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?
“this is a company for grown ups.”
That’s too bad. I was thinking of getting their phone when I needed a new one, I guess I’ll just add them to my mental list of companies to avoid.
I’m a grown up. I’ve been remote for a decade. I’m pretty successful too.
Right? Imagine thinking that working in a cubicle is something to aspire to as a “grown up.” Fuck that. I’ll continue working from home, like an adult, thanks.
goddamn i read parts of the article trying to figure out which company… Im not a marketing guy, but nobody can tell me that “nothing” is marketable brand.
Allow me to introduce you to their main competitor, elon musk.
Oh, I don’t mean competitor in the business market. I mean their main competitor for worlds least marketable brand identity.
He took twitter, which had it’s own global brand awareness, and blundered it so bad that every media company refers to it as “X (formerly twitter)” because they know that if they had just put X, nobody would know what the hell they were talking about.
And his other company is literally named “The Boring Company”. Where I assume they make disease, and murderous robots that are somehow racist.
It’s still unbelievable considering Twitter had made its way into other languages’ lexicon other than English. In Spanish, for example, the word “tuit” had been added officially in the dictionary. It had no competitors in brand awareness and all it took was a manchild with money to burn to take it all down.
Clearly it’s not a company for grown ups because you think they’re all children that won’t play together unless you cram them into a classroom and tell them, “Make nice.”
Right? Grown ups can be trusted to get their work done without someone watching them all the time. It’s small children who need constant supervision.
I guess I’ll just add them to my mental list of companies to avoid.
😆 mental ?! I already have my list in my browser bookmarks
Part of it is literally named teenage engineering! The division working on the earbuds.
Teenage Engineering is a hardware design firm that Nothing contracts with for hardware design. They aren’t a division of Nothing and they don’t work on just earbuds.
Teenage engineering partnered with Nothing. That isn’t the same thing.
It baffles me because in many of the quotes they are clearly trying to be understanding and respectful toward those who disagree with this, but then they come out and call them children
Ironically, that’s a really childish thing to do.
“this is a company for grown ups.”
When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up. – C.S. Lewis
If only most CEO’s knew how to read. smh
Don’t I have one and it’s the only Android device I’ve owned that crashes and reboots almost daily. I can’t recall any other device ever doing it actually.
This company’s all about the next gimmick and couldn’t care less about actually making decent phones.
"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.
“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 need to be out of the physical office all the time to deal with my actual life. How about that? WFH 4eva
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.
Guarantee this is a ploy to chase off the ‘less committed’ employees (read: less desperate), while not having to announce mass layoffs.
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.
This just means they’re a struggling company who needs to cut headcount and want to do it without paying severance
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.
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.
Cool cool, we’re cool. I get a little triggered when I hear people say that NN/DL models are “fancy statistics”—it’s not the first time.
In what seems like another lifetime ago, my first engineering job was as a process engineer for an refinery-scale continuous chromatography unit in hydrocarbon refining. Fuck that industry, but there’s some really cool tech there nevertheless. Anyway when I was first learning the process, the technician I was learning from called it a series of “fancy filters” and that triggered me too—adsorption is a really fascinating chemical process that uses a lot of math and physics to finely-tune for desired purity, flowrate, etc. and to diminish it as “fancy filtration”!!!
He wasn’t wrong, you’re not either; but it’s definitely more nuanced than that. :)
Engineers are gonna nerd out about stuff. It’s a natural law, I think.
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.
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.
The way this usually works out is you loose all the good employees and you’re left with the dregs who were unable to find another remote position in time.
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
This is an interesting approach from the CEO, in that it demonstrates why unions are mandatory.
I’ve just right now noticed that they are talking about the company…
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).
uhhhh…
anyone else totally misinterpret the lede to mean “there’s no reason to go to work at an office” lol?
Yep. Pretty sure the editor knew what they were doing 🙂
It’s like god damn Odysseus and Polyphemus up in here.
Definite “Friday was the name of his horse!” energy here.
nice, yet another company to avoid as either employee or customer
As a customer, why do you care if the employees are wfh or not lol
Because you vote with your money.
As long as those businesses keep receiving money, they will continue these malpractices and damage the market.
I wanna see them pay for office hours AND commute hours. In a big city you easily have 1+ hour a day irrevocably lost to commuting.
Companies don’t even have to pay people for the time spent going through their own required security checks… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrity_Staffing_Solutions,_Inc._v._Busk
So glad I live in California. A faulty security gate once prevented me from leaving my job on time. Which pushed me past 12 hours on shift, which automatically meant I was earning twice my hourly wage while I waited. Plus it required a mandatory additional meal break, which I couldn’t take. Since I couldn’t take it, I was automatically given an additional full hour’s wage, as required by state law.
I’m glad I don’t work for a company that forces me to go through a security gate, and I’m glad we don’t track hours. I get paid salary, and I rarely work more than 8 hours in a given day, and my average hours worked per week is usually under 40.
It’s nice you had some protections, but those protections really shouldn’t be necessary.
You’re lucky. Many people on salary end up working overtime with no pay increase.
Once again, there are good managers & (far too frequently) bad (Elon loving cockwomble) managers
Being salaried doesn’t remove you from those protections, at least in Europe. You get overtime, which is either 1.5x pay or you accumulate PTO.
In the US most salaried positions are not eligible for overtime. Unfortunately, California has yet to close that loophole.
The next job above me is salaried. If I were to get a promotion, I’d be making about 2/3 of my current income because I would lose all of the hourly protections I have. Despite a higher base pay.
Wow. Now I don’t want to go to the US even harder than before.
If I’m reading that right, the decision was reversed by the 9th circuit.
The District Court originally dismissed the case, ruling that the security checks were made after the regular work shift and therefore not “an integral and indispensable part” of the job. The Ninth Circuit disagreed, ruling that the checks were necessary to the principal work of the job.[2][3]
The US Supreme Court then reversed the Ninth Circuit ruling. You’re quoting the background that gives context to the case in the lixned article.
Scumbags all.
Open plan offices fucken suck.
Noise, constant distractions, and that one arsehole who never covers their mouth when they sneeze, sending a wave of infectious germs rolling out across the office floor.
God I remember how the flu used to just rip through the office come wintertime… Since switching to remote work, I think I’ve taken 1 sick day this year.
I’m in an open floor plan with cubicles. There is one asshole who has an office, he insists on having loud conversations, with his door open, on mother fucking speakerphone through his tinny laptop speakers. I’ve resorted to a white noise playlist on Spotify. He’s a client, so not cool telling him to fuck off.
“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.
I have a hypothesis that anyone who is required to be on site without having to do a hands-on thing (e.g. physical maintenance or repair) is actually a garden hermit, that is, hired to perform as an extra for the pleasure of viewing upper management.
I also have a hypothesis that a lot of company budget and material goes towards handling and pacifying upper management (e.g. the way a binky pacifies an infant) since they are accustomed to being coddled and not accustomed to actually managing.
To be fair, I’ve only been able to observe the relationships between clerical class and management class in a handful of companies, including a small one-store CD-Rom reseller and Bechtel Corporation circa 1990, but my observations have been consistent between them.
I have a hypothesis that anyone who is required to be on site without having to do a hands-on thing (e.g. physical maintenance or repair) is actually a garden hermit, that is, hired to perform as an extra for the pleasure of viewing upper management.
They’re Type 1 Bullshit Jobs, aka “Flunkies”
Flunky jobs primarily exist to make someone else look or feel important. Throughout recorded history, rich and powerful people would surround themselves with servants, clients, sycophants, and minions of one sort or another.
This sounds about right to me.
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.
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.
We had a tremendous office culture in the 1950s.
If you were a middle class white man, sure.
Every other company:
“Hey, we’re hiring…”
Excuse for layoff. What I hear from the article is a CEO, who himself is not a grown up, crying me, me, me, my company, my profit, selfish behavior without any concern for his employees who have largely contributed to his startup success.
Humans have a “me” problem in general. The secret is not to create conditions for it to manifest itself.
Anti-monopoly laws, unions, distribution of power, openness, readiness to break nonsense laws, stubbornness in defending important laws, understanding of common sense both in following and in breaking the law, and the same that applies to laws applies to any moral principles.
You know, consciousness of good and evil, wisdom of all the enormous amount of good literature available for anyone able to read in English and other most spoken languages.
Just being human and understanding that no device of human making can “solve” human nature.
I’d say Tolkien and Lewis on the fantasy side, Heinlein and Asimov and Simak on the sci-fi side, and Lem in between them. Some Jules Verne and Sabatini would be good too. I have a reflex to Russian classics due to having been force-fed them in childhood, but there are things worth learning. And Lucian of Samosata.
Carpe diem, memento mori, astra inclinant sed non obligant. OK, I think my head needs a reboot.
When it comes to addressing the “me” problem, Buddha has to be on the list of people with advice worth checking out. Ego issues may run deep, but modern capitalism encourages and nurtures the worst of them. A lot of what we face today isn’t due to any unchangeable human nature, but capitalists will try to persuade us it is, because that undermines our will to grow past the system that serves them.
Thank you, yes, Buddha is.
I also forgot Tao Te Ching.
but modern capitalism encourages and nurtures the worst of them
We-ell, one of the reasons I emotionally hate communism is because I’ve grown in Russia and have deep acquaintance with some things which were being planted just like you describe, but by Soviet education.
An example: someone has a hobbyist project, that project becomes useful for their group, the group (without any participation) takes pride in it as “our” project, then later that someone makes a weak squeal about not even credit, but their own wishes to continue their hobby by their own understanding, the group judges them heavily and makes them repent. In Soviet moralist stories the person with the initiative would be the one to blame for “selfishness”, while their contribution would be considered “as expected” (because they owe the “collective” everything they can do), so the rest of the group who’ve done nothing useful would be “better” (because they don’t have to do anything, just use what belongs to the “collective”) and that person would have to redeem themselves. No irony, no nuance, just this.
