Posts by MachDiamond

BMW deems drivers worthy of warmth, ends heated car seat subscription

Re: connected services as a strategic imperative and a driver of future revenue

"My response was generalized as a large number of all trips can be replaced with NONE. Im not saying its a perfect solution, im just making the point if its snowing or really cold then DONT DRIVE, try and find other ways."

Yeah, ok, but it's not possible for most people that aren't retired. If there were so much snow that roads weren't open or IMO it was too dangerous to drive, I'd stay home. Just being really cold isn't an excuse a boss might accept. I'd be very leery of public transportation in bad weather. For starters, I'd not want to wait at a bus stop or open platform and secondly, I don't want to be caught out somewhere if they stop operating or are behind. At least with a car I have some options.

Economizing is easier to advocate. If people aren't making individual trips to pick up a bottle of spice or a single box of nails, that cuts out some of the most inefficient and wasteful travel. Where I am it would take a whole day to run errands with 2-3 stops taking the bus. I'd also worry about perishables in my grocery bag thawing or getting warm. I'd also only be able to pick up the things I could carry for 1/2 mile from the bus stop to my house.

"They use sat radio in US to deal with long range."

Satellite is useless for local traffic and news and overkill for local sports. It also requires users to pay a subscription. I've had satellite radio before and enjoyed it, but I don't drive that much anymore and can get even more choice on the internet when I get bored of my massive music collection accumulated over decades.

"Er, what? I doubt all cars having MW would encourage more MW stations on the band, so nothing extra for the Govt."

The radio stations have to pay licensing fees and if there are no MW radios, there won't be broadcasters to pay for licenses. A MW (AM) license is really cheap compared to FM or DAB. If you wanted to start a news or talk station, it wouldn't be that costly and you could reach a much larger audience which can equate to higher ad rates.

"Huh? Why would FM all go off air in an emergency but MW keep going? It's just transmitters at different frequencies."

In the US there are now many "local" FM stations that are robots. Programming is all done from a central location quite distant from the transmitter with the "DJ's" babble syndicated out and newsreaders that spend their working day reading off the news for multiple markets that gets queued up and sent to a transmitter someplace. About the only local function is ad sales and promotions.

During one of the big US hurricanes, only a few very small FM stations were left broadcasting. The FCC gave them temporary permission to increase their power if they could to be able to reach more people with information. Those small stations were mainly one person operations or staffed with volunteers such as college stations and they could be on the air since they had back up generators and people to work the system.

"Phone holders should be banned."

It saved me from having to make one to hold a non-network-connected phone to use with Torque Pro. My car doesn't have all of the info screens that many modern cars have so I have a repurposed phablet to get a real time view of fuel use, oil pressure and other things that aren't displayed on the instrument cluster. The 'phone' gets the data via BT from a sender plugged into the OBD port.

"So they are charging a monthly fee for something that, to the company, is a fixed one-time cost."

Tesla just went and did a similar thing by selling a discounted Model S with less range but with the same battery pack as a model with longer range. It's just a software lock on how much battery you are allowed to use.

"My G12 BMW has a sunroof, "

I think of sunroof as the eventual leak point in the roof of a car. For all of the hassles they bring, I don't find them worth having.

"Electric handbrakes?

"

The other name for the handbrake is the "emergency brake". If your normal brakes were to fail for some reason, you could use the handbrake to slow the car with a bit of finesse. With the electric parking brake, it's all or nothing. I've also used the handbrake to roll a car a bit without starting the engine.

Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead

Re: Computer MOT

" it may as well be Bob 2.0."

We are legion!

Re: Computer MOT

"Also had one refuse to proceed until I replaced a cable from the desktop machine to the router,"

Sometimes you have to put the phone down, brew a cuppa and then get back to Bob (from India) to tell him you've done it, rebooted and still have the same issue.

We try to teach kids to be truthful, but we find later in life that it can be easier to get things done if one lies. Resumés for example. Craft one to exactly match the job description and finally own up when you get to interview with the department manager you would work under. If they won't have you, they have no respect for creative problem solving.

Google promises eternity of updates for Chromebooks – that's a decade for everyone else

Re: Hardware behind the Iron Curtain

"Things like printers and scanners having proprietary drivers that will randomly stop working one day will eventually become a thing of the past."

Printers aren't that hard. Scanners are a pain as there can be all sorts of options so there needs to be specific drivers to use some beyond just digitizing some paper copies of an old contract. In my case I'm scanning slides and large format film (up to 6x7) and using multiple pass options to tease out the best results. Not every sensor is the same either so interpreting the data can be vendor specific as well.

Hardware behind the Iron Curtain

Way back in the day just after the USSR crumbled, I got to work with a bunch of Russian engineers that got the hell out as soon as they were allowed and hoovered up a lot of engineering jobs for peanuts (not to them). One of the things I learned from them was how efficient they could code. Only the military engineers would get nice computers and somebody working in academia would be lucky to have their very own PC-XT they didn't have to share with several others. These days I see software updates that slightly improve on a precious version but now need the latest OS to run which in turn requires newer hardware than I have. If I upgrade my computer to run the new OS, I'll likely find that there aren't driver updates for my peripherals and there goes yet another scanner. I have a very top end scanner right now and an ancient Mac to use it that I got from a friend of mine when he moved. I'm just hoping I can get all of the family's slides digitized before something breaks. Most scanners today are built like crap and getting something that can do slides and large format film is expensive.

Ford, BMW, Honda to steer bidirectional EV charging standard

Re: maybe

"Not to be too pedantic, but Chinese firms have made some BIG claims recently on battery tech, true. But so far, not a single one of the claimed batteries has been seen in the wild or been given the chance to be tested,"

Plenty of universities are guilty too. Some grad student will come up with a lab curiosity on a nano scale and extrapolate the findings to absurdia. There's a huge amount of work that has to be done from when a new battery technology or improvement is found in a lab to when IT MIGHT become commercially viable. I've had that sort of thing happen when I built a prototype product that came out awesome but then couldn't get 10 to come out consistently. Sometimes it was just too labor intensive to make the product in quantity and the market for it wouldn't support something at twice the price of the competition no matter how much better it was.

Re: Not sure I'd do this

"The power company will also charge the battery for you (at a cheap rate) when they have surplus power."

I'd rather set the rules on selling and buying. If I have solar and it's close to dawn on a weekday, I might not want to buy any power from the grid as there might be enough in the battery to get me through my morning routine and then it will charge from the panels "for free". I might also want to prevent selling power in the afternoon so I have plenty stored to keep from paying the highest rates of the day rather than bridge over that period. I might also want to scrap all of that as family has come visiting and my usage pattern is very different.

Re: All your electrons are belong to us.

"as well as management options that'll restrict EV charging to "grid-friendly" times of day.""

There might be a very good reason an EV needs to be charged at a time of high demand. The easiest way to nudge people towards time when demand is low is to vary pricing. If you are in the SE of the US and a hurricane is on the way, you will want to top up your EV to be able to evacuate. If The Man has locked people out of EV charging, that's not going to go well for those rule makers. If they don't have some sort of code to bypass those restrictions themselves, they could also be caught with their $130,000 Model X having to be abandoned in the drive to be caught in the flood and take the Range Rover/Mercedes/BMW/Escalde/Aspen instead.

Re: He really does say some dumb stuff

"Besides which, at the point at which you're umnplugging the car - you're probably leaving the house."

That was my thinking. If I'm out and the power goes off, the worst thing is I have to reset a couple of clocks (stupid range and microwave don't have a bloody back up for the clock time). I'm not going to race home and plug my car in to make sure all of my outputs are ready and waiting. The same thing applies when I'm leaving. I might check on my phone to make sure my destination isn't in the dark too or it would be pointless to go. The corner market is on the same distribution leg my house is on so if I'm off, so are they. No point in leaving if that's where I'm going.

Re: Do not want

"Why should my investment in a car be used to make up for lack of investment by the entire energy industry?"

It makes sense not to overbuild a solar system and to use all that you generate so IF you wind up exporting anything, it's after the house is cool or hot enough, there's a full tank of hot water (back to the old water heater tank again), the car is topped up and any battery storage is full. Getting 90% to self-sufficiency and using the grid that that last little bit (if available) can be the most cost effective way to go. If the grid is down, and how often does that happen where you are, there's likely some ways to economize enough so you can be perfectly comfortable on your own. There are modules now that can take care of power management to rules you set. It's also not that hard to have a system that will export to the grid or 'island' as required so it's not stacks of money to have both options. This is the path I am planning for long term. Short term I'm getting certain things off the grid that return the most savings for the least expense.

Re: management options that'll restrict EV charging to "grid-friendly" times of day.

"Or worse, it was charged, but you forgot to unplug it or turn off the upload feature, and now there's not enough juice to get you where you need to go. Who cares if you're going to miss that urgent medical appointment, family holiday, work meeting or whatever. It's all for the Greater Good (TM)."

I'm getting that you never plan ahead when you have an appointment and can't be bothered to program any energy sharing to always leave enough for off-nominal use. Do you fill up the petrol tank the day before you are going to leave on a long driving holiday or at least make sure you have enough to get to the train station/airport? Or, do you wait until the morning of and race around to get to the petrol station when you are already behind schedule?

Re: Compatibility?

"Obviously, for this V2G to work charging points will need to be upgraded, however, this should only be those charging points where this is desired."

That will mainly be sites used by fleets and at workplaces where a car will be for long periods of the day. People could opt in while at home, but I would suspect that many will want to have a charged up car when at home more than when they are at work, just in case. Fast charging sites along a motorway would be the least place to have V2G.

Re: Connection

" I know they are also trying to create the first distributed power generation network in the US with the powerwalls"

Many home battery storage systems can send power to the grid. The Powerwall is following in the footsteps of companies such as Bosch, Siemens and BYD to name a few. I'd have to see some scenarios and numbers to see if it's worth sending power to the grid from a home storage battery or holding on to it so it's there to offset usage at the home.

Re: Connection

"Not that long ago the US gave the nod to the Tesla charger as the new standard"

The SAE J3400 standard will use the Tesla US plug and the CCS protocol so it's a combination of the two "standards" that are already in use in the US. In other parts of the world, Tesla was required to provide the CCS combo plug for their cars rather than their own.

The standard isn't codified yet and the makers that have pledged to go with it won't have it on their cars for a year or three. Even some Tesla owners will have to upgrade their cars so they speak CCS and not all Superchargers speak CCS right now either. In the process, Tesla has to put their plug in the public domain, but they will then be able to stick their hand out for a pile of US taxpayer largesse. Previously, the free money the US government was/is to give away towards EV charging would have excluded Tesla since they were a walled garden.

Re: Don't get it

"I don't like shilling for a specific company but this exists in the UK already :D"

It's needs to be made a standard so it's worthwhile for everybody to create devices to take advantage of it. A dual zone electric or multi-input water heater is another place to dump cheap power besides an EV, but it needs to know when rates are cheap.

Power grids tremble as electric vehicle growth set to accelerate 19% next year

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

"What supermarket is charging 70p?"

I've seen pricing like that at the closest train station to me in the US. Nobody was paying that for a couple of reasons. The charging spots are up front and nearly always ICE'd and there is very little need for DCFC at the train station. Ideally, the charging spots would be on the other side of the car park where they are less likely to get blocked with ICEV's and much slower. It's a commuter station so most are going to be gone for the better part of the day. If they are topping up their usage from going to a fro to the train station and some local shopping, they won't need high speed charging. I don't think the security people at the station can issue citations so there's no downside to parking in the charging spots if you can't/aren't charging. If the city wanted to raise a bunch of money in a hurry, they could spend some time at the train stations and write tickets for ICE'ing the EV charging slots and parking in the handicapped spots (they'll only be there a few minutes. Entitled bastards). They would need one officer to write tickets and another to stand back and provide cover. Plenty of those people would cry racism and how they are being picked on rather than acting sheepish that they've been caught obviously breaking the rules written down on that sign 1.5m in front of them citing the restriction and the relevant code. Grrrr

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

"Solution is for EV chargers to be attached to dedicated providers who will have the appropriate IT systems to authorise and manage charging and do the transactional billing etc. which is basically what we have in the UK."

I still say in this case, it's far simpler to bill the EV owner annually or semi-annually either using an averaged rate or a rate calculated based on miles driven and the weight of the vehicle (or weight class). If a VAT is being added based on the retail price at a DCFC, it's even more tax since the cost per kW is more than what one would pay at home. If that's what you want to discourage the use of public fast chargers......

I'm trying to think of ways to reduce the amount of accounting overhead. If the charging provider has to assess, collect and remit the tax, that has a cost that will be passed on to the customer in the form of higher prices which leads to more tax.

Airbus to help with International Space Station replacement

Re: 2001

"Of course, we should also have the Hubble in high orbit, with the infrastructure up there to add to and maintain it, as well as Hubble-27 and friends but that, too"

Perhaps Hubble 3.0. There have been some very big advances in ground based astronomy and as long as there aren't 10's of thousands of satellites in LEO to cloud the view, it's still possible to plenty of valid science for lots less money. JWST was chosen over another visible wavelength telescope to get a broader view of what's out there rather than a deeper look. There's only so much budget to go around after the weather service and IRS have paid the invoices for the pallets of ammunition they've been ordering in the US.

Re: 2001

"People are attaching some magical and spiritual context to Pad 39A, but it's nothing of importance really."

yeah, I can imagine the apathy when some newsie announces that Pad 39A, the site where Neil, Buzz and Michael left to put boot prints on the Moon for the first time on Apollo 11 has been wiped flat then coated with sparkly bits of stainless steel. (/sarc)

Salesforce flipflops from 'you're fired' to 'you're hired' in six short months

A board with no insight

It is very odd that a company would need an across the company cut and 12 months later need to go on a massive hiring spree. Did they accumulate a bunch of dead wood and wish to get rid of it all at once instead of constantly culling people that don't contribute? Did they come up with some new and amazing new products/services that everybody is clamoring for and they need more staff to handle the rush? I think it more likely that they are intensely focused on spreadsheets and aren't doing any planning more than a month or two ahead.

It makes sense to freeze hiring if it looks like tough times ahead. If those tough times are more abrupt, tighten up groups by letting a few people go and also looking at fixed costs. With the return to office push, some arguments are focused on expensive office leases that landlords aren't willing to break. That doesn't mean that office can't be vacated and a new, much less expensive office can take it's place outside of that hyper-expensive big city downtown. Yes, two rents, but the operational cost of the one being vacated might cost more than digs someplace else. Landlords are usually amenable to breaking a lease if there's another tenant that will take over the space. Sub-Leasing is also an option. The company leaving to save money could leave behind a set up with all of the office furniture since second hand office furniture has a negative value. All of the networking cable can be prettied up and some effort made marking and documenting the runs so the next occupant can just drop into place. Some of the switches and other hardware could also be left in place. The idea is to make the space extremely easy for some start-up flush with investor cash to be able to move in to the over-priced offices and be operational in days.

This story has me thinking that looking at a company's employment moves over the last couple of years might be a great indicator of a board that can't see where they are and where they are going. It would be a warning to investing until they've shown more stability.

IBM Software tells workers: Get back to the office three days a week

Re: Show me the actual office I'm returning to

"Give me a dedicated cube in a quad. and I'll be there,"

I recall a tv show that showcased an architectural firm that had a big factory space and each of the people there built a shed at an "address' to their tastes. It was amazing and they had a list of people that wanted to work there and expected those that were there to be very good earners for the company. Everybody knew exactly where the bar was set, but due to the sort of people that were hired there, there was almost never people being let go. The sheds were incredible workspaces. Often there would be a couch so somebody could have a lie down and contemplate the universe when needed and there was a library 'in town' stocked with all sorts of art books and photos of architectural works from all places and times. The sheds seemed to have been about the size of a quad.

Re: Triple Productivity?

"Return to office is mostly based on the increasingly irrelevant first line manager,"

who has no idea on how to manage people they can't see and shoulder surf.

One of the best managers I ever had could have been anywhere in the world and not just on the other side of the engineering office. He held a office meeting or talked to each person one on one and let them know what needed to get done. We got back to him with a timeline to bracket how long we thought it would take and what sorts of things might impact the schedule. He put all of that in project management software to show to those above him. We each had a list of things that needed to get accomplished and would be told if priorities changed. It was so easy to work with a clear direction and few interruptions. Everybody knew what they needed to get done and when it had to be completed. Work fast, take time off. If things were going slow, more time had to be put in. It all averaged over a month and none of us cared if we worked 9 hours one day. Chances would be good that Friday would wind up only 6-7 hours long in compensation. Part of that is having a small team that all have respect for each other even if we were complete bastards. You got your job done so you weren't the one holding up the project.

"and should probably depend on whether you are using mass transit (can multitask) or driving yourself."

That really depends on the buss/train. If it's standing room only, good luck trying to get work done. Busses lurch and sway too much for me to keep my head looking at a notepad or laptop. Some trains move around too much as well when the tracks are poorly maintained.

"Hire serious, mature, knowledgeable people, give them flexibility and autonomy, and the work will get done like you wouldn't believe."

Also, it's a good idea to teach them techniques to work more efficiently and keep improving in their jobs. Some of the things I've picked up over the years are very meta. It helps to remember things if I write them down. If I were to come up with things that help me be a better sales person that I wanted to share at the next sales meeting, I'd write them down on paper and have a pad, notebook section or folder for exactly that. I do keep notes when there are things that I want to talk to a client about. If it's not urgent, I'll keep those notes with their name on so I can refer to it the next time we have a call. It's little things like that that make more more efficient. I'm also not bothering clients several times a day with one question or topic. I'm bothering them once a week with a longer call and ticking everything off that I can in one go.

Re: Spend Time in the Office

"But for all the reasons IBM states in their recent announcement regarding the software group returning to the office I would agree its better for the overall business. "

Going by the overwhelming sentiment so far in the comments, you'd do well to make some arguments for your position. Would you advocate for being in the office daily or just a day or two a week with all of your other teammates? I can see it being a good thing for sales people to tell each other about customer trends and desires so presentations are more on point, but everyday?

Re: WFH productivity

"But when a Jr employee, who was good personal friends with the boss' boss, decided to use the dead man's shoes approach to get my job, one of the excuses used to fire me was that I didn't always answer the phone. "

If there wasn't documentation that not answering your phone was an issue, that they sacked you using that excuse puts you on the receiving end of payments for being sacked. You have a good case of identifying an issue with being assigned an extension that attracted nuisance calls and nothing was done about it kills their argument anyway. If you responded to messages that involved you in good time, I don't think any tribunal wouldn't side with you. To demand that somebody answer their phone every time is silly. A person could be talking to somebody else. I won't answer my phone if I'm having an in-person conversation with a client unless it a family member who never call unless it's an emergency. I won't put one client on hold to take a call from another unless I know the call is immediately important and can't wait. I think of my policies as just good manners. I've dropped friends that were always texting when we'd get together. If the times we had to have a bite together weren't that important that they could ignore their phone for 20 minutes, how good a friend were they really?

It always depends on the employment laws where you are, but mostly a company has to show cause for firing somebody to get out of paying some sort of redundancy. To let one person go to make room for somebody else with connections isn't something they'd want to admit.

Re: Impact on staff

"When myself and a couple of similarly aged colleagues have had enough they will be a bit screwed."

You and your colleagues need to all quit, form a small consulting company and contract with the company for 3x what you make now.

I know a few people that are kept on due to their vast institutional knowledge of things that must be kept going for contractual reasons, but nobody new is being taught about them and the schools don't teach those skills. Part of the reason that the Shuttles were retired is they were designed using 1960's technology and the the little old ladies that could wind the magnetic memory cores were all used up. To replace that technology with modern electronics would have been too expensive to amortize over the remaining life of the spacecraft. I expect that towards the end, those ladies could command an exceptional pay rate for their work since not many engineers now have even heard of magnetic core memory. I once made a stack of money redesigning some electronics modules that went into the fire alarm system used in high rise buildings. They were no longer supported by the company that made them and it would have been super expensive to replace the entire system. I think they would have also needed to close the whole building during the time it took to R&R the alarm system since it couldn't be occupied without it. It wasn't a "money is no object" thing but they were willing to budget a whole lot for the project if required. Time was of the essence to since they found me through the original engineer when they had installed the last spare of one of the cards. If that stopped working, they'd have to close the building which I expect would cost in penalties due to the tenants. I'm glad I marked up my prices for that job since the last time I checked with them, they haven't had any failures and still have a stack or replacements on hand. Maybe I did too good of a job.

"However when I attend is up to me, if I have to go to another office or a DC then that counts as a day in the office."

If the company has people moving around, a small office here and there isn't a bad thing so a transient worker has facilities at that location, but does it have to be in DC? The traffic, the crime (petit, grand and real whoppers) and the cost make it a horrible place. Other than the museums and monuments, obviously.

"A corporate edict of "You must be in th office X days out of Y" is pointless. There are only two possible reasons for these edicts:

1 - Stupid top brass

2 - The company has signed expensive leases on offices which they can't get out of and want to see some return on their money."

3- The managers don't know how to set goals and evaluate performance unless they are staring at the back of somebody's head.

The lease on the expensive office space is only exacerbated by also having to pay for HVAC, internet, coffee, bog rolls, cleaners, etc. With the space vacant or at least a section-able part vacant, there's a chance of finding another band of suckers to lease (sub-lease) the space. Often a landlord is happy to break a lease if they have another entity willing to move in (and execute a lease of at least the same remaining term). In the US there's an odd practice of a separate company operating the car park at buildings. A company may have an allocation of spaces that's just enough for a few managers, but anybody else will be required to pay. Since it would be rude to have a meeting at your office and expect your visitors to pay for parking, you would validate their slip and pay the charges for them. Yet another cost tacked on to keeping that building.

Re: Where are the facts & figures to support a return to the office ?

" i.e. if you need to stay home to avoid infecting the rest of the office,"

It might not even be you. It could be a sick family member or an injury. A sick child doesn't need constant looking after, but a parent will need to be home with them. There'll be plenty of time to get work done with no more time off durning the day than one might take at the office.

Re: Where are the facts & figures to support a return to the office ?

"Was IT a thing back then? "

No, but WfH was. Housewives would take on piece work to supplement the family's income when kids weren't taking up all of their time. Some craftsman would live immediately adjacent to their shop so could be defined as working from home even if it was a separate building. A classic high street would often have shop owners living in a flat over their business.

Large businesses in the 1950's needed to have employees in one building for communications. Mail boys would constantly be running between floors delivering and picking up post as well as inter-office memos. With the internet and phone calls being so cheap, there isn't that need any longer. Functional divisions of a company can be miles or even countries apart with little affect. Many companies already are even if they don't admit it. The main corporate offices of Google are in California yet they have satellite offices all over the world. What's a few more "satellite" offices (WFH)? The same goes for IBM, Amazon and every other very large company. The phone 'receptionist' for Amazon could be a little old lady working from a cupboard in Des Moines, IA for part of the day and somebody based in Metairie Parish, LA at another time or Hilo, Hi later the same day or all at the same time. A VOIP phone, computer and internet connection is all they need. To see if our Mr. Smith is in doesn't require being in the same building to check anymore.

"We'll see smart companies and startups profiting from this by scooping up all the talent by allowing them to work from home! Dinosaurs like IBM, Zoom and Google will be left holding the bag."

The smart companies are going to know that they can be much more competitive if they aren't tugging against a giant anchor of a fancy office building. Just the monthly bill for HVAC for offices would scare the pants off of me. Put all of those workers in their own homes and they will have a much wider range of tolerance to the temperature. That's also compensated for by not having to dress in business wear that's too hot or too cold. My favorite jumper isn't something I'd wear to work, but it does keep me warm. When it's hot and I'm working at home, I can put on a tank top and some light shorts or less if I'm not expecting anybody stopping by. I'm not video conferencing on demand so that's not an issue. I don't charge a premium to my customers to work from home. I'd need to raise my rates if I maintained an office and there's nothing a shared office building would net me. A few of my customers have those, but they also have employees and meet with clients there. They like having a conference room they can reserve when they need it yet aren't responsible for when they don't. One is a deluxe building with phone answering, a person in reception and mail handling/package acceptance.

A photographer I follow on YouTube has a presence in London, but lives elsewhere. There's no way he could afford a studio in London and has admitted it's better for him to not be in a big city full of temptations to sin. The presence is an agent in the city along with a mailing address. When he books a job with a client that wants to work in London, he rents a studio and the gear and takes a train in for the couple of days it takes to do the job. The rest of the time he's paying far less for housing with his SO and kids. They can also afford a larger house in a better environment for raising the kids.(Sarc) If a sole trader sees benefits like this, a larger company full of the most clever people that HR can find should be able to see it too. (/Sarc)

Re: Why do people assume it is only upper management that supports back to office?

"but partly it's because this "better in person" myth is bullshit."

It's not a good 'global' argument. There are cases where in-person is better, but those are few. Classically, the issue has been comms. Even the alien starship conferencing pods were crap in a reverberate room full of people. With everybody communicating with their own mic and camera, the level of quality is substantially better. Even going to a headset and better camera can improve on what's built into a laptop. I still have times where I find it useful to get together with a client in person, lock the door and work on a project until we've thrashed out all of the important bits. From there it's back to email and a vidcon now and again to stay the course with another in-person towards the end of the project. That's a whole 2 in-person meetings in an average of 6 months. I can skip the in-person stuff if I need to, but I do find it more efficient for the most critical aspects if we are close enough that it isn't a huge bit of travel.

Re: Why do people assume it is only upper management that supports back to office?

"And that means any business leaders that splits teams over offices making any claims about being in the office for easy communications are at the normal level of "business leaders"."

And we are back to companies gathering everybody in a downtown office block where traffic is impossible, crime is rampant and the cost of a coffee is on a level with the monthly cable bill. So much for leveraging the vast advances in communications there's been since the 19th century. I have a face to face meeting scheduled with somebody in Moldova this weekend and I'm in the US. In this case, it's mediated via computer, but we'll be able to share information and have a discussion with hand waving, inflections and everything. There might even be some........ facial expressions. This is all a good thing as I'm not in any way going to travel to Moldova.

Re: Why do people assume it is only upper management that supports back to office?

"Also the day after I've noticed an increase in the number of blood shot eyes due to extra curricular team building...."

Sounds like the office day should be on a Friday. The downside is those evening meeting spaces are pretty booked up on Friday evenings.

Re: Why do people assume it is only upper management that supports back to office?

"In fact, having half the people in the team working from home is the worst, because you need to handle separately the communications to both groups,"

If people that need to ask their colleagues have to send an email/PM/Text or other written communication, it means they might look for the information on their own or at least not interrupt somebody else's work until that person looks at their messages. I'm happy to answer questions, but I really hate losing my train of thought when I'm "in the flow". There's always some point where I come up for air and will check mail, see how long past lunch it is, etc.

If things are being discussed in the break room or in the halls and not summarized and written down, they didn't happen. It's important that things get documented since there can and will often be people not in that loop due to being off that day, at a conference, in the loo, etc. A manager is not going to be happy with not being told about something they should know but weren't at that informal confab. If there are people working outside that one office in the group, there should be a formal workflow that keeps them apprised of things. It could be a workmate that's at home due to a broken leg and while they can do their job just fine, getting to and from work, not to mention taking care of personal needs, isn't going to be easy for them. I've worked at a place that had too much off-the-record decisions being made with no thought as to all of the others that those decisions would affect. I had a week go by where a change was made to the type of motor being used was changed from one type to the another. That week I was working on the control circuitry and wiring specs. It wasn't until I was getting approval to order the parts that I was told about the change. WTH, a week wasted and it wasn't like there weren't pages on my todo list that I could have been knocking out, but I wanted to get that part done so it could be handed off to somebody else for them to take it from where I left off. That person wasn't told either so they had a bunch of wasted time on their work log as well.

" I think some people prefer working at the office and at a certain point others just find it easier to join them."

If you have roommates, young children or a big construction site next door, going to the office might be a good thing. It may also help some people that need to remove themselves from the temptation of going off to watch the telly or muck about in the garden when they should be working. I'm the same way when it comes to learning. I have taught myself a lot of stuff, but I do best in a classroom with a structured lesson plan and a good teacher.

"removing the pointless header files that they'd only inserted a week earlier to make the kloc audit look good."

There's lots of stories of how it is very important to measure things in ways that are useful or somebody is going to game the system to their benefit. It's one thing to say that there needs to be 100 assembled widgets at the far end of the line at the end of the shift/pay period/quarter (with bonuses) vs. there needs to be 100 widgets 'that pass QC' at the end of the line and for every one that fails, the count against a bonus is reduced by 2-3 widgets.

"Most competent developers shouldn't be writing a lot of new code, on average."

Electronics engineers shouldn't be coming up with new and novel circuits for things either. When I started, there were books of circuit blocks and now there's a huge internet of searchable circuit blocks. Not only that, there's gobs of online calculators so I don't have to remember the formulas for a second order RC lowpass filter and have that sort of thing bookmarked. I have a shelf of books (many shelves, or I should say, many bookcases) of engineering books so if the net is off, I can still get work done, at home. On the last move I counted 120 banker's boxes of just engineering books. I'm not going to take that to work. I've only worked at one company that had a really extensive library right in the engineering area and one more that had a library located on the campus which wasn't as handy. I'm proud of the new things I've come up with, but managers are mainly impressed with the volume of work, not how clever it is.

"I worked on a contract where the project manager decided that such productivity could be measured by counting the number of semicolons in the source code"

So, you had a manager that didn't know much about what you did yet still had to manage. I think I'm starting to see the problem.

"I think pretty much all attempts to measure the productivity of software development have failed."

I think it would depend on how you break the process down. Many things will be very straight forward and might even be able to be dragged over from someplace else, slapped with some motar, leveled off and made part of the whole with other bits being the core of the project and taking more time. A good manager should be able to know what is what and be able to sort out, roughly, how long the different parts take to get done and look for that progress on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. It's tying everything together if multiple people are working on one project where having people in one place can make a difference. The rest of the time all you'd see is tables with row of people with headphones on banging away on a laptop.

When I was working in aerospace, it was much like that example of everybody together, separately. The first day of the week we held a meeting to see where everybody was and compare notes and the rest of the week, outside of going to the testing range if there were something to test, was people around the office with headphones on banging away on computers. In my case, I might have also been at my electronics bench. The propulsion engineering might have been bending some tubing and installing fittings. I would have been better off at my home work bench which is much better supplied and the propulsion engineer didn't work on hardware every day.

Re: My Winter Heating Is Always On

"Passive House here (yay, Germany Building Standards!!!)....

No heating/cooling required."

That's my goal. I just picked up some more materials yesterday to build two more solar heating panels. I was hoping to have my evaporative cooler running on solar this year, but the budget said otherwise. I'll have it off-grid before next spring/summer. My electric blanket does a magnificent job of keeping heating bills down in the winter. I sleep better when the room is cold and I'm snug under the blanket. I shouldn't have waited so long to get one (now have a spare too).

Since my HVAC and utility costs in general are my look out, it's good for me to invest in ways to keep them to a minimum. For an office, there are fewer options and it can be extremely expensive. Even worse, if the office space is leased, the improvements typically remain with the building according to all of the commercial leases I've ever had. The ROI better be good enough in a short period of time or it's not worth it to the company.

"It's reasonable to assume that heating/cooling a home is less efficient per person than heating/cooling an office."

There are so many variables that it's hard to quantify. I've been to some offices where there's a a soaring atrium and a receptionist or two sitting at the front desk and, perhaps, a security guard. That foyer is heated/cooled and could be a larger volume than an average home. Many people looking to reduce their energy bills will make sure their home is well insulated, switch to double or triple glazing, a heat pump, etc. Upgrades that aren't necessarily possible with an office building.

Adding to the energy cost to commute can blow figures right through the ungasketed front door of the office. No to mention the cost of wear and tear on a personal auto and even trains