As long as they don’t have different allergies or had biometrics recorded and assigned to them at the hospital it arguably wouldn’t even matter.

That’s crazy to me. Our manager went out on a boat last week on Friday, and we haven’t heard shit from him since. Hell, we’d probably tattle on him to our skip level if we did because our skip would be furious to hear people are working during vacation. I’m a software engineer in the US, and unfortunately stories like yours are all too common here :/

I have like 3, but I find myself going back to Sync. I wish Relay would have gone this route as that was by far my favorite.

The price is a bit steep for me personally, but I agree. I’m currently on Connect but the call from Sync is strong.

The Max would be major overkill, and might actually be worse for you because of the worse battery life to drive the higher power draw chip. My personal laptop is a 16" M1 Pro MBP and I’ve never had it hitch on me. My work laptop is a similar spec 14" and I regularly run a dozen of programs at once (Outlook, Slack, Chime, dozens of Firefox tabs, Music, and 3 to 4 IntelliJ instances) without issue. Occasionally it does get a little warm when I’m doing 30+ minute builds, but that is akin to many torture tests reviewers use.

Edit: After seeing the price difference is only $200 I’d just get the Max if you don’t mind a bit less battery life.

I’ve never personally used the machine you’re referring to, but unless you’re doing long video renders it likely won’t matter. Programming takes very little resources, even when using a debugger, compared to the torture tests reviewers use. Any heavy load comes in bursts of compiling/interpreting which also don’t hit the machine anywhere close to as hard. Music production might be a bit more strenuous, but still well within the area of not having issues.

I’d say stick with the 14" if that’s what you prefer. It’s not designed to render videos 24/7, but even if you did that it’s still pretty damn fast even when throttling.

I’ve never heard anyone other than OP have any privacy concerns over Signal. Their encryption method is rock-solid, and they win the award for best response to a government subpoena

I can’t imagine having a manager like in this post. I had to get a few hours coverage for my on call shift to pick my partner up from the hospital for an outpatient surgery. Manager didn’t ask why I needed coverage but it just happened to come up. They immediately offered to get my entire shift moved without me even asking.