It is still useful for you to know. That "overhead" often does very little to advance your career or even just advance _you_ professionally. And until you measure how much overhead you're incurring, you wouldn't even know.
Much like how people didn't know they're spending 4+ hours on Instagram and YouTube every day until Apple started cataloging and surfacing phone usage. When I saw my own usage I was horrified, and I have cut it down significantly since then, and closed FB and Instagram accounts entirely.
To translate that into the professional domain, there may be some optional bullshit activities you participate in solely because you don't see their cost. You'd be able to identify them and cut down on your participation, possibly either improving your career situation, or improving work/life balance, or both.
There was a time when I worked at a BigCo where there was so much bullshit during the day, I only could do work from home in the evenings. So I worked ~14 hours a day for years - 8 hours spent on bullshit, then another 6 at home on actual work. That wasn't fun at all.
Try actually tracking the time using a free service like Harvest. You'll be surprised just how much longer some things take objectively than subjectively. I'm not saying do retrospectives every week or whatever, but do at least a few, then take note of time sinks and weigh their utility against the time they take. I don't think one can build awareness of this without measurement, something the essay also alludes to.
As someone who also tracks time in some amount of detail (to bill clients for it), communication, and _written_ communication in particular takes a surprising amount of time. All those Slack threads you might not even think twice of engaging in can easily destroy half your working day, even if you ignore the cost of context switching. Emails take longer than you think. Design docs take _much_ longer than you think. Code reviews take longer than you think also.
For me at least coding seems to take less time objectively than subjectively, but it's also quite obvious that most of my time is not spent on coding, sadly. A good chunk of it is completely unproductive bullshit that simply has to happen because that's how the company chooses to operate. I tell them it's not the only way to do things, but they insist on wasting ~1.5 person days a week on "standups" and "scrum" (the team is 12 people, excluding me). They could _easily_ move 50% faster if they shed that bullshit and just gave people sizable tasks and some degree of autonomy and personal responsibility. Instead it's down to who can _appear_ the busiest during standup.
Not anymore. Go to Redfin and see for yourself. I wasn't even looking in the "city proper", I was looking within half an hour drive to Austin downtown. I consider it dumb to buy property without any land to go with it, so I wanted a decent house with an acre or two of land at least. The only decent options I was able to find were all over a million dollars. And then there's flood insurance to contend with in Austin area - you really have to look where it does and does not flood or you could also be on the hook for $1K/mo in flood insurance, without which the bank won't issue a loan.
In this case terrible traffic is the result of buding a ton of crooked relatively narrow roads without any rhyme or reason. Family with children _cannot exist_ in most of the US without a car. Even in Austin itself if you don't have a car everything is just too far apart, and you could spend an hour or more fetching groceries quite easily. I actually forgot my driver's license at home and while it was being fedexed to me I got to experience the car-less Austin lifestyle. Let me tell you authoritatively, you wouldn't want to live like that. But at the same time if you live in Austin itself you don't want to bother with a car either, there's relatively little parking, so you'll really be struggling to find a spot once COVID subsides. I've seen the same deliberate shrinkage of parking happen in other "progressive" cities. Nobody gives a shit if you got kids and need a car. Another thing that Austin shares with other progressive cities is its massive and growing homeless population, though I must also say that even the homeless people are nicer there than, say, in SF or Seattle. At least I haven't seen anyone shoot up heroin in public or shit on the sidewalk.
The traffic situation is already pretty bad in that area, seemingly deliberately so. That is the case even during the pandemic, I can only imagine how bad it is when _nobody_ is remote. It seems that progressive Austin wants everyone to move to the city and give up their cars, which is not a realistic thing to do for most people in TX because it's not built for such lifestyle. I have no other plausible explanation.
Since I'm apparently "posting too fast", I'll just post my reply to the post below here.
US cities (including Austin) are not built to make this viable. I grew up in Russia which mirrors the European way of building things. Everything you need for your family is within walking distance, for what I hope are obvious reasons. The US is not built for this. If one's goal is to get rid of cars, you have to build cities with that in mind. This takes decades, which is why nobody seems interested in actually doing this. Instead we get this passive-aggressive "let's build less parking and roads" thing that you see in US urban centers. No attention whatsoever is paid to how the folks actually live, how they raise their kids, and so on. I'd also argue that, as we switch to electric (and eventually to nuclear power, since that seems inevitable if we actually want to solve the climate crisis rather than just make Al Gore filthy rich), cars will become less and less of a problem, and population will spread out rather than move into the cities. Cities are a bad deal as it is. Expensive real estate, congested roads, high crime.
Don't know yet. One thing I realized is I can't really decide whether a place is worth moving to without living there for a few months. So that's what I intend to do before I uproot my family and move. I like TX in general, but a week or two does not give an even remotely complete picture, beyond just the basic "affordability" and quality of available housing stock.
I've looked at properties in Austin area a few months back. It's more affordable than CA, but it's still way out of reach of most non-HQ staff that Tesla employs. I've read the stat that property values have gone up 43% due to exodus from locked down blue states over the course of just the past year. Couple this with Texas' higher than average property tax rate (_especially_ in Austin area) and you've got some pretty un-affordable housing. FWIW, I'm looking at FL now instead.
100% predictable. They'll eventually move factories there as well, at least the ones where there are a lot of employees. CA is downright abusive to businesses. Only the highest margin Silicon Valley style businesses (which Tesla isn't) can survive in such a hostile regime, and only out of necessity - because that's where talent happens to live. As talent distributes more and more and companies move out, CA will run out of other people's money. Happens every time. That's why they're planning a wealth tax which you'll continue to pay for 10 years after you move out.
This holds up really well, in any STEM field, not just mathematics. Celebrate those dimples on the surface of human knowledge, if you can, in fact, even make them. Very few people can, and our future depends on them.
Kids learn all of that in kindergarten nowadays. The main function of primary ed is to keep kids occupied while their parents are at work. Primary ed will completely fail at that if it goes online.
5 year old is not "education" though. Everything before high school is glorified childcare, and it should be treated as such. Let kids be kids. They don't have to be "2 years ahead" just so their parents could beat their own chest, unless they're staggeringly and obviously gifted.
That's not to say that the current quickly slapped together "virtual education" is not going to be an utter and complete unworkable trainwreck, because we all know that's exactly what it's going to be. Well to do folks such as myself will hire private tutors (who, BTW, work just fine through Skype, by virtue of having done it for years). Less well to do folks will suffer the incompetence of our ultra-expensive $13K/pupil-year education system where less than 1/3rd of the expense goes towards teaching.
If people in power didn't want it to be a trainwreck, they'd reach out to folks who have been in this business for over a decade and learned at least how not to fuck it up completely. Instead they're trying to duct tape something together with MS Teams it looks like, and each school district is duct taping its own bespoke thing.
Is there anything like https://github.com/herumi/xbyak on the Rust side? I like this approach a lot for non-tivial high performance work since it lets you tweak your assembly for particular hardware at runtime.
Has anyone here done any rigorous testing wrt flicker in particular? Of the reasonably priced brands (which excludes Hue), what's the lowest-flickering warm white bulb?
Those same people would be making $250-300K in the US, with about 25-30% effective tax rate (depending on the state), and healthcare mostly paid for by the employer. Assuming they're actually senior and get paid that much in Eastern Europe.
The salaries that are considered "acceptable" in those countries would result in a _negative_ effective tax rate in the US. Tax rate alone is not everything. It's a combination of pretax pay and the effective tax rate that you need to be considering.
At least you don't need to spend 4+ years on a degree that's not worth anything.
Don't know how accurate this list is, but I'm pretty sure an electrician in my area wouldn't even want to get out of bed in the morning for 40K euro per year.
Much like how people didn't know they're spending 4+ hours on Instagram and YouTube every day until Apple started cataloging and surfacing phone usage. When I saw my own usage I was horrified, and I have cut it down significantly since then, and closed FB and Instagram accounts entirely.
To translate that into the professional domain, there may be some optional bullshit activities you participate in solely because you don't see their cost. You'd be able to identify them and cut down on your participation, possibly either improving your career situation, or improving work/life balance, or both.
There was a time when I worked at a BigCo where there was so much bullshit during the day, I only could do work from home in the evenings. So I worked ~14 hours a day for years - 8 hours spent on bullshit, then another 6 at home on actual work. That wasn't fun at all.