Doing microservices from the start is fine if you know what to expect. Having worked with massive monoliths, there are cons that people don't consider longer-term and the longer you dig yourself in the harder it is to pull yourself out.
Honestly I think the realistic advice should be to go monolith if you or part of your team aren't experienced with microservices or if your app is simple / you'd be overengineering it otherwise.
If you're starting a SaaS company, you can envision the moving pieces, and will be growing your team quickly microservices properly in the beginning can have a lot of benefits.
Just feels like another one of those dogmas people just mindlessly scream on the internet all day without considering all the cost/benefit analysis for each particular case.
> Whatever the grand strategy for success is, it gets broken down into lots of smaller tasks. When you hit a wall on one task, you could say “that’s it, I’m done for the day” and head home, or you could switch over to something else that has a different rhythm and get more accomplished. Even when you are clearly not at your peak, there is always plenty to do that doesn’t require your best, and it would actually be a waste to spend your best time on it. You can also “go to the gym” for your work by studying, exploring, and experimenting, spending more hours in service to the goal.
Absolutely true.
> I think most people excited by these articles are confusing not being aligned with their job’s goals with questions of effectiveness. If you don’t want to work, and don’t really care about your work, less hours for the same pay sounds great! If you personally care about what you are doing, you don’t stop at 40 hours a week because you think it is optimal for the work, but rather because you are balancing it against something else that you find equally important. Which is fine.
And this is really the key to the whole shorter work week argument. I agree with John; if you are running your own company or initiative in an area you are passionate about, the 40 hour week question probably doesn't even dawn on you. Why would you want to work less to achieve a goal you are ambitious to reach? If anything you are working more because you enjoy it and want to see more progress more quickly.
But most people working a typical job (even in tech) are not in a position to care deeply about their work and its outcomes - why that's the case is a separate discussion and probably differs person-to-person. A good amount of those people might even be working on things during those 40 hours that are a poor use of their individual time due to bad management, bureaucracy, inability to work on things they want to, etc. These people are not able to work 40+ hours things that feel or are as important as other things in their life such as side projects, family, exercise, etc. And so the 5 day, 40 hour workweek feels incompatible with their life.
> But most people working a typical job (even in tech) are not in a position to care deeply about their work and its outcomes
Perhaps most people - after looking at their paystub - are acutely aware that their employer doesn't deeply care about them. In my experience, there is a direct link between how much effort I put in going above and beyond in my work and how much higher (or lower) than average my salary was - with an inverse experience multiplier. I put in lot's of unrewarded effort fresh out of school. I didn't know any better, and probably used work to fill up down-time
Why do you need to put "productivity benefits" in quotes?
I hope I am misinterpreting this. It's been shown scientifically time and time again with actual data that this is the case [1, World Economic Forum] - denying this or being sarcastic about it seems really disingenuous and ideology-driven to me.
Is there someway to do a controlled double-blind study that I just can’t imagine? Because I can definitely imagine other causes in the studies described in that article.
"Most people" don't get to choose, they're stuck with 40. (Or more, for some salaried positions.) The idea is generally "all of your time".
In principle they can just not do those particular jobs. In practice most "careers" expect "full" time.
Some fields are inherently quite flexible, like some doctors/dentists can decide to not schedule anything for a week.
In the linked comment JC said "I am deeply appalled at the thought of trading away individual freedom of action and additional value in the world for that goal."
People are treating this as if this is the Reddit of 2011. If you really think this protest is going to stop the momentum of a Reddit IPO payout you are sorely mistaken.
I personally don't care one way or the other about any reddit IPO payout. Happy for them if they get paid, reddit has been an amazing service for many many years.
What I DO care about is being able to browse without ads and recommendations I don't want shoved down my throat. They could have done things in a way that preserved 3rd party clients but required payment for an ad-free experience. People would be mostly fine with that I think.
There are a few "hardcore" staff/prinicpal engineers at my company (a well known tech unicorn). They are basically OGs who were a big part of the company's early success. Really smart and saavy guys who are left alone to focus on executing on big stuff.
The reality for other staff engineers here is exactly opposite though - you're not allowed to just be "executing" and your day consists of being stuck in meetings, doc writing, and management-lite. Honestly it's so bureaucratic and so far removed from the actual tech I really got turned off from that career path as I got more visibility into it.
For smaller companies it's probably much more fulfilling though.
I mean, he might pay very close attention to everything at his company. That doesn't mean he's deeply involved with the engineering.
For all you know he had some technical presentations given to him by his engineers and is just repeating the info within. I don't doubt he himself has enough engineering background to follow or contribute to the technical conversations at Tesla et al, but yeah.
At some point you just have to reason about how many companies he has and how much work he already has merely being CEO or chairman of these firms and how he could possibly be doing day-to-day engineering decision-making on top of that. And given the very public and embarassing exposes we've gotten from engineers at Twitter, I have deep, deep reservations that Elon is really a saavy engineer.
I am really disappointed to hear this news - by the sounds of it their entire office was gutted by layoffs. I have to say that as someone who follows politics, 538 is a unique source of insightful and data driven political coverage without wading into the mindless editorialism that plagues other major publications. Their coverage during election seasion is consistently fantastic and they've had a great long-running podcast covering lots of political topics as well as diving into how they model election forecasting.
Silver has publicly mentioned several times he hates covering politics and sounds like he will be taking his forecasting models with him once his contract expires. There are other news sites taking similar data-driven approaches but I've never found them to have as much transparency or volume of rich discussion as 538 has over the years. And of course his popular election forecasts are pretty much the gold standard.
Massive loss for political journalism if Silver chooses to walk away from politics as a result of this.
Tbh it does seem he was bit naive of what he was doing at the time and of the consequences. He wasn’t just some rando out there cracking software for personal use - he should’ve expected the government would be going after and throwing the book at people like him. It’s puzzling he didn’t take security more seriously or just stopped doing it entirely earlier.
The shocking part for me though was reading about how he was put with violent offenders and experienced being sent to “the hole”. Like what the fuck? Does the federal prison system not separate white collar criminals from high security prisoners? Honestly insane.
If you're letting yourself get used like that not once but multiple times I don't know what to tell you lol. Do you also give money freely to scammers on the street?
Why would you not report that? Airbnb would bring the hammer down on that host so quickly it wouldn't be funny. I'm serious, they would not tolerate that whatsoever and would get you compensated and moved to another property.
Personal anecdotal data, but to be fair to Airbnb, they have repeatedly looked out for me..
Just recently I had someone cancelling on me whilst I was in the car driving to the place. Airbnb were straight on it, instant refund, extra credit towards another place and someone rang me to try and help me book an alternative for that night (I was quicker than them and had thankfully booked the next door unit before they even rang).
I've had a few bad stays over the years (getting woken early doors by bailiffs was fun), but they've generally been sorted out really quickly.
The times I've tried the alternatives in the last few years I've come up short and regretted the lack of support.
I've used airbnb for many years (since the glory days!), but have to agree the fees are killing me now.. just give me the full price up front..
Because of this. I spend a lot of time picking the property and often, where I go, there aren’t that many good ones, nor much time left before I arrive. “Another property” might not be in the same town.
Between tolerating the BS, or losing my preferred apartment… or, I guess, antagonizing the host who already doesn’t follow the AirBnB rules… I have so far chosen to tolerate the BS.
If you make another choice, that’s fine. If you find it so outrageous lol then we just have different priorities.
Honestly I think the realistic advice should be to go monolith if you or part of your team aren't experienced with microservices or if your app is simple / you'd be overengineering it otherwise.
If you're starting a SaaS company, you can envision the moving pieces, and will be growing your team quickly microservices properly in the beginning can have a lot of benefits.
Just feels like another one of those dogmas people just mindlessly scream on the internet all day without considering all the cost/benefit analysis for each particular case.