Alcohol.
Lots and lots of people lean heavily on it and think that alcohol is the spice of their life. When, it contributes to so many problems than it’s so-called benefits. We tried, in America anyways, to outright ban alcohol. Problem was that the person who wanted it banned, was too extremist.
Like he didn’t think it all through and think just going for the jugular of the problem is what will work. When, it didn’t and just made people work around it until eventually the ban was dismantled.
So, since then, we’ve been putting up with drunk drivers, drunk disputes, drunk abusers and other issues. I still wish we could just slam our hands down at the desk and demand we sit to discuss in how to properly deal with this issue than people proclaiming that it’s not a problem.
Sorry, no.
I mean, you’re right that git enables this, and that would obviously be a great choice for many tech workers, but employers in the US despise remote work and will do everything they can to never allow that to be any where near as widespread as it easily could be.
Not sure if you’ve somehow missed it, but after Covid lockdowns ended, basically every large tech firm in the US started mandating return to office work, and many of them even admitted they did so as a way to functionally lay off employees without actually laying them off.
Even Zoom, the company that maintains the most widely used remote work software… mandated their employees return to office.
There are ultimately 2 real reasons for this, ignore the bs that comes out of the media:
Actually effective management can easily be done remotely by competent managers, competent work can in most cases be done by competent employees remotely, but the managers need to feel that in person social hierarchy dominance, or they get upset.
If we went to a massively more remote work paradigm, a fuckton of offices become pointless.
This crashes the commercial real estate market, offices start going (even more) vacant or converting to residential or mixed use, which would lower housing prices.
Can’t have that kind of bubble pop, or else we go through something similar to the 08 crash… in an economic environment that is already very precarious at best, and more realistically is already contracting in basically every metric other than GDP.
… We have a whole bunch of generally normalized social views and approaches to many aspects of how things work, which are all mutually reinforcing, which prevent actual social progress from happening, and the hatred of remote work is one thing that reinforces our car dependent construction of society.
It doesn’t matter that the vast majority of people would be better off with more widespread mass transit, it doesn’t matter that the vast majority of people would be better off being able to do remote work.
Those things don’t make C Suite see line go up next quarter.