- cross-posted to:
- antiwork@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- antiwork@lemmy.ml
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Then I’m not buying anything from them again.
I’ve bought Nothing from this company. Like, nothing. No no nothing. Like zero of nothing. I’ll leave now.
Man I hate how I barely ever buy anything, makes it impossible to boycott any company
Got everything on your way out? Nothing left behind?
“this is a company for adults” says the CEO of a company who slaps “Glyph” lights on knockoff iPhones and calls it innovative. I hate when I see Carl Pei’s smug face pop up every few months. Hey Carl - put a fucking charger in the box. OnePlus is thriving without you.
I won’t buy anything that isn’t stock Android. Sick of never being able to find anything.
No devices have “stock Android” though. Even the Pixel is a customized version of Android. Vanilla AOSP doesn’t even have a usable phone dialer included with it.
Not sure what you’re saying… ru referencing Nothing OS, or Oxygen… or…?
Anything that isn’t a Pixel, pretty much. Every single manufacturer seems to think it’s their duty to replace all the settings screens with their own custom bullshit.
He is not wrong tho… it’s the company interest vs employee interest. And I must say, as someone who works 100% remotely, sometimes I do wish we are all again at the office. It was so easier to know whats happening around you on the fly, instead of spending half a day in your calendar making or taking meetings.
So you can spending half of the day you save to travel to and from work…smart
In comparison to the non-existing work-life balance in most remote positions where you are basically available 0-24? No thanks. I’d rather travel, the 20min in the morning is perfect to “wake up fully” and in the afternoon to decompress while getting home.
Pfft, I work remote and I only work 8 to 5. Don’t let people boss you around
Nobody bosses me around, I just work until I’m done, and I don’t need to manage my time, because I have all the time in the world working from home. Also, it feels like being in home prison, never seeing anyone you work with. Have the feeling some people exist only on computer screens.
I understand the benefits of working from home, but meeting other people in the office is what made it human to begin with. I miss chatting with people while getting coffee about non-work related stuff. I knew what was going on without needing a meeting or briefing. I could just work in the office on things I needed to work - which made it so I could go home earlier. Now I am just at home all the time, wasting my time in meetings. Idk, I wish it would work for me, but it just doesn’t. I need the social aspect of the office.
Oh yeah, how I miss my co-workers have super sexist and racist conversations in the break-room /s
“Carl” is not compatible with the human race.
We need a human recycling center.
Ngl, that’s a genius headline
Yeah I was expecting this to be a thought piece in general about companies requiring them be back in office.
I did a double take when I first read it. Then I realized it was, Nothing, the phone company.
I did not even realize until reading this comment that Nothing was a company.
Fuck me.
Nothing will.
Who’s on first?
We had a tremendous office culture in the 1950s. Since then, we have had numerous – very numerous – improvements and innovations in the telecom space, in the office assistant space (think personal digital assistant, or rather all the ubiquitous tools that do what those used to do), and other general improvements which empower significantly enhanced productivity.
To say people still need to be in the office is to say there have been no improvements. The fact is, we can be at home and be more productive than in an office. Anyone who tells you otherwise has ulterior motives.
Company is too invested in real estate? Sounds like an issue that the C-suite caused and that they alone should fix. Middle management needs to feel useful? Maybe they should find a career that actually has a need for their micromanagement instead of forcing other people into an obsolete box to appear useful. Show me a company against remote work, and I’ll show you a company with outdated goals, more outdated methods, and leadership which should be replaced en masse with people from 2024.
We had a tremendous office culture in the 1950s.
If you were a middle class white man, sure.
WFH is not a new concept, nor restricted to office work. Priya Satia’s book Empire of Guns reports that 2/3rds of company-employed Birmingham blacksmiths in the 1700s worked from home, and were more productive for it.
Nothing I said contradicts that. But it is the case that there are a wide variety of technologies which make WFH even easier than it may have been before.
If people did it before, they should keep doing it. But now, even more people should be able to WFH.
Supporting argument, not counterpoint
One person does what 10 people did in the 50s, these assholes just want control, and companies like this shit for brains, is going to have workers who don’t care and just want a paycheck. He’s not getting cream of the crop with his pouting childish screams. He’ll be irrelevant in a few years.
“This is a company for grown-ups”.
Says man who makes phones that sparkle and a fidget spinner earbud case.
"Remote work is not compatible with a high ambition level plus high speed,” Pei said in the email, telling employees who are worried about flexibility that “this is a company for grown ups.”
Sounds like he actually means it’s a company for exploitable young people and socopathic assholes. Grown-ups have other responsibilities and don’t want work to commandeer their whole lives.
Guarantee this is a ploy to chase off the ‘less committed’ employees (read: less desperate), while not having to announce mass layoffs.
“This company is for grown ups. Now sit over there where I can check on you constantly and do what I tell you like a child that can’t be trusted alone.”
The actual sentence, according to a Verge website comment, was: “This is a company for grown ups, so if you need to be out of office to deal with some issues, we trust you to make the right decision.” If true, this doesn’t reflect well on Verge journalism.
I don’t care about Verge. I care about the person who cons others into toiling underpaid so that they can Lambo and talk shit to magazines.
I need to be out of the physical office all the time to deal with my actual life. How about that? WFH 4eva
The real problem is that Nothing brings… nothing to the table. Oh look, another startup making another Android phone in a sea of companies making Android phones, with yet another skin.
What do you mean? Their phone has lights on the back.
“Remote work is not compatible with a high ambition level plus high speed,” Pei said in the email, telling employees who are worried about flexibility that “this is a company for grown ups.”
“I know this is a controversial decision that may not be a fit for everyone, and there are definitely companies out there that thrive in remote or hybrid setups,” he added. “But that’s not right for our type of business, and won’t help us fully realize our potential as a company.”
Very reminiscent of Musk’s message to Twitter employees a couple of years ago.
“Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”
And his own attitudes towards work-from-home:
Musk imposed a strict return-to-the-office policy for Tesla in June 2022, warning them they would lose their jobs if they refused to do so. Employees would need to spend a minimum of 40 hours at the office a week; anything less would be “phoning it in.”
“Get off the goddamn moral high horse with the work-from-home bullshit,” Musk said, “because they’re asking everyone else to not work from home while they do.”
“If you want to work at Tesla, you want to work at SpaceX, you want to work at Twitter — you got to come into the office every day,” he said.
Right so because he likes to work in an office and feels more productive when surrounded by coworkers, he makes the mistake of thinking that everyone is like that. Or that the most effective workers are extroverts
“Get off the goddamn moral high horse with the work-from-home bullshit,” Musk said, “because they’re asking everyone else to not work from home while they do.”
elon musk, the great social equity watchdog.
This just means they’re a struggling company who needs to cut headcount and want to do it without paying severance
Considering this company was founded as a remote work company from the beginning, you’re absolutely right.
It’s such bullshit too because drastically changing someone’s working conditions is clearly a constructive dismissal and should lead to severance payments.
In addition, this tactic will result in the best employees leaving first, because they’ll get employed somewhere else.
Cue the pivot to some ridiculous buzz tech like AI in the near future, then being acquired and promptly abandoned by some big corp.
The thing with AI is, what the term today refers to most often is neural networks, which are really advanced statistics. And the thing is, to get more precise statistics, you need exponentially more data. And of course the marginal utility decays exponentially. So exponentially increasing marginal expenses meet exponentially decaying marginal utility.
Just to be clear, I am in love with statistics and especially generative algos, and have written papers on it before ChatGPT was a thing.
I just hate that one company made a chatbot with it and now the whole world is cargo culting around it.
Friend, your brain is also just a neural network. “Advanced statistics” are happening in your head every second. There is nothing exceptional about humans, save for the immense complexity of our neural network.
AI is a very broad term that also includes expert systems (such as Computational Fluid Dynamics, Finite Element Analysis, etc approaches.). Traditional machine learning approaches (like support vector machines, etc.) too. But yes, I agree—most commonly associated with deep learning/neural network approaches.
That said, it’s misleading and inaccurate to state that neural networks are just statistics. In fact they are substantially more than just advanced statistics. Certainly statistics is a component—but so too is probability, calculus, network/graph theory, linear algebra, not to mention computer science to program, tune, and train and infer them. Information theory (hello, entropy) plays a part sometimes.
The amount of mathematical background it takes to really understand and practice the theory of both a forward pass and backpropagation is an entire undergraduate STEM curriculum’s worth. I usually advocate for new engineers in my org to learn it top down (by doing) and pull the theory as needed, but that’s not how I did it and I regularly see gaps in their decisions because of it.
And to get actually good at it? One does not simply become a AI systems engineer/technologist. It’s years of tinkering with computers and operating systems, sourcing/scraping/querying/curating data, building data pipelines, cleaning data, engineering types of modeling approaches for various data types and desired outcomes against constraints (data, compute, economic, social/political), implementing POCs, finetuning models, mastering accelerated computing (aka GPUs, TPUs), distributed computation—and many others I’m sure I’m forgetting some here. The number of adjacent fields I’ve had to deeply scratch on to make any of this happen is stressful just thinking about it.
They’re fascinating machines, and they’ve been democratized/abstracted to an extent where it’s now as simple as import torch, torch.fit, model.predict. But to be dismissive of the amazing mathematics and engineering under the hood to make them actually usable is disingenuous.
I admit I have a bias here—I’ve spent the majority of my career building and deploying NN models.
That said, it’s misleading and inaccurate to state that neural networks are just statistics. In fact they are substantially more than just advanced statistics. Certainly statistics is a component—but so too is probability, calculus, network/graph theory, linear algebra, not to mention computer science to program, tune, and train and infer them. Information theory (hello, entropy) plays a part sometimes.
What I meant when I said that they are advanced statistics is that that is what they do. I know that a lot of disciplines play a part in creating them. I know it’s incredible complicated, it took me quite a while to wrap my head around what the back-propagation algorithm.
I also know that neural networks can do some really cool stuff. Recognizing tumors, for example. But it’s equally dangerous to overestimate them, so we have to be aware of their limitations.
Edit: All that being said, I do recognize that you have spent much more time learning about and working with neural networks than I have.
Ever since TV remote was invented, people don’t even lift their asses off the couch and walk over to the TV to change the channel. Unless a company adapts to changing tech landscape, they can be many things, but not a company for grown-ups.
Goddamn. It took out my boy Rock Biter’s whole crew, it made the Child-like Empress cry, now this? Disgusting behavior.
Moooooon chillllldddd!
Nothing is requiring employees to be in the office
fiveANY days a weekFTFY
Not according to the article linked. It. Ever mentions this. I was so confused as someone who read this article more than once to see people in the comments saying things like read the article.
According to this and other articles I’ve read they were already requiring hybrid work accomodations (and has transitioned to hybrid work from purely WFH). One other thing is this doesn’t necessarily seem to effect sales and press related roles.
** "After launching remotely during the covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Nothing has now mandated that its 450 employees will have to come into the company’s London office five days a week. In an email to staffers last week, Nothing CEO Carl Pei suggested that those unable to transition from remote working should leave the company and “find an environment where you thrive.”
Pei’s goal, according to the email he published on LinkedIn, is to improve collaboration and innovation across design, engineering, and manufacturing, which he argues “does not work well remotely.” The new mandate will take effect in two months, and Pei will be accepting live questions about the decision from Nothing staffers during the company’s next town hall meeting.
“Remote work is not compatible with a high ambition level plus high speed,” Pei said in the email, telling employees who are worried about flexibility that “this is a company for grown ups.”
“I know this is a controversial decision that may not be a fit for everyone, and there are definitely companies out there that thrive in remote or hybrid setups,” he added. “But that’s not right for our type of business, and won’t help us fully realize our potential as a company.”
Return-to-office mandates are hardly unique in this industry. Meta, Amazon, Google, Roblox, and even Zoom have all scaled back their remote working policies following the winding down of pandemic-driven lockdowns, but most of those changes require staff to be in offices for up to three days a week.
By comparison, Nothing’s demand for five-day office attendance may sting for employees who helped shape the company while embracing its founding work-from-home environment. We haven’t found any comments from staffers on the situation, but they may be waiting until the company meeting to voice concerns." **
And Nothing is going to fire you if you don’t find a creative way to meet their bullshit attendance metrics.
I love being treated like a gradeschooler. Really boosts my morale, especially with nearly two fucking decades of experience and being on the wrong side of 35.
Stop bothering me and let me do my fucking job, for christ’s sake.
Edit: all that said, the company name does make for an amusing headline
I’ve just right now noticed that they are talking about the company…
This is an interesting approach from the CEO, in that it demonstrates why unions are mandatory.
I’d meet those rules out of spite, and do a really crappy job while there. They’d essentially be forced to fire me, and I’d consider suing for wrongful termination in not providing a suitable work environment for me to do my job (evidence is my productivity before and after being forced back to the office).
