I had the same thought about delivery-only stores. Honestly, I'm in support of it. I hate driving. But grocery stores are not up to the task right now with order and delivery systems.
1,237 karma · joined November 14, 2008
1. A large number of people decided to move to home delivery. We couldn't get a delivery slot for weeks.
2. I was able to get a delivery once. We had to submit the order the night before. Then I had to wake up early the next morning and continually hit refresh on the delivery scheduling page until a slot opened up, probably due to someone canceling. However, 40% of the items we ordered were no longer available. When we go to the grocery store the items are there. For some reason, they show as out when ordering online.
We gave up 6 weeks ago. People who were willing to put up with scheduling weeks in advance and not receiving important parts of their order are finally giving up.
It's not really a preference. Our grocery stores are not setup to handle the volume. Fortunately, we're moving into farmers' market season so we can avoid larger stores to some degree.
An important factor is that my team works from home regularly so, when offices shut down, we were already setup for 100% remote work. People who haven't had time to really setup may have been overwhelmed for a bit.
You can't imagine the relief from just being able to throw in a load of laundry mid-morning, take the dog for a walk at lunch, and starting a meal immediately after work. Working from home is a major stress reliever for family people. My wife and I are also saving quite a bit from not driving our cars, not going out for coffees or lunches, etc.
When we're not in the middle of a pandemic and kids are at school, camps, etc., working from home is a major boon for family people.
My organization operates culturally at the pace of an insurance company. Despite the benefits of a semi-remote organization to my employer and the opportunity this pandemic provided for proof that productivity can remain high when working remotely, it will choose to have people on-site.
Now I'm searching for remote-only work.
[EDIT: Added "sick" in the last sentence of the first paragraph.]
Recently I picked up friend chicken from a small restaurant in Providence, RI called North. It was their take on chicken karaage. It was crispy but tender and was spiced with something mildly hot. It's my new favorite.
I prefer sticking with the small places. They're not afraid to spice to local tastes rather than spice for the median person in the US.
Often I look at my older code and recognize the stage of development as a coder that I was in. It's usually not cringe-worthy but it makes me pensive about how I would handle it now.
Another joy is when I find out that a module I wrote is being used extensively by other developers. Just recently I found out that a small, single-purpose function I wrote for my specific needs and deployed to our shared library, is fundamental to another team. They asked me about modifying it for requirements they have. The code itself wasn't beautiful but it filled a need and could be understood well-enough to modify by another. It made me happy all day.
And yes, other creative pursuits give me the same joy. Some practice sessions on my drums seem effortless. My ideas seem to flow regardless of the technical difficulty. Likewise, some dinners I make are chef-level tasty and get the desired "yummmm" from my wife and daughter.
Keep a memory of the times when your code makes you smile. Those memories pull you through the down times.
Our environment is a mixture of in-house developed apps and COTS. Until recently, our major COTS vendors didn't have cloud solutions. Now they have cloud solutions but they're far too costly for us to afford. So we need to keep them in-house and continue to employ the staff to support it.
Our in-house apps integrate the COTS systems. Our newer apps are mostly in the cloud. But the older ones are in technologies that need to stay where the database server is, which is in our server room for the reason stated in the last paragraph. Rewriting the apps isn't on our radar due to new work coming in.
Historically, outsource vs. in-source seems to ebb and flow. The clear path is usually muddied when new technologies come out to reduce cost on one side or the other.
It's incredibly tough to know the full effect of a trade-off on your organization until you start going down that path.
We're early in the process of adopting a micro-service architecture. With only a handful of services so far, I can already see how a team of two is going to spend a lot more time with operational issues and debugging.
I like that the SE can fit in my pocket as easily as my current phone. The price is also attractive, although I tend to keep phones until they become too slow and battery life becomes an issue.
However, I'm frustrated constantly by typing on it. Just typing a couple of sentences in a text message can take minutes. (I'm a 60 wpm touch typist on a standard keyboard.) It's become so bad that I'm moving back to a laptop for most communication. My phone is coming close to a read-only device.
Is the 11's size enough help for typing that it's worth the price?
If so, does it fit in your pocket, i.e. how do you keep it on you?
We run into problems when someone with a proclivity to one side meets a problem best solved by thinking on the other side of the spectrum. An example is a young dev in my organization who was given requirements for a new app that required a data store. Not being comfortable with SQL or relational databases, he chose a document store. It wasn't a good fit. Very quickly requirements expanded and caused his code to balloon into a mess of nested loops with lots of if-checks. Performance has progressively decayed as well. A simple multi-table join with filtering would have knocked off 2/3 of the code.
My productivity has gone up measurably. In normal times, I get plenty of social stimulation outside work so I don't need any from work.
While I think many organizations will retain remote work for some percentage of their workforce when the crisis is over I don't think we're about to have a revolution. The generations in charge came of age with face-to-face being the way people got things done. They aren't going to change.
(I'm not trying to be exhaustive. The examples above are common ones I've seen regularly and they make me cringe.)
I don't need to know the variable names used in these cases. The very act of not using a relational database properly or not handling exceptions is easy to spot.
Now that I've been away from mandated code reviews for quite a while I can understand why reviewers go to the trivial. Firstly, "code reviews" are really "system reviews". It's difficult reviewing a project whose requirements you don't know with a design that came about through iterative design and possibly in a language you don't use.
My current team is small and split into an integration group (mine) of two people and a UX group of two people. My group partner and I look over each other's projects and stay up on the requirements as the project progresses. But it's completely informal. Yet it seems to work better than having a group of 2, 3, X number of randomly chosen developers from my department.
Yes, in music, composers do work together although I wouldn't make a general rule about it. Writers tend to be solitary. They reach out to people when they're researching something for a story. But outlining, thinking through story lines, and the actual typing part are solitary. From interviews with writers, I get the impression that a good editor is indispensable for developing a story though.
Likewise, painters and sculptors in my acquaintance work alone.
I wouldn't read anything else into it.
I think the issue, in American culture, is bigger than just employers and career choices. My wife and I discuss this subject often. The problem is that we are a two career couple who are raising a child in a culture that hasn't, and may never, adapt to not having one parent at home. Our society isn't setup for it. Vital services, like healthcare or simply furnace maintenance before Winter, require a person home from 9am-5pm. Doing so requires either working remotely or a promise to make up the time when you get back to the office.
I'm not sure what the answer is. Maybe working remotely will help. Maybe we need to postpone careers until kids are raised like my parents' generation did. (My wife is far better suited to a career. I would gladly volunteer to be at home if we didn't need both pays.)
When we visit Brooklyn we usually get free street parking.
As you described, clearly there are good cases for driving. Cities are not one of them.
Yes, you want to use a car in this case. But, in the life I imagine, I would rent a car. I dislike driving intensely, but I can see use-cases in which cars are necessary. However, Americans have been largely forced into car ownership, despite the expense and hassle of owning one. A reduction in car ownership coupled with more pedestrian-friendly community designs is more my goal than making cars extinct. I would like my household to go from two to one vehicle.
We should be looking at occupations that require people being alert but not engaged for a glimpse into drivers' behavior.
I'm not pretending to be the first to state this observation but I feel like it needs reinforcement here.
A video game programmer would probably not be helped because a big part of their coding, as I understand it, is wringing out every clock cycle and byte of memory possible. However, the programmer writing the AR/AP system that allows tracking for in-game purchases would find OCaml, for instance, very beneficial.