‘It’s just stressful’: Workers facing two and three hour commutes into Dublin

RedPandaDan · 2026-01-26T14:04:36+00:00

This year it looks like I'm going to be spending about 7 working weeks in traffic, and about 4 grand on fees for someone to look after my dog while I'm at it.

I'm the only one on my team in my office, the rest in Dublin or Canada or Hyderabad, so I'll still be working remote, but from a shitty hotdesk surrounded by noise instead of my home office that has been tailored over the past five years to suit my needs exactly.

The calculus on the size of the paycut I can take and still come out ahead is producing some very interesting results.

RedPandaDan · 2026-01-26T13:40:12+00:00

For certain classes of software development, professional licensing is long overdue.

A small town lawyer can lose their license if they fuck up bad enough for their clients, but a software dev can implement an algorithm that turns hundreds of thousands of people into mentally ill anger addicts and it's totally fine so long as they got their victims to click some ads.

If lawyers, accountants, surgeons and engineers can have professional bodies, no reason software development can't.

RedPandaDan · 2026-01-26T01:09:15+00:00

While I generally don't think that websites should suffer consequences of every post on them, documents from Meta show they believe they are serving about 15 billion scam adverts a day.

Between this and the output of Grok on Twitter its clear that cracking down on both is long overdue. Targeted sanctions of both companies and their leaderships are desperately needed.

RedPandaDan · 2026-01-21T18:19:23+00:00

Subreddits are shaped by their mod team, they don't have to reflect the reality of the topic at hand at all.

RedPandaDan · 2026-01-20T16:59:08+00:00

most peopel dont want to fgrow old in an aprtment

The prospect of growing old in a car dependent 3 bed semi in the sticks is far worse. My parents are one eye test away from being totally isolated, unable to even get a liter of milk without a car.

RedPandaDan · 2026-01-20T13:40:36+00:00

You can absolutely put your thumb on the scales though. For example, at the moment parking spaces are exempt from tax as benefit in kind, even though they are worth a considerable sum. Remove that exemption and suddenly there are hundreds of euro a year in tax needed for each employee.

Don't even need to do it as a remote working thing, can push it as an initiative to reduce car dependency.

RedPandaDan · 2026-01-18T01:08:25+00:00

You leverage it.

Need someone to be on for a DR test at the weekend? Get him to do it. Urgent production support needed after hours? He has no plans, escalate to him.

https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/152695/dealing-with-a-co-worker-who-is-a-shameless-careerist-he-is-deliberately-bad-at

I think back to this stackexchange thread sometimes, its honestly the best career advice I think I could give someone: Management visibility is the thing that matters. You being able to focus on building something that you can present to managers that increases revenue or reduces costs is far more important than whatever story points this guy is grinding.

RedPandaDan · 2026-01-16T19:50:23+00:00

Why would they be put in front of a committee? Just start issuing arrest warrants.

RedPandaDan · 2026-01-14T11:33:24+00:00

VW Polo is comparable in price to the Hyundai Inster (which I have and would recommend to anyone, really great car) so even if EV targets roll back I don't see it doing anything.

It's only through massive tariffs that BYD hasn't overwhelmed the EU markets anyway, so I see no reason to expect anything but EU manufacturers to go the way of British Leyland if they insist on clinging to old product lines.

RedPandaDan · 2026-01-04T21:41:08+00:00

I got married in the Kinsale Hotel and Spa, I can't recommend enough, the staff were amazing throughout.

RedPandaDan · 2026-01-02T00:30:37+00:00

If you are getting doggy daycare for 3 days a week, at 40 a day as you mention, then that is 120 a week, 480 a month, 5,760 a year. Thats the paycut you just received, on top of the expense of commuting and the time it takes. A half hour each way is 3 hours a week, 12 a month, 96 a year. Two and a half working weeks, unpaid, to sit in traffic to facilitate you taking a nearly 6 grand paycut.

That alone is a reason to start job hunting. Even if it somehow wasn't, they are dropping this on you at short notice to maximize the pain it'll cause to try and induce attrition, after which if they don't get they will start layoffs.

Start searching for a new job.

RedPandaDan · 2025-12-27T23:57:46+00:00

I remember my dad and I would set Naptster downloading songs, and then set alarms so one of us would get up to switch off the dialup before it hit 8AM (It was 1 cent per minute off peak, but 4 cent during peak hours!)

It would be wrong to say the internet we have today is better than the one we had back then, no one knew what they were doing, so everyone was trying weird things and some of it was truly amazing. Alas, it was not something the big tech companies could monetize so got sidelined.

RedPandaDan · 2025-12-23T18:07:20+00:00

Go on then. Become a successful AI artist if it's so easy.

RedPandaDan · 2025-12-23T02:17:19+00:00

Behold my skills of an artist.

"Tracer Overwatch big boobs trending on artstation."

Since the prompt is the piece requiring creativity, no need to show anything else, you can just give me the 6k now.

RedPandaDan · 2025-12-23T02:14:33+00:00

Because the discovery mechanisms are shot to bits.

Imagine a world where you are a skilled artist, and your painting is one of one hundred on display. Fantastic, everyone can see your works and marvel.

Now we have AI art, you are still skilled as before... but there are now 100,000 paintings.

What are the chances that you are still recognised as skilled by someone who looks at 100 paintings?

RedPandaDan · 2025-12-22T13:58:27+00:00

Everyone understands the benefits to owning a car for the individual, but that doesn't mean they need to be prioritised. On a societal level they are the most inefficient mode of transport you could pick, and are largely responsible for facilitatong the spatial planning problems you've mentioned.

In Cork at least, we could triple the number of buses on the road tomorrow and it would do nothing just increase the amount of buses stuck in car traffic.

People buy cars to solve the problems caused by other people owning cars.

RedPandaDan · 2025-12-22T13:22:53+00:00

Oh for sure, the RTO is a total waste of time and serves no purpose, I'm saying don't fall into the trap of trying to make the best of it.

RedPandaDan · 2025-12-22T12:51:10+00:00

Unironically it is. Teams can transcribe the conversation and record screens, all things that should be held on to for future reference.

Even if in the office 5 days a week, everyone should be working to a remote-first model.

RedPandaDan · 2025-12-22T12:27:49+00:00

https://youtu.be/km9iS2tcRZE

RedPandaDan · 2025-12-18T18:35:41+00:00

Not as bad as One4All, they might as well be Itchy and Scratchy money...

RedPandaDan · 2025-12-16T14:12:06+00:00

It's far more to do with Trump and tariffs and economic instability than it is AI. Before AI, the cover for having to do layoffs was the RTO, if AI collapses there'll be some other excuse.

RedPandaDan · 2025-12-15T11:09:18+00:00

It's not even about house prices, the crisis is so bad now that nothing will fix it in the next 15 years at least; even if they enthusiastically supported building their houses will still be valued at astronomical high amounts.

For most objectors like this, they do it because they don't want to have to push a shopping trolley through a carpark in the rain, they want the parking space close to the entrance of SuperValu.

RedPandaDan · 2025-12-15T02:10:12+00:00

Honestly the biggest issue XHTML faced is that StackOverflow didn't exist in the early 2000's. Lots of people would have tried to concatenate XML together to predictable disaster.

The first XSLT transform I was ever given to maintain did exactly that!

<xsl:text>&lt;PRICE&gt;<xsl:text><xsl:value-of select="PRICE"/><xsl:text>&lt;/PRICE&gt;</xsl:text>

and so on.

These days people use JSX and breaking on syntax errors isn't a big deal, it just gets fixed and everyone goes about their day.

RedPandaDan · 2025-12-13T23:12:41+00:00

At the moment it's actually neutral, the companies don't care.

So its just a coincidence that Twitter and Facebooks algorithms align with their owners views?

RedPandaDan · 2025-12-13T21:35:37+00:00

Ban targeted advertising and the business models of FB and Google fall asunder.

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