Well written article full of humility and vulnerability? I love it. My reaction: you don't need to feel ashamed of not knowing something, there is far too much to know and I'm still learning new techniques and concepts 37 years in, so I would never judge you for it.
I would also not judge you for having your own preferences and opinions. I too prefer working in an office to remote work, but when I say this out loud other developers take it as advocating RTO or saying remote work is worse when it just doesn't suit my personality. I get that it's a touchy subject but there is no need to get up in my face about it.
You mention bullying and brigading and that seems to be an unfortunate reality of this industry. I suspect there is a lot of insecurity and imposter syndrome that causes people to write hyper-confident blog posts about why they are better without AI and how their tests have 100% coverage and how (unfashionable language which half the world uses) is garbage etc. Maybe if we all follow your example and be candid everyone could chill out a bit.
I'll go next: despite trying several times, I have never successfully written anything more complicated than Fibonnacci in Lisp or Haskell. I know it's clean and pure and all that, but my brain just won't work that way.
I don't take issue with what you've said about remote work despite very much having the opposite opinion to you because you phrased it as your own personal opinion.
This blog post does pretty much the opposite though; its analysis of remote work is pretty much entirely just generalizations of their own experience, but phrased as if they're objective truth. It was an especially weird editorial choice to make use of the "general" second person given how much outside of that one paragraph was written in the first person. In an article that's ostensibly trying to be humble and vulnerable like you mention, it just comes across as patronizing. I can't say I'm surprised that the author might have been judged for expressing this opinion because it's not about their personal preference, but a judgement of its own.
I think a lot of people genuinely struggle with the idea that sometimes how something is said can matter just as much as what's being said. Being correct and being respectful are orthogonal concepts even when talking about objective truth rather than opinions; if someone asks what 7 times 9 is, there's a difference between telling them "63" and "Well, obviously it's fucking 63, duh!". For a subjective topic like remote work that some people's lives have been quite significantly affected by, it's even more important to put some effort into understanding how one's words will come across, because if the phrasing is poor, people aren't necessarily going to feel the need to go out of their way to try to give it the benefit of the doubt. I can't know what exactly the author was thinking when writing that paragraph, but I also can't distinguish between whether they have the same viewpoint as you but communicated it poorly or if they genuinely think that there's some sort of objective truth than I'm worse at my job working remotely than I would be working in person. Given the amount of care I've put into addressing many of the exact issues they've raised due to needing to work remotely because of a medical condition of an immediate family member, it was quite hard for me not to have an immediate strong angry reaction to how flippant they seem to be with what's at best their phrasing of their opinions. My point is that it's a lot more work to actually care about how one's point comes across than it is to claim that people are overreacting after the fact, and it's worth considering how much of the reaction the author mentions having gotten in the past is reflective of this.
It feels like you're blaming the author for the lazy thinking of someone who might read his opinion and take it as objective fact.
The 7 times 9 analogy doesn't track it all. 7x9 = 63 is an objective fact by definition. His thoughts on remote work are an opinion by definition. If other people decide that what he says is dogmatic, blame it on their own lack of critical thinking skills.
The meta-point of the article is that we should express are thoughts without qualifiers and embellishments to manipulate other people's perceptions of us.
> Remote work eliminates a lot of problems with office work: commutes, inefficient use of real estate, and land value distortion. But software development is better when you breathe the same air as the folks you work with.
It's pretty hard to know where the opinion is.
The whole paragraph presents as though author is relating known symptoms of a disease. We're never really sure which they themself actually experienced. They look more like arguments in support of a cause.
Author is totally entitled to open that door, but then it also becomes fair game to attack the perspective.
I am pointing out the fact that he is using factual statements in support of his opinion. "Remote work sucks" is an opinion. "Pair programming is less fruitful" is a statement of fact (regardless of the veracity of the claim).
"It is my opinion 7 x 9 = 63," wouldn't be an opinion in the sense that opinion was being used in the thread. Yes, we can question the veracity of a statement of fact, but that isn't the same sort of opinion as whether something is subjectively good or bad.
> The meta-point of the article is that we should express are thoughts without qualifiers and embellishments to manipulate other people's perceptions of us.
In my experience this is a common failure point among tech/analytical folks (myself included) which leads to their words and actions being genrally misconstrued and effectively misunderstood by the larger segement of the population which is rarely able or disposed to handling communications without embellishments.
You're wrong (IMO) The onus should not be on the communicator to qualify every statement of opinion. This is tedious and unreasonable.
Not prefacing what clearly is an opinion with "IMO" is not a jedi mind trick that makes others believe it as fact.
You're also demonstrating some hypocrisy by presenting your own point of view in the same manner. No qualifiers. You're simply stating something as truth
> The onus should not be on the communicator to qualify every statement of opinion. This is tedious and unreasonable.
I fundamentally disagree with this. In my experience, it's in pretty much in possible for people to perfectly understand intent without a certain amount of effort from both the communicator to express it clearly and the listener to understand it. In practice, I don't think there's a good chance of successful communication for any nuanced topic without good-faith effort from both sides, and I can't differentiate between the language the author used and what I'd expect to hear from someone who reflexively dismisses any disagreement as in bad faith.
This argument over the semantics of how to express an opinion feels like a proxy for people who strongly disagree with him on remote work seeking an outlet.
I say that because you (and everyone else who seems upset) clearly understand it's just his opinion. Therefore, why are you offended by his intent? Whatever his intent might be, I think it's irrelevant. It's simply a strongly held opinion.
> I say that because you (and everyone else who seems upset) clearly understand it's just his opinion.
I genuinely don't understand whether it's the case or not, and I've tried to be clear about that. I am not able to tell whether it's their opinion or if they actually feel like they're objective facts; both are plausible to me, and I'm arguing that if they want people to understand which they mean, they need to be more specific. Otherwise, people will draw conclusions that may not align with their intent, and that's something they could avoid if they put more care into how they expressed it.
I think the issue is that the OP wasn’t giving an opinion. They stated things as facts. When you say “x is y” you’re making a truth claim, and people are going to challenge it if it sounds wrong or depends on context.
A lot of folks flip to “it’s just my opinion” only after they get pushback, but if you present something as a fact, it’s fair game to question it.
Like if someone says “apples taste bitter and have no flavor” that reads like a universal claim, so yeah people will argue. If you say “I find apples bitter and lacking flavor” that’s obviously personal taste and nobody is going to demand proof.
Nobody is asking for IMO everywhere. Just don’t frame opinions as facts or the other way around.
My point was that they don't at all phrase it as a personal opinion:
> Remote work eliminates a lot of problems with office work: commutes, inefficient use of real estate, and land value distortion. But software development is better when you breathe the same air as the folks you work with. Even with a camera-on policy, video calls are a low-bandwidth medium. You lose ambient awareness of coworkers’ problems, and asking for help is a bigger burden. Pair programming is less fruitful. Attempts to represent ideas spatially get mutilated by online whiteboard and sticky note software. Even conflict gets worse: it’s easy to form an enemy image of somebody at the end of video call, but difficult to keep that image when you share a room with them and sense their pain.
It's hard for me to read that as anything other than literally describing to me what my the experience of working with me remotely is. OP has never worked with me as far as I'm aware, so they have no idea whether it's accurate or not. Charitably, they might not mean what they're saying literally, but I'm making the argument that for topics that are controversial because of how people have been burned by overly prescriptive policies in the past, the burden is on the speaker to avoid voicing opinions in a careless way that relies on the listener to glean that their intent isn't the same as what people have experienced in the past.
My meta-point is that while people are free to express their opinions without spending effort trying to make their intent understood, but by the same token, people are free to react to those opinions with the exact same level of effort spend trying to understand their intent. In my experience, there are a lot of people who complain that they're treated unfairly for expressing their opinions without realizing that what people are actually reacting to is how they express their opinions, not their opinions themselves. I've personally struggled quite a lot over the years in having trouble understanding how other people will interpret my communications, so I have a lot of sympathy for people who also struggle with this, but if someone doesn't seem to even accept the premise that part of the responsibility for being understood lies with the person in expressing their intent clearly, I lose patience quickly. This is especially true when the "opinions" are expressed in a medium where the person communicating has an unbounded amount of time to work on clarifying their intent before the message actually is received by someone else; I don't expect everyone to be able to perfectly articulate things in real-time when talking in person, but when the opinion is expressed via a blog post, they don't have the same constraints in working on how they convey what they're saying. The fact that the blog post seems to be overall taking the stance that it's better not to try to worry about how someone will interpret their intent makes it feel even more likely they might just not understand what people's actual issue with their communications have been in the past.
It genuinely seems like they might not have been able to distinguish between good-faith misunderstandings and bad-faith intentional misinterpretations of what they've said, and that's unfortunate if it's led them to the conclusion that they just don't need to care about what anyone thinks about their opinions rather than that they need to learn how to better communicate to those who are attempting to respond in good faith and ignore the ones who aren't. A lot of people understand that people can disagree with them in good faith in the abstract but fail to actually recognize when that's happening in the present, and quite a lot of what's expressed in this blog post resembles what I've seen from other people who struggle with that.
Giving a blank check to anything someone says because they disclaimed that they'll be uttering opinions? That sounds kinda naive. Have you never heard someone include facts to support their opinions? Would you disagree that it's fair game to attack opinions presented as facts? The "problematic" paragraph jumps out because the assertive generalizations moot the earlier agreement that the author is sharing their experience. The proclamations are not subjective they're factual. Perhaps re-read that passage yourself while donning your own critical thinking hat.
What are we arguing about? Is it the way he expressed his opinion?
Would you agree that whether something is an opinion or fact is itself objective, for most cases at least?
I ask because nobody is questioning whether or not what he states was actually an opinion. They seem to simply be upset with the manner in which he phrased it. He was simply too sure of himself and people found that offensive. Which seems a little ridiculous don't you think?
I'm arguing that I don't actually know whether the author considers their paragraph about remote work to be opinion or fact. If it's their opinion, I think there's legitimate concern based on it that they've in the past misunderstood reactions to what they perceive as expressing their opinion because they've done a poor job communicating their actual intent based. If they do in fact thing it's objective fact, I think they're just incredibly wrong and unaware of it.
> pretty much entirely just generalizations of their own experience, but phrased as if they're objective truth
I mean you're describing 90% of blog and forum posts on the Internet here.
This (IMO - so it's not ironic) is the biggest leap most people need to make to become more self-aware and to better parse the world around them: recognizing there is rarely an objective truth in most matters, and the idea that "my truth is not your truth, both can be different yet equally valid" (again in most cases, not all cases).
I think my issue is that the blog post comes across to me as in essence an argument that the person communicating shouldn't be dissuaded by potential reactions to what they say, but it fails to account for the difference between good-faith and bad-faith reactions. There's a huge difference between a bad-faith misinterpretation and a good-faith misunderstanding in my opinion, as the latter seems to come just as often from a failure on the part of the communicator to be clear as from any fault on the listener. It's hard for me not to get the impression that the author either can't or doesn't seen the value in differentiating between those cases based on the fact there's such significant room for improvement in clarifying their views in their paragraph about remote work, which is why I called it out.
> I have never successfully written anything more complicated than Fibonnacci in Lisp
I hadn't until a joined a lisp based project. Learned a ton. My brain didn't work that way at first either, but working with it every day I eventually got it.
Alternatively, learn little by little, eventually your brain will grok it. I think it took me more or less two years before I could actually write Lisp code I felt confident about, from the first moment I started reading books at night about it.
Except… science has shown this to be true. Even after a year-plus of work, less than 2% of devs work faster or more efficiently with AI than without it. And for almost 90% of the remainder, regression analysis strongly indicated that none of them would ever be better with AI than without it, regardless of how much practice they had with it.
These general results have come up with study after study over the last few years, with very consistent patterns. And with AI becoming more hallucinatory and downright wrong with every generation - about 60-80% of all responses with the latest models, depending on model being examined - the proportion of devs being able to wrestle AI into creating functionally viable work faster than they could to it themselves has also decreased slightly.
> I would also not judge you for having your own preferences and opinions. I too prefer working in an office to remote work, but when I say this out loud other developers take it as advocating RTO or saying remote work is worse when it just doesn't suit my personality. I get that it's a touchy subject but there is no need to get up in my face about it.
You ever wonder why? Serfes finally got freedom after corona, but apparently some actually prefer to be in a serfdom instead of having freedom to choose for yourself. You're being a useful idiot for managers, that's why you get backlash.
That is a very strange (and very emotional) take. I find it easier to focus with some other people around me, so long as they're being quiet. An office (or a library) is easier to work in than my house. I also really like the idea of separation between my home and my workplace. If I was rich and had room in my house for a separate office I could close the door on when the workday was over, perhaps I'd feel differently.
So I'd prefer to work in an office, so long as it was nearby and the commute was short and my officemates were fairly quiet. This does not mean that I'm "advocating for serfdom". Working for an employer is no more (and no less) serfdom in an office than it is at home.
The main problem with the office work versus WFH debate debacle is that the positions are not on equal footing and, actually, are not equally valid.
Working in an office as a preference is one that naturally relies on the control of other people. The reason people like working in an office isn't because of the office. If you went to the office, by yourself, it would be worthless. The value of the office is the communal nature of it.
So, one position naturally requires forcing other people to work where they might not want to, and one doesn't. With WFH, you can work in an office, nothing is stopping you.
When you say you prefer working in an office, you aren't stating your preference. You're stating what you arbitrarily think everyone elses preference should be.
I feel like you're putting words in someone else's mouth. Maybe you are not responding to OP but, in your mind, to an ex-colleague that did so in a different venue than this forum?
In a forum like this, stating your preference is just that: stating your preference.
If you were talking with your manager and stated your preference, you'd be stating your preference and, between the lines, asking to make it happen for yourself.
If you were talking with your manager and stated your preference and specified the reason is because you prefer working around people, only then, between the lines, you'd be asking to make it happen for your whole team.
I agree, the preferences don't do anything unless used as a collective. But from the point of view of comparing the viewpoints, they're not apples to apples, because one requires the cooperation of other people. WFH isn't actually 'from home', it's from not-office-with-everyone-else. So if you just want to work in an office, then WFH is perfect for you. Arguably even better than working in the one and only office, because you get to choose the office.
But the buried lede so to speak is that RTO has literally nothing to do with the office. The office is just an empty box that happens to exist somewhere.
So the level of control for each preference is wildly different, and they can't just be compared like that. One is naturally 'closed', and the other naturally 'open'. That, to me, does speak to the intrinsic value of each preference.
> Working in an office as a preference is one that naturally relies on the control of other people.
Not at all. Working in an office as a preference is one that can instead rely on working with other people who also share that preference. No control is necessary.
Right, sure, until one of your employee's eventually says "hey I want to work from home because X, Y, Z" and you have to force them to be in the office or fire them. Because everyone else's comfort, supposedly, relies on this person's discomfort.
With such a preference I can't help but wonder:
1. How genuine is it? Where is the "cutoff" point where in-office work no longer works? Do we need 100% compliance? What about 80%, is that good enough?
2. What, materially, do you gain from the preference and does that material gain actually rely on the preference? From what I've heard, 99% of the time it does not.
At what point did you decide that I have employees?
I find that I work better in an office, depending on the office. I'm in no position to enforce that position on anyone. (I'm currently unemployed and looking for work, in fact.) I find that I dislike giving up room in my small house for work. And I dislike having no separation between work and home.
These are all personal preferences. Nothing is being enforced on anyone. Your reaction is overblown.
Right, I understand all of that, but the indisputable reality is that such a preference requires actions from other people to be satisfied. That's just what it is - in office work requires people working... in an office.
This isn't a reaction on my end, I'm just explaining where the value judgment of the preference comes from. It's intrisincally a "closed" preference, and people don't like that generally.
You are not in a position of power to exercise said preference, you rely on the goodwill of your company. That's fine, but still, you exert some influence. People are listening, and some of them do have the power to exert that control. So when you say "I like that control", it makes people a little nervous.
And, onto my whole "does this actually require in office work" point:
> find that I dislike giving up room in my small house for work. And I dislike having no separation between work and home.
This is that. None of these preferences require in office work, that's just a close enough proxy. I would argue these are more obtainable in a WFH environment, because the cost savings of WFH can easily afford you a dedicated office space away from home.
Because, again, one is open, and one is closed. So with the open one you can just do that.
Nobody is stopping you from spending time breathing the same stale, rhinovirus-ridden air as other people. What people take umbrage with is the idea that the rest of us should be forced into propping up the commercial rental market as well.
Dude chill. It's an air-conditioned room with desks and a coffee machine, not a cotton field.
Some people like having an office.
I could call someone like you a hyper dramatic agoraphobic socially inept recluse over a simple posted opinion but that wouldn't be kind,fair, or mature
> It's an air-conditioned room with desks and a coffee machine, not a cotton field.
It's a huge open space filled with stale, stinky, dry office air, obnoxious people and dirt. Conditions are not cotton field or not cotton field, only serfs think like that.
> I could call someone like you a hyper dramatic agoraphobic socially inept recluse over a simple posted opinion but that wouldn't be kind,fair, or mature
Projecting much? My home setup costs costs more than half of that "office" combined, and that's just my room.
Do you seriously think I want to kill my back, my eyes and my attention for 40 hours a week when I can comfortably work at home and be much more productive instead of playing clown because some bubs can't tolerate working without distracting another person for 5 minutes?
>I suspect there is a lot of insecurity and imposter syndrome that causes people to write hyper-confident blog posts about why they are better without AI...
I mean, it's better than the hyper-confident blog posts about how AI made them an ubermensch superdooper 100000000x developer but "no you can't see the code because it's for WORK". Nice subtle dig, though.
Honestly, good for you. I am almost two years into my spreadsheet and I try to get in 10 minutes a day of intense exercise and half an hour or more of walking to counter sitting all day at the computer. Many people try to "get healthy" and change their entire daily routine at once and that is impossible to do while also living a normal life. It sounds like you layered in one activity at a time and each success motivated the next ambitious goal. This is a smart strategy and one I would recommend to others.
I overthought this so, so many times. This time around I was just like see floor, do pushups, log it lol. One thing led to another and now I'm suddenly feeling like Hulk Hogan.
The comments on this thread are a perfect mixture of Group A, explaining how there is no value in AI tools, and if there was, where is the evidence? And Group B, who are getting value from the tools and have evidence of using them to deliver real software, but are being blasted by Group A as idiots who can't recognize bad code. Why so angry?
I've been writing code for 36 years, so I don't take any of the criticism to heart. If you know what you are doing, you can ship production quality code written by an LLM. I'm not going to label it "made by an AI!" because the consumer doesn't care so long as it works and who needs the "never AI!" backlash anyway?
But to the OP: your standards are too high. AI is like working with a bright intern, they are not going to do everything exactly the way that you prefer, but they are enthusiastic and can take direction. Choose your battles and focus on making the code maintainable in the long term, not perfect in the short term.
I do think that is a real risk, yes. I don't want to use LLMs as a crutch to guard against having to ever learn anything new, or having to implement something myself. There is such a thing as productive struggle which is a core part of learning.
That said, I think everyone can relate to wasting an awful lot of time on things that are not "interesting" from the perspective of the project you are working on. For example, I can't count the number of hours I've spent trying to get something specific to work in webpack, and there is no payoff because today the fashionable tool is vite and tomorrow it'll be something else. I still want to know my code inside and out, but writing a deploy script for it should not be something I need to spend time on. If I had a junior dev working for me for pennies a day, I would absolutely delegate that stuff to them.
That sounds more complicated than what is actually happening here. The way wave functions evolve over time, their velocity of movement is proportional to the frequency of oscillation. That is why measuring the frequency component of the wave function gives you the momentum function.
You have to keep in mind that the wave function represents the many places the particle can be with some probability, as well as the many frequencies it could have, so what uncertainty means in this case is that if you constrain the function to a small area in space (with zero probability outside it) you necessarily end up with a momentum function that spreads across many different velocities.
Re: the first point. I agree that large changes should always be broken down into individually testable pieces, however I don't agree that they can always be broken down into individually shippable pieces. This is definitely true of large refactor projects, where a simple change (like upgrading a third party library) will unavoidably trigger thousands of changes throughout the codebase. I find it easier as a reviewer to look through a bunch of TODO comments that outline what needs to be done, and then each subsequent review addresses a manageable amount of the TODOs. I really see no other way since we can't ship two copies of, say, jQuery to customers.
I totally agree with you that the architectural changes should be agreed upon in advance, with direct conversations happening and whiteboards if necessary. I tried to make it clear in the post that architecture design should happen before any coding begins, but the gap I noticed was that even with full agreement on a schema or even down to the function level, there are still important details to work out before writing logic and UI on top of it, and that requires special attention from reviewers.
Just to play devil's advocate though, if you avoid face-to-face design sessions and do everything through code reviews, you will be forced to explain your thinking in text, and the whole conversation will remain as a record for future developers getting familiar with the code who may be confused about why things were done a particular way. The code review paper trail is immensely helpful to understanding a large codebase - reading through sparse meeting notes is never as good.
I would also not judge you for having your own preferences and opinions. I too prefer working in an office to remote work, but when I say this out loud other developers take it as advocating RTO or saying remote work is worse when it just doesn't suit my personality. I get that it's a touchy subject but there is no need to get up in my face about it.
You mention bullying and brigading and that seems to be an unfortunate reality of this industry. I suspect there is a lot of insecurity and imposter syndrome that causes people to write hyper-confident blog posts about why they are better without AI and how their tests have 100% coverage and how (unfashionable language which half the world uses) is garbage etc. Maybe if we all follow your example and be candid everyone could chill out a bit.
I'll go next: despite trying several times, I have never successfully written anything more complicated than Fibonnacci in Lisp or Haskell. I know it's clean and pure and all that, but my brain just won't work that way.
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