How would you force someone to take time off?

If I was their boss I would say something like “you’re job is to stay home and do anything besides work for the next week, you will still be paid for this time”. Easy.

As for the on-call stuff. Yes, that’s the point. It should be unsustainable for a company to continually rely on their daytime programmers for frequent on-call alert handling.

If off-hours issues happen often, the company can hire an additional team to handle off-hours issues. If off-hours issues are rare, then you can depend on your daytime programmers to handle the rare off-hours issue, and know that they will be fairly compensated for being woken up in the middle of the night.

I’ve been at too many companies where an off-hours alert wakes up a developer in the middle of the night and the next day the consensus is “that’s not good, but we’ll have to fix the underlying issue after we finish implementing the new UI the design team is excited about”. It’s not right for a developer to get woken up in the middle of the night, and then the company puts fixing that on the backburner.

I’ll say it again. It’s about aligning incentives. When things that are painful for the worker are also painful for the company, that is alignment. Unfortunately, most companies have the opposite of alignment, if a developer gets woken in the middle of the night the end result for the company is that they got some additional free labor, that’s pain for the worker, reward for the company; that’s wrong.

When I think of a tech worker union my thoughts first go to standardizing everyone’s pay and limiting what I can earn myself. I’ve probably fallen to anti-union propaganda.

A tech worker union that says nothing about pay could still do so much.

A union could ensure that the company’s incentives are aligned with worker’s incentives around things like on-call.

I’d love a union that forced a company to give all on-call workers compensation. Something like:

1. If you’re woken up in the middle of the night, you automatically get 8 hours comp time (time off), plus 2x the time you spend on-call during off hours.
2. Accrued comp time over 20 hours must be payed at 10x normal pay if the employee leaves the company for any reason. The idea here isn’t for employees to accrue comp time, but to give the company a strong incentive to ensure employees use their comp time.

Basically, if a company is having lots of on-call alerts, or the company is preventing employees from using their comp time, you want this to be directly painful to the company. Incentives should be aligned, what is painful for the worker should be painful for the company.

Or, regarding “unlimited PTO”. I’d love to see a union force companies to:

1. “Unlimited PTO” policies are fine, but they must have a guaranteed minimum amount of PTO specified in writing. So none of this “yeah, we heave ‘unlimited PTO’; oh, we’re really busy this quarter, so can you wait to take PTO until next quarter?”.

Tech workers have it good compared to a lot of workers, but there are still plenty of abuses a union could help with, even if the union never even mentions pay.

What is the game? It’s not being a shill to answer questions.

This is how companies that don’t have competition act. This is how most companies act. We need more anti-trust enforcement.

There was a time I wanted a Tesla, but I don’t anymore. This is just another reason why.

Does Tesla care about making a “neat thing” or do they care about making “a car that can drive me places”. The doors clearly show they prioritize making a “neat thing”, but I want a reliable car.

Opening and closing doors was a solved problem. Somehow Tesla made it worse.

🎵 Don’t wanna close my eyes 🎵

Google doesn’t index Discord, which means the billion dollar ad industry makes little effort to push their ads on Discord.

It’s like if a bunch of people were gathered in person talking about something, with many of the same pros and cons.

I was thinking about why a small landlord might be better, and I know there are exceptions, but usually a small landlord is is not going to squeeze every penny out of their rentals, sometimes out of the goodness of their heart, but most importantly, a small landlord has other ways to be productive.

A small landlord who has a normal job, if they want to improve the world, they do it through their job or personal projects, they build something or create something or whatever.

A big landlord who does nothing else, they aren’t actually creating anything, they’re just rent seeking and the most creative way they can imagine to improve the world is to rent seek even harder.

Our economic system gives greater rewards to those who move money around than to those who create things or cure cancer or anything else. The ways of turning a lot of money into even more money are taxed less (usually not at all) than more common ways of earning money like working a job or creating physical goods. The richest people didn’t get rich by creating something that improves everyone’s lives, they got rich by moving money around.

Yep, can I play it at 2x speed or skip ahead? If not, then it’s the ad. At the very least blank the video and mute the sound. I’ll enjoy a moment to breath and consider if there’s something better I should be doing.

Surely the free market and competition will deliver what customers want, right? … Right?!?

The market is filled with products people hate.

Explain to me again how free markets and competition are supposed to work?

It helps make things more self-contained. If a Linux distribution comes with an LLM that knows how to use and tweak the OS and also knows a lot about various programming languages and lots of things in general, that’s a big step towards having an OS that can be operated locally without using the internet.

I wouldn’t like it if Linux required an internet connection to function, and yet… I’ve never been able to configure or do much of anything in Linux without referring to the internet.

It’s no different than what the internet has been doing for us for decades. People tell us commands to run, we use our best judgement, maybe check a couple things, and then run the commands. If the internet suggests a command or a LLM suggests a command, what’s the difference?

Maybe.

Like, if I could type “extract the audio of this video and re-encode it as a medium quality MP3, break up the audio into 30 consecutive tracks” in a shell, and the next line was populated with the appropriate ffmpeg command, but not yet executed, I could quickly look over the command, nothing looks fishy, so I go ahead and run the command.

LLMs have a high coolness-to-code ratio; very cool and not a lot of code. This is the type of thing open source developers are more interested in, so I hope Linux will have some good AI built-in and running locally.

Half of Linux usage is on the text-based command line anyway, just what LLMs are good at.

We often make laws without a way to enforce them 100% effectively. For example, my road has a 25 MPH speed limit even though we haven’t yet installed speed limiting chips on every single car in the nation, we still went ahead and put a speed limit on our road though, and it mostly works, but sometimes someone drives 30 MPH.

It seems the people who are the most staunch defenders of capitalism and free markets are the most resistant to the capitalist and free market solution.

Clean air (or rather, air with normal levels of carbon) belongs to the public, and anyone who wants to take it away should pay the public.

Senior developer here, it looks like they are helping to me.

They are doing extra work to change the product in ways that customers don’t want.

Can someone explain to me again how “free markets” and “competition” are supposed to work?