Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large. 

Not without the sacrifice

Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, got into some controversy during a recent talk at Stanford. Basically, he said that Google is falling behind AI startups like OpenAI because of work-life balance and working from home policies. The virtual-signaling crowd has come out in criticism, saying work-life balance is super important, and not everyone wants to dedicate a majority of their time energy towards work.

And that’s fine - have your work-life balance! Just don’t expect the same results as a team of workers spending 80 to 100 hours a week slaving away at a problem. As the great Thomas Sowell wrote: “There are no ideal solutions, only trade-offs.” Eric is absolutely correct: a mature company of many thousands can get beaten by a plucky startup dedicated to a eureka moment. For every Adobe, there’s a Figma willing to out-grind its ass.

Work-life balance has many positives, but there are indeed trade-offs. I know this first hand. My career working IT at a university has tremendous work-life balance. However, I know I’m leaving lots of money on the table. In fact, I make the least out of my group of friends. The equation is simple, really: the more time you spend working, the more money you will make. Show me a CEO who goes home right at 5:00 PM, and I will show you a failing company.

I think what people want - and honestly, who wouldn’t if you can get it - is to have work-life balance, but also the high salary. They want the results without the sacrifice. Obviously, that’s not how it works in the real world. If you have aspirations of climbing a company ladder, you put in more work than what is minimally required. You are going to get beaten to the higher seat by the coworker who can come in on a Saturday, while you are home tending to the kids.

Is it fair? Of course it is. The lunch is not free. What do you want to sacrifice?

Nothing doom about this.

Can't touch me

Word on the street is that YouTube is cracking down heavily on ad blockers. Videos absolutely will not play if you don’t disable/whitelist. I intensely abhor watching YouTube with ads, especially when videos are less than five minutes. If I had to watch a 30-second commercial before a three-minute music video, I would just skip both entirely. More than any other streaming service, YouTube is where I spend most of my viewing time. A smooth experience with zero ad interruptions is kind of important (first world problems).

Over the years, browser ad-blocking extensions have done well to keep the YouTube ad machine in check. However, even before this latest crackdown, YouTube has been doing whack-a-mole on the extensions for a long time. It would work fine one day, then the next you’re suddenly seeing ads on videos, wondering why your ad blocker isn’t doing its magic. The solution is to switch to another one, and if that also gets whacked, then to another. Perhaps you’ll end up back to the ad blocker you started with, because it's received an update to combat the YouTube shenanigans.

Frustrated by this, I picked the obvious solution to the problem: pay for YouTube Premium. I bet that’s what YouTube hopes to achieve with its latest crusade against ad blockers: get more folks to pay up. At a not cheap $14 per month, I get the full YouTube experience completely ad-free. Best of all, I can watch videos on my Apple TV’s built-in YouTube app, also without ads. It’s not possible to run an ad-blocker on TV apps, so prior to subscribing, I avoided watching YouTube on my much larger (than a laptop screen) LG TV. These days, a majority of my YouTube time is on the TV.

Crack down on ad blockers all you want, Google. I am chilling over here. The people complaining about it are sitting in the cheap(skate) seats.

A San Francisco classic.

Sorry to hear

With many big tech companies doing layoffs recently, I didn’t think that someone I personally know would be part of the cohort getting the axe. Not until yesterday, when a friend informed me a mutual friend who works at Salesforce, no longer works at Salesforce. She’s doing relatively okay otherwise. The severance is generous, and she’s been diligent with money for a long time. The savings cushion is for precisely these unfortunate moments in life.

I guess I had the impression that people who’ve been with the company for a long time would be safe from the layoff reaper. Which is why I didn’t exactly worry for my friends who was at Salesforce and is at Google (fingers crossed for that friend). I read a tweet recently of a person who got fired from Google after being there for 20 years. These big tech layoffs aren’t simply to cull the massive headcount increase during the pandemic - it’s an opportunity to reevaluate all areas and get leaner.

I’m glad my workplace unionized, so there is some measure of last-in, first-out during times of austerity. Of course, that cuts both ways: under-performers get saved from termination on the virtue of them being with the company for a long time. It’s not a hard rule, however. During the pandemic, our campus had some layoffs, and no one in our IT support department got axed. Which make sense: you don’t get rid of people in the department that is wholly supporting your remote learning effort.

Obviously then the campus did not expand/hire massively during the pandemic - unlike the big tech companies. So I have to think we’re in better shape to handle the supposedly recession headwinds to come. During these times, everybody wishes they have the security of a government job.

Torii.

Burner phone

I reckon the newly announced Google Pixel 4A would make an excellent burner phone for travel.

What exactly do you need from a smartphone when you are in a foreign country anyways? For me, it boils down to two things: be able to take excellent photographs, and be a competent Internet communications device. All other apps and features we’ve grown accustomed to, such as digital payments or access to Netflix, become superfluous once I am outside of the States. i mean, you really shouldn’t be binge watching shows during those precious vacation hours, should you? Might as well just say home at that point.

What I use a phone for when I travel to China is taking many pictures, and accessing the Internet for maps and keeping contact with friends. While my regular carry - an iPhone 11 Pro - indeed can and does both of those things splendidly, that phone also contains a lot of private information that would be rather cumbersome to carry through border crossings. Unfortunately, I am not a stranger to having my phone searched when coming back into America, and I think getting a burner unit with only a minimal amount of necessary information put on it is worthwhile for my own protection.

Mind you that’s not because I am some criminal mastermind, but rather I am hoping to avoid as much extraneous hassle as possible at customs and immigration. Agents want to search my phone? Go right ahead: there’s nothing but vacation photos and records of places I’ve searched for on Google maps.

This brings us perfectly to the Pixel 4A: at $349, it’s just compulsive enough of a price for me to buy one without much further justification. Google’s Pixel phones are renowned for their photographic capabilities, and the Pixel 4A reads like it does not deviate from the lineage. I wouldn’t be missing out on the equally awesome cameras on the iPhone (except for the 2X zoom). From looking at the specs I presume the 4A is a competent Internet device as well, so that’s my other travel need taken care of. It doesn’t matter the 4A doesn’t have fancy aluminum and glass construction, or it can’t do wireless charging: for a such a relatively cheap price, you don’t expect it to.

But heck, it’s got an OLED screen!

While I don’t suppose I’ll be travel anytime soon (thanks, COVID), it’s never too early to be prepared, right? Let’s see if the price of the Pixel 4A gets even lower come Black Friday (or whatever semblance of that may be this year).

Ready for action.