I worked at Agilent doing MMIC’s in the early 2000’s, and just missed this era. As the story goes a German group made a logo of a beer stein with bubbles, using multiple mask layers to get lots of detail and 3D depth. Classy stuff. But all the little features created a lot of debris during liftoff in processing, and it crashed yield with a bunch of shorts. The management response was to ban all the logos en masse. You put down a library logo of an A inside a circle for copyright, and text from the library for chip ID, no more, no less.

One of our conference rooms had picture from another old chip, of road kill. Zig zags on the top metal layer, a flattened critter on the first metal layer. It was the Dog Bob conference room, not entirely sure why.

A lot of administrative assistant work also got pushed upwards onto less competent and more expensive employees. Instead of handing an admin a pile of receipts after a business trip you go into a web app and do it yourself. Since I only occasionally travel I end up spending a couple at $100 an hour first resetting a password, then using my phone to snap pictures of receipts, typing in values since, guessing at charge codes, and so forth. After that I am usually frustrated and annoyed for the rest of the day and have lost a lot of focus on my actual job. If only we had someone who did this regularly to do it in half the time, for a third the pay

So the promise of AI being sold to dolts in management scares me more than the actual likely future of AI in the workplace.

How did the world become so hostile to children? We should welcome the next generation with open arms and knock off all this "seen and not heard" BS. Parenting is hard under the best of circumstances, and indeed kids need to go places as well. If you don't like it, go charter a personal jet.

Best yet, if I “adopt” a dozen or so embryos, can I claim a dozen child tax credits?

Step 3: Profit!

Sign?! How old school. Just opening a box, or visiting a website can result in you vicariously getting entangled in the TOS. Long gone are the days where you had the right to refuse a contract while just going about your day.

Part of the point of a labor board was to mitigate the inherently asymmetric relationship between a single worker and a large company. The courts are a very expensive way to deal with a labor issue. Basically the payout has to be in the 6-figures level just to get a lawyer to even think about taking your case. Large companies have the ability to bankrupt anyone with legal fees for more minor offenses. If such a board ceases to exist it will embolden many more abuses to escalate.

Whistleblower protections in general are in tatters, and bluntly speaking the incentives vs. personal risks are such that only a fool would stick their neck out these days. Quietly create a paper trail to CYA, and find a way to escape further involvement. Anything else gets you sued and blackballed.

Four 9's, Six-Sigma, etc. Often these are buzzwords the management latches onto in lieu of turning their brain on.

As you state, quality and safety are very application specific. As an engineer I got zero training on how to even properly do a MTTF calculation, and even recently had to learn about a whole side of wear-out failure predictions that nobody within the company properly grasped, including our quality person. A 1PPM failure rate can be both horrifying, or phenomenal depending on the application and measure.

I don't mind an actual good office. An office needs to be designed around the kind of work being done, and workers in it. If you need people to do deep work, they need to be able to put their head down for hours at a time and dive deep without being constantly distracted by cross-room banter, or random co-worker interruptions. If you want people to collaborate on a single screen you need to cubes/offices big enough for additional people to pile into comfortably. A one-size-fits-all ever shrinking cubicle is likely not the right design for a lot of workers. WFH is not the right fit for all kinds of work either, but often it is better only because offices are so badly designed. I have seen very few examples where the workers actually got real input into how the office was designed or configured.

An exception was when I talking with Barry Gilbert (RIP) at Analog Devices about 15 years back. He designed his office around what he thought design engineers actually needed. This meant physical offices with a closing door. Door closed, leave me alone, I'm doing deep work. The lab spaces was in the center so that you walked out of your office and had easy access to the lab space. It made a lot of sense, and reminded me how how bad every other engineering office I have worked in has been designed. Cubes have shrunk to 8'x8', walls are shorter and less sound proof. People fear making noise so they don't collaborate, and when you do you indeed distract many coworkers. My lab space is usually on the other side of the building, if not in another building. Short walls mean I have bright lights in my sight line right now that fatigue me when doing intensive IC layout work.

Would Barry's office design for marketing? Unlikely. For software design? Not likely. But generic cube-ville is likely mediocre to bad for almost everyone.

My rambling point is that I think there is a huge amount of wasted productivitiy when it comes to how we do our work, and it goes well beyond WFH vs in-office. If I could get a quiet environment when I needed it without resorting to noise canceling headphones or hiding in a conference room I would be much more pro-office. If it wasn't so exhausting to collaborate on on visual discussions around the circuits I design I would be more pro-WFH. Instead I am pro-retirement.

My Nissan Leaf is in need of a fresh battery, but they stopped making the replacement packs and at the overall price for the several year old stock of remaining batteries makes no economical sense. I can get a Bolt with a fresh battery for pretty darn cheap with more than double the range.

Really sad state of affairs to chuck a whole car out, but here we are.

A couple worthy podcasts from Freakonomis Radio that dig into this:
Why Is There So Much Fraud in Academia?
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped?

Roughly speaking we have an incentive system around "Publish or Perish" that makes honesty much less profitable than fraud. Fraud itself is too simple of a term when it comes to things like P-hacking. Until you can have a good career without becoming a paper mill, the problems of low quality and fraudulent academic papers will persist.

If you want folks to be healthier, keep their workloads reasonable, make it part of your culture to take your vacation days off and take time off when sick.

Instead we mostly have few days off to start, you get side-eye for taking it, and if you take time off work just piles up for when you return. Worrying about falling behind in particular makes it hard to actually relax when you take days off.

All that costs money, at least short term money, so it will not happen. Wellness programs are cheap per employee while creating the perception that the company cares, even if they do nothing.

The old expression was "I know I am wasting half of my advertising dollars, I just don't know which half."

A few years ago there was a wave of companies who stopped or scaled back a lot of their banner ad sales, and other web based ads with claims of zero impact to their sales. That noise dissipated and advertising has barreled forward at full speed. Somehow companies have evidence ads are ineffective, yet they just keep pouring ad dollars in. It boggles the mind.

Drive-by-contracts are part of the new reality. First it was shrink-wrap contracts, but now simply visiting a site may result in you being held to their ToS. Until the courts stop agreeing that signature free mostly unread one sided documents that require a legal degree to understand can be considered a legally binding contract, we are just stuck this way.

What I'd like to see is some malicious folks start adding first-born clauses to their web sites to highlight just how insidious and ridiculous all of this is.

The integrated circuit.