Also if your vision of WFH is that everyone sprawls out then it doesn't solve some of your other issues: people will still need to use their vehicles to get places (because unless we solve the root issue of 'too few homes' then those people will be spread out from each other or services to not create more cities with too few homes) and their sprawled out suburban communities will not suddenly become more walkable. They'll just drive everywhere.

As a customer, I get the experience of a cashierless store. I don't really care how that's accomplished.

As an investor, I might care that I'm being sold snake oil, but I doubt that I chose to invest in Amazon solely over the Fresh stores.

As someone working in the industry, it might certainly affect my perception of what's possible or feasible, but I'm already used to the fact that most of what's being sold as "sophisticated AI" is snake oil.

It just feels to me like this article strikes a bizarre tone about it all, not to mention the fact that other comments in this thread have offered up equally plausible explanations.

Also if the issue here were age, I assume that GP would also pay more for an ICE car.

I pay $1200 a year to insure my Tesla Model S at the max liability coverage, with comprehensive and collision. Admittedly, I've filed that I drive a max of 6k miles a year and I have the highest deductible set on both comprehensive and collision, but I have strong doubts it'd quintuple in price to insure if I went and set those to more typical settings.

My commute was a pleasant 25m bike ride I could use to listen to podcasts (which is exercise I've now lost, so losing the commute didn't exactly give me a bunch of extra free time). Seeing coworkers in person was a really nice way to not only get some social contact every day but also build a rapport with my teammates. The office was also going to be a great place for my dog to get some socialization with other dogs.

Yes, I was annoyed at the moves to more open spaces and with regular frustrating interruptions, but with those mitigated, an office with my actual coworkers (with at most 1 day a week at home) is vastly superior to what I'm doing now, regardless of how much processes change. Not to mention, employers sort of implicitly assume that any time you gained back from not having to commute or whatever are just going to doing extra work.

One reason (among many) why I'd be very resistant to permanently working remotely is that nobody is going to be paying me extra to move into a 2br apartment so I can have a home office, despite the fact that all the employers would hypothetically be saving a killing on their real estate.

Do you have a device that supports night shift? I wonder if using that feature could work to your advantage in re bedtime. (I'm just a childless person speculating, but wouldn't that be grand?)

As someone with about five years of experience as a professional software engineer, I'm really still looking to level up my IC chops, along with a healthy dose of mentorship (mentoring interns or new hires on my team) and what I'd call "tech leadership" (advising on engineering reviews, making technical decisions about how to best build things). I would basically worry about stunting my development as an engineer if I switched to focusing on management, and I'm not even convinced my role models for career development are really in primarily "managerial" roles (I'm thinking of both famously very good backend devs both at my company and at the big SV companies).

Separately, I have relatively little interest in being in a role where my output is judged as the output of a team of people who aren't me. I get that that's the best way to judge managers, and that managers do very valuable intangible things in unblocking their team, but I'm skeptical that I'd be able to feel satisfied by this. If anything, it kind of feels random: at an equivalent level of my unblocking the team and being a good manager, if I have an amazing 10x engineer on my team then the output is just going to be higher than if I have an average engineer. So in less clear-cut cases, how can I tell if I just did a good job at unblocking or if my engineers are really good? (This is not to say that I don't feel satisfied doing mentorship-style things or architectural advising-style things, but that feels separate to me. I think I prefer empowering other engineers by leveraging knowledge and writing good platforms/tools/APIs rather than doing the organizational empowering thing).

I write all these things, because it really seems like a foregone conclusion of both this article and the industry as a whole that an engineer will eventually become a manager. Is that what I most likely have to look forward to in my career if I wind up working at the well-established/mature companies?

EDIT: I'd also just appreciate being told if I'm thinking about everything entirely wrong or something here.

EDIT2: This also isn't to knock people who _do_ enjoy doing these things, but it's not for me and I imagine it's not definitionally for every good engineer.

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Unrelated to the above, point 8 feels a little bit in contradiction to point 1. How does one keep learning their craft without direct experience?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen

There may very well be people who are getting away with doing it now, but the leaked data eventually winds up being used which is how you get caught.