This. In office-heavy companies, the "remote guy" is one people talk about in every performance review. "They are remote, are they delivering enough value?"
With all the bad news we've been hearing in the past year, how are fully remote, or remote-first companies doing? Are there many jobs available?
I can’t find the article now. But I saw a citation that in office work is back to pre pandemic levels.
> With all the bad news we've been hearing in the past year, how are fully remote, or remote-first companies doing? Are there many jobs available?
In my experience looking for remote regular old senior enterprise Dev jobs with AWS experience last year and the year before is that every open req gets hundreds of applications (LinkedIn “Easy Apply” shows you) and I heard crickets from submitting hundreds of resumes. I had 10 years on my resume of relevant experience and I had just come off of a three+ year stint working at AWS Professional Services (full time direct hire).
In 2023, I did get two offers relatively quickly via my network and another offer by doing targeted outreach to a company based on a niche AWS service that they were looking for experience in.
In 2024, same thing, I was laid off and the day before, an internal recruiter at my current job reached out to me. While I was going through the interview process with them, I kept submitting resumes for regular old enterprise dev jobs and heard crickets again.
I did get the job I interviewed for. It is as close to a dream job as I can imagine.
For context: both times I was looking for full time strategic AWS consulting jobs specializing in app dev. The enterprise dev jobs were my plan B and what I did before mid 2020.
I joined MSFT ~25 years ago and worked there for 10 years. It was a great place to work. Everybody (in Redmond) had their offices, great outdoor areas for walking and meeting people, great conference areas, decent and relatively affordable places to live nearby (some within walking distance), some of the best Engineers in the world etc. I don't think there is a company life like MSFT used to have anywhere on Earth nowadays. :(
There are some small Mexican restaurants like that here in the US. I often eat lunch at a small nearby Mexican restaurant and pay around $8 for my meal.
If we could manage the country using HN experts, we'd be incredibly prosperous. People here know so much more than the actual professionals in the government.
Only a few people pointed out the obvious. Trump aims to bring everyone to table to renegotiate global commerce. Every country's economic strategy today is to have positive trade with the US and that is unsustainable.
A risky tactic, but refreshing after decades of the old tired policies that brought us the collapse of parts of US manufacturing and so much pain during COVID due to a complete dependence on foreign suppliers for... Well, everything.
I don't know if this will work. But I know what we had before wasn't working. We'll see.
This is the most mind-blowing thing to me: a bunch of multi-hundred-billionaries all standing beside a billionaire that shits in a gold toilet and is in charge of the richest country on Earth angrily proclaiming that "Everyone is taking advantage of us!"
> Trump aims to bring everyone to table to renegotiate global commerce.
Throwing the gauntlet in the dirt isn't how you achieve this type of diplomacy, as the world will just form new economical alliances with more predictable trade partners instead of wasting time trying to appease Donald Trump.
> A risky tactic, but refreshing after decades of the old tired policies that brought us the collapse of parts of US manufacturing and so much pain during COVID due to a complete dependence on foreign suppliers for... Well, everything.
By "policies" do you mean US corporations trying to make as much profit as possible by moving manufacturing to cheaper countries?
The result of tariffs, even if manufacturing for some products moves back to the US, will be higher prices for consumers even in the long run as you cannot produce things as cheaply as other countries. In a country where wages have not kept up with inflation the economic pain will keep mounting.
> I don't know if this will work. But I know what we had before wasn't working. We'll see.
Coupled with:
> People here know so much more than the actual professionals in the government.
Is funny to read; If you had those actual professionals in the government, they would be able to show you some serious predictions about how these moves will improve the economy and when you can expect the "golden age" to show up.
Hot take: workplace and social media April Fools jokes aren't funny and are often inappropriate and disrespectful to people's time.
It's cool to do these to your friends in High school, but I once wasted a good amount of time at work because of an April's fool joke. I already didn't want to do the work so I got really upset to have wasted time doing something boring and useless.
Additionally, the scale of social media can create situations where it wastes everybody's time several times per day... Including on HN.
Feel free to prank your friends, but don't bring it to work or the Internet, please.
All jobs I have ever worked have collectively wasted more man hours through incompetence and the usual corporate BS than I could ever hope to with any conceivable April fools joke.
The deal is they pay you a fair amount of money to put up with that. Whereas people such as the gentlemen in the article are causing people stress for no reason and with no compensation - and barely even an acknowledgement of misbehaviour.
There are worse crimes in the world, but it is bad.
> There are worse crimes in the world, but it is bad
Bollocks, and bollocks to the parent hot take. Any moral framework that forbids fun, whether it's because it offends God or "causes people (a tiny bit of) stress", is repugnant to me
There is an irony that you're adjudicating away other people's stress while holding up your own opinions and feelings of repugnance as evidence of a problem.
The reality of professional standards is we can't control what people feel or happens to them but we sure can put a good faith effort in to try and make the experience as neutral as possible. This April fools prank breached that standard in an unpleasant way. I hope there wasn't a student tired and on edge trying to meet a deadline. It'd feel awful to think the print system was out, spend a morning running around and then learn that some IT bloke was abusing his power out of a misplaced sense fun. It isn't a serious offence but it is bad behaviour.
> The reality of professional standards is we can't control what people feel or happens to them but we sure can put a good faith effort in to try and make the experience as neutral as possible.
You should use some Microsoft or Google products. They "sure can put a good faith effort in to try and make the experience as" crappy and masochistic as possible, while siphoning all your data.
And yes, avoid people without humor, especially the serious types.
It's not the offense, it's the wasted time and money. Think of one of those meeting timers that counts in dollars instead of minutes. Now apply that to all the time spent by random people calling the main office, and by the main office fielding all those calls. It's one thing to cost your employer thousands of dollars because you made a mistake (I'm sure we've all been there), and quite another to cost your employer thousands of dollars with a prank.
You can't even make the (quite bad) defense that people should have known better and it's their own fault for falling for it. The message was 100% plausible.
> It's not the offense, it's the wasted time and money. Think of one of those meeting timers that counts in dollars instead of minutes.
Yes, think about it.
Captcha, (Windows) updates, crappy UIs updated every couple of months, new features instead of bug fixing.
_That_ is wasted time and money.
Not every second of working time has the same level of productivity/value. Having a clock that measures time in dollars makes no sense because it assumes some linear relationship between them.
No, it assumes some linear relationship between pay and time. Which is a little iffy for salaried workers, but only a little.
My employer gets about 40 hours/week of "work" from me, whatever that might consist of. I cost them $X every two weeks in pay and benefits. It's pretty reasonable to say my attendance in a one-hour meeting has a $X/80 cost to my employer.
You don't need to overcomplicate this. The employment relationship is pretty simple at its foundation: the employer buys the time of its employees.
There is a very linear relationship between time and money for the one who pays the employees though.
Nobody says “you know boss, that two hour meeting today was a total waste of time, please deduct two hours worth of my salary from my paycheck”. So the company quite literally pays for everyone’s time who was at the meeting. And that is a function of who is present and how long the meeting goes. It is very much not a function of productivity/value.
And the point of having a, more often rethorical than real, taximeter showing the cost of the meeting puts this into perspective. The more people you invite the more the meeting costs. The longer it goes the more it costs. The goal is not to abolish all meetings, but to make people think if the bang to buck ratio of the meeting is right. To instill a culture where people prepare for meetings, they have concrete questions or decision outcomes they are looking for, and to criticaly think about the length of the meeting and right-size the invite list.
“Corporate efficiency” is vague and largely meaningless. “Don’t waste a bunch of your coworkers’ time” is a lot more concrete. Especially don’t set up the people who answer the phones to get angry calls due to your prank.
Haha, the times they are a changing. I still remember c't april fools joke from the 90s where they published a scencil (template) to indicate where you have to drill a hole into your pentium CPU to be able to overclock it. I still chuckle about the whole thing almost 30 years after the fact, still wondering how many morons actually destroyed their perfectly working CPU back then. At times, active thinking of your peers just needs to be challenged so they don't get too confident...
This reminds me of the joke videos where you could drill a hole into the iPhone to access the headphone jack or microwave it for wireless charging. I don't recall seeing any pictures of people actually doing those things though, just "angry" comments which were also probably jokes.
I probably wouldn't make it so absolute. But when I was doing some writing for CNET, there was invariably a warning leading up to April 1 that if you are considering an April Fool's joke in print, just don't.
Y’know, I’m inclined to agree here, but I don’t think it was always this way. Over the last few years I’ve been feeling really fatigued, I suppose, by April Fool’s Day, and I think feeling this way has coincided with the rise of fake everything on the web. Rather than one day a year where we get to be amused by pranks in good faith, we’re mentally on-guard every day trying to identify whether a story or (increasingly) an image is real or not. Rather than one day a year where you’ve got people sending you stuff like “ALIEN LABORATORY DISCOVERED UNDERNEATH PYRAMIDS” accompanied by obvious-to-you GenAI images, now it’s every day, and still not everyone is in on the joke (and a joke is the best-case scenario behind creator’s intent).
HP LaserJet 4s squarely date TFA’s prank in the early-mid 90s. I can agree with you that lame corporate April Fool’s Day jokes on the Internet are overdone; but 1990s-era campus sysadmin’ing ruled. Sysadmins kept a close eye on things to ensure no one (especially the servers) got hurt, but computer geeks were far from mainstream and a spirit of playful tolerance and taking-care-of-our-own prevailed. Well do I remember telneting to sendmail on port 25 and sending spoofed email to classmates…
The university-wide email was probably too much but displaying INSERT 5 CENTS on an HP LaserJet 4 for a day is great.
My take is that April fools jokes cross the line when they affect people you do not know. Put in other terms: if you can't deliver a direct and sincere apology, you're being a jerk.
I'm surprised this is being downvoted. Don't waste hours of other people's time for your fun.
Imagine being one of the people who had to field all of those phone calls. Probably quite a few of those callers were quite angry. Imagine being subject to that anger because some moron in IT you never met thought it would be funny to play a prank that lands on your head.
We have no right to tell people they have to learn to climb to get to top of the Everest.
I can't draw but I want to create my Art using AI. What I now see is a bunch of people who associate their self worth with a rare talent and don't want others to join the party. I want to resolve the issues around copyright for training, but once this is out of the way I want to draw exclusively through AI because it's the only way I can do it. And I LIKE IT.
I'm a skilled pianist. The funny thing is that I heard similar criticisms about computer music a couple decades ago. "No playing skill needed". Despite knowing how to play, I'd rather do computer music nowadays anyway. Please stop telling me what I can and can't do!
I'm not disagreeing with "let them do it", but the comparison with computer music isn't really fair.
Computer music, as it existed a couple decades ago, still played exactly what you asked it to, and it wasn't filling areas where you underspecified the music with a statistical model of trillions of existing songs. And that's the difference, for me: the ability to underspecify, and have the details be filled in and added in a way that to the audience will be perceived as intentful, but which is not.
Agreed - computer music compared to live music is what, say, Adobe Illustrator is to drawing. Or a Wacom drawing table, but definitely not prompting AI to draw for you.
Whether drawing (writing etc.) through AI counts as drawing (as making art) is a debate we have to resolve in the upcoming future.
It is possible to very critical of something without "not allowing people to do it".
Dismissing the argument that we are losing something in this "democratization of creativity" by fighting a strawman that says you are not allowed to participate instead is a bit lazy
>We have no right to tell people they have to learn to climb to get to top of the Everest.
My, my, you really took the worst example to defend your point. The Everest is now an overcrowded dumping ground full of cadavers, shit and trash, with idiots putting not only themselves but their sherpas and other mountaineers in danger due to their arrogance, lack of ability and shittiness.
>What I now see is a bunch of people who associate their self worth with a rare talent and don't want others to join the party.
What I see is a bunch of people creating digital doubles of existing artists without their consent and using it to make money.
I don't know where you hang out on Reddit but on my subs people are almost invariably hostile to AI. AI art, even stuff that looks great, gets down voted to oblivion.
If this is as good as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which appears to use a similar technique, it would be AWESOME. Hopefully they didn't sanitize the old cartoons.
Silvestri certainly had a style and some distinct instrumentation in the 80s (you'll also hear similarities in the Abyss and Predator). Sometimes I like to think of the alternate movie tracks as bonus tracks for Back to the Future. I should listen to them and Roger Rabbit again!
With all the bad news we've been hearing in the past year, how are fully remote, or remote-first companies doing? Are there many jobs available?
reply