This is a false dichotomy. There is value in the normal social interactions of a workplace even if they don't become lifetime friends. Seeing people during the day, small talk, having relationships come and go - these are healthy and enjoyable things even if they never get deeper.
> There is value in the normal social interactions of a workplace even if they don't become lifetime friends. Seeing people during the day, small talk, having relationships come and go - these are healthy and enjoyable things even if they never get deeper.
Definitely true, but it's a completely different kind of value than what you get from a stable circle of friends outside work. If you have the latter sorted out, than the former is a great addition because overcoming challenges together and spending a ton of time together leads to bonding, if shallow, and I've had lots and lots of fun with my "work besties" especially early in my career. Plus, since most people do spend a lot of time at work, might as well make that as pleasant as possible, and being well-connected and well-liked never hurts.
But if your social network is just your colleagues, then this sort of thing becomes liability since in all likelihood you'll lose all of them, possibly quite abruptly, possibly even when you actually need support. A lot of workplace friendships tend to not outlast a common place of employment for long, if at all, so changing jobs means you'll also ditch your social circle, and having to start over again and again isn't fun after the third time or so, nor is discovering that some people become icy once they're sufficiently ahead in the rat race. Workplaces tend to be an environment well-suited for relatively shallow but fun connections, but quite badly suited for forming deep, long-lasting ones, and a healthy social life needs both.
Hence I second grandparent's advice to focus on building a stable social network outside work (possibly even from work friendships where there is a strong connection and a common hobby or the like, but that should happen outside the office and over non-work topics). It does get harder to make new connections later in life (at least I find it so); better not tie those that you manage to make to a workplace that may well try to foster and exploit this exact thing because it serves the interests of the business to have you depend on their office for social warmth.
That's also not necessarily tied to WFH or from an office; some people may find it easier to do this in a WFH setting, others will be very successful mining the office for actual friends to go hiking with on the weekend.
As grandparent, I would add that my advice is also in the context of the original comment. If you're going crazy and feeling locked in your apartment for 23 hours per day, then you definitely don't have a strong social support network. If your solution is to get an in-person job for social contact, that's a great first step... just make sure to take the subsequent steps to use those contacts to build a non-work social network so you have the support you really need.
Many of the comments/responses to me seem to be missing the original context. Yes, all friendships come and go. Yes, interaction isn't family and family isn't interaction. Yes, you can carry on friendships with people after you quit.
Everyone is saying true things. But as someone who has moved cross country to work at a startup, treated the startup as my social life, and then left that job... I was devastated by the number of people who I thought were close friends who basically didn't talk to me after I left the company. I learned that lesson in a really rough way at 26.
Now, I take my own advice, and when I meet people through work that I get along well with, I try to move that friendship outside of work so hopefully it has a chance to outlast the job and be an ongoing social connection. That also opens my network up to their friend network. It also gives me social support beyond someone to gripe about work with.
That's all I'm saying. When you have no friends or support, having daily interactions is good/necessary, but try to use that to solve the main problem: having no friends or support.
> If you're going crazy and feeling locked in your apartment for 23 hours per day, then you definitely don't have a strong social support network. If your solution is to get an in-person job for social contact, that's a great first step
Someone in a place like that should take whatever socializing they can get, because such a situation is dangerous in itself, loneliness kills and the lonelier one becomes, the harder it is to get back out, socializing is a muscle that wants exercise. Certainly not arguing against an office job and coworkers as a first step, just don't leave it at that, is what I'm saying (as are you)
> But if your social network is just your colleagues, then this sort of thing becomes liability since in all likelihood you'll lose all of them, possibly quite abruptly, possibly even when you actually need support.
Yep. Moved for a job, only real social circle that "stuck" there was coworkers. When people started leaving and the company started to fall apart, my "social circle" fell to bits.
A lot of friends have similar stories, and a lot of companies in tech try foster this environment where everyone in the office is a whole ecosystem of mates. Which makes you not really bother put the work in to make friends outside of work.
> But if your social network is just your colleagues,
I found this to be especially true in academia ... I spent about 10 years at the same university in different groups and have not kept many of the friends I made along the way.
This goes both ways, I spend a lot of that time in one group and got to see several "generations" of students and colleagues come an go ... After a while you just stop trying to have deep connections because most are there only temporarily.
(Also at some point students just become to young to befriend :-) )
I think you’re both right, just don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Sure having office “friends” or social interactions at the office is a good thing but just make sure those aren’t your only social contacts.
Zooom2 allows for moving/resizing of background windows. Last I checked, BetterTouchTool window manipulation required clicking the window which brings it to the front.
The problem is that this then becomes a cache invalidation problem. Many of the examples presented will be outdated in 1 year, and completely wrong in 5. How can you know which answers need to turnover and when?
> It is almost certain that if someone is smart enough to build a search engine while living off of ramen, they also know more about what Google is capable of.
I'm not sure this is a given. Tons of brilliant developers (myself included) build complex products without having ever considered the market, or just assuming that users will come out of the woodwork if it's technically awesome enough.
Seems to me that if a founder doesn't have immediate answers to some of these "existential questions", that's a red flag right there.
Yeah the premise is clearly untrue. People build useless stuff all the time. If you're going to build something without having answers to these questions you need to be honest with yourself that you're doing it for fun, and for many that moment will not come unless they are challenged on it.
Not true. If it were based on cost of living, then Google would pay more for you to work from Hawaii than from Alabama. (Spoilers: it doesn't, they're both in the same salary band.)
It's slightly more true that it's based on the local cost of labor, but even more so that it's just based on the state, with carveouts for MSAs (which are defined based on county) surrounding certain offices commanding higher salaries.
You'd make just as much working remotely in Matamoras, PA as you would working out of the NYC office in Manhattan.
You would think that Mountain View based Google, being registered as a Delaware Corp, would understand the benefits of legal residence being different than practical residence.
And it's not fraud for an employer to arbitrarily control pay based on someones location? Is their revenue similarly confined by that employees contributions because of location?
If company can pick arbitrary locations around the world to be their HQ, or Trump can use Mar-a-Lago as his residence, then so too can every other citizen following the law and paying their taxes.
One is legal the other isn't.... This isn't hard you would be committing fraud no questions. Also depending on how you've lied you'd also be on the hook for tax issues to the government rather then just and issue with your company.
For criminal fraud to happen, there has to be a defrauded party. If I follow my local tax laws and negotiate a better salary with a corporation based on Location A, while potentially living elsewhere at Location B/C/D for prolong periods of time with lower costs of living, that is not fraud.
Getting the company to enter into a contract under false pretenses is fraud. "intent to deceive" is alone enough. This isn't some kind of gotcha where your technically ok if you do X and Y. Intent matters!
Two parties entered a contract with the understand you would live in location A if you don't that's fraud objectively.
No, it's not tax fraud. Tax is between you and the government, not you and your employer. The U.S. even allows you to ask your employer not to deduct tax so you can deal with it personally.
If you follow whatever local and state laws apply to your situation, you're perfectly in your right.
I didn't bring up taxes, I'm just responding to it.
The topic is whether a global corporation with access to a global workforce should be allowed arbitrary salary negation privileges because of the circumstances of a candidates geographical circumstances, while robbing the candidate of the same privilege.
Just sounds like another way to exploit labor at a time of record profit windfalls for corporations.
A dev in Mountain View has many more high-paying opportunities than the same guy in Weed, CA (pop. 2,862). Google pays him more because that’s what it takes to retain him.
Someday if most employers switch to remote-first, this won’t matter and salaries will be equal everywhere (a lot lower than we’ve seen in tight labor markets, and probably the first world in general).
People do that with car insurance and jobs with residency requirements.
I used to drink with a bunch of fireman who lived about 300 miles away - they had to live in the city or adjacent county. They’d have a flophouse in the hood shared by like 20 guys and crash there once in awhile when they pulled overtime as well as get mail.
Travel scams are similar too. If a company will reimburse travel if you’re 50 miles from home, people will “move” so they can bill the mileage tolls.
It works great until it doesn’t. If you want to give up your cushy Google gig for a few thousand bucks, good luck.
Well for starters you're gonna have all applicable state and local taxes withheld from wherever you're fraudulently claiming to be living, as that is going to be where you are ACTUALLY living as far as all relevant taxation authorities are concerned.
I think a more non-fraud tactic would be to find the cheapest area in a high cost of living area and minmax on that dimension. Especially if it’s by county, then there are likely unfavorable areas within that county.
But if there is anywhere in the county that has escaped full IT gentrification because of poor commuter access, those prices are going to explode if they haven't already. Since median house price is a huge fraction of CoL calculations (and a frequent complaint among some economists), staying in county gets you a raise, if your friends do it too.
Yeah, last time I looked at rents in my hometown, the cheapest options there were comparable to the cheapest options in San Francisco. They're probably a bit ahead of the curve; most the empty land around is either federal or LADWP, so there's limited room for new development, but it's a major shot up from pre-pandemic prices where renting a full house was cheaper than an SF bedroom.
Not at Google. When you go remote you're paid based the same as if you were onsite at the nearest office to your residence, limits are roughly CSA (combined statistical area) in the US—not cost of living.
I wrote and maintain Lacona, a Mac productivity App (https://lacona.app). The majority of my revenue comes from being a part of the Setapp subscription service.
It would work fine as long as everyone consuming the shopping list has a reasonable idea what normal things your shopping lists. Things like "kili sike loje" (red round fruit) are ambiguous but are no doubt close enough to jog your memory enough to work.
The toughest part that comes to mind would be particular spices. You would probably need to start borrowing words to distinguish between things like thyme and rosemary ("namako Tin", "namako Loseli")
One key characteristic of natural languages is that when they don't work, people invent and share new words.
kili sike loje isn't enough to distinguish cherries from cherry tomatoes, red grapes, cranberries, red currants, red plums or red apples -- every one of which is a perfectly reasonable thing for me to put on a shopping list.
And so you'll note that we have the words tomato, grape, cranberry, currant, plum and apple.
Now, French has a language academy to decree what is proper, and English --
"We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." -- James Davis Nicoll
A language which isn't useful will either change or be abandoned. Natural languages almost always change.
Languages often invent terms by combining existing words, though, and then some combinations become standard. Indeed, your own list has "red grapes" and "red currants"! For some other prominent examples, consider "pineapple" or "pomodoro" ("pomi d'oro").
I think they do have the same feature, despite being different services. In fact, I believe that the call screen service is offered even on any Pixel phone, regardless of carrier (Google Fi).
