The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Working from home is powering productivity (News)
Mon, 14 Oct 2024
Nicholas Bloom finds WFH is powering a productivity boom, Matt Mullenweg has decided that WP Engine's beatings will continue until morale improves, Levels.fyi has added a salary heat map, Gareth Edwards highlights just how fragile the Internet really is & Artem Zakirullin details how cognitive load is what really matters in software development.
Full Episode
What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is ChangeLog News for the week of Monday, October 14th, 2024. SpaceX won the weekend by having Starship's super-heavy booster return to its launch pad where the launch tower caught it using arms, which they nicknamed the chopsticks. Meanwhile, I can't even chopstick a serving of fried rice without the aid of my offhand. Oh well, let's get into this week's news.
Working from home is powering productivity. Here's Nicholas Bloom writing for the IMF. Quote, WFH increased about tenfold following the outbreak of the pandemic and has settled in at about five times its pre-pandemic level. This could counter slowing productivity and deliver a surge in economic growth over the next few decades.
If AI yields additional output, the era of slow growth could be over, end quote. Nicholas's research into this topic focuses on how work from home, one, increases inputs like labor and capital, and two, grows productivity. However, like all things, it does have its downsides, including the damage to city centers and large reduction in valuations of commercial office space.
Still, Nicholas concludes, "...being an economist usually means balancing winners and losers. Analyzing changes in technology, trade, prices, and regulations usually has mixed effects with large groups of winners and losers. When it comes to working from home, the winners massively outweigh the losers." firms, employees, and society in general have all reaped huge benefits.
In my lifetime as an economist, I have never seen a change that is so broadly beneficial. The expropriation of advanced custom fields. Matt Mullenweg has decided that WP Engine's beatings will continue until morale improves. His latest move? taking over the Advanced Custom Fields plugin, which is used by millions.
Here's WP Engine posting on X, quote, We have been made aware that the Advanced Custom Fields plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress.org. A plugin under active development has never been unilaterally and forcibly taken away from its creator without consent in the 21-year history of WordPress. End quote.
To see it for yourself, visit the ACF plugin page, which lives at wordpress.org slash plugins slash advanced dash custom dash fields. And what you'll see, at least as I publish this on October 14th, 2024, is Automattic's own secure custom fields plugin.
This is technically inside the realm of wordpress.org's guidelines, which says they can remove any plugin for any reason, but it is not inside the realm of of what's cool or reasonable in the open source world. Ruby on Rails creator David Hennemeyer-Henson says it well, quote, weaponizing open source code registries is something we simply cannot allow to form precedence.
They must remain neutral territory, little Switzerland's in a world of constant commercial skirmishes. a United States software engineer pay heat map. Levels.fyi, which is a site started to help job seekers compare pay across different companies, has added a salary heat map. With it, you can, one, explore the interactive heat map of total compensation pay ranges across the United States,
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