| This is an ad, Hacker News: > [More sophisticated tools] can understand these aspects' in-depth impact on your productivity, catching the unseen blockers and pain points that remote work has brought. Then, based on that data, you can implement changes and measure the results. … which links to their product. The submitter/author is the co-founder. > Not only have office interruptions increased; for many engineers, home life poses an entirely new set of challenges. It's a different set of interruptions. In the office, I have all the din and chaos of all of my coworkers around me, since private offices and cubicles have fallen out of fashion in favor of stuffing in as many people in as few square feet as possible. At home, well, I don't have an office there either, since when the average cost of a home is north of $1M in many metros¹, home ownership is fairly out of reach, even for a SWE. No home, and no apartment big enough, means I also don't have a home office. I also didn't have a desk or chair, either; I started this pandemic at a couch and coffee table, and found out the rest of the world was too when I started shopping for desks and chairs and they were well out of stock. > If an engineer in an office needed a mouse or monitor, the company would buy them the relevant tools. Most companies will buy tooling for, but the company; that is, whatever is purchased is owned by the company. I don't partake in this, as it's an incredible amount of e-waste. ¹and in most of the data I've seen, rent:wage is high in any geo. "SWEs are paid more" is true, but it doesn't change the cost of a house. Put them in terms of salary years to control for changes over time, and it's 3-10× (depending on location) more expensive for me than it was for my father, who held a similar "highly paid" service industry job. |
In other words, worker compensation has not kept up with increases in the cost of living, and even engineers are not exempt from this trend.