So there is an enormous cultural failure because no one wrote a blog post containing knowledge that is primarily of interest to Bendini?
Surely I’m not the only one who would want accurate information about an area if I was considering moving to it and not have to play twenty questions with the person who lives there, assuming I know what to ask? (e.g. “do homeless people by any chance defecate on the street?” is not a question I’d intuitively ask, even though the question is quite relevant)
In fact, Bendini did reblog and comment on a post I wrote, In Defense of Unreliability, in which I discussed the fact that I get places through trains and Uberpool. Perhaps he simply assumed I was a very unusual person, or perhaps he forgot, or perhaps he didn’t bother to read the post he was commenting on, but either way this doesn’t make me very optimistic about the plan where Bay Area rationalist bloggers transform into the Bay Area travel bureau instead of Bendini taking responsibility for not making glaring mistakes.
I did read and reblog that, yes. Consider a passage from your essay:
However, I do want to explain why I myself am quite unreliable and how I benefit from a social norm in which this unreliability is acceptable. (We should also note that I have lived in the Bay for the majority of my adult, actually-socializing life, so I may be unfamiliar with the benefits of a non-flake lifestyle.)
And a passage from mine:
When a negative attribute present in some individuals becomes woven into the cultural fabric, it becomes much more difficult to unravel. Even if it makes the community worse off on the whole, individuals can benefit in ways analogous to special interest groups. People with the trait that was previously frowned upon now get accommodations around it, ranging from a free pass to continue the behaviour, to resources being spent in order to limit its repercussions.
You are welcome to have this mutual “random flaking is allowed” agreement, but a widespread acceptance that this is the way things should be impacts anyone trying to do something important. Imagine a startup trying to operate on a policy of “yeah just come to work whenever you feel like it, don’t wory about picking up the phone or respond to emails, just do what you want and we will have to work around it I guess”
This is one of the reasons for-profit things are far more successful, it’s not just the ability to get people to do the unglamorous work by paying them money, but the set of norms for what is and isn’t acceptable. The problem is that projects not run as for-profit buisnesses flounder because people don’t actually follow for-profit norms like showing up when you say you will.
This is bad if you acnowledge the existence of projects which are a poor fit for the for-profit model, as things like this make them far less successful.
The majority of this comment (from “I did read and reblog”) seems like it’s changing the subject, in a direction that looks a lot like point-scoring. Ozy was saying that you had sources of information about Berkeley that did not appear to inform this post; in response, you bring up the question of reliability.
I agree with Phil that the question of whether it is a good thing that I am unreliable is entirely unrelated to the question of whether you should have learned about Bay Area transit from a post you read which extensively discusses Bay Area transit, which in turn is a derail from the fact that you have a factual error in your post which you have not corrected several weeks after it was first pointed out to you.
In retrospect, snarkily proving I had paid enough attention to your post to incorporate some of it into my essay was not the best way to make the point. My apologies.
The reason I have not changed the article is that changing that information would require a careful splice to preserve the original feel of the passage, for no informational benefit. Here is why I think this:
Public transport, although cheaper than driving due to government subsidies, is slower according to Google maps (if they can’t provide accurate info in the commute radius of their top employees, I’ll be very suprised). This seems to be in line with the regular gripes that wonder across my tumblr dash about how slow and unreliable it is, something you also point out in that post
The Bay Area’s public transit system is really really good compared to public transit in most of the rest of the country (for one thing, it is possible to get places on it). However, our public transit is certainly inferior to, say, New York City’s. One of the ways this works is that sometimes, based on the Inscrutable Whim of the Train Gods, the train will choose to show up fourteen minutes late.
Looking at the actual data Google gives, we get a estimated commute time of 50m − 1h40m on a typical workday (I used 1h30m as the figure, as a number towards the higher end of the range wouldnt mean the hypothetical person wouldn’t be late to work half of the time)
That same journey on public transport, without delays or missed connections from the previous one being late is 1h45m, five minutes longer than the worst case estimate for driving.
Do you have local information that would contradict this?
If you work at Facebook you probably take the Facebook bus, which is ~1 hour 30 minutes door to door (I’m guessing based on the Ward-Street-to-Google travel time).
Things you can do on a train that you can’t do driving: read, write, meditate, watch a movie, talk to a friend online, knit (and similar handcrafts), plan/schedule things, study, answer emails. It’s not a great time for any work where you really need to be in flow or where you need equipment that takes up a lot of space, but otherwise there are a lot of goals you can advance while sitting on a train.
Things that you can do driving: listen to music, listen to a podcast or audiobook, talk to the people you’re carpooling with if you’re carpooling, talk to your kid if you happen to use an on-site daycare that you’re taking them to, maybe call someone on a carphone, that’s… about it. All five of those things, of course, can also be done on a train. And of course distracted driving can literally kill you or a child, while the worst case scenario for distracted train-taking is missing your stop.
The Google bus has wifi (I believe Facebook bus does as well) which means you can do more things because you have Internet on your laptop and not just your phone.
Taking public transit also improves your health and has a variety of positive externalities on e.g. the environment.
“yeah just come to work whenever you feel like it, don’t wory about picking up the phone or respond to emails, just do what you want and we will have to work around it I guess”
This has been the policy at all startups I’ve worked at. “Be here at 9am (or at my current place, 10:30am), except if you don’t want to. Come to this meeting, except if you’d rather not. We’re paying you to be value aligned for this amount of time a week because you passed our capability tests on hiring, everything else is up to you. Just be agenty about it.”
The key things here are value alignment and implicit norms, Netflix offers employees “unlimited vacation”, the quotation marks are there for a reason.
There is a big difference between an employee who works semi-irregular hours and misses irrelevant meetings and one that goes completely off the grid without any warning when they are being relied upon to do a specific task.
If your PR person flaked on a scheduled news appearance because they were in bed redditing, are you telling me the company wouldn’t mind because they are pro-autonomy?
Most startup employees are not PR people, and “scheduled news appearance” is a relatively small fraction of what PR people do.
My husband works for Google and AFAICT their policy is “show up on time for important meetings, get your work done, otherwise we don’t care.” “On time” is apparently a function of how far away the meeting is from your desk, and since most meetings are maybe a minute’s walk away you will be side-eyed if you are consistently more than a minute late. OTOH, if you have to travel and get stuck in traffic, you will not be side-eyed for showing up ten minutes late.
We Bay Areans are not, in fact, routinely getting fired from our jobs for unreliability.
My husband works for Google and AFAICT their policy is “show up on time for important meetings, get your work done, otherwise we don’t care.”
I am already aware of this, and I’m not sure why it appears as if I’m unaware of how things work at companies like Google? Given the distinction between categories I highlighted in the above comment:
There is a big difference between an employee who works semi-irregular hours and misses irrelevant meetings and one that goes completely off the grid without any warning when they are being relied upon to do a specific task.
Most startup employees are not PR people, and “scheduled news appearance” is a relatively small fraction of what PR people do.
I chose an infrequent but very clearcut scenario in order to function as a good example of someone being relied upon and dropping the ball. Pointing out that it is rare is fighting the hypothetical, like saying you wouldn’t pull the lever in a trolley problem because it might get you arrested.
If you find this hypothetical unsuitable, perhaps one of the following would work better:
The head programmer on a team taking a spur of the moment vacation the week before the next software release deadline.
The sysadmin/whoever not returning phonecalls for a few days when a software bug locks out all users from the app.
The team lead who was meant to be giving a presentation to the CEO to show the new design/whatever decides to take a long lunch and is an hour late.
The CEO who repeatedly ducks calls from his investors because he is averse to explaining why quarterly growth metrics took a nosedive.
The new hire who reads the unlimited vacation spiel and decides to take a three month vacation post-induction so he can “take time to recharge in order to become more productive” on the employer’s dime.
I’m not even saying one of these examples will get someone fired, just a repeated pattern of behaviour like this.
There is also the point that people who have these jobs know this on some level, and even if they are unreliable in social situations they do not behave like that when they don’t think they can get away with it.
The point I’m making is there are situations where reliablity definitely does matter (e.g. commuity projects/voluteer run events), and a widespread norm of people behaving like it doesn’t is greatly hindering the ability of those projects to operate.
Whether reliability matters socially is a little more open to dispute, and I’ll grant that it is reasonable to have reached different conclusions, as my attempts to suggest it does are gestures in the direction of There Are Rules Here.
Surely I’m not the only one who would want accurate information about an area if I was considering moving to it and not have to play twenty questions with the person who lives there, assuming I know what to ask? (e.g. “do homeless people by any chance defecate on the street?” is not a question I’d intuitively ask, even though the question is quite relevant)
I did read and reblog that, yes. Consider a passage from your essay:
And a passage from mine:
You are welcome to have this mutual “random flaking is allowed” agreement, but a widespread acceptance that this is the way things should be impacts anyone trying to do something important. Imagine a startup trying to operate on a policy of “yeah just come to work whenever you feel like it, don’t wory about picking up the phone or respond to emails, just do what you want and we will have to work around it I guess”
This is one of the reasons for-profit things are far more successful, it’s not just the ability to get people to do the unglamorous work by paying them money, but the set of norms for what is and isn’t acceptable. The problem is that projects not run as for-profit buisnesses flounder because people don’t actually follow for-profit norms like showing up when you say you will.
This is bad if you acnowledge the existence of projects which are a poor fit for the for-profit model, as things like this make them far less successful.
The majority of this comment (from “I did read and reblog”) seems like it’s changing the subject, in a direction that looks a lot like point-scoring. Ozy was saying that you had sources of information about Berkeley that did not appear to inform this post; in response, you bring up the question of reliability.
I agree with Phil that the question of whether it is a good thing that I am unreliable is entirely unrelated to the question of whether you should have learned about Bay Area transit from a post you read which extensively discusses Bay Area transit, which in turn is a derail from the fact that you have a factual error in your post which you have not corrected several weeks after it was first pointed out to you.
My offer of betaing remains open.
In retrospect, snarkily proving I had paid enough attention to your post to incorporate some of it into my essay was not the best way to make the point. My apologies.
The reason I have not changed the article is that changing that information would require a careful splice to preserve the original feel of the passage, for no informational benefit. Here is why I think this:
The hypothetical journey from Ward Street to Facebook HQ, although insane from my point of view, isn’t all that uncommon among tech workers in general.
Public transport, although cheaper than driving due to government subsidies, is slower according to Google maps (if they can’t provide accurate info in the commute radius of their top employees, I’ll be very suprised). This seems to be in line with the regular gripes that wonder across my tumblr dash about how slow and unreliable it is, something you also point out in that post
Looking at the actual data Google gives, we get a estimated commute time of 50m − 1h40m on a typical workday (I used 1h30m as the figure, as a number towards the higher end of the range wouldnt mean the hypothetical person wouldn’t be late to work half of the time)
That same journey on public transport, without delays or missed connections from the previous one being late is 1h45m, five minutes longer than the worst case estimate for driving.
Do you have local information that would contradict this?
If you work at Facebook you probably take the Facebook bus, which is ~1 hour 30 minutes door to door (I’m guessing based on the Ward-Street-to-Google travel time).
Things you can do on a train that you can’t do driving: read, write, meditate, watch a movie, talk to a friend online, knit (and similar handcrafts), plan/schedule things, study, answer emails. It’s not a great time for any work where you really need to be in flow or where you need equipment that takes up a lot of space, but otherwise there are a lot of goals you can advance while sitting on a train.
Things that you can do driving: listen to music, listen to a podcast or audiobook, talk to the people you’re carpooling with if you’re carpooling, talk to your kid if you happen to use an on-site daycare that you’re taking them to, maybe call someone on a carphone, that’s… about it. All five of those things, of course, can also be done on a train. And of course distracted driving can literally kill you or a child, while the worst case scenario for distracted train-taking is missing your stop.
The Google bus has wifi (I believe Facebook bus does as well) which means you can do more things because you have Internet on your laptop and not just your phone.
Taking public transit also improves your health and has a variety of positive externalities on e.g. the environment.
This has been the policy at all startups I’ve worked at. “Be here at 9am (or at my current place, 10:30am), except if you don’t want to. Come to this meeting, except if you’d rather not. We’re paying you to be value aligned for this amount of time a week because you passed our capability tests on hiring, everything else is up to you. Just be agenty about it.”
The key things here are value alignment and implicit norms, Netflix offers employees “unlimited vacation”, the quotation marks are there for a reason.
There is a big difference between an employee who works semi-irregular hours and misses irrelevant meetings and one that goes completely off the grid without any warning when they are being relied upon to do a specific task.
If your PR person flaked on a scheduled news appearance because they were in bed redditing, are you telling me the company wouldn’t mind because they are pro-autonomy?
Most startup employees are not PR people, and “scheduled news appearance” is a relatively small fraction of what PR people do.
My husband works for Google and AFAICT their policy is “show up on time for important meetings, get your work done, otherwise we don’t care.” “On time” is apparently a function of how far away the meeting is from your desk, and since most meetings are maybe a minute’s walk away you will be side-eyed if you are consistently more than a minute late. OTOH, if you have to travel and get stuck in traffic, you will not be side-eyed for showing up ten minutes late.
We Bay Areans are not, in fact, routinely getting fired from our jobs for unreliability.
I am already aware of this, and I’m not sure why it appears as if I’m unaware of how things work at companies like Google? Given the distinction between categories I highlighted in the above comment:
I chose an infrequent but very clearcut scenario in order to function as a good example of someone being relied upon and dropping the ball. Pointing out that it is rare is fighting the hypothetical, like saying you wouldn’t pull the lever in a trolley problem because it might get you arrested.
If you find this hypothetical unsuitable, perhaps one of the following would work better:
The head programmer on a team taking a spur of the moment vacation the week before the next software release deadline.
The sysadmin/whoever not returning phonecalls for a few days when a software bug locks out all users from the app.
The team lead who was meant to be giving a presentation to the CEO to show the new design/whatever decides to take a long lunch and is an hour late.
The CEO who repeatedly ducks calls from his investors because he is averse to explaining why quarterly growth metrics took a nosedive.
The new hire who reads the unlimited vacation spiel and decides to take a three month vacation post-induction so he can “take time to recharge in order to become more productive” on the employer’s dime.
I’m not even saying one of these examples will get someone fired, just a repeated pattern of behaviour like this.
There is also the point that people who have these jobs know this on some level, and even if they are unreliable in social situations they do not behave like that when they don’t think they can get away with it.
The point I’m making is there are situations where reliablity definitely does matter (e.g. commuity projects/voluteer run events), and a widespread norm of people behaving like it doesn’t is greatly hindering the ability of those projects to operate.
Whether reliability matters socially is a little more open to dispute, and I’ll grant that it is reasonable to have reached different conclusions, as my attempts to suggest it does are gestures in the direction of There Are Rules Here.
Downvoted because this comment does just appear to derail into an irrelevant direction.