Name, address, and phone number served plenty of critical functions when they were published in the White Pages. Cell phones not being listed there was kind of an accident of history. It was common to call a listed landline and be given or forwarded to a cell number. Only after most people stopped having landlines altogether did a phone number come to be considered sensitive information (unless you were a celebrity or something).
Ironically Facebook is responsible for much of this, as friending someone on Facebook became a lower stakes, less intimate alternative to exchanging phone numbers.
>Around $400 a month of plans buys roughly $2800 of API usage at list prices, which is a real bargain right up until you hit the ceiling. The plans are metered, and any large AI native workflow will chew through the included tokens fast
I don't think that's true at all. I'm doing 8-12 PRs a week at work, all primarily Claude Code, and the usage at API billing has never broken $500/mo.
Pretty much anything coming out of middle management or "org leadership" is performative. Line managers and their reports are generally actually building products and keeping the lights on.
There is a tier just outside of FAANG that pays similarly or better, prominent examples being Uber, Airbnb, Stripe, Block, Databricks, Datadog, Pinterest, Snowflake, etc.
It is too bad that so many companies have built these huge microservices beasts where you cannot run much more than unit tests locally, and you pretty much have to guess at the impact of your change until you have merged it, deployed it, and turned on the feature flag for your own account / test account. This loop is slow, which is perhaps a cost they are willing to pay, but it is also not safe for agents, which will be a massive setback.
The narrative "we don't need as many staff because of AI" is a labor disciplining device whether or not it is true. Remaining engineers, loaded up with more projects under the threat of layoffs and with no outside opportunities, work nights and weekends to get them done. Then it is literally true that we accomplished more with less. And in a sense it is even "because of AI." But not in the way that you're supposed to think they mean it.
This is so true. I'm not one of these people that think AI is not going to be revolutionary eventually, but the way I see upper management acting is basically exactly as you say. As a threat to discipline better labor.
Which is why junior and senior talent alike are forced back into the office. Except that tenured senior and staff employees from the boom times are in the San Francisco office, but all the new grad hires from the last 2-4 years are in various third world offices. And neither of them can get conference rooms, so everybody's on Zoom at their desk all day, trying to be heard over their neighbors.
So man companies that are doing RTO are in no way trying to reorg to make teams stay colocated, it's rather puzzling. I know a UK manager with only reports in the different parts of the americas, and there's never more than 2 in the same city, so for all intents and purposes, the teams are just fully remote but stuck badging in. And that's after a reorg this april, where many US managers got laid off.
Along with trends like having line managers be in charge of 20+ direct reports, it leaves people scratching their heads.
Yeah ... my org immediately stopped provisioning space for new employees once we had remote and could desk-share, so when RTO idea came up, the first thing that stopped it was we physically have only about 50% of the desks we need now. It's now actually awkward when we hire someone new and they want to work in the office because we have to explain we actually physically can't accommodate that.
But still there are people who preach RTO as if all the desks are just waiting there. I think all the benefits of remote work are just taken for granted now and people just see downsides.
And both of them are wrong, because they _should_ be trying to figure out what works best for the person; not what worked best for _them_ and forcing it on the person.
There main problem, at least in my experience, is that there's a direct conflict in it
- There are people that work better from home and get more done there
- There are people that work better in the office, with people around them
Regardless of which you pick, you're going to make one of those groups less productive.
I do agree that some people who want one thing but work better with the other. It's on the manager(s) to figure out which works before; for each individual and for the team.
Ironically Facebook is responsible for much of this, as friending someone on Facebook became a lower stakes, less intimate alternative to exchanging phone numbers.
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