I’ve been WFH from a different country for three months without telling HR, and the anxiety is finally starting to eat me alive. My VPN is holding up, and my manager hasn't noticed that my home office background is just a stock photo. The tax implications are probably a nightmare, but my quality of life has doubled since I left the Bay Area. Is it better to ask for forgiveness if I get caught? Should I just keep going?

Does anyone else find it difficult to get another job while you are currently employed? Most people say that it's easier to get a job while you have a job, but that has never been the case for me. What normally happens is I go to an interview with the knowledge that I can mess up the interview and perform poorly. Sometimes I ask questions that I know are going to make the interviewer uncomfortable. This is probably both good and bad. Most jobs I have landed happened when I was unemployed.

I got dinged on my latest review for not participating enough in the team channels, and I feel like I’m back in middle school. Apparently, shipping clean, bug-free code ahead of schedule takes a backseat to not dropping enough memes in the #random channel. My manager literally told me that social presence is a core metric for our remote culture this year. Is this normal? I’m so grumpy about it.

Do you think AI will ultimately make society more equal or more unequal? Why?

Our CIO is pushing us to learn a programming language that no one has heard of. He used it in his old job. One looked into it and found that no company or government agency in my state used it. It doesn't appear in TIOBE Index. It doesn't appear in Stack Overflow's to programming language. My colleagues and I see this as a huge career limitation. What can we do about this?