The dumb part of this sort of plan is that they will also lose a number of high performing engineers who just don't want to be part of a culture like that. I saw it at IBM with their push to cut costs by giving lousy reviews. FB didn't invent this crap. Boss's start hiring throwaway workers to be sacrificial lambs to the 15% cutoff. You can get away with it for maybe a year or two since every company does have some folks around who don't pull their weight. But if you keep doing it, the results get worse and worse.

Because we started expecting people to survive medical emergencies and the rigors of pregnancy and birth we started investigating deaths. Also the technology to hunt down these genetic variations probably hasn't been around very long.

Compared to tax cuts for the rich, bailouts for the banks, subsidies for oil companies, the military industrial complex, pensions and health care for Congress... there are billions (trillions?) in spending that are far more upsetting than some ordinary people getting student loan debt wiped out.

This will be an unnoticeable drop in the vast ocean of national debt. And at least it doesn't almost exclusively benefit people who are filthy rich already.

It's simplistic to think that the education degree is so that the teacher can understand 8th grade algebra. It's so that teachers can deal with students, parents, administrators, teaching techniques, technology, psychology.... A good teacher is an inspiration for their students to want to learn and understand their world.

Likewise, social workers must be trained to deal with potentially dangerous situations. To talk to vulnerable people and earn trust. To navigate complex personal and legal situations where lives could be on the line.

Skimping on these essential services is how we get 8th graders who can't read and 10 year olds who need abortions.

I would rather my tax money go to thousands of people who took out education loans than PPP loan forgiveness, bank bailouts, tax breaks for the ultra-rich etc. At least ordinary people have a chance to benefit from this policy.

Right wing fanatic assholes who use the free speech banner as an excuse to be hateful pieces of shit when they could have simply skipped over the story and moved on to whatever else is going on in their sad little lives.

As opposed to the conservative thinking: who cares what mess we make as long as someone gets rich?

No doubt that current and historical attempts at socialism and communism have been train wrecks. But that doesn't change the fact that it is in vogue now to label any government person, law, regulation, speech etc that someone doesn't like as socialist or communist. The people generally using those words as epithets now don't even realize how good they have things compared to being in an actual authoritarian state.

Semantically yes, if you're on site you're doing SOMEthing different. But, for purposes of employment, I do think we'd want to be able to say that something affected job performance in a meaningful way. Most of what I've heard about how working from home is bad comes from corporate types who can't be bothered to figure out how to adapt their management style to the new world. And the rest from some sort of idea-crat who thinks they are so motivating, so amazing, so inspiring that there can be no company culture unless people are onsite to bask in their presence

No doubt there are people who love working in an office. They don't need to justify it to anyone, but I know of some who like the physical company of their peers or have a noisy home environment that hinders their work. More power to 'em.

I've been working fully remote for 14 years now as a software developer though, and I can say that I get plenty of work done and partake in all the corporate culture that I can stand from a distance. Even with a number of companies using carrot and stick approaches to get their people back to the office, there are still more options for fully remote work than ever. It's a good time to think about what you want to do and where you want to do it and look for a company that supports it.

Can't speak for the role of the people in TFA, but it isn't actually true that there is always a difference. For example, when I worked for IBM my team was global. Whether I was in the local office or not, I still spent the day on the IBM chat client keeping in touch with people from India, Ireland, Canada, England and other parts of the US. The only thing I accomplished by being in an office was running up IBM's internet charges instead of my own.

There are roles that can be more productive working remote. There are roles that are pretty much impossible to do remotely. Paying people less if they opt to work from home is an interesting test of how much it's worth to those people. I wonder if we'll see a follow up article on how it played out.

Consequences for shareholders is easy-ish. If the corporation is held accountable in a real way... via fines that are more than what can be dismissed as the cost of doing business, for example, then the shareholders will feel it. I mean at this point, just stopping the insanity of any taxpayer subsidy for the petroleum industry would be a major step forward. These guys get hauled in front of congress just about every year to justify getting gov't funding while posting (yet again) record profits.

Prior work is a tough one, because it's hard to prove originality.

40 acres is pretty small as farms go. And a sustained drought means your pond dries up and you don't get so much water in the winter that you can catch up. I wonder at what point it'll be cost effective to try desalinization. Probably that before it would be effective to build a massive pipeline from the great lakes.

Given the track record of new things in tech, pushing back on what feels like almost everything is not necessarily inappropriate. Many, many new things will be old dead things in a matter of months or years. Also, while they're still shiny and new, their feature set, support and enterprise reliability are probably crap. There's a happy medium between adopting every new toy and none of them. Experienced engineers have a lot to contribute to that evaluation.

But the stock prices rise on every piece of cost cutting news so these chaps pad their resumes with how their tenure at company X led to a 32% increase in stock price. Then they just trade each other around the tech industry round robin style as CEOs tanking the products and morale of the employees as they go. But, they retire at 42 years old with a zillion dollars and don't have to care about us little people.