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So the ant-secret to alleviating vehicular traffic is to just have 70% of drivers just stay at home. Anyone who's work in a large corporation has probably noti

So the ant-secret to alleviating vehicular traffic is to just have 70% of drivers just stay at home. Anyone who's work in a large corporation has probably noticed about 30% of the employees do 70% of the work. I often read comments here saying they don't understand why more IT folk don't work from home. Turns out we may have been approaching the problem from the wrong angle. We ought be espousing the benefits of not-working from home.

mulmen 8y ago
I get a lot more work done from home than I do in my distraction filled open office hellscape. I also don’t get hit by errant nerf darts from the new batch of SDEs that act like the office is a daycare. There’s nothing valuable about the modern corporate tech office space. Any work accomplished there is in spite of the work environment, not because of it.
- user5994461 8y ago
  >>> I also don’t get hit by errant nerf darts from the new batch of SDEs that act like the office is a daycare. This is clearly an issue with your current employers that should not be generalized to all companies.
  - mulmen 8y ago
    It's a "startup" thing and since corporate America loves to sell the idea that we are all startups it happens in a lot of places. And it's stupid. Just like open offices. This article makes it about gender equality but I'm male and I still don't think it is fun. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ez3mde/dear-startups-fuck-your-nerf-battles https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ez3mde/dear-start...
ravenstine 8y ago
Well, sort of. The ant-secret is to simply create more space and fewer opportunities for collisions. Humans, the supposedly "superior" creatures to ants, are terrible at driving because most of them treat driving as a competition, ignore established flow of traffic (either the speed limit or the current average speed), and switch lanes too often, among other things; all of it might only save a minuscule amount of time for one driver while incidentally slowing down all the other cars on the road. Traffic would almost be a much lesser for humans if they drove at a reasonable speed and kept a greater distance between cars to compensate for the poor human reaction time. Of course, as you noted, keeping cars off the road would be the most realistic way of achieving this as there's no way to convince the average person to drive properly. I don't think that most tech workers should have to work in an office, but it would make more sense for them to work in an office than to employ the 70-80% of ineffective workers and force them to commute every day. But then those millions of people would have no jobs or means of income! Perhaps, then, there could be a good argument made for universal basic income; calculate all the money lost in traffic collisions, the resulting deaths, maintenance of roads, fossil fuels, future expenses caused by global warming, etc., and perhaps it would cost us more than to pay most of the population not to work or at least not work in offices.

mulmen 8y ago

I get a lot more work done from home than I do in my distraction filled open office hellscape. I also don’t get hit by errant nerf darts from the new batch of SDEs that act like the office is a daycare. There’s nothing valuable about the modern corporate tech office space. Any work accomplished there is in spite of the work environment, not because of it.

user5994461 8y ago
>>> I also don’t get hit by errant nerf darts from the new batch of SDEs that act like the office is a daycare. This is clearly an issue with your current employers that should not be generalized to all companies.
- mulmen 8y ago
  It's a "startup" thing and since corporate America loves to sell the idea that we are all startups it happens in a lot of places. And it's stupid. Just like open offices. This article makes it about gender equality but I'm male and I still don't think it is fun. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ez3mde/dear-startups-fuck-your-nerf-battles https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ez3mde/dear-start...

ravenstine 8y ago

Well, sort of. The ant-secret is to simply create more space and fewer opportunities for collisions. Humans, the supposedly "superior" creatures to ants, are terrible at driving because most of them treat driving as a competition, ignore established flow of traffic (either the speed limit or the current average speed), and switch lanes too often, among other things; all of it might only save a minuscule amount of time for one driver while incidentally slowing down all the other cars on the road. Traffic would almost be a much lesser for humans if they drove at a reasonable speed and kept a greater distance between cars to compensate for the poor human reaction time. Of course, as you noted, keeping cars off the road would be the most realistic way of achieving this as there's no way to convince the average person to drive properly. I don't think that most tech workers should have to work in an office, but it would make more sense for them to work in an office than to employ the 70-80% of ineffective workers and force them to commute every day. But then those millions of people would have no jobs or means of income! Perhaps, then, there could be a good argument made for universal basic income; calculate all the money lost in traffic collisions, the resulting deaths, maintenance of roads, fossil fuels, future expenses caused by global warming, etc., and perhaps it would cost us more than to pay most of the population not to work or at least not work in offices.