That's true, but since then we also have had some sort of global event. One of the side effects of that event has been that remote work has become much more normalized around the globe. Which is reflected by the fact that the lifestyle of digital nomads also has taken off in recent years.
As someone from the Netherlands this was interesting to read. My one nitpick is that the author seems to switch between Berlin/Germany and the EU as a whole a few times making the reader think that some things might apply to the entire EU. Which isn't the case, this article is mostly about Germany and really specific to Berlin as well.
Some examples:
- Sunday shopping: Totally a thing here in the Netherlands.
- Smoking: A lot of people smoke here, but it certainly does feel like a lot less people than in Germany, and it certainly is allowed in fewer places.
- Alcohol: Yes, in the Netherlands you can also drink on the street. In Germany and Berlin specifically, it is also part of the drinking culture, it seems. Certainly Germany has a different drinking culture where there is much more strong liquor available in supermarkets where in the Netherlands you need to go to liquor stores or a special closed section of the supermarket.
Again, mostly nitpicks but worth enough to point out imho.
> - Sunday shopping: Totally a thing here in the Netherlands.
I guess it varies significantly by city then, because until a year ago or so the main shopping street here in Leiden was 90% shut on Sundays. More recently I have seen more and more shops stay open on Sunday too, not sure why they changed, but I am glad they did :)
I thoroughly enjoy the silent Sundays. I don't know why so many people require Sunday to be open, especially if so many of them allegedly suffer from stress and a too "fast" lifestyle. Going out on Sundays here is awesome.
Yes, of course that requires people working too. Perhaps not fair for the many that need to work, but there are a few advantages.
I understand that, I guess you can't make everyone happy at the same time :)
For me the issue is that those same shops are usually open 10:00 to 17:30 or so. Which is also the time I work, which means I was forced to go on Saturdays (like most other people). If I had other plans for Saturday, tough luck.
Because it's an absolute crap. In Germany the workaround is gas stations that were converted into grocery stores.
Even in my country where shopping is only closed on pub holidays the gas stations now serve as grocery stores and bake fresh bread on those days. It's just populism.
The alternative is to have everyone being forced (ahem, "incentivized") to work all the time, and having rest days becoming a privilege only for white-collar workers.
You can have a mandatory minimum number of rest days without fixing when those rest days are. In fact, this is already how it works for those professions that are allowed to work on Sundays; their rest day might just be a Tuesday instead.
Could you imagine how that would play out in case we started applying this logic everywhere, and we completely lost the concept of "the weekend"?
- "I know that this is your day off, but everyone will be requested to come to work this Wednesday because the team is about to miss the sprint goal"
- "Now that banks and stock markets open on Saturdays and Sundays, we will have to have everyone on call rotation, all week long."
- "We do not have the budget to increase our team by 2/7, so everyone will have to pick up the slack"
- "Sorry Jane, your refusal to continue on a strict Mon-Fri schedule is hurting your chances of making progress on this company. Yeah, I know you have children and that schools are not open all week long, but Mary has been showing up whenever asked and she seems to be more reliable".
This idea of "individuals should be free to choose all the time" is also another good example of cultural differences between North Americans and Europeans.
Look at the American companies that claim to offer "unlimited PTO", but when you probe it a bit further and ask how many vacation days employees took on average, the recruiter will tell you "oh, about 12 days".
This idea of "freedom to choose" works mostly to get in favor of the system to get peons pitting against each other. The only way to have the majority of people benefiting from a community-level policy is to apply it at that level.
It's funny that you bring up PTO, since all your examples could be applied to PTO as well (all-hands meeting when you're on vacation, on-call rotation throughout the year, 24 legally guaranteed minimum vacation days straining budgets, parents timing their vacation to coincide with school break) and the European solution is to have a minimum number of days everyone gets off, but they're free to choose when.
Vacations have a completely different context from weekend breaks. It's one thing to have an organization planning around a down time once in the year than a constant weekly reset of schedules, employee requests, etc.
we have laws to protect against this kind of nonsense.
if you are forced to work on a day off you have a right to get a free day within two weeks. the maximum worktime in a week is 48 hours.
same goes for the mother with children. childcare is an absolute right that can't be denied or lead to a disadvantage. the above behavior would be illegal, and it would be quite easy to put a stop to it.
so none of your scenarios would come to pass. except the first one maybe, because that can be compensated with extra days off after the sprint.
Your naivete would be cute if it wasn't so dangerous.
> maximum worktime in a week is 48 hours.
Ask anyone in a competitive industry, regardless of seniority, if there was ever a time in their career if they didn't work more than that.
> childcare is an absolute right that can't be denied or lead to a disadvantage.
Just today I saw a post on LinkedIn from a woman telling the story of how she came back from maternity leave to find out how her report was promoted to do her job and she was offered the lower position but kept with the original pay/benefits.
It's a shitty situation and the woman claimed she had the privilege to tell them to shove it, but there is nothing illegal about it.
The woman got back with her job title and pay intact, but because during her absence her report took over her work, the company had to decide which of the two employees would have to perform the secondary function.
What do you think that a company should have done instead? Take back the promotion of the employee that stayed? Keep two employees as the "boss" and be forced to hire a third one?
And then you are effectively discriminating against the employee that did not / wanted not / could not have a leave. How is that solving anything?
This is the typical Protestant/German absurdity, trying to reduce every interpersonal problem into a systematic process that can be blindly applied to everyone, like we were all disposable cogs.
it's not discrimination if i offer you a temporary position. it was never meant to be a permanent promotion. it's like a time limited contract. you know up front what you are getting. if you don't like it you can reject it. however, i am pretty sure that doing well in a temporary position will look good for future promotions.
having children is important for the future of our society, and this needs to be protected. in this situation it is the mother vs the temporary replacement. if i can't keep both, then in the interest of our children i must give preference to the mother.
Except it is not. You are probably very well aware that maternity leave in Germany protects the mother's job up to three years. There is never certainty about when the mother will come back.
Look, I am not saying that extended maternity leave is not important. What I am saying is one can not put someone else's career growth on the line over this.
> having children is important for the future of our society, and this needs to be protected.
Correct. Yet fertility rates keep going down and women keep delaying their pregnancies and favoring work over kids. Why is that?
Couldn't it be that we have been optimizing for economic output (dual family income becoming mandatory, the school system that is basically tailored to allow parents to work full time, laws that try to keep women working during the childbearing years) instead of optimizing for a system that keeps a nuclear family living well enough on a single income?
To go back to the original discussion: for Christ's sake, we are talking here about the idea of getting rid of weekends. Isn't that further propagating the idea that pushing our society to more work is a good thing? Where does this madness stop?
Except it is not. You are probably very well aware that maternity leave in Germany protects the mother's job up to three years. There is never certainty about when the mother will come back.
that's irrelevant, because there is a certainty that she will come back, and the contract for the replacement should be worded accordingly.
What I am saying is one can not put someone else's career growth on the line over this.
what is the alternative? force the employer to hire both? how is that reasonable? this is no different than getting contracted to work on a project, when i don't know when the project will end. i know the end will come eventually, and i can prepare accordingly. as i said before, this is a conflict between the needs of the mother and the needs of the replacement. protecting the mother (or the father, since they can take time off as a parent too) is simply more important than protecting the replacement who knows from the start that this will be temporary. they can plan their career accordingly.
Couldn't it be that we have been optimizing for economic output instead of optimizing for a system that keeps a nuclear family living well enough on a single income?
that is true, and i agree with you that this is a problem. but the solution is elsewhere. part of the problem is that raising children is still not supported enough. and not working is stigmatized. my dad was in this situation. as a single parent he could not work and had to rely on state support with zero income. once we got older he had to switch careers because he could not work in his old job due to health problems. that's basically the situation that any single mother faces who did not work and thus had no qualifications for any decently paying job.
and that's the problem right there. by only allowing one person in a family to work, we are greatly disadvantaging the other person. and that is the reason why living on a single income will never be popular. instead we need to address this problem in other ways. one way would be to reduce everyones (not just parents) work hours to 20-25 hours per week, so that parents can split the time raising children evenly and both parents have an equal chance of having a career at the same time.
the other idea would be to provide stay-at-home parents with resources to earn qualifications that they can use to work once the kids are old enough.
what we can't do is to expect stay-at-home parents to remain without qualifications for the rest of their lives. that would create a large segment of unemployable people, leaving them dependent on the state, or on their divorced earning partners, (which has the secondary effect of making divorce much more difficult because the earning partner would have to continue to provide for their ex, which means they possibly can't marry again)
especially among women this would create two classes of people. those that have a career and those that don't. you ask why the fertility rates are going down? this is one reason.
getting rid of weekends. Isn't that further propagating the idea that pushing our society to more work is a good thing?
we are not getting rid of weekends. we are adding flexibility. the maximum time to work in a week doesn't change, nor the right to a day of rest after working 6 days. (not sure if such a right exists, but i think it should.) added flexibility would also be beneficial for those who are not christians. the jewish day of rest is saturday. in islam traditionally people take a day off work on fridays. locking the day of rest to sunday is a very christian centric practice, and not compatible with a multicultural society.
also, in times where companies experiment with 4day work weeks i see absolutely no risk that allowing work on sunday will lead to people working more days. and making a day of rest mandatory is a simple protection against any abuse of that. allowing shops to open longer will also create more jobs. the only ones at risk are those who are seelfemployed. but they are already at risk. noone stops me from working on sundays, only my health, and my family.
It looks like we are not going to see eye-to-eye on this one:
> what is the alternative? force the employer to hire both?
The alternative is to do exactly what the company did. Parent-to-be gets the job secured but not the career prospect.
> we are not getting rid of weekends. we are adding flexibility.
If the line of where the work week begins and ends becomes blurry, you are by definition getting rid of weekends. You are arguing that "flexibility" is the only outcome of such a proposal, but you are ignoring the fact that all these schemes are introduced with the idea to benefit those who want some type of exception, but it doesn't take a long look at historical evidence to show that these "flexibility" usually gets exploited by employers to pit workers against each other and to push the price of labor down.
> locking the day of rest to sunday is a very christian centric practice, and not compatible with a multicultural society.
The only requirement is to have at least one day where the majority of society can not be compelled to work. If a Seventh Day Adventist does not work during Sabbath because of religious observance, fine. If a Muslim does not want to work on a Friday, also fine.
The alternative is to do exactly what the company did. Parent-to-be gets the job secured but not the career prospect.
so having children will hurt your career? and that is good why? the only effect we will get out of that is even less people who choose to have children. this is not what we want.
historical evidence to show that these "flexibility" usually gets exploited by employers to pit workers against each other and to push the price of labor down
is that really the case? i don't see anything like that happening in the US or other countries where sunday work is already a reality.
> the only effect we will get out of that is even less people who choose to have children. this is not what we want.
Combine with proper social policies that make it possible for families to live on a single income, and you can bet that most women will choose children over career.
> is that really the case? (...) where sunday work is already a reality.
Tell me what types of jobs have people willing working year round on the weekends. You will see that most are not doing by choice, but because of circumstances.
Combine with proper social policies that make it possible for families to live on a single income, and you can bet that most women will choose children over career.
i very much doubt that, for reasons already explained. most women will not want to be dependent on a man or the state to be able survive. they will choose independence over having children.
it used to be possible for a family to live on one salary. and for work in IT or other high paying jobs it still is. if you were right then most families who could afford to live on one salary would do so, but they don't, and those who could not would protest.
no matter what policies we enact, women do not want to stay at home.
they want a career just like men. and i see no reason why they shouldn't.
people do not want to live on a single income. besides the independence for women they also prefer the extra wealth.
if we want people to have more children we need to allow everyone to combine working and raising children.
You will see that most are not doing by choice, but because of circumstances
ok, i have to concede that point. if we allow sunday work we do need to have some strong protections to allow people to refuse, and it's probably not easy to work out what is needed to do that, and i don't know if we want to explore that in this discussion.
in the US btw people can demand the sunday off to practice their religion. it's not enough, but it is at least something.
Yeah at first, the rules like closed shops on Sunday seem annoying, but as time goes on I now enjoy the forced quietness. If only because it adds some flavor to the week, making Sunday not just another day indistinguishable from every other.
Fair, I should have clarified that I am mostly talking about supermarkets. These close fairly early in Germany on weekdays (where here they are often up until 9 in the evening) and are all closed on Sundays.
In bigger cities, they're usually open until 22:00 or 0:00 (except in Bavaria).
In Berlin, depending on where you are, you even got your friendly Späti around the corner which is open around the clock, where you can get food, drinks, bread and some hygiene products.
Replacing SAP for Oracle to me feels like replacing one evil for another.
Besides the companies themselves constantly upselling you and having idiotic licensing terms. Both are very much the sort of companies with products you only are "able" to implement with extremely expensive outside consultants.
It's interesting that the third-party consultants hired by the city to implement it aren't named in these articles and "Oracle" is taking the brunt of the blame, much like "Ticketmaster" doesn't care if you don't like them or not, you're going to use them. It's not just Oracle's fault for a 200m pound invoice, and I agree jumping from SAP to Oracle is probably one reason why the customization costs that much more than going from some smaller accounting system.
You have third-party consultants charging for addressing all the mistakes in the system, present on daily chats and constantly chasing them around for support. Oracle's always upselling you on the parts of the system you haven't implemented yet.
The actual municipal employees are making 75% (my own estimate) of what their industry peers make in salary so they're just trying to do their job as they found it, not attempt to replace the status quo with a "solved, open source, one-size-fits-all solution" like so many here believe various ERP systems are. Everything sounds better on paper.
> It's interesting that the third-party consultants hired by the city to implement it aren't named in these articles
It certainly is, here in the Netherlands consultancy companies are often directly mentioned as a cause for a lot similar projects going over budget. Though the government really doesn't seem to be able to do much about it or simply doesn't care. As most recently they appointed the ex vice-president of one of those companies as a state secretary of Digitalisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zsolt_Szab%C3%B3_(Dutch_politi...
They probably know, but don't have the ultimate say in the matter. As others have said, having one screen as opposed to a variety of buttons and knobs that need to be wired is likely cheaper (even more when you don't really invest in proper software development).
I am not sure about the cost reasoning. The cars were equipped with all the buttons and knobs before the touchscreens. Then they started adding touchscreens - and it was the screens that were expensive, not the buttons that were already there.
But they went too far and moved everything to the screens. It's fine for big portion of the controls, but it's a big no-no for the controls you need to use while driving. And that's just a few buttons, to be honest.
Anyway, a decent design process would figure out. Seems like inner politics won instead.
> and it was the screens that were expensive, not the buttons that were already there.
The combination of a screen AND buttons is still more expensive than just a screen. If you are introducing a new component that is going to otherwise raise the cost of production, you will be looking for ways to reduce cost or, maybe more aptly, offset the cost of the new component.
With touch screens, you are presented with a unique option where the thing you introduce can be used to move all sorts of functionality to that would otherwise need its own hardware.
You also need to keep in mind that the physical buttons on older cars didn't need to be tied into a computer system as much as modern buttons.
Yeah, some touch buttons work through conductivity and are really sensitive. Fittingly for this post, our cloths dryer has a touch "screen" which is to say that it is a slab of plastic with icons that are touch sensitive. Often enough, I can't get them to register a touch unless I press really hard or if I wet my finger first.
> Also, I didn't really noticed a significant difference in code quality, even the best model (GPT-4) write code that doesn't work,
Interesting, personally I have noticed a difference. Mostly in how well the models pick up small details and context. Although I do have to agree that the open Llama models are generally fairly serviceable.
Recently I have tended to lean towards Claude Sonnet 3.5 as it seems slightly better. Although that does differ per language as well.
As far as them being slow, I haven't really noticed a difference. I use them mostly through the API with open webui and the answers come quick enough.
> The windows phone experience was: sign up for a dev account to download visual studio with WP support. Start up VS, asked for your account again.
This is something that Microsoft still struggles with. Some things have improved, but a lot of the dev experiences on the Microsoft side are still cumbersome and not aimed at small time devs.
My experience here is with browser extensions and publishing these for both old Edge (pre chromium) and the newer Edge. The entire publishing dashboard is/was overly complex and assumes you are either a single person or a big organization with (azure) AD set up. With Mozilla AMO you can just add individual developers to your extension by mail, and with Google it is as easy as setting up a group.
With browser extensions specifically (and Edge as well) you can also clearly see where it is still a dedicated motivated internal team setting things up and where things were handed over to more general teams and support was also outsourced to somewhere else.
Anyway, my main point is that even now, many years later, Microsoft still struggles in this area making me think this is more fundamental to the company culture and way of operating.
Probably good advice if you are right handed and have good fine motor skills.
At least way into the 90s kids here learned to write with fountain pens. For me this meant pages full of smudges, forked pens and generally unreadable text.
As soon as I was allowed to switch to a regular pen my handwriting improved a lot (still not great, but better).
Interesting maybe, but also one that lacks sources. It is entirely possible that this passed by me and I just didn't catch the thing mentioned in the blog post. But, I also can't find much in the way of any reference to it online. Not even a hint using various search terms and combinations as mentioned in the blog post.
It very much gives the impression of it being a story made up as a vehicle for the main point they are trying to make.
Are there other alternatives that are 1) open source 2) offer the same integration to begin with and finally 3) have been audited or are popular enough to be under constant scrutiny?
There is of course the KeePass ecosystem, but that is why I included my second point, as with KeePass you are responsible for vault syncing, having clients for all platforms, etc.
I suppose that it is good to be aware of other options. At the same time, jumping ship so easily also doesn't seem realistic or ideal behavior to me.
I have no affiliation, just found them this week, but https://psono.com/ exists. So 1 and 2 are met and 3 is half-way there maybe? It's a self-audit but they have been around a while. Apache2 licensed.
Again, I literally found them the other day, and other than a cursory check to make sure the UI/UX is friendly enough to compete with BW or 1P, I haven't had a chance to look through their code at all yet. I have no idea if the promises they document are met.
Hi, Sascha here, the main developer behind Psono. Psono has been audited multiple times so far, usually on a yearly bases. The last one here https://psono.com/blog/security-audit-2024 (you will also find a link to the audit itself)
I decided that vaultwarden should not have an internet accessible port. Are there any that meet those requirements and also let you (reliably!) edit/create passwords when offline?
Also, sometimes the bitwarden client decides to blow away my local copy of the password database. I'd like it to store it pesistently on all machines so I have to lose my phone, my laptop, my vaultwarden server and its two backups before I get locked out of everything.
Currently, the phone + laptop don't count as backup copies.
> I decided that vaultwarden should not have an internet accessible port
So how does your browser extension work when outside your LAN? via Tailscale or similar VPN mesh? And for people who use it outside of the LAN entirely?
The app (and iOS keyboard integration) degrades to read only mode. It works about 95% of the time. I'd rather it work 100% of the time, and be read-write.
I don't run the browser extension. (There have been too many other password managers with exploitable password bugs.)
i use the keepass ecosystem with app.keeweb.info.
Its an open source webclient that can directly pull from your google drive (and other places!).
I use a google drive through keeweb for syncing, 2 clicks and its syncd. Auto pulls when past pw.
keepass works in browser (how I use it on a computer), can work offline (which is good in air-gapped instances, one of my reqs) and works directly on my android phone without issue.
It is actually sort of how I used it as well, though through nextcloud. It did still remain a hassle. It also requires all different apps to be maintained and equally safe.
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