain that there is too many calls. And if you try to profit from an existing meeting to go to the bottom of that, you just ruin the meeting. In the office, you confront them, show them on the screen exactly why their answer is not helping, and they cannot really go away without answering.
There is also other cases were a question is asked to them in the office, and other people chip in, with things like "wait? what? you told me that it worked the other way around ...". Again, this is not possible remote unless you systematically add everyone to all the chat (and people stops looking at them anyway because it's too much noise).
As for badly designed for purpose, this is just the natural consequence of bad communication: the person thought they knew when they did not, and considered "yeah, whatever, details are not my problem". In the office, there are way more opportunities to notice that early and to correct the course, based on the same situations as given in example above. Again, it is just based on facts.
It reads to me that your company lacks standards and expectations to hold employees accountable. The in office culture uses the proximity of people to work around the lack of standards and expectations.
If the standards did exist then bad design doesn’t make it through design review or code review. If expectations did exist, then the employees manager is having a conversation about lack of documentation being a problem that needs to be fixed.
Let us not blame remote or in-office for the problems of poor management.
That's an extremely naive view of the reality. Bad employees exist, and the mentality amongst Devs is pretty bad. This is visible in this kind of thread where the first instinct of a lot of commenters is to blame everything on management without even think if sometimes part of the problem is due to unprofessional devs.
I'm not saying that everyone against RTO is a bad employee or is biased (I'm against RTO myself). I'm just highlighting the unbalance and the strong unawareness of this aspect.
For those unprofessional devs, it is ridiculous to pretend that "a better standards" will magically turn an a*hole (to take an extreme case) into an angel. You are talking about "work around", but this is not a work around, this is a relatively efficient and pragmatical way of dealing with this kind of problem. What you propose seems to fall apart as soon as the dev has a tantrum and has decided that something is not like they like.
You seem to assume that none of what you are proposing has been tried, despite it being obvious. (and it also does not mean that we are not going to continue to do that, but it is just stupid to pretend that "working from the office" is forbidden while it helps a lot to ease the problems)
Let's also notice that supervising and controlling the standards to catch it up each time it slips is a lot of effort, it is pretty risky, and the devs hate it and then blame the management. What you are saying is that the management should work very very hard to accommodate an a*hole, and at the same time, asking the a*hole to make a small sacrifice is unacceptable.
> Let us not blame remote or in-office for the problems of poor management.
The point of my comment is "let us not blame management when they are trying to solve problems of devs unable to understand that their own comfort is not the centre of the universe".
Let be clear: I'm not supporting forcing working in the office. What I'm saying is that the large majority here are behaving exactly like my problematic colleague behaves, pretending that it is obviously a management problem when in fact maybe the management is just trying their best to find a pragmatical solution. As far as I can tell, RTO can be the result of management trying their best because the devs are not accepting that something is inefficient in the way they are working. It may not be the case, but the problem is that people here are convinced it is not the case, not because they have proofs, but because it is what they want to believe.
I sympathize with your frustration, but if your goal is quicker communication, then the employee should be given notice of this issue and subsequently let go from the company if they refuse to comply
What if they ignore you in the office? Is that behavior OK there because they at least showed up?
I mean this sounds like either a terrible employee (not working or not capable of working), terrible manager (not communicating expectations), or a scape goat excuse because someone wants RTO
Humans also tend to be more sympathetic when they remember they're working with another human. Maybe the issue here is that someone is lacking sympathy when they don't see the other human
Are we really reaching the ridiculous situation where someone argue that firing an employee is a better solution than trying to mitigate the problem?
If you enforce RTO, in the worst case, the employee will be pissed and will quit, leading to the same situation as if you fired him (except that it's less risky, less costly, less damageable for the reputation, ...) (the employee can also try to sabotage their work, giving you a better position to fire them smoothly).
Do you also realize that firing someone and the whole process to re-hire someone else is a big waste of time? Why would you do that if you can avoid it?
Also, my illustration is a fixed scenario. I'm talking about a dev who can work relatively efficiently when working at the office, and cannot when remote but don't understand why. It is not about an employee who will "ignore you in the office" (why the hell would they do that, they've never done that before) or "refuse to comply" (they were explained the situation, but they were truly unconvinced by it, which means they did not really change not by insubordination, but because they were not really capable of changing).
So, you talking about "terrible manager" is irrelevant. Terrible managers exist, I've said so earlier. Here, I'm giving a real life reality where it is not the management, it is not a scape goat, it is just people who truly try to make things work.
And maybe they are wrong and there is a better solution. But that's not the point. My point is that someone said "I know it is X". Maybe it is X. But I've observe several devs saying "I know it is X" and I have he proofs that they were wrong.
So, naturally, I ask: I'm ready to believe you, but there is no way for me to know if you are right or wrong, so can you give me element more objective than just "I know it is X", for example an analysis that is smart enough to acknowledge that maybe RTO is sometimes coming from a truly honest desire to make things better.
I'll say it again: it's not about working better from home or from the office.
Of course you're supposed to be working correctly as a group, and your example is a dysfunctional group because one dev who wants to stay home doesn't play well with others.
The crucial point is that only the group can decide what is best for itself. If the group (you and your colleagues) decide the fix is to be full office, then fine, you as a group decide to come back to the office. If the fix is to alternate some days home with no collaboration and some days at the office where you concentrate all the discussions, then fine. Whatever the choice, it's yours and that's what matters.
The issue is people are paid to do what they're told.
It's incredible how infantile a lot of the reactions are here. This guy took an on-site job and is now whining that he has to go back TWO out of the FIVE days he EXPECTED to be there.
The point of my story is that Devs are sometimes really bad to decide what is best for their team.
The problematic dev was convinced their way of working and communicating was perfectly fine (even after multiple time where collaborators reacted). The rest of the devs team were also agreeing. They were measuring their efficiency as the number of tickets they were doing. As the same feature with small crucial tweaks were coming their way again and again, they were pretty happy with themselves: they were doing a lot of tickets, none of them too challenging. They were even saying that they are more efficient in remote than before.
But the persons outside of the team were noticing the problems and paying for it. The research and development team (that I was part of) had to wait a long time to see features we desperately needed put in production, as each time it was not what requested (and no, the requirements were correct, the devs just went in the wrong direction because they read half of it because they assumed they knew). Same for the other team having to collaborate with the devs. Same for the managers, who were seeing clearly that there is a problem, continued to explain to the devs and show them proofs that the work was not done properly, but the devs were convinced "a lot of managers are useless anyway, they just say that because they want to feel important, let's not change anything".
The problems were communicated clearly to the devs, but they just ignored it, and when we were forced to change the way of working, they complained that "it was done without any explanation" and "it is mandatory".
So, no, the opinion of the devs on what is best is not always trustworthy. And this is my point: someone said "We know why companies don't give explanations". I'm just saying: I saw plenty of devs saying exactly that while I saw myself that this was bs. I'm not saying it's never that or that it cannot happen, I'm just asking: do you have objective element to support this, or is it a "smart conclusion from the very very smart dev team who know better than everyone and yet don't understand how much inefficient they are"?
I think you focus too much on this one person in a few of your messages here. The issues you present are easily mitigated no matter in the office or work from home. It takes
I'm forced to detail this one person situation because people reacts by re-inventing the situation so that it fits what they want to hear.
This one person is just one example, even a bit extreme, of a mentality that I keep seeing over and over again.
The problem is not this person, or "working from home" or "at the office", the problem is the mentality here: they are basically saying that asking someone to go back to the office can only be part of an evil plan from incompetent management.
As you say "the issues you present are easily mitigated". One way to mitigate s to ask the person to work at the office. The problem is this mentality of excluding this mitigation as if it is not as good and as legitimate as another one. All the other mitigation that you will come up with will have inconvenience for one or several actors. It is just biased to say "I can solve the problem by clicking on the button A or on the button B, but if they click on the button A, they are incompetent evil management, because after all, they could have clicked on button B. Button B has also some inconvenience, as much as button A has, but not directly to me, so it means it is objectively the best choice"
This is a good point and something else I have noticed. Juniors are the ones suffering without oversight from those of us that have made all their mistakes before.
There's been more than a few times where I've thought "if I could just sit next to this person for half an hour, I could save myself a frustrating 3 hour teams meeting".
>Of the billions in tax incentives granted to US companies every year by cities and states, many agreements require workers to come into the office some of the time, or at least live in the region. For companies receiving these incentives, relaxing in-office attendance could be costly.
>The contracts were crafted in a pre-pandemic era, at a time when commutes to the office were a given. Now governments are deciding whether to crack down or rewrite the rules entirely. In some states and cities, policy changes have already been proposed to account for the new reality of hybrid work.
tl;dr It's yet another way for these hugely profitable corporations to not pay their taxes.
As I've said "I'm sure bad management and bad direction exist", you showing me one example of bad management or one motivation for having a bad management does not prove anything.
It's a fallacy similar to this one:
1) vaccines help avoiding sickness (equivalent to: working in the office can be a way to solve real problems that the dev doesn't care about)
2) big pharma can make a lot of profit by selling vaccine (equivalent to: working in the office can make profit for the company)
According to your logic, number 2 would "prove" that number 1 is impossible.
A lot of this stuff was done outwith contract, in both places, during the pandemic.
> Anything else is an informal benefit and can be taken away at any time
Well, yes, and this is why people are getting mad. People should also be much more explicit about the cost of their commute; you can argue back and forth about the benefits of being in the office, but almost all commutes are deadweight loss and some are both miserable and expensive.
Our team was going into the office once a week, some of us had even started going in twice a week because it just made meetings easier.
Then the RTO mandate happened and we suddenly have to be back in 50%. Three times a week is excessive (even if it is only every alternate week), and the entire team's enthusiasm to come in and work together has evaporated nearly completely.
We were never given a reason why, either, they gave us a completely contrived response about "company values" when pushed.
To further your point about new team members benefiting from RTO: I’m six months into a mostly remote contract gig (2 days a week in the office) at a large financial services company, in a team that was very well distributed across the country even before the pandemic. I’m based out of an office that would have been peripheral to most of the team anyway, even if we were fully onsite.
It’s been the most difficult start to any job I’ve ever had. The total lack of face-to-face with any of the team means I can’t get to know anyone else, there’s no cooperation whatsoever and zero knowledge transfer… getting time to chat with your colleagues requires booking a meeting in their well-stuffed calendar weeks in advance. We get a half-hour slot per week with the Tech Leads to ask questions, which means I’m blocked frequently, and any other comms with them is through MS Teams, where you’re lucky to get a reply that day. I suggested more frequent scheduled time with the leads but that was knocked back immediately.
This is a place with no culture. We are literally not a team. It’s a prime candidate for a centralised office with a mostly onsite policy, in my humble opinion…
I was at a place with the exact same problems that was in-office pre-pandemic. It was even worse: you couldn't book time with architects OR product managers. For PMs you had to add your questions to a document and join a sometimes daily 30min meeting and hope they got to your questions.
This isn't an office vs remote problem. It's a hiring not enough people and pretending that doing no planning is okay, problem.
and this was an insurance company. Hardly a "move fast and break things" industry.
Not hiring enough people is a chronic problem for all companies. Being remote makes it worse though, since WFH tends to amplify personnel and culture problems…
The only thing WFH solves really is long commutes and noisy offices. It also makes it easier for families to organize their day, which is why a lot of parents like it.
You got it right at the end: "This is a place with no culture. We are literally not a team." But this is not a remote/local issue. This is bad team organisation with crappy leadership. They could fail in the same way locally and it could work so much better remotely.
It's on your manager to fix it if your team can't communicate effectively or at all. You're letting them off the hook by thinking moving where you work would magically make things better without culture changes.
Source: Seeing my team every day. Talking with them immediately if they need help. We do group hangouts for current issues. I talk with them more than local team I worked with many years ago.
There’s definitely a management problem, no doubt, but I’ve been in thriving teams before, despite poor management; we were all friends who shared the day in the same place together.
I’m in total agreement that remote work needs good management to be effective.
At this point its the "that wasn't real communism" argument. Is it possible to have a fully communicative remote environment with thriving culture and personal interactions? Probably. Does it happen? Not often.
Relationships, communication, and culture pretty much set themselves up in office. While remote you have to work extra hard for it and it just doesn't seem to be happening for most people.
>Relationships, communication, and culture pretty much set themselves up in office. While remote you have to work extra hard for it and it just doesn't seem to be happening for most people.
While I understand the motivation for this take I do not agree with it. You have to be intentional about supporting remote teams from the get go, which means you have to select for the skills that let those teams thrive when you're staffing them and especially their management chain. Expectations have to be clear, time needs to be protected from calendar pirates, outcomes need to be measured and accounted for, team members need to be able to talk to each other and management needs to keep reasonably close (but not oppressively so) tabs on team ops. It can absolutely work but it doesn't happen by accident.
That's just my point. So much stuff you get for free by being in the same room now has to be a deliberate, planned effort, and it's unclear if you even can get the same level of personal connection between people over Slack. And it just isn't happening at all the places I've seen.
For a ton of people and roles there's nothing really magical about being in an office. If you're any good at remote communications you can connect with people over Zoom, Slack or (ugh) Teams and form professional connections. Personal connections are a different animal.
It's very different. The "that wasn't real communism" argument is a thing because we've never seen one. For remote work, we have many examples of companies where it works and we've got examples of companies with terrible on-site culture.
"culture pretty much set themselves up in office" - that culture is sometimes avoidance, aggression, backstabbing. You have to work on the on-site culture as well if you want it to function well.
A big part of my job as a tech lead is to keep people unblocked and transfer knowledge. If I’m ignoring my DMs during the day, what exactly am I doing?
My individual coding output pales in comparison to what I can accomplish by making other people more productive, keeping everyone rowing in the same direction. I feel bad if I take more than 1/2 an hour to respond to a question, at very least directing that person to someone else who knows the answer (or help find it).
I don’t think this problem has anything to do with remote/in office work.
Prefacing this with the fact my office is essentially a farm, so quite nice surroundings, and also only a 10 minute drive away from home in a regional town, so there's no awful commute involved.
It's still not the same - I was part of a team for 5 or 6 years and never met them in person. Apparently I wasn't important enough to fly to the US even once to meet everyone.
We had very little rapport, didn't know each other at all, it was a very poor experience of being in a team and extremely demoralising and inefficient.
I took my current job because I wanted to go back to the office and get to know my team mates properly. It's much better.
I do like the hybrid approach, I can basically work from home whenever I want, but I go to the office most working days. I probably work from home less than 3 weeks of the year all up, and usually when I need to do something here I can't do at work like making some brackets or similar.
The incidental conversations you have, short brainstorming sessions over breaks and lunch, just being socially closer, makes a massive difference.
I used to go for smoke breaks with a different project leader, even though I don't smoke, because we could spend that time talking about stuff related to our projects and bounce ideas off each other. That job was also in an awesome startup complex that used to be a railway workshop - way cooler than sitting around in my spare bedroom on my own.
I admit I'm no fan of too dense an open plan or hot desking - both dehumanising efforts - and eating at your desk should be banned.
Opposite anecdote, I was hired remotely at AWS during Covid and I only met anyone on my team a year and half in.
There was a well organized onboarding process which was a combination of Amazon indoctrination, AWS indoctrination, and team specific tasks including who I should schedule a 1x1 with. There were tasks specifically geared toward getting to know the internal tooling.
Admittedly when I started at my current company fully remote - a much smaller company - right when we were hiring rapidly for a new project, it was on me to get up to speed about knowing what my role involved, who to schedule 1x1s with and create my own onboarding itinerary.
I always like to point out to fellow devs that there are a lot of Bad Companies out there. It’s not an easy task to find a good one.
I haven’t needed to work from some remote open space office since March 2020.
Though since Covid cases came down late spring this year I do sometimes go - every other month or so - mostly only for when our toddler has to be at home for some reason.
At which point the company’s open office is temporarily less distracting than my (much better customized and equipped) home office.
Of course sometimes it can also be good to have lunch together or share some war stories for kicking off some planning or some such, not regularly needed in my line of work though.
So it’s nice to have the choice, have lunch together now and then.
I would quit immediately if there would be any form of direct manager pressure to come back.
I’m an adult and a professional, I do work on my own terms. If that’s something a company won’t respect then I will be giving my precious labour elsewhere.
> It’s been the most difficult start to any job I’ve ever had [etc.]
Right but, dropping a slice of anecdata cake, I've had that experience multiple times before I ever did any remote working (and not just in contracts, in perm jobs too.) If the culture is rotten, it matters not whether you're onsite or offsite.
I mean, 3/5 is “most” in my book… but the finer detail in my post was that I’m in a satellite office. The bulk of the team are elsewhere, effectively making me a fully remote team member.
> As someone new to my organization and team I’ve greatly benefited from a partial rto mandate. There’s something about being able to quickly bounce ideas or questions off a team that physically sits around you that slack can’t quite emulate
Well, you know who doesn’t benefit? Me with your constant interruptions. With remote work, I’m able to control when I want to respond and when I want to do deep work.
Even when working in office, when I have questions, I always ping my colleagues on IM first, instead of directly walking to their desk or shouting at them.
It's respectful and could be turned into a policy.
You're assuming the worst in the person you're reply to. My team and I are extremely respectful of each other's focus, and yet we all still prefer the office for the same reason's as GP. Do you not see how there's a middle ground, whether you agree with it or not? Or do you think every interaction you have with a colleague that you did not initiate is a burden?
Serious question, what do you call respect? My idea of respect is that conference calls or any phone calls should not happen in public spaces. If someone has their headphones on send them a message and let them respond asynchronously or schedule time with them.
Yes, at n-3 and n-2 job I was the dev lead and de facto “cloud architect” and it was mostly in office. When I wanted to do “deep work”, I would either come in late and do my deep work from home or find some place to hide at the office and set my status to “doing deep work”, close Outlook and Slack. I would check my messages at least once an hour.
If there is ever an emergency that only I could handle, I was doing my job wrong.
My n-1 job was at AWS working in Professional Services. There everyone was juggling multiple projects, on customer calls, in planes, on-site with a customer, etc. No one expected an immediate response. Almost every interaction was either asynchronous or you would ask someone a question and the answer would be “my calendar is up to date. Send me a meeting request”.
I also first learned the concept of “office hours” there where the lead would just block off time on the calendar where the people could just join an open Chime (does anyone outside of Amazon use Chime?) if they had any questions.
I don’t know what things are going to be like at my current company once things fully ramp up. But I suspect as the person who is responsible for cross team architectural guidance, I will need to be able to handle the chaos using what I learned from my past three jobs.
In my personal case, it has been an investment my colleagues have made in me that has paid significant dividends. I can now quickly take huge loads of work off their backs, and have more than made up for a a few interruptions or conversations during lunch / after work.
Sure you could argue that the same investment could be made remote. But the reality is people are more likely to be walking their dogs or cooking lunch, and that’s why they wont have time for you.
At the end of the day it’s not really about whether YOU benefit or not during work hours, its about whether the organization benefits. They’re paying the bills for your stretch of time. But even if it was all about you and your protected time, theres an argument to be made that you benefit as well in the long run.
Extremely well put, I don’t often see a comment matching my perspective / experience so closely in these discussions.
I believe that the challenge of onboarding for remote teams in more fundamentally difficult than is acknowledged. I’m not so sure that the best remote-first culture and process can ever match a good in-person onboarding experience.
Do everything the in-person one does, and ensure there’s a team meet up sometime in their first month, with a cultural emphasis on getting to know the new folks.
It’s fundamentally difficult to onboard. What makes “remote” onboarding hard is the same things that makes in-person hard: you basically need to hover over the new hire and ensure that they aren’t getting stuck on anything and that they are getting comfortable with asking for help and that existing team members are helping them.
The thing that makes remote more difficult is that it’s harder for a team lead to see if the new hire is getting helped: passive surveillance is harder when you aren’t sitting nearby. I think you can easily mitigate that by being a good leader and making sure to have routine check ins throughout the onboarding, starting at twice or three times a day for the first couple of days and slowing down over the first couple of weeks until you hit a weekly cadence or the new hire is thriving.
One of the issues in my company is that since the pandemic we have only hotdesks. So bouncing ideas off team members is hard as they're usually somewhere else in the building. Before we had fixed desks and departments so you would know where to find someone.
We have this terrible booking app called Planon that doesn't offer any way to locate someone. And it's horrible to use (every time you use it you have to sign in with a 3 step MFA process). So most people just ignore it and it causes a lot of conflicts between people that booked a desk and people that just grabbed one. It's a total mess. At the same time I'm sitting beside all sorts of noisy annoying sales goons that are on the phone all day so I get nothing done.
All it's accomplishing now is that I thoroughly hate the company and its 'leadership'.
I much prefer the office and think the only issue with RTO is when promises are not kept, but: screw hot desking. I've only had to do it for a few weeks but I hated it. I prefer much cubicle with high walls and good natural lighting to WFH, but prefer anything to hot desking. I'd rather work out of a hotel room.
I find now even in the office, people are so busy switching between being glued to their Slack or or video chat, then switching back to work, that it is harder to walk up to people and interrupt them casually. So I don't feel the quick bounce of an idea off someone is as smooth as it used to be, in my case, where my workplace has one thousand slack channels going all day. Also we don't have telephones, which I believe makes communication harder.
The unavoidable fact is that this guy took an ON-SITE job, and is now whining because he has to go back for TWO out of the FIVE days he originally agreed to.
There are plenty of people who will gladly replace this entitled, unprofessional crybaby.
I’ve read in a few places that it’s bad for you, but I’ve not done a deep dive and formed an “I’m confident” level of knowledge. The wikipedia article suggests that it might be bad, but there’s not a lot of research on it.
I love nerding out on food as mich as the next person. On food and cooking is one of my favorite kitchen tools. Sichuan chili oil is a staple condiment in our house.
That said, i find the following to be an oft-repeated bs phrase parroted across the internet. You can find it tracing back to reddit threads over ten years ago.
> You can end up with what are called fines and boulders, fines being tiny, dust-like pieces of coffee that create bitterness in the cup, and boulders being large chunks that create sourness or emptiness in the cup.
I dare any coffee drinker to blindly try their coffee with a crappy grinder, and compare to their $200 carbon fiber whatever. You wont detect the difference. I once looked into someone’s reddit account who was repeating this - and found that they were selling grinders elsewhere. Must be awesome margins.
A friend of mine started a company based entirely on the premise that grind quality matters. They did many blind taste tests and found that they could taste a 50μm difference in grind size when they controlled the other variables. Can you tell the difference between a $50 spice mill and a $200 burr grinder? Yes, absolutely. Can you tell the difference between that and a $1,500 expresso grinder, probably.
His little startup company ended up getting bought by one of the large coffee companies.
Even amateurs will notice the difference between a "perfect" pour over from a $50 grinder and a $200 grinder. The GP clearly does not own a V60 :)
Above the $200 range really only matter for espresso. Manual brews don't need that fine grind precision, just consistency (no fines, no rocks) at medium grind levels.
I’m sorry but what is an “amateur” coffee drinker? Is coffee drinking so complex that you can become an expert in it? Get over yourself, you’ve been drinking the koolaid, not the coffee.
People who own v60s tend tie the promotion of v60s to their personal character so i know this might fall flat but; every real study ive seen, thats blind, has shown no no added benefit to slightly more consistent grounds. Ive noticed the same when testing between the two myself. Feel free to share otherwise if you have data to support that ;)
Do you have a link to such a study? My google-fu is failing.
I don't doubt you but would like to read it and try to confirm my bias anyway!
My experience is mainly with completely crap grinders vs high-end burrs which is very distinguishable. Probably low/mid end burrs do okay as long as there aren't too many fines. Grind size variability may even be advantageous :)
It’s fascinating, isn't it? “Experts” are more than willing to dish out hundreds of dollars for finer microns and consistent particle sizes, and even measure those sizes using LASERS. They will go through the trouble to make fancy edited videos with all sorts of dubious claims about taste. But all of these people are totally unwilling to do blind taste tests and release their data, and as such we find a massive lack of real studies on the internet. People will make every excuse under the sun to not run blind taste tests on the effect of different coffee grinders. Look at this guys list of reasons… lol he states that he needs “people from around the world” in order to make such a study accurate.(https://towardsdatascience.com/double-blind-coffee-studies-a...).
The one i know of was done by Americas test kitchen. I had read and/or watched another a while back but couldn’t find it. Good luck with your cuppa - continue to enjoy the ritual.
I don't know if there is a taste difference that's meaningful, but the consistency is probably the real difference between grinders.
With a spice mill, it's a total crap shoot if a grind will pull properly, blast through or block up completely. It is a challenge to always get a good grind.
A burr grinder? If it's the same beans, it is set and forget. Always the same grind, same pull, easy.
If there is any taste difference, I suspect it is down to consistency of the grind and not much else.
Tasting a difference in grind size does not equate to fine particles being “bitter” and larger particles being “flat”, nor does it result in a slightly uneven grind being “better” than a more consistent one…
The effect of fines being bitter and the coarse being sour is easy to test. Take a decent grinder and your favorite coffee. Grind one batch a couple notches finer than usual. Grind another batch coarser than usual. Brew both with the same amount and temperature of water for the same time as you normally would. Compare the flavor of both brews. This is a common step of "dialing in a brew" to get your preferred flavor. The finer grind tends to be more bitter, the coarser tends to be more sour.
Now take a bit of both grinds and mix those together and brew them. You will find it is both bitter and sour.
If you want to avoid placebo, simply perform a double blind test.
James Hoffman has plenty of videos demonstrating this, even on himself. He tests many methods, machines, and beans. The things the community says matter he can reliably detect in a double blind test. Other things typically show no effect.
Don't forget, this isn't just Reddit. People have been brewing coffee for centuries. There are many professionals and lifelong tradespeople. There are definitely things that matter for making a good brew and particle size is one of them.
>Grind one batch a couple notches finer than usual. Grind another batch coarser than usual.
You are giving me advice as though I havent been "dialing in" my coffee for over a decade. Of course if you brew two different coffees with 100% different particle sizes, you will get different results. This is an exaggeration fallacy. It is not the same test as having 95% of one particle size vs 5% of another, which measures the improvement you might get from upgrading a $50 grinder to a $200 grinder.
>Don't forget, this isn't just Reddit. People have been brewing coffee for centuries. There are many professionals and lifelong tradespeople. There are definitely things that matter for making a good brew and particle size is one of them.
Yeah, people have been brewing coffee for centuries. No, people have not been concerned about minuscule differences in particle sizes for centuries. The ethopian method still consists of roasting beans in what basically amounts to a cast iron pan. Dominicans still roast their beans in sugar over a fire. Both have been grinding their beans using mortar and pestle since the beginning of time, and continue to this day. Would you scoff at those, and tell them their coffee is not "dialed in"? I'm sorry, but the pretentious exaggerations over coffee particle sizes absolutely are a recent phenomenon, and that you are seriously suggesting history in support of your claims reveals an obvious level of naivety.
EDIT: Also, you should be extremely wary of "learning" from well-edited videos of taste testers such as James Hoffman whose entire livelihood depends on being a coffee personality in a world where coffee is touted as being more complex than it actually is...
Your argument is "I dare you; you won't notice a difference." That's not convincing. Those of us who've spent time in the industry can even detect differences between high end conical vs flat burr grinders, let alone the difference between a bladed spice grinder compared to a burr grinder.
There are substantial differences to be found in many variables of coffee brewing. Just because you don't have a palate for it doesn't mean others don't.
Are you aware of any blind tests done on this? I'm fully aware that I can taste the difference between my Specialita and a blade grinder.
What I'm less convinced by is that more and more expensive grinders taste better to any noticeable and consistent degree. Personally I'd say that the taste changes day by day, maybe according to my mood, whether I brushed my teeth or ate something sweet in the last hour or two, the humidity, bean freshness, whether any defect beans got into a particular cup, and probably a ton of other factors.
I'm willing to accept that my tastes are not developed enough. But I need real double blind tests to back that up, not just people saying I should trust them because they claim to be an expert. Are there any?
Yes. Check out James Hoffman on YouTube. He tests many machines, including grinders, using double blind taste tests, and he can reliably tell the difference between many machines.
Though keep in mind that his palate is especially refined. Average Joe buying a coffee at Baskin Robbins isn't going to notice the difference between different high end grinders.
I meant by real scientists in a lab, not a YouTuber. Like a consumer testing lab maybe, or a university.
Besides, I've watched a good few Hoffman videos - including his high end grinder reviews - and while they are great, they aren't scientific standard double blind tests. They're just him in his kitchen.
I did search in case I missed anything, but can't find any videos that you might mean. If you have a specific video in mind, please link it.
> I meant by real scientists in a lab, not a YouTuber. Like a consumer testing lab maybe, or a university.
Maybe look more into who he actually is before dismissing him? He's a National Barista Championship winner and has decades of professional coffee experience and knowledge beyond just brewing a daily cup. He also co-founded a roasting company that became the largest wholesale specialty coffee supplier in London. It's not like he just popped onto Youtube one day in 2016 and decided to start making coffee videos.
It doesnt need to be convincing - I’m not the one making the claim that $200 coffee grinders make better coffee, so I’m not responsible for backing up that fact with data.
I make my morning coffee on a Lelit espresso machine. I use a Niche zero espresso grinder. I can easily tell the difference between grind sizes a mm apart on the dial, when it comes to taste in the cup (and even with milk). The espresso machine can tell the difference too, because even a minute difference in grind size can make a significant difference in the coffee puck’s ability to withstand the water pressure.
You see, when you make espresso there’s a pretty narrow range of grind sizes that produce acceptable coffee. Too coarse, and the water gushes through the puck without building much pressure. Too fine, and the puck essentially turns into coffee cement and the machine isn’t able to squeeze out more than a drop or two of (very bitter) espresso.
Within that narrow range you can find the needle on the water pressure gauge hitting numbers anywhere between 4 and 10 bar (I’ve set my machine’s overpressure valve to 10 bar so that excess water pressure is shunted away and circulated back into the brew circuit). I find the coffee tastes best when I can hit the sweet spot between 9 and 10 bar without the OPV kicking in. This is subject to uncontrollable factors such as differences in tamping but generally occurs at a very specific grind setting that I find after dialing in a new coffee.
As for differences in flavour? It’s all about extraction. Underextraction (from failure to reach a high enough pressure) results in sour, thin coffee. Overextraction yields very dark, bitter coffee with a powdery mouth feel. Proper extraction avoids both of these problems and tastes sublime, nutty and chocolatey (with medium-dark roasts) or fruity and juicy (with lighter roasts).
There may be a lot of gadget-headery going on in the espresso world but I can confidently say that correct grind size makes an enormous difference in the quality of coffee. Whether you need a $2000 grinder to achieve that is debatable, but you absolutely will not achieve it with a $40 blade grinder (which cannot control grind sizes at all).
Do you live in Europe by chance? When people in the USA talk about coffee they are typically not talking about espresso, which is a different beast altogether, and something I have no experience with.
I live in Canada. I’m not Italian. I only got into coffee a couple years ago.
If you ask the experts, much of the physics of espresso apply to pour-over coffee as well. Grind size and distribution, water flow rate through the coffee bed, channeling, fine migration and filter clogging.
Of course, the ‘typical’ coffee drinker is just looking for some caffeine with sugar and milk to help start their day, so they don’t care about this stuff. But if you make pour-overs and drink black coffee made with specialty roasts then all of this technique applies, and so a good grinder can help a lot.
Pour-over fans tend to prefer lighter roasts and flat burr (as opposed to conical burr) grinders, which are said to produce a more unimodal grind distribution with fewer fines.
This entire paragraph reads “because the experts say so”. As an avid coffee drinker and experimenter for many years now I’d challenge you to question that “more unimodal grind distribution” effect on pour overs especially as it relates to very minor differences in distributions measured across grinders.
This entire paragraph reads “because the experts say so”
Well I have to say that because I am not a pour-over drinker and I have no experience with grinders other than my Niche. I think I was pretty clear about the fact that I was relaying hear-say rather than speaking from my own experience.
Seriously? The grinder is the most important part, in my experience. When I first got into aeropress and pourovers, I was frustrated for years with bland and inconsistent brews. It was only after I upgraded to a decent burr grinder that everything fell into place. It’s just impossible to tweak anything else without first starting with a good grinder. I make adjustments of a few micron at a time with my grinder, and the difference is significant for both espresso and pour over. It’s much rarer that I make adjustments in water salts, brew temp, and brew method.
>Lol, no you don’t. Microns are much smaller than you think.
You absolutely do.
Many stepped grinders will have steps on the order of magnitude of 5 microns, EG-1 being probably the easiest one of the bunch to prove [1].
But note that this is talking about the difference in the _burr distance_, not the ground particle size difference.
In a world where we figured out how to make perfect burrs that produce uniform particle sizes these _might_ be the same, but even the most expensive and fanciest coffee grinders produce a relatively wide distribution of particle sizes.
Speaking as a someone who does DIY CNC, it's easy to add an adjustment dial labelled in 5 micron steps. But those labels are basically decorative if other imprecision in the machine means adjustments aren't reliably reflected in the output.
Even if your coffee grinder is in a room temperature-controlled to within 1 degree, the heat output of the motor could easily cause more than 5 microns of thermal expansion.
But obviously, if the coffee tastes good to you, then that's a coffee making success regardless of how precisely you're grinding things.
While I agree in general, a good quality burr grinder is surprisingly consistent. I'm not sure you could reliably get distinct results one notch apart, but at a given notch you will have a very narrow spread in grain sizes and a couple notches apart they will be visually distinct. James Hoffman has some videos comparing several cheap and expensive grinders, including looking closely at the grain size, and you can see the difference clearly.
Surprisingly consistent when measured using coffee that is ground to hundreds of microns is not an indicator about consistency at the few microns level. Use high quality calipers on the burrs, you’ll be shocked how much variance you see run to run at one adjustment, never mind what happens when you move the dial. Micron marks on grinders are pure marketing.
I'm more than willing to admit this being true on like... 98% of grinders out there; would be a little surprised to see that in a insanely expensive and _very_ overbuilt grinder like EG-1.
I’ve spent ten years in the specialty coffee industry (not selling grinders). If you’re controlling other variables properly you should definitely be able to tell the difference.
I think this is an important insight. Some people don’t have much experience in making repeatable coffee, and whether you make the coffee well is more important than how good the grinder is.
But once you have repeatable steps and that are good (water, quantities, temperature etc.) the grinder becomes the most important piece even in espresso.
I would say it's most important for espresso, at least in espresso machines that do everything else well. You essentially control the duration of the pull via the grind, and the taste of the shot comes predominantly from how long and hot you pull it.
As you said, once you are dialed in, really the only variable I am tweaking per bag of beans is the grind.
Not really, almost everything else matters more. Bean quality and water quality in particular are at the top of the list. Good beans bad grinder > bad beans good grinder. The grinder is the last place to look, even though it does matter.
The mistake you’re making is that not all variables are under your control.
Getting better and better beans is very hard. You’re stuck with what is available. You’re stuck with what water is available (if you’re a reasonable person). You’re stuck with the local roasters.
So of the variables you can control, the grinder is the most important piece of equipment you can buy.
Of course they are, don’t be so helpless. Getting good beans vs Starbucks is trivial. You’re obviously not limited to local roasters, google “specialty coffee delivery”, it needs to rest for around a week anyway. As is getting filtered water (in-line under your sink for less than $100, filter pitcher for a fraction of that) and saline drops (you can buy them for next to nothing online or mad-science your own for even less). All of those things will make a huge improvement compared with a better grinder.
Again. Grinders can make a difference, but they’re the last step in the chain. Do everything else first.
The other mistake you’re making is thinking people haven’t tried all of this and this is new information to them. And that trying all that results in a product that someone else prefers.
The fact is, there is a certain level of spend needed. If you’re not making espresso, this is very low these days. You can get very cheap, good gear. If you are making espresso, you’re spending several hundred minimum. Although you can lower your spend quite a bit if you’re willing to hand grind for espresso.
It's not an important insight at all - it's a credentials fallacy. "I was in industry so I am right". Many people have spent many years nerding out on coffee, myself included, but you'll note I don't use that as an argument for being correct.
It’s exactly what you’re talking about. The claim was “i was in industry -> therefore i know if you control the other variables you can tell the difference”.
For one, controlling the other variables is an obvious step you need to take when testing the effect of particle size. For two, it doesn’t follow that the OP is magically correct in his hypothesis about the effect of grind size just because he thought of this step and works in industry.
Your posts are very curious. Why do you think that the credential (10 years in the specialty coffee industry) mentioned is fallacious or somehow irrelevant? It seems to me that a decade spent finding ways to control variables and improve the quality and repeatability (both in a cafe setting and for customers with home setups) of coffee is like.. super relevant here.
Also - is controlling the other variables actually obvious to most as you say? Are those variables even easily identified by the average home coffee maker? I'm not so sure.
Look I hope I’m not insulting your profession but controlling the 5 or so variables that go into brewing good coffee is not exactly rocket science. To claim to be an expert in it is akin to claiming you are an expert in sharpening knives or picking a lock. It’s something basically anybody can take up, the rules for success follow a general formula, and if you experiment just outside of this formula you’ll find the way that works best for you. Hell, even the prices of growing, preparing (fermentation), and roasting coffee beans is infinitely more complex than the brewing process imo.
So no, the fact that you claim to have spent a decade professionally controlling the water temperature, bean roast,ratio, brew time & process, and grind level, does not make you any more knowledgable than any one of the other million nerds (including myself) who do this on a daily basis as well. Yes, controlling all of the variables when taste testing is obvious to most coffee geeks (people responding here). Americas test kitchen has been doing this for decades with recipes that have many more variables than the coffee brewing process.
No, those variables are probably not easily identified by the average home coffee maker. That’s because the average coffee maker is a boomer with a keurig. I still don’t think it was a particularly insightful comment though, regardless of this fact. This forum is not made of keurig drinking boomers.
So in your home coffee nerd experience coffee made from grounds with a narrow size distribution is not noticeably different than coffee made from grounds with a broad size distribution?
No, in my home coffee nerd experience the realized size distribution across multiple grinders is minimal enough that it has no effect on flavor profile. When all other variables are controlled, of course ;).
Exactly! Just like how all of the “experts” liked blade-ground coffee when it was blindly tested (https://youtu.be/O7LAzSKgeoQ?feature=shared), in what seems to be the only blind test that brings together experts on the internet. They liked it, so that’s what counts.
It’s easy to like something though when that something’s “taste” (when drilled down into the realm of unrealities) is largely social.
That’s why John Manzo noted as such in coffee, connoisseurship, and an ethnomethodologically-informed sociology of taste.
That's nonsense unless your the kind of person who says a cup of instant is indistinguishable from a freshly ground brew (and post covid there probably are many more people who can't).
The size and consistency of the ground coffee makes a huge difference in extraction of coffee and therefor the taste, so a grinder that can make a consistent, repeatable grind will be noticeable (perhaps not as noticable as purchased ground vs freshly ground), but for some the difference between instant, and fresh ground with a $50, $500, or $3000 isn't worth the price.
>That's nonsense unless your the kind of person who says a cup of instant is indistinguishable from a freshly ground brew
No, it isn't nonsense. And yes, I can tell the difference between a cup of instant and a cup of freshly ground brew.
This video actually proves my point. James not only avoids tasting the coffees blind, but you can see that at 6:35 the particle volume is all basically the same size with extremely minute differences - looks like a factor of less than 10% volume density with very little distribution difference between grinders.
It matters if you’re brewing pour-over coffee. If you don’t use a burr grinder the fines settle towards the bottom while pouring and clogs it up. Takes forever!
The difference in filter and espresso is quite a lot at the blender to burr grinder stage and a little bit from 200-1000$ getting better throughout. I’m sure you’ll be saying you can’t tell the difference in lots of areas because you can’t tell the difference. Which is fine btw!
You can absolutely taste the difference between a crappy grinder and a good grinder. I'm not sure what a carbon fiber grinder is, but a proper flat burr grinder that produces a relatively uniform grind size makes the biggest difference in coffee taste, as long as the coffee you're drinking hasn't been burned to ash.
Comparing my cheap spice chopper and my cheap burr grinder, I noticed a clear improvement. Maybe that's because the spice chopper was so bad at chopping coffee beans. I doubt the fancy burr grinders make much difference, but then again I was skeptical of the cheap burr grinder until I tried it.
I don’t mean to sound pretentious but i have a hard time understanding how anyone can have a difficult time differentiating between art nouveau and art deco. The only similarity between the two lies in word “art”.
In that post I explore a few ideas as to why I think this happens. I think it’s more that Art Nouveau gets labeled as Deco.
In general though, both are art movements from roughly the same time period with roughly the same basic principles. For someone unfamiliar with art history, it can be confusing in a way that doesn’t happen with say, Medieval vs. Neoclassical architecture.
Not the same time period. Art Nouveau started in the 1890s and was exhausted by the time of the start of the First World War (1914). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Nouveau
Read my comment again. I said “roughly” the same time period. And yes, they overlapped for about a decade and from the perspective of someone unfamiliar with art history and living a century later, that is very close.
WW-I was a huge event in the history of this world, and it is a pretty clear divider between those two styles of art and architecture.
I wouldn't call pre-WWI and post-WWI "roughly the same time period". Not by a long stretch.
The length of time between them is not relevant in this case. What is relevant is the events that occurred between them.
Like the pre-atomic age and the post-atomic age. The events themselves in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were relatively short-lived. But their impact on this world greatly exceeded the time immediately before those two events and the time immediately after those events.
No, it's not a "clear divider" between the two. It was more of a slow transition between Art Deco and Art Nouveau, which as I already stated, overlapped for nearly a decade.
This is all pretty clearly laid out in the historical literature that you yourself linked to. You don't seem to understand how art movements work; there is not a firm dividing line when one ends and the next begins.
Beyond that, the question was about why people mix the two. Your nit-picking about how we should divide history is irrelevant to the discussion.
Art Deco got its start in 1910, but it didn't take off until after WWI. I did read those pages, even though I've been a big fan of Art Nouveau since I met my wife in the mid-90s and she introduced me to the style, and I was a fan of Art Deco since I was a kid in the 1970s and 1980s.
And I lived in Brussels, Belgium for almost eight years, in a house that was built in 1910 (according to the numbers formed into the bricks), and I lived about two blocks away from Hotel Horta. We have several coffee table books on Art Nouveau and Art Deco, some of which you can no longer find.
So, I am very well acquainted with both styles and when they were common. I also make a point of reading articles at any links that I include for reference.
Well, then it's a little unclear to me what you are arguing against. That they aren't from "roughly the same time period" from the perspective of someone that isn't familiar with art history? Why would someone unfamiliar with art history make a distinction between early 20th century art movements? They both occurred in the early 20th century, unlike (as I used in my example) neoclassical and medieval styles, which occurred centuries apart.
This is the subject of the grandparent post that I was replying to. Yes, in actuality, they overlapped a bit, and Art Nouveau waned as Art Deco rose – although again, this is not so clear cut in other art fields as it is in architecture; e.g., jewelry or furniture.
WWI was a watershed event. A world-changing event. It wasn't as short as the time period between when the first atomic bomb was dropped and when the second one was dropped, but in the scale of world events, it was still relatively short.
And while Art Deco got started before WWI, it didn't really take off until after WWI.
Just like Art Nouveau that got started in the 1890s, but didn't really take off until after the International Paris Exhibition in 1900.
Both styles took several years to get started and really take off. And Art Deco didn't really take off until after WWI.
I think the source of the issue is that Art Nouveau and Art Deco also both commonly get mixed up with Arts & Crafts (as well as Craftsman and Mission), which is ancestral to them both and shares elements with both -- sinuous organic shapes and hard geometric shapes.
