Case in point:
I had to take my extended family visiting us to Manhattan for 2 days last week. Total 6 adults. The cost of taking the LIRR and Subway would have been upwards of $180 (LIRR $120 + Subway $60) per day! Driving was much more affordable (and convenient) even with the expensive parking charges of $50 for 12 hrs of parking in prime locations.
Public transportation needs to become more affordable first. I would have happily taken the train if it was comparable in cost.
Nope, I had the same experience. Family of 5 trip to Manhattan and we looked at possibly taking the train into the city but it made no sense financially, even after accounting for the outrageous parking costs in lower Manhattan. For one or two people mass transit is a no-brainer, three was roughly break even, but once you have a bigger group you're pretty much stuck driving.
If every car in a major city was filled to capacity, I don't think we'd be having this conversation. A major part of traffic congestion is that a significant portion of people are driving their vehicles with a single passenger, sometimes two.
This is why we have HOV lanes that lower or make tolls free.
Things change when you live in the boroughs. For one thing, no need for LIRR; which isn’t what most people refer to when they talk about “public transit in NYC.”
But also, if you take the subway regularly, there are multi-use and unlimited passes, students get free metrocards for weekdays, and so on.
I read somewhere that libraries pay a decent amount to the publishers for every audiobook borrowed through Libby. So I always try to make sure the book interests me and will actually listen to it once borrowed.
We do it. Usually agile comes from above and the team only have to tick a box, say they re agile and show a shadow org around it. We even rotate the scrum master sometimes to spread the joy.
End of the day, we fill the client's need, as efficiently as we can without letting them run wild in expectations and keeping cost in line with budget: it's common sense and I dont get what the agile religions bring really. Turn idiots into mediocre people, maybe ?
We have scrum master as a rotating hat with all the other senior developers on the team. 99% of my day is code or meetings on what I'm coding. The only burden is once a week I look at jira with some managers and help them click boxes. I'm not sure what a full time scrum master would really do.
It seems pretty popular in big software-centric companies like the FAANGs. IME the turnover is usually every couple of months, as the sacrificial lamb gets tired of it and other team members start to feel like it might be time to take a turn in the bilges.
I can understand why the idea of hiring someone to handle that role would be appealing, but it really isn't a full-time job.
Plus, the last thing that BigCo engineering teams need is more politics; they have more than enough of that between the overlapping layers of engineering, project, and product managers.
No, they are not. In some cases, if an individual contributor is not good at contributing, if one has political capital, that one can become a scrum master. And you see this in mega tech companies all the time.
I've heard that is the theory- that it should be a role on the team, not a title, and (optionally) that it should rotate. Everyone on the team at some point contributes to leading the team, so everyone gets accustomed to communicating well.
That said, I've never actually seen it in practice.
At best, it has been a role someone in product takes on so they can act as a shit shield from above and let us know if there is something urgent, but otherwise stays out of the way.
At worst, it is a frivolous salary that takes the book-keeping notes from stand-ups and puts them in a report noone reads.
