It's sometimes seen as a security issue, especially if you are not provided with a company-issued laptop. Or your work may require specialized equipment like beefy machines for 3D rendering or local access to a server.
I wouldn't say that working efficiently with people directly counts as "meta". Productive cooperation with others sounds like a straightforward skill to improve, with no new rules being introduced.
Maybe new company/team organizational approaches or methodologies (Waterfall, Kanban, etc.) can count as playing the meta and give you an edge over the competition.
Both can be classified as 'anecdotes', I agree, but talking about your work conditions when asked, is a completely different anecdote as opposed to someone not actively complaining when they are with friends/acquaintances.
The difference between having a coding team manager that expects everyone should work 60+ hours and a non-coder who is against it, can be huge. I prefer the latter.
I vaguely remember all of those things as separate phases.
- Moving away from IE, I fell in love with Opera (lots of built-in features), most others with Firefox
- Chrome comes in, it's Google, it's lightweight, people try it and like it
- Chrome gets really fast, it appeals to even more people
- Meanwhile, Firefox has enough extension power to replace Opera for me (who can live with the tabs BELOW address bar or without mouse gestures?)
- Chrome implements the aforementioned technical stuff (separate processes, etc.), appealing to power users (this may have happened before speed improvements or at the same time)
- Chrome finally gets extensions and I start using it personally, but it's impossible to be a web dev without Firefox+Firebug. (IE6 still sucks, but combined with Visual Studio, feels superb for JS debugging)
- Chrome's dev tools gradually get better at everything. I start living in Chrome.
... years later ...
- A year ago I often used Firefox for its great Canvas debugger. They broke it. I've since forgotten about Firefox.
... 2019 ...
- Microsoft is trying to drive people away from IE, hoping for Edge adoption. I don't care for Firefox. Opera is almost Chrome with extensions. Edge sounds like it wants to be Chrome. Chrome won on most battlefronts. I don't like that fact, because of the "free from corporate greed" reasons mentioned, but it's going to be hard to change the status quo.
> If the guy examines Samsung Galaxy phones, it would almost be the same.
This is just guessing. If I have to bet, I'd as well bet that Google/Samsung/ISPs/Everyone is spying on you, but just guessing and shrugging it off is not helping.
We should be inspired to check even more devices and inform users about backdoor traffic.