Are you a parent, and has this been your kid's experience? Because that's definitely not my middle-schooler's experience. She's on her fourth book of the school year for which she'll need to write a report.

I don't doubt there are other schools out there that have had to abandon book reports, but I wonder how widespread it is. We're not in a particularly competitive school district (unlike our neighbors), so I don't think there's anything special about the kids in this school.

I'm in finance in a big city. My salary is 195K doing SRE work. Given where I am, I think my software dev C++ coworkers make within a 150K range more than me. (FPGA guys are probably 200K more based on job postings.) But I do live in a high-cost-of-living area so there's that.

I definitely saw it at a very large financial institution where I once worked seven years ago. About a year before I left, they created a whole new department around security and got tons of leverage across multiple levels and departments. Security-related upgrades trumped regular changes. And any discovered vulnerabilities were given high priority for devs to drop whatever they're doing to fix. In forming their group, they recruited people from different teams throughout the IT field, including devs, build engineering, devops, networking, and systems engineers, so that the department had a good handle on institutional knowledge throughout the company.

Those stickers on her plane are sponsors, too. So it's likely the family didn't foot the whole bill for the plane and preparation for the trip.

I guess it would be more entertaining if there didn't seem be so many of them.

It just seems a little depressing to see so many people upset about this.

So edgy.

If you work for Google, you're already getting decent hardware to work from home with.

Per the article (second paragraph):
"For people who want to continue working from home, Pichai said the company will allow employees to expense up to $1,000 for equipment and furniture, such as standing desks and ergonomic chairs. "

Incidentally, my company (not Google) gave all employees 1K in March to help pay for any WFH-related expenses. Now that it's looking like we'll be WFH for at least till 2021, we're being allowed to expense upgrades on office equipment. So, I got myself a decent standing desk.

They did this with 4G. Here's a quote from an article from 2012:

The emptiness of 4G was highlighted last week, when people who installed the latest iPhone 4S operating system upgrade noticed something that seemed too good to be true: The network indicator on their phones began displaying “4G” rather than “3G.” This change occurred only for people who use AT&T’s cellular service; Verizon iPhone users who installed the upgrade still saw the 3G indicator. Some people took the change to mean that their phones had gotten faster wireless Internet access, but that wasn’t true—the OS upgrade did nothing to change how your phone communicates with cell towers. All that changed was AT&T’s marketing. Early last year, essentially overnight, AT&T began rebranding its 3G network as a 4G network. So now that tired old 3G phone is fresh again—lucky you, you’ve got 4G!

New owners, new developers. All that's left is a brand.

It's a decent arrangement, but there are pluses and minuses. You get regular interruptions from your 1-year-old, but at the same time you get to see your 1-year-old so frequently -- and she gets to see you!

I do miss lunches with co-workers, though. On the day I go onsite, I'm usually too busy, packing in a week's worth of face-to-face meetings into one day.

*punishing those without kids, that is.

No one is talking about punishing those with kids. It's an observation based on the "quiet of my own home" quote.

> Published: January 14, 1987