Sounds like a great reason to unionize.
And Nothing is going to fire you if you don’t find a creative way to meet their bullshit attendance metrics.
I love being treated like a gradeschooler. Really boosts my morale, especially with nearly two fucking decades of experience and being on the wrong side of 35.
Stop bothering me and let me do my fucking job, for christ’s sake.
Edit: all that said, the company name does make for an amusing headline
This is an interesting approach from the CEO, in that it demonstrates why unions are mandatory.
I’d meet those rules out of spite, and do a really crappy job while there. They’d essentially be forced to fire me, and I’d consider suing for wrongful termination in not providing a suitable work environment for me to do my job (evidence is my productivity before and after being forced back to the office).
I’ve just right now noticed that they are talking about the company…
This just means they’re a struggling company who needs to cut headcount and want to do it without paying severance
It’s such bullshit too because drastically changing someone’s working conditions is clearly a constructive dismissal and should lead to severance payments.
Considering this company was founded as a remote work company from the beginning, you’re absolutely right.
In addition, this tactic will result in the best employees leaving first, because they’ll get employed somewhere else.
Cue the pivot to some ridiculous buzz tech like AI in the near future, then being acquired and promptly abandoned by some big corp.
The thing with AI is, what the term today refers to most often is neural networks, which are really advanced statistics. And the thing is, to get more precise statistics, you need exponentially more data. And of course the marginal utility decays exponentially. So exponentially increasing marginal expenses meet exponentially decaying marginal utility.
Friend, your brain is also just a neural network. “Advanced statistics” are happening in your head every second. There is nothing exceptional about humans, save for the immense complexity of our neural network.
Just to be clear, I am in love with statistics and especially generative algos, and have written papers on it before ChatGPT was a thing.
I just hate that one company made a chatbot with it and now the whole world is cargo culting around it.
AI is a very broad term that also includes expert systems (such as Computational Fluid Dynamics, Finite Element Analysis, etc approaches.). Traditional machine learning approaches (like support vector machines, etc.) too. But yes, I agree—most commonly associated with deep learning/neural network approaches.
That said, it’s misleading and inaccurate to state that neural networks are just statistics. In fact they are substantially more than just advanced statistics. Certainly statistics is a component—but so too is probability, calculus, network/graph theory, linear algebra, not to mention computer science to program, tune, and train and infer them. Information theory (hello, entropy) plays a part sometimes.
The amount of mathematical background it takes to really understand and practice the theory of both a forward pass and backpropagation is an entire undergraduate STEM curriculum’s worth. I usually advocate for new engineers in my org to learn it top down (by doing) and pull the theory as needed, but that’s not how I did it and I regularly see gaps in their decisions because of it.
And to get actually good at it? One does not simply become a AI systems engineer/technologist. It’s years of tinkering with computers and operating systems, sourcing/scraping/querying/curating data, building data pipelines, cleaning data, engineering types of modeling approaches for various data types and desired outcomes against constraints (data, compute, economic, social/political), implementing POCs, finetuning models, mastering accelerated computing (aka GPUs, TPUs), distributed computation—and many others I’m sure I’m forgetting some here. The number of adjacent fields I’ve had to deeply scratch on to make any of this happen is stressful just thinking about it.
They’re fascinating machines, and they’ve been democratized/abstracted to an extent where it’s now as simple as import torch, torch.fit, model.predict. But to be dismissive of the amazing mathematics and engineering under the hood to make them actually usable is disingenuous.
I admit I have a bias here—I’ve spent the majority of my career building and deploying NN models.
That said, it’s misleading and inaccurate to state that neural networks are just statistics. In fact they are substantially more than just advanced statistics. Certainly statistics is a component—but so too is probability, calculus, network/graph theory, linear algebra, not to mention computer science to program, tune, and train and infer them. Information theory (hello, entropy) plays a part sometimes.
What I meant when I said that they are advanced statistics is that that is what they do. I know that a lot of disciplines play a part in creating them. I know it’s incredible complicated, it took me quite a while to wrap my head around what the back-propagation algorithm.
I also know that neural networks can do some really cool stuff. Recognizing tumors, for example. But it’s equally dangerous to overestimate them, so we have to be aware of their limitations.
Edit: All that being said, I do recognize that you have spent much more time learning about and working with neural networks than I have.
First devouring all of Fantasia, now this.
Hahaha
He is not wrong tho… it’s the company interest vs employee interest. And I must say, as someone who works 100% remotely, sometimes I do wish we are all again at the office. It was so easier to know whats happening around you on the fly, instead of spending half a day in your calendar making or taking meetings.
So you can spending half of the day you save to travel to and from work…smart
In comparison to the non-existing work-life balance in most remote positions where you are basically available 0-24? No thanks. I’d rather travel, the 20min in the morning is perfect to “wake up fully” and in the afternoon to decompress while getting home.
Pfft, I work remote and I only work 8 to 5. Don’t let people boss you around
Nobody bosses me around, I just work until I’m done, and I don’t need to manage my time, because I have all the time in the world working from home. Also, it feels like being in home prison, never seeing anyone you work with. Have the feeling some people exist only on computer screens.
I understand the benefits of working from home, but meeting other people in the office is what made it human to begin with. I miss chatting with people while getting coffee about non-work related stuff. I knew what was going on without needing a meeting or briefing. I could just work in the office on things I needed to work - which made it so I could go home earlier. Now I am just at home all the time, wasting my time in meetings. Idk, I wish it would work for me, but it just doesn’t. I need the social aspect of the office.
Oh yeah, how I miss my co-workers have super sexist and racist conversations in the break-room /s
“this is a company for adults” says the CEO of a company who slaps “Glyph” lights on knockoff iPhones and calls it innovative. I hate when I see Carl Pei’s smug face pop up every few months. Hey Carl - put a fucking charger in the box. OnePlus is thriving without you.
I won’t buy anything that isn’t stock Android. Sick of never being able to find anything.
No devices have “stock Android” though. Even the Pixel is a customized version of Android. Vanilla AOSP doesn’t even have a usable phone dialer included with it.
Not sure what you’re saying… ru referencing Nothing OS, or Oxygen… or…?
Anything that isn’t a Pixel, pretty much. Every single manufacturer seems to think it’s their duty to replace all the settings screens with their own custom bullshit.
This is called a silent layoff
uhhhh…
anyone else totally misinterpret the lede to mean “there’s no reason to go to work at an office” lol?
Yep. Pretty sure the editor knew what they were doing 🙂
It’s like god damn Odysseus and Polyphemus up in here.
Definite “Friday was the name of his horse!” energy here.
Open plan offices fucken suck.
Noise, constant distractions, and that one arsehole who never covers their mouth when they sneeze, sending a wave of infectious germs rolling out across the office floor.
I’m in an open floor plan with cubicles. There is one asshole who has an office, he insists on having loud conversations, with his door open, on mother fucking speakerphone through his tinny laptop speakers. I’ve resorted to a white noise playlist on Spotify. He’s a client, so not cool telling him to fuck off.
God I remember how the flu used to just rip through the office come wintertime… Since switching to remote work, I think I’ve taken 1 sick day this year.
I have a hypothesis that anyone who is required to be on site without having to do a hands-on thing (e.g. physical maintenance or repair) is actually a garden hermit, that is, hired to perform as an extra for the pleasure of viewing upper management.
I also have a hypothesis that a lot of company budget and material goes towards handling and pacifying upper management (e.g. the way a binky pacifies an infant) since they are accustomed to being coddled and not accustomed to actually managing.
To be fair, I’ve only been able to observe the relationships between clerical class and management class in a handful of companies, including a small one-store CD-Rom reseller and Bechtel Corporation circa 1990, but my observations have been consistent between them.
I have a hypothesis that anyone who is required to be on site without having to do a hands-on thing (e.g. physical maintenance or repair) is actually a garden hermit, that is, hired to perform as an extra for the pleasure of viewing upper management.
They’re Type 1 Bullshit Jobs, aka “Flunkies”
Flunky jobs primarily exist to make someone else look or feel important. Throughout recorded history, rich and powerful people would surround themselves with servants, clients, sycophants, and minions of one sort or another.
This sounds about right to me.
I wanna see them pay for office hours AND commute hours. In a big city you easily have 1+ hour a day irrevocably lost to commuting.
Companies don’t even have to pay people for the time spent going through their own required security checks… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrity_Staffing_Solutions,_Inc._v._Busk
So glad I live in California. A faulty security gate once prevented me from leaving my job on time. Which pushed me past 12 hours on shift, which automatically meant I was earning twice my hourly wage while I waited. Plus it required a mandatory additional meal break, which I couldn’t take. Since I couldn’t take it, I was automatically given an additional full hour’s wage, as required by state law.
I’m glad I don’t work for a company that forces me to go through a security gate, and I’m glad we don’t track hours. I get paid salary, and I rarely work more than 8 hours in a given day, and my average hours worked per week is usually under 40.
It’s nice you had some protections, but those protections really shouldn’t be necessary.
You’re lucky. Many people on salary end up working overtime with no pay increase.
Once again, there are good managers & (far too frequently) bad (Elon loving cockwomble) managers
Being salaried doesn’t remove you from those protections, at least in Europe. You get overtime, which is either 1.5x pay or you accumulate PTO.
In the US most salaried positions are not eligible for overtime. Unfortunately, California has yet to close that loophole.
The next job above me is salaried. If I were to get a promotion, I’d be making about 2/3 of my current income because I would lose all of the hourly protections I have. Despite a higher base pay.
Scumbags all.
If I’m reading that right, the decision was reversed by the 9th circuit.
The District Court originally dismissed the case, ruling that the security checks were made after the regular work shift and therefore not “an integral and indispensable part” of the job. The Ninth Circuit disagreed, ruling that the checks were necessary to the principal work of the job.[2][3]
The US Supreme Court then reversed the Ninth Circuit ruling. You’re quoting the background that gives context to the case in the lixned article.
Wow. Now I don’t want to go to the US even harder than before.
Excuse for layoff. What I hear from the article is a CEO, who himself is not a grown up, crying me, me, me, my company, my profit, selfish behavior without any concern for his employees who have largely contributed to his startup success.
Humans have a “me” problem in general. The secret is not to create conditions for it to manifest itself.
Anti-monopoly laws, unions, distribution of power, openness, readiness to break nonsense laws, stubbornness in defending important laws, understanding of common sense both in following and in breaking the law, and the same that applies to laws applies to any moral principles.
You know, consciousness of good and evil, wisdom of all the enormous amount of good literature available for anyone able to read in English and other most spoken languages.
Just being human and understanding that no device of human making can “solve” human nature.
I’d say Tolkien and Lewis on the fantasy side, Heinlein and Asimov and Simak on the sci-fi side, and Lem in between them. Some Jules Verne and Sabatini would be good too. I have a reflex to Russian classics due to having been force-fed them in childhood, but there are things worth learning. And Lucian of Samosata.
Carpe diem, memento mori, astra inclinant sed non obligant. OK, I think my head needs a reboot.
When it comes to addressing the “me” problem, Buddha has to be on the list of people with advice worth checking out. Ego issues may run deep, but modern capitalism encourages and nurtures the worst of them. A lot of what we face today isn’t due to any unchangeable human nature, but capitalists will try to persuade us it is, because that undermines our will to grow past the system that serves them.
This is disappointing to see - especially since I like a few of their products.
I’m not sure how it is in London, but there’s a strong government push to get people to go back to office (the city). Since politics is every politicians side hustle, and a lot of them own commercial real estate that’s been tanking post pandemic, I feel like they are forcing companies to bring people back to re-inflate the real estate value.
Since companies can’t outright say it’s the government, they have to come up with excuses.
The worst part is I don’t know what’s worse: if I’m wrong or if I’m right :(
Except for manager-level peeps who crave the power and control that comes from dictating how people live their lives under them
Chaff
