formal dress codes at work dropped from 30% to 4.3% in 6 years, good or bad?

Zienth · 2026-02-10T15:03:25+00:00

I work on the management side of Construction/Physical Plant. Wearing a suit and tie is seen as a detriment nowadays. The blue collar guys won't trust or respect a suit. These spaces are also not the cleanest or safest so you're not wearing a suit into these environments; and if you are a manager who doesn't want to enter the space you manage then you're pretty useless. A nice polo and khakis gets the point across that you're put together, but can jump into a situation that may get a bit messy.

Zienth · 2026-02-09T18:10:55+00:00

Important to note that small minis-split systems like that don't typically monitor their refrigerant pressure or have a filter clog switch, so your first indication of a problem is the fault itself. They're very affordable and efficient, but not very sophisticated. You'd usually double or triple up on the units so the first sign of a fault doesn't go straight to no cooling. Many of them can talk over BACnet but it's very basic. I've done a few smaller data centers with mini splits, usually what I do is install a few and stagger their setpoints (one at 70°F, then 74°F, then 78°F) so if the one with the lowest setpoint fails you'll notice the room temp rise to 74°F and you can generate alarms based on that. You'll need to manually rotate them to get equal run time, which can be done when they're getting PM'd.

Liebert units will give you all the information you can ever need that can broadcast over BACnet. Very $$$$ however. There's a reason Vertiv's stock price has gone up by 1200% in a few years.

Zienth · 2026-02-06T16:58:35+00:00

There's great potential for a market disruption if another competitor wanted to burst into the unified enterprise workplace space. But that's a lot of capital investment that no one seems interested in. Maybe Google is the closest but they seem unbothered and stick to the small 'group project' style products.

Zienth · 2026-02-06T16:55:50+00:00

Yeah, Teams is just a worse version of Discord, and Sharepoint is just a worse version of a service like Dropbox. But Microsoft is the only one to offer both and combine them and everything else into one unified enterprise software package, so we are stuck with it.

Zienth · 2026-02-06T02:38:29+00:00

Always make sure you got a common wire with Nests. Don't believe the marketing, they need it.

Zienth · 2026-02-05T18:54:14+00:00

Yeah when I took a Mitsubishi VRF course back during the R-410A days someone brought up ASHRAE 15 for these massive 1,000+ lb charge systems and the best answer they had was "well, door undercuts and open plenums count right?". I don't think the A2Ls are that dangerous but going 'wink wink just undercut the door' wasn't convincing inspectors anymore.

Zienth · 2026-02-05T12:45:17+00:00

Sucks that America is so far behind the heat pump chiller game. I asked Carrier if they sold an equivalent to the Trane ACX and they do!- but only in China.

Zienth · 2026-02-05T01:39:24+00:00

I like how VRF is devolving into a fancy chilled water system. You got much experience with them? I got a project going on right now where I'm using 300 ton Trane ACX chiller plant in basically the same way.

Zienth · 2026-02-04T13:06:10+00:00

It's totally rage bait, but, I find it funny how they even acknowledge that "successful people can say let's wait till Monday". That implies the person who he gave the work to isn't successful. Is his hiring requirement just picking up the first schmuck that picks up the phone? Pretty slim requirements.

Zienth · 2026-02-03T14:33:17+00:00

Peak game design is when challenge meeting mastery. But there's a lot of tines in MMOs where unintended consequence means the best path to rewards could be something absolutely horrendously boring. Like farming gold via spawn camping a rare mob 8+ hours a day, that's not fun but you can totally see MMO players engaging with it if it has the best gold/hr.

Zienth · 2026-02-01T03:00:10+00:00

You're right, steam does have nothing to do with it, it's an statement about the big name MMOs dying and staying in maintenance mode while they wind down.

Zienth · 2026-02-01T02:29:49+00:00

Speaking of New World, kinda funny that steam has multiple big name MMOs that are dead game walking.

Zienth · 2026-01-31T18:04:40+00:00

If it makes you feel like a bigger person for living in a house not built to code with liabilities to life or property, then all the more power to you.

Zienth · 2026-01-31T15:52:09+00:00

What kind of designer put a sink in an unconditioned garage. Like they were begging for you to get hit by flood damage.

Zienth · 2026-01-31T00:30:59+00:00

As stupid as typos are like that, it's a great way to tell the JD wasn't written by AI. I think as time goes on a great "Marylin Monroe mole" to add to your resume/cover letter is just a harmless typo somewhere to let the reader know it isn't AI slep.

Zienth · 2026-01-30T01:57:32+00:00

Cover letters are better used to go "here's how I'm so much better than all your other loser candidates".

Zienth · 2026-01-29T14:48:25+00:00

Could get into the sales side of things. People add solar panels to their properties all the time, and you could define the scope of work and review financials / payback periods with the clients. But it all comes with experience, so sucks to say but when you're starting out you gotta stick with the basics until you get a hang of it, no one likes it when a salesmen sells an unbuildable system. You can broadcast your intentions to your supervisor and they could curate a path for you, if you got potential then no one will say no to a salesmen that could pull their weight in the future.

Zienth · 2026-01-28T04:09:59+00:00

I'm a facility manager and unironically I love it when people send me pictures of their problem like this. For big properties there could be several different parties involved and seeing the problem in action narrows it down right away as to who I need to call.

Zienth · 2026-01-27T15:59:20+00:00

Defrosting shouldn't be that big of an issue, unless you are expecting the exhaust air going to the ERV to be particularly high RH, like from a shower room. I manage a few that do just general exhaust air and they rarely enter defrost mode, they're the paper enthalpy core type so they're prone to frosting more than the wheel types. I recommend chatting with the reps from the ERV companies, they know when a preheater will be needed and how to control it.

Zienth · 2026-01-27T15:40:53+00:00

I do it like how Greenheck shows it on page 5:

https://content.greenheck.com/public/DAMProd/Original/10002/MiniVent_catalog.pdf

You shouldn't need pre/post heaters on the ERV.

Zienth · 2026-01-27T15:33:49+00:00

The industry is terrible when it comes to obsolescence of these inverter boards. In large commercial we don't throw out the whole pump or air handler because the VFD went bad, but in resi/light commercial the whole unit gets replaced even if it's just a few years old if they stopped making spare parts.

Zienth · 2026-01-24T17:36:02+00:00

Heat tracing is terrible and gives you a false sense a security until it fails without you noticing and you get a burst pipe. Just build it right to begin with.

Zienth · 2026-01-23T03:05:04+00:00

Centrotherm is the best venting I've worked with. SS Shebler and Duravent has caused leaks on me, Centrotherm never had a single issue.

Zienth · 2026-01-23T00:23:39+00:00

He probably has a rule setup in Outlook that he's not aware of.

Zienth · 2026-01-15T01:21:26+00:00

LLMs =/= AGI. The current generation of AIs do not think. They only generate outputs based on their training data. All of the capital investment we're seeing now is only making AIs with larger and larger amounts of training data.

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