JDubbleu

All fair points, and I'm definitely leaning more towards your viewpoint having read them.

I guess I've just never felt the need for them given I've been treated and paid well so far, and I really like the ability to just walk next door at a moment's notice if I so desire. Not that I've ever not given two weeks, but the option to do so, and not feeling like I'm gonna be compensated less due to short tenure is nice. Not that unions have to operate that way, but historically that's the case.

I'm glad it has worked well for you! I'll definitely be more open to joining one in the future, and strongly consider it if the opportunity arises. Thanks for your perspective.

Same. I play the same 5 games throughout the year and rarely buy anything, but a few games I'd been looking at went on sale. I could've pirated them, but it was just so much easier to click buy on my Steam Deck and instantly download and play them. Not to mention cloud saves for free, remote play, and the ability to dock the thing to my 65" 4k TV.

Steam has robbed me of more money than any streaming service ever could, and I'm not even mad because they provide the best service I've ever received no matter how many or few games I buy. They recently identified one of the biggest reasons for refunds and piracy being people who want to validate games will run well on their system, especially on Steam Deck. As a result they're working on a demo feature so you can test a game before buying it.

Unions can't really prevent layoffs unfortunately, but can guarantee severances. However most tech employees already receive generous severance packages.

Software engineers also still sit at half the unemployment rate of the rest of the US despite the layoffs throughout this past year.

I'm very pro-union, I just don't think they belong in tech given how much power engineers already have, and that power being entirely dictated by the ability to jump ship yesterday.

Couldn't agree more as a software engineer who recently switched jobs. Unions are fucking amazing in most industries, but I can't help but feel it would hurt workers more than it would benefit us in tech. You could guarantee 5% a year raises indefinitely and it still wouldn't be enough. Even at companies where you consistently get 10% raises per year + bonus you can just jump and hit 20%+.

Software engineers can also have insane risk tolerance career-wise because we make enough money to build massive emergency funds and investment portfolios to fall back on if things go south. This is all without considering that sometimes you just don't vibe with a team, or you stop learning and want to go elsewhere to expand your skill set. Under a union, which usually awards people based on tenure, you'd be punished for making these sorts of moves despite them making you a better software engineer.

I know a ton about cars, but short of taking the motor apart there's only so much you can glean from a drive and quick once over.

It's a gamble to get a used car you know nothing about when you have a truck you know is at least a bit reliable. My family grew up playing used car roulette and it's pretty damn hard to come out ahead in this scenario. Best to run the thing until it dies while saving up for a new or like new vehicle.

Thank you! I'm already getting some great use out of it as my new company hired me largely because of my AWS experience. I also learned a ton there thanks to my exceptionally brilliant team so I can't say I regret my time there even if it was stressful.

I did a lot of research a few years ago and settled on ProtonVPN. I won't say anything authoritative regarding privacy as I haven't done any recent research, but I've been very happy with the service so far.

I run a seedbox with all the traffic from qBittorrent tunneled through ProtonVPN and I've gotten up to 200 Mbps down through a few very healthy torrents before, and on dedicated speed tests I can pull down ~250 Mbps on my gigabit service. I've also never had it go down despite using the exact same server 24/7.

Their documentation is also amazing and they generate connection configs for Wireguard and OpenVPN on their website using provided parameters making it dead simple to get started.

Yup! That's the bullshit part and what really grinds my gears when people say we're just whining. I have 0 problem going to an office that I was assigned at my date of hire. What I have a problem with is 1) retroactively assigning offices to remote designated employees and 2) forcibly relocating people across the country for zero reason. They're actively uprooting entire families and fucking so many people over.

I'm fortunate enough to have gotten another job before it impacted me thanks to referrals from friends, but not everyone is as fortunate.

I work at AWS (won't after this Friday since I got a remote job), and while I'm pretty low on the totem pole, internally it is very clear what is going on. Leadership is slowly phasing out non-proximate workers. Why? No one knows really, but our best guess is unofficial layoffs and upholding commercial real estate.

It started with RTO 3 days a week for everyone except remote employees in May. Then in September basically all remote employees were forced to relocate to their team hub. This was as much of a shit show as you think. You were given 30 days to decide and 60 days to move. What people did was "decide" on the last day to move, and then drag their feet for the next 60. Then quit without notice as soon as they had another job lined up. Don't get me wrong the market is rough, but 90 days is enough to find a job if you have halfway decent connections and AWS on your resume. By now my team already lost half of our devs (3/6).

More recently, in waves, they're forcing people to relocate to team hubs. Even teams who were historically spread out across the US. I'm from the west coast but my team is in Colorado and the second I caught wind of this I grinded my ass off and got another job. When I told my manager he was very understanding but frustrated at the situation. My two teammates were even more frustrated, and one of them is on the west coast too. My team could be one person soon.

Didn't mean for this to turn into a rant, but Amazon is nuking teams left and right like this and it will catch up to them. As a whole things are breaking more often in AWS systems than usual, and our service is starting to show cracks. Our reliability is down hard because we had a collective 35 years of knowledge leave our org. Almost all of whom were the team expert.

For me, a native speaker, I've been confused maybe twice by the use of singular they, and all it took was a quick clarification to remedy. This is because it seems pretty rare in English to use a pronoun without some context surrounding it.

If someone came to me and said, "they went to the store" my confusion would be due to a lack of context. Who are we even talking about in the first place? In that scenario gender neutral he, which is confusing for a myriad of other reasons and can lead to false assumptions, would be just as confusing.

However in an exchange like, "where did this person go? They went to the store" or, "where did Alex and Bob go? They went to the store" the context provides whether they is singular or plural. Revisiting the first example with zero context, "they" would normally be replaced by a proper noun. This sets the required context and makes future uses of "they" make perfect sense.

Whereas with gender neutral he I'd assume you knew the gender of who you were referring to. I grew up using they in the singular form constantly, and it's not like I was surrounded by queer culture, it's just a function of how English is spoken in some places even outside of the UK (I'm from California).

I can definitely see it being confusing though if you were taught "proper" formal English. No one I've ever encountered speaks that way and it's largely reserved for academic works. Hell, should'nt've and wheredya might as well be in the dictionary by now.

As someone who grew up somewhere super flat it really doesn't get to you because it's all you've ever known. However, now that I live somewhere with hills it drives me crazy when I visit home.