[ttldr]

the article is certainly "Articulate", and i'm sure its content and message is agreeable to many in the community (myself included). no doubt that it speaks to the day-to-day chafes of working engineers and other technical folks in a corporate environment.

taking a look at the author's startup[1] is interesting. it seems clear that he's trying to collapse employees' personal slack afforded by remote/async work. that makes sense in terms of boosting butts-in-seats accountability, and i guess by some draconian measure that could translate to "productivity" (read: answering random interruptions to deep work). but i worry that the very dynamic he's espousing would itself kill builder culture. you can't think deeply about a problem when you have people bombarding your attention based on their own whims. from the company's landing page:

> Actually talk with your coworkers. Walk over to your teammate for a quick question. 10x faster than sending a zoom link.

also, i guess this is more aesthetic, but the skeuomorphism is super weird. i would be super suspicious of a work environment that requires this sort of SIMS-like virtual environment. it seems like a half-assed, 2D version of VR workplaces that are crawling their way out of R&D departments at certain advertising companies (looking at you Meta(verse)).

[1] https://www.teamflowhq.com/

[jstanley]

What the author's startup does seems completely orthogonal to the idea presented in TFA, no?

It's possible for a person to be wrong on one thing (though I'm not taking a view on whether they are) and right on another thing.