Another cofounder of Gather here -- I'm totally okay with you posting your app here (Calla right?) or the whole list. I think the hackernews comment readers would benefit from seeing the wider space of takes on this idea.
I just asked my manager for a 24 hr work week (3 days on, 4 days off), and they said sure, and the company prorated my salary down.
The company I was working for came out of a university research lab, and so had a culture of PhD students working part time for it, so this was not outside the norm there.
The downside was not getting equity, nor benefits, but I was on my parent's insurance and wasn't too keen on their equity anyway, so this was fine for me.
The other path here might be working somewhere with a culture of fixed goals rather than a time expectation.
For example, many remote companies that operate asynchronously won't expect you to be in the office 40hrs a week, but will expect a certain level of work to be done each week. If you can get that done in 24 rather than 40, then it works out fine for you.
This is why I love remote work. Studies [0] show that most office workers work only 2.5 hours a day on average, with the rest being socializing, procrastinating, surfing the web, and so on. If I can get my work done in 4 hours a day, I'll have done more work and have more free time, since managers in an office expect you to be there for 8 hours a day, but not so for remote.
I don't believe 2.5 hours is representative, so please cite these studies. Personally,senior engineers (individual contributors) that I have worked with spend 4-6 hours per day making significant contributions on their own and the other 4-2 hours working/coordinating with their team and sister teams. The only plausible scenario where one can do an acceptable job in 2.5 hours per day is where a senior person is doing the job of an entry level person. For people managers, having effective 2-4 hour days on an ongoing basis are very unlikely in my experience. I am open to be surprised with examples that prove otherwise.
Here is the study I read it from, there might be others. In my experience, yes, it doesn't work for managers, only those who are individual contributors doing programming full time. I doubt however that even the senior managers are coding the entire time for 4 to 6 hours, it is difficult to do so every single day. More likely, you perceive them to be doing that much work since they are present during that time, which is the same reaction I get as well; colleagues and bosses speak of how much work I get done compared to others, yet they don't realize I work a lot fewer hours. It's all about efficiency.
> However, this eight-hour movement didn't become standard until nearly a century later, when, in 1914, Ford Motor Company astonished everyone by cutting daily hours down to eight while simultaneously doubling wages. The result? Increased productivity.
What happened was the shift from craftsmen at a workbench to a deskilled assembly line had significant turnover. The cost of training and retention was high enough that Ford instituted the lower working hours and higher wages.
From one of Ford's biographers: “So great was labor’s distaste for the new machine system that toward the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963.”
You see this in shipyards during the war war 2 years where once the initial pool of workers is burned out, you need to raise wages to bring in more workers.
The classic study on this topic that everyone loves to cite is "“Constant, Constant, Multi-tasking Craziness”: Managing Multiple Working Spheres", from 2004, where anthropologists observed 14 workers building software, specifically:
* Four software engineers
* Six analysts (more like a Project Manager)
* Four managers (like an Engineering Lead)
What they found is in a ~nine hour day, the people did between ninety minutes to 4 and a half hours a day doing their 'focused work'. You can imagine that project managers are pushing 90 minutes, and the engineers are closer to 5 hours.
All of this is on top of two hours a day chatting with people across cubical walls.
In reading a bunch of these studies, you find small populations, and a focus on law firms and consulting because their work is significantly more legible.
Yeah with coronavirus and all, but I did before as well. Generally it's about 2 hours a day, but I work intensely in those hours. I never go over 4, as a general principle. Again, this isn't really comparable to office hours, as most people don't work non-stop (with short breaks of course) or as intensely, so I do finish much faster than my other in person and colleagues.
Every software job I've ever had, has an infinite amount of work that could be done. So somehow I have to justify the amount of work I've gotten done, which is usually less than the amount they 'want' done (which is all of it), and the justification is usually "couldn't spend any more hours on it, literally".
It also goes against the essence of many companies that want to grow and to do so make everyone more productive. So you want to cash in that productivity but so do they!
It's a cross between Zoom x Pokemon. You only get audio and video from people you're standing next to, and as you walk away from them, the video fades away and the audio drops off.
With current video chat apps, you lose many of the dynamics of real life meetups. In particular, you lose the ability to have multiple people in the same shared space having multiple conversations.
In real life events, you can talk to a few people at a time while still being able to quickly go from one conversation to the next. With video chat, you have to talk to everyone at the same time.
Online Town is meant to fix this.
The way it works is, when you're near someone you get their audio and video, when you walk away from them their video drops off, and their audio fades out.
So you can have multiple conversations within a single virtual space.
Join me in the public room! Would love to get your all thoughts on it :)
Hi Liamuk! You won't believe this but I was working on this exact idea all of yesterday and shipped a basic version with proximal audio and a 2D canvas to display players. It's not ready for HN traffic yet, but I joined Online Town and ran into Cyrus.
We had a great ~10 minute video chat in the middle of the street about the possibilities of virtual realms. I've just popped him an email and sent some techno recommendations :).
Good luck with Online Town! I think we'll see a whole spate of similar ideas focusing on a variety of niches.
This is a great feature. Having been to a 100-person conference on Zoom which tried to emulate social activities by splitting large groups in Zoom breakout rooms, there is clearly a need for a service like this. Congrats on shipping!
Hi. I think this is a great idea - particularly as I'm unable to visit my girlfriend and 4 stepkids in the lockdown (I don't live with them), and I've been having meals with them (Saturday breakfast is a 'thing') via standard video call.
Just tried online town (I'm on Firefox 75 on Windows) with my girlfriend (she was on her ipad), and I could see my video in a box, and she could see her video in a box, but we couldn't see each other. The fade in/out worked on distance, but only of the box - no audio or video of each other.
She was also initially unwilling to enter the room as she thought she'd be in a room with three men (from the sample image given when visiting a room link) - I know it says 'on the left there's an example', but maybe that might need replacing?
Really great idea, though, and much needed at the moment!
I am building this too atm, but a slightly different implementation (python backend en typescript frontend).
I started saturday; I've had the idea longer, but that it's more like a feature than a product kept me from building it.
Nice work, keep it up!
Surprised no one has replied here. I've been thinking about the same problem for the past few weeks regarding real life group dynamics in digital mediums. Interesting stuff, wish you all the best
This is very neat. The whole idea of having multiple ongoing conversations in the same world that you can just walk closer to hear reminds a lot of Sun's Project Wonderland from ~10 years ago.
Leaned in way more on the 2d game aspect of it, and have video drop-off too, but the place it came from: "being able to have multiple conversations in the same shared space without hearing everyone at the same time" is the same.
I had a very nice conversation with one of your developers in your app. I hope you folks can build on your tool and find a path to success. Good luck in your endeavors!
The key to the American team's recent success is forgetting about the IMO and just learning math. Instead of teaching mechanics-- techniques specifically for solving olympiad problems (as they had done a lot of before, and as many countries do), the idea was to just show interesting and fun things from real math and build strong intuition for mathematical problem solving through that. If you look at lecture's he's given in the past at MOP: http://www.math.cmu.edu/~ploh/olympiad.shtml, you can see they're mostly just highlights from his area of research.
When he was being considered for coaching he told the MAA he would run training for the IMO team in a very different way from how it was done and how and that choosing him would be a gamble: there was a chance that it would go spectacularly wrong. The gamble has seemingly paid off.
It's also nice that this is a quintessentially American way of doing things :) Just pursue what you find fun and it'll pay off. Don't over-optimize for the accolades.
While Loh's approach is commendable that is not necessarily the approach the kids follow to be selected. IMO is kind of artificial in its subject matter so it is not true that the more math you know the higher your odds. These kids have trained very hard on their own (you have to be obsessive to get to the competitive level), just to be selected. My guess is that Loh's approach kind of loosen them up instead to giving them more of the same of what they already did on their own and this seems to have worked wonders for the highest performing kids.
It might be more interesting if voting occurred at the level of space separated words rather than characters.
As it is right now, twitch is tripping over itself trying to even type "ls" given the delay. As anyone who's ever tried to use ssh over a poor connection can relate to, there's a whole lot of "llllss" type command lines getting run.
