partial_accumen

If one product manager gets added to a call, I hear about it from the other PMs. A good day for me is when I have 8 straight hours of coding to do and I don’t speak to a single soul at work.

Unless you’re coding for yourself, you’re not going to escape PMs in any other org you would go to. Your situation is where soft skills come into play. Identify a PM you like, and route all your communication through them. If others want updates, point them to your chosen PM. If others want invites to meetings tell them “no problem, reach out to [favorite PM] to get added”. If Favorite PM doesn’t invite them to the meeting then its an argument between Favorite and the other person and you’re out of the loop.

The best engineers aren’t just good at their technology, but also communicating with others effectively.

but I can imagine Republicans and other pouncing on this politically to roll back some environmental legislation.

They’re already doing that anyway today and gas is nowhere near $8/gallon.

Peterson said in a statement provided to NBC. “We stand by our decision as a privately owned bookstore to determine what titles and merchandise are suitable for our shelves or easily accessible by young children."

Mr Peterson, you absolutely have that right to do what you want with your own store. However, that won’t insulate you from the consequences of your actions when your employees quit rather than capitulate to your bigotry and your customers evaporate for the same reason. Even from a business point of view, you might want to look at sales numbers for the Republican views you’re courting. Far fewer buy books than your previous, more open minded, clientele.

Energy hungry appliances means more energy (electricity/gas) consumed. trump’s other efforts are killing green energy generation. So these two things together mean more fossil fuel energy consumption which props up his selling us all out to fossil fuel interests. This tracks with trumps corporate capture.

All respect to Mr Doctorow, but he’s got this wrong:

Tech workers are workers, and they once held the line against enshittification, refusing to break the things they’d built for their bosses in meaningless all-nighters motivated by vocational awe.

…and…

Tech workers stayed at the office for every hour that god sent, skipping their parents’ funerals and their kids’ graduations to ship on time.

It wasn’t “vocational awe” it was money that lead tech workers to work long hours and sacrifice. Lots and lots of money, five to ten times what your non-tech same-aged peers were getting. It was so much money that if you didn’t live too high on the hog, it set you up for a very nice retirement and having “fuck you” money in your late 30s and 40s. During those days the only thing a tech union would do would make your life balance better, but at the cost of your salary.

With all the tech layoffs and enshitification, those meteoric salaries are starting to come down to Earth. They’re still high comparatively to other professions though. So I think tech unions will gain more traction now, but employers also have more tech workers (right now) so they can bully their current workers to try to avoid unions. However, tech is cyclical, as is hiring. I’ve been in tech long enough to see 3 large downturns, but when the pendulum swings, the hiring returns and (so far) those high salaries have too. If the pendulum swings too quickly and the high salaries (and now “work from home” requirement) returns, tech unions will be back to where they were struggling to establish themselves in the industry of job hoppers jumping ship from one employer in under a year or less chasing the larger compensation.