Agree, but it's an easy habit to pick up.

>If you don’t then it will start being ignored because its never accurate.

Yes, that pavlovian response works both ways. If people keep interrupting my meetings, I'll remember to put up the thing. Remembering to take it down when the meeting is over is more problematic though.

>It also doesn’t work if you get an impromptu call or meeting you weren’t planning for.

It does. I've never had a meeting where it didn't take me a few rings to get my AirPods in anyway.

I totally agree with most of what you said and I appreciate the technical solution presented. Like I said my mind is just into finding simple, non-tech solutions right now. Also another benefit of the simple solution is it costs probably a buck or two, cheaper if I made the tag myself with scissors, part of a cardboard box and a marker.

The problem with both solutions is it doesn't work for dogs who typically can't read. An even simpler solution just occurred to me. Shut the door when I'm in a meeting.

On the contrary though, I've been fascinated with simple non-technical solutions to problems lately. For example, my buddy hates it when people use his driveway to turn around. He lives on a corner lot and the layout is prone to people turning around in his driveway, and apparently this is a pet peeve of his. He was talking about installing a gate, or a retractable pole that he could extend from a hole in the driveway, all these intricate technological solutions, etc. I gave it some thought and got him a street cone off eBay to put in his driveway. I leveraged human psychology over technology and it worked like a charm and only cost $30.

For your example, I would just put a do not disturb sign on the door. The flip around kind they have at hotels. It takes getting up, but just as effective and you get a few steps in. Of course you don't get to learn and build stuff, but like I said, I'm fascinated by simple solutions right now.

This depends on the number of shits given. I can make anyone better who gives a shit, but there are a whole lot of people who don't and are irredeemable. If this seems to be the case, it's best to cut bait and find someone else quickly. In the 90s, it was "hire fast, fire fast," and somehow this was discarded. It was a tough but highly effective model for making really good teams.

To add to this, it seems people are either unwilling or unable to figure things out for themselves. There are some proprietary things that are really tough to figure out, but it seems a lot of devs these days spend about 5 minutes, then ask for help. "Back in the day," devs would spend a day or two banging their heads agains the before asking for help, and they were better for it.

This no shits given isn't limited to developers, but BAs, PMs, Biz and QA people. It seems a lot worse today than 10 years ago. I ended up spending a good chunk of my day doing people's jobs for them. The people that were hired to take stuff off my plate end up putting stuff on my plate.

Maybe I'm just old and salty. Get off my lawn!

That's partially because big companies decided WFH was now verboten. Part of it was because execs in that area didn't want their personal property values to go down, I suspect. I'm sure there was also governmental pressure as well to protect the auxiliary businesses like local restaurants, protect tax revenue like property tax state income tax, etc.

This analysis relies on someone to have a mortgage that takes 100% of their salary every month. The general rule was don't buy a house over 3x your annual pre-tax salary. I think it's moved up past that in most places though. Either way, don't buy so much house you can't afford food. I would think that goes without saying.

>Moreover if the fear is your portfolio losing value, buying a house doesn't really mitigate that. Sure, you might still have a house at the end of the day, but that's cold comfort if you paid $2M for a bay area house that subsequently saw its value tank (eg. something like Detroit).

This analysis is an edge case and in no way represents the norm. I'm not sure of any area that has gone from Bay Area prices to Detroit prices in a single lifetime.

>Even in some sort of apocalypse scenario a house isn't obviously better than stocks, because the whole concept of owning a house relies on some sort of functioning legal system.

Another crazy edge case. It's saying don't buy a house because an asteroid might hit. I'm pretty sure that newly non-functioning legal system wouldn't protect your stock portfolio either. If it comes to that, best to invest in bullets and whiskey.

>On the other hand there are very real problems with investing in "bricks / house". It has historical under-performed stocks.

Include paying rent in your analysis comparing it with stocks, particularly after you pay it off. You're sinking $X into a rental property with zero return and zero equity gained. I don't have to pay $2000 to the mortgage ever again and I have an asset that has more than doubled in 20 years, and a place to live that is essentially rent/mortgage free for life. That's a lot of dividends comparatively. Also, rents go up, mortgage payments typically don't, so factor inflation in your rent analysis.

>Moreover a single house provides poor diversification compared to a basket of stocks and its performance is tied to the economic health of your local area.

You shouldn't ever put all your money in stocks. Putting money in real estate, bonds, CDs, cash, etc. is the definition of diversification.

>If you lose your job, there's a good chance that your house won't fetch a high price.

Housing prices are unrelated to an individual losing their job. If you lose your job and haven't saved up enough runway, you could default on your mortgage. You could also not pay your rent. You get kicked out either way, but the bank should cut you a check for the equity you have remaining, minus whatever fees they conjure up.

>All of this makes for a poor risk adjusted return, and it's unclear how "has value to you" counters this.

All of your points were based on invalid assumptions, edge cases, or are irrelevant when compared to paying rent. Buying a house is a long game.

It mattered enough for someone to pay you money to do it, and that money put food on the table and clothes on your body and a roof over your head and allowed you to contribute to larger society through paying taxes.

Is it the same as discovering that E = MC2 or Jonas Salk's contributions? No, but it's not nothing either.

I would imagine the state takes the vast majority of their pay.

In the United States, the general perjury statute under federal law classifies perjury as a felony and provides for a prison sentence of up to five years.

>The quality of the apps I'm seeing seems vastly technically overengineered, almost like 100 different hero engineers added their own "tricks" just to seem clever, make a name for themself, make everyone else's life harder, and then pat themselves on the back while writing extensive documentation about why their little chrome extension or alternative way of doing things solves X,Y,Z (while completely ignoring how convoluted and burdensome they've now made something that, while technically inconvenient, was utterly simple to understand prior).

This is what endless interviews full of leet code questions buys them. At least all their engineers can estimate how many ping pong balls will fit in a school bus.

Agree. With no degree, but a skill and interest in programming coupled with experience, you're actually in a pretty good place. Find a company that doesn't suck. They seem elusive but they exist. They might not pay as well, but you can get through the day without counting the seconds until it's over.

Shit companies are always hiring because they have high turnover, so it would seem like all companies are shit, but they are not.

Maybe get out of NYC. If you are in the straight tech industry, think about doing tech in another industry, they all need it.

FWIW, there will always be times of stress in tech, but if the place is actually well managed, those times would be minimized.

It would be more obfuscated than that. They're scummy, I didn't say they weren't clever. A company probably wouldn't make the exact same product in three different countries and Amazon probably wouldn't stock all three, they'd just pick the version they could make the most money on. Also, they probably wouldn't make the difference obvious, just a few cents or dollars here or there. They would say the tariff is $5, when it really was $4.50 and they'd just round up. At scale that really ads up.

>Seems like a very fast way to completely lose the trust of your customers.

Most of them lost trust a long time ago. I mean, what companies do you trust? I don't trust very many, if any.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe we should all trust Amazon...

Edit: Amazon said displaying tariffs was never approved and won't happen. More junk news.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/amazon-considers-displaying-...

It might be like shipping and handling: $20. The shipping is probably $5, the handling is $15. The handling is just a fee they charge to sell it to you. They want you to think it's shipping that's why they put "shipping" first. Uber Eats calls it "taxes and other fees," which are mostly fees, but they want you to think it's taxes, that's why they put "taxes" first.

Many business are scummy like that, we've just gotten used to it.

The point being, they are signaling a price hike and they are trying to attribute it to tariffs, which maybe or may not be true down to the penny. If they were exact in what the tariff was, people can easily calculate their cost, which Amazon doesn't want. I'm sure they will sneak in some extra profit in there at some point using similar tactics as described above.

Say local business charges $110. Imported charges $80 but a 50% tariff making it $120. If the import charges $120, they won't be competitive on price, so if that was their only differentiation, they would need eat at least $10 in tariffs.