I'm curious how big of a factor a consistent core team is to having long-term sustainable and stable software. When companies have people rotating on projects constantly and the original vision and design principles of the product are lost or changed, I can only imagine that contributes to the problem.
I think that's a big factor. This is what RSUs and bonuses are supposed to solve: You entice employees to stay rather than job hop. However, companies have gotten too greedy and RSUs amount to a pittance, a vestigial perfunctory play act mimicking a bygone era.
Everyone is greedy, that's how markets work. Every employee is trying to maximize their income and every employer is trying to minimize their expenses. But somehow one of these is seen as "greed" while the other is not.
As a software developer I get paid far above most workers and my job is easier than most other jobs. And yet I could still switch jobs frequently to squeeze out even more money.
It's common for tech companies to give RSUs which vest over 4 years with annual refreshers being comparatively quite small. The financial incentives can dwindle after just 4-6 years at a given job.
The gotcha to that, of course, is that while you're enticing people to stay in the company, you're doing nothing necessarily to keep them on a single project within that company.
I've tried to retrain myself to open Obsidian (and have Obsidian configured to always jump straight to my daily note upon opening) if I compulsively pick up my phone. From there, I'm either going to write about what I'm actually trying to accomplish in the moment, or realize I had no real goal and just compulsively picked up my phone as happens more often than I'd like. It's then much easier to just put my phone back down instead of getting locked into browsing random internet streams, or I just do whatever thing I actually got my phone out to do.
I've injected some intentional friction into an otherwise compulsive habit, which opens up the opportunity to redirect that behavior. It's been very a helpful switch so far.
Not to mention it prevents people trying to legitimately access these services from doing so by putting extra barriers in place, defeating the purpose of the assistance program in the first place.
Perhaps there is something to be gained by being forced to slow down anyways. Speed for the sake of speed isn't always the highest priority. Certainly there are contexts where "keeping up" is a priority, but not always.
This abysmal response suggests that there are no non-US citizens currently employed there and nobody knows how it would work if one was hired. Good to know! I’ll be interested to hear when someone finally guinea pigs it.
I'm with you here -- constraints like that can definitely be useful! The constraint of slowing down to write by hand is also useful for me in this context.
You're touching on a reason I like paper too -- in a digital format, I end up thinking too much about how I'm going to organize the information as opposed to just getting my thoughts down.
Organizing the information is important too, but worrying about it before your thoughts are clarified is a quick way for me to get pulled away from my focus on the problem.
