I agree, up to where the company runs into tax implications (because now you're employing someone working in another country, and they'd really like their share of payroll taxes and such.)

But within those boundaries? I don't see why I should fuss that my staffer got to house-sit for a couple weeks, so long as they're getting the work done and getting their hours in.

And that's 100% cool. I have staffers who go in a couple times a week just to get out of the house. Others come in because their spouse also is remote, and it's just easier to split up. Some just don't have the space at home for dedicated office areas. It's a personal choice.

My (again, personal) logic goes thusly - if I'm spending the hour on the commute, what am I and the company getting out of it? In my case, our team is spread out across the country - there's no-one else in my province. So all my meetings are going to be on screens anyway. If there was someone local I needed to meet, I'd happily arrange my day to go in to do that meeting in person. Guess what - most of *them* don't want to come in either! So, if I'm going to do exactly what I do at home, just in a less comfortable chair and on a smaller screen and fewer snacks on hand... what's the gain for anyone?

Even if my team was local - and they'd been hired non-remote and thus lived reasonably close to the office - having everyone in person for meetings sounds awesome. But the rest of the day we're all on our computers doing our work with our headphones on to concentrate, which loops back to - what's the advantage?

Wait - so the company said "if you work out of the office you get to take the day off", not "you can remote in"? The former is just good practice. The latter is playing favorites.

It's an attempt at framing. "Piracy" was coined intentionally, because it frames as evil theft, not copying. "Forbidden sharing" brings to mind those years where kids weren't allowed to trade lunches at school because a principal decided it was an allergy risk.

Could just be Stallman has less luck than Doctorow - "enshittification" seems to have caught on rather nicely.

Hell, back in the mid-90s software companies were poaching first-year students ("to get them before education ruins them"). And the O&G companies had to be bullied to stop taking kids at 16 who figured "hey, why finish high school when I can go straight to a six-figure oil rig job!" What they didn't tell the kids was "yeah, in a few years we'll punt you for the new up-and-comers, so hope you like being 25 with no education!"

Wasn't the whole problem that this *wasn't* a Google project (or any business support at all)?

Well, there was that whole global pandemic, and turns out keeping the economy from imploding costs a few bucks. Unless you wanted mass unemployment, followed by homelessness, followed by deaths?

There's a few restaurants in town that have those little robot waiters. And they *all* have a human following them around.

And every decade or two there's a new scare-story of the new thing being bad for kids. Before YT was video games. Before that was TV. Before that was radio. Before that was newspapers. And so on...

Difference is a college kid has a degree - they owe a bunch of money, but they have paper that will be recognized at other businesses.

A Palantir Pal will get used like a rented car for a few years until they get worn out (or decide they'd like more than entry-level wage), get punted to the curb, and will now be 22 with a high-school diploma and "experience" no-one else cares about.

I thought the plan was "Don't use that Chinese product - the Chinese government has backdoors in it! Use Good ol' American products, with good ol' American backdoors!"

Just compare how America treats Middle-East countries they know don't have nukes to North Korea (who either does or is bluffing extremely well).

I would hope that the last two decades of cyclical hiring + layoffs has disabused programmers of any seniority of the notion that their employers consider them anything other than a fungible product. "We hire rockstar dev" is just company code for "we shall blow smoke up your ass, force you to give us unpaid overtime until either the project is done or you burn out, and then fire you to save costs and get our management bonuses. Sure you're jaded now, but that's OK - there's a whole new graduating class of suckers we can hire instead."

I'm still a daily-driver VBA programmer. Ain't saying I'm fond of it, but Excel as a stealth UI can't be beat. People who will flail and gnash because they can't understand a Salesforce or web form will happily fill out cells that are quietly uploading values to server, because they didn't have to "learn" anything. It's just Excel.

Hell, I'm no guru but I know the answer for this - it's so you can run long tasks without having to tie up a limited terminal in the lab. Log in, start your task, log out and go for beer while someone else gets use.

Now, in this world of "everyone has their own computer and terminal", it's not as necessary a feature as it used to be. But that hardly seems a reason to arbitrarily flip the default.