I’ve observed the same pattern in corporate world with folks which are close to promotion stage. Nice people suddenly become bitter and very hard to work with. Only the best stay nice.
And leases, something very people know is that Van Moof has a great corporate leasing program. All big tech offer eBike commuting options paying Van Moof Leases.
I think it is genius, the bikes are expensive to buy, but $100 a month lease including maintenance is very popular among Big tech (especially if your company pays for it).
They could very well be losing substantial money on that. Leases only work if the quality of what you lease is high enough that you won't be bleeding to death on the availability guarantee. Financial lease insulates the lease provider from that but if it is operational lease then whoever inherits the leases might be in for a very hard time.
100% Agree and unfortunately I don't have numbers. However, anecdotally I work for a big tech and I have one of the leases, and it is a very popular option across my colleagues. I'd probably never buy one, but with the lease I'm very happy customer. Also they gave the option to upgrade to newer models for $10 more dollars a month after a year which I think it helps them to fix operational issues. There is also in-campus maintenance which is very convenient. I think that if they operate/scale the lease business properly it could make a very good business in its own.
There are multiple of these lease suppliers and then there is Van Moof themselves, I take it your deal is with Van Moof directly. That should - assuming the new owners have actually bought the lease contracts as well - give you a priority position for spare parts. Here is the FAQ of another such provider (there is also Athlon, possibly others):
Certainly a concern. So for Backblaze I use an email address on my own domain which is then forwarded (thanks to Cloudflare; previously Gandi) to another email service which is currently iCloud. I did this after hearing about horror stories of loosing email access with Google a few years ago as you mentioned. I’m running on the assumption that Backblaze, Cloudflare and Apple will not all try to screw me.
I’ll say for me the most important data is family photos which I’ve got them duplicated in Amazon Photos. B2 is the hedge against Amazon, and Amazon is the hedge against B2.
For other documents, I’m willing to trust b2 for now. They have not given me a reason not to trust them. One benefit of reading HN daily is I’d hope to see red flags posted on HN if b2 is having problems. Maybe I’ll consider having an alternative. I also don’t want my data floating across multiple vendors even if encrypted.
Clear "Correlation does not imply causation" case. The fact that people stayed more time at home implied they consumed more of everything online and accelerated digital services adoption making companies related with digital services sell more, plus less expenses (no travel, less expenses in facilities) made higher profits. Remote work correlating with Higher profits is a correlation not a cause afaik.
Many assumptions in your statement. You probably can't evaluate your productivity by yourself and record profits come at specific context, specific time and based on a historic inertia and multi-year strategy.
This is not about fighting any tyranny, this is about running companies, and the same way there are costs associated to work in an office for you, there are costs associated with employees working remotely (and not only economic), but you don't see them.
I can, because I go into office twice a week now. The days I am least productive are the ones I go in, because I lose more than the two hours of door to door commute every day. It is the fact that I lose my most productive hours of the day in waking up, getting ready, fixing a breakfast, getting myself to the office and having to small talk with people before FINALLY I can work.
Then you are accepting that what drags your productivity down is commuting, not actually working from an office. Remote working may be a solution to your problem but comes with associated costs you may be not counting (misunderstandings, wrong team member mental models, alignment calls, longer on boarding times, suboptimal knowledge sharing, less serendipity/synergies in general). Another solution to your commuting problem is find a job that is closer to your place
I agree. However I still support work from home because it’s not up to me as an employee to fight for something that benefits the company at my own expense.
Commuting, finding an apartment closer to work, living in a place that you dislike, buying lunch or making it in advance, and a whole mess of other things are expenses that fall directly on an employee.
On the other hand suboptimal knowledge sharing, misunderstandings, less serendipity, etc. are not only hard to measure but are strictly of benefit to the employer.
If WFM means slightly less productivity per dollar spent in exchange for employee happiness , then so be it. The company can absorb the expense just like it does when it pays for on site cafeterias, overtime, and bonuses or extra vacation to mitigate burnout.
I'm confused how any of those downsides are resolved coming into work? All of those things are just as liable to happen in person. To be honest meetings are a lot more to the point when done remotely. In person the first and last 10 minutes of a meeting are spent just pissing away the time on whatever, the presenters dog did something funny this morning perhaps. If you are having issues with onboarding team members or getting everyone on the same page, just have them meet more often over zoom to discuss projects. Having them come into the office comes with this assumption that people will meet up and help eachother and be productive etc, but in my experience most office chitchat is not relevant to work at all.
Productivity is hard to mature, and the more senior someone is, the more their job involves communication vs production. Communication in person is different, so while companies can be remote, and that can work well, the prices sometimes paid are subtle and hard to see/measure.
It’s fairly easy for most people to compare their own productivity before and after working from home. Mine is significantly greater. The number of hours I’ve spent working has drastically increased due to losing my 2 hour commute, and the focus I’ve been able to achieve at home is like nothing I’ve ever seen at an office.
Personal productivity isn't the same as organizational productivity. This is one of the key things at the heart of the WFH discussion. It's entirely possible that you personally wrote more lines of code, but the team still fell behind in products shipped. This could be due to many different factors. One easily identifiable one is that while good employees might be more productive WFH, poor performers are even more poor when WFH, and it becomes much more difficult to actively manage/coach/mentor poor performers when they are remote.
There's many more metrics too, like attrition, or poor onboarding experience for new hires, or inability to coordinate across teams (sure you're producing more personal output, but is it the right output?)
Organizations are more than individuals working in isolation. They're coordinated masses of people that have to work together, and what is best for one person's personal productivity may not be best for the organization's overall productivity.
Communication is great for organizations, but I don't understand what you are getting in person that you don't get over zoom talking about whatever you need to talk about. It's not like the entire org is talking to eachother at once in person. At best you talk to like a handful of people a day, probably a good amount of that talk has nothing to do with work. Meanwhile with zoom I've been having so many more directed meetings with key people. Like before, we would sit in this in person meeting and say something like "it would be nice to get Steve's input on this, if he were here in this meeting" and now with zoom we can actually get steve in the meeting. We meet with people from around the world who might have relevant input.
If your issue with wfh is team isolation, just have more meetings and get better at communicating. The issue is not the venue, its the event.
> You probably can't evaluate your productivity by yourself
I’m going to go out on a bit of a limb here, and say if you can’t evaluate your own productivity, you aren’t trying.
If you are running any kind of scrum, or you are tracking estimates on tickets, you can create a velocity for yourself. You can track that velocity over time - weeks, months, years.
You can track the velocity of your peers, or at least your entire team and compare your velocity to that.
You can look at how many features you implement.
You can look at how many code reviews you do and compare that against how many code reviews your peers are doing.
And finally, you can calibrate your own measurements against your bosses feedback on your performance.
There’s a lot of data to be tracked, and so I really do believe that if you don’t know your own productivity in relation to your past productivity, or to your peers productivity, it’s because you are not collecting the data, not because there’s no data to collect.
Many assumptions in your statement: people are fully capable with self evaluation of their own productivity and companies aren’t bringing people back because of some cost associated with remote work. Apple, in this case, is making people come back to justify their super expensive and ridiculous new campus.
