I just want my own office. That's all. I'd be pretty okay with going in if I had my own office with 4 walls.
First job of my career, they told me I would have an office of my own. First day I come back do for full time (I had interned there too with my own office), they tell me they're switching buildings to go open office in about a month's time. I got a precious few weeks with a personal office, and then it was all gone. I hated this change of scenery mmediately, but I guess I got used to it after a few years.
Working from home took me back to that zen. I didn't even know how much I missed it - how much I needed my own space to feel productive.
I've since changed jobs, and I kinda dread having to go to the open office nightmare once this is all over. The facilities are way nicer than my last job, but it's still an open office.
Open. Office. As. Implemented. In. Our. Industry. Is. Stupid.
1. An office with four walls, a door that can be closed is helpful but as a _minimum_ I'd also want:
2. Pristine bathrooms
3. Clean kitchen and good supply of tea/coffee (with ample space for those to store or prepare their food hygenically).
The amount of places I've worked that can't provide 2 and 3 is saddening. Nothing worse than being stuck in a dirty smelly place, hanging around to get points for presenteeism.
No I'm gonna get on a rant.
Why is it that my home network is superior to the crappy wifi at the office?
Why with my limited salary can I setup a better desk with much better screens / computing equipment than my employer provides?
My organisation just opted into open area hot desks instead of offices. One day in there and interrutped about 5 times in 30 minutes by people who otherwise would have pinged me on slack and allowed me to reply in a manner more respectful of my workload. They see this as a big advantage of the open area "instead of making meetings you can just go over and quickly chat to someone!"
When you think about what software people do when they are most productive it is almost a deep trance-like state, I would compare it to meditation. Imagine proposing that people go and do their meditation out in the corridor where everybody is walking past and talking to each other, getting coffee and randomly interrupting you. It's insane anybody ever thought it was a good idea.
Unfortunately closed offices are a huge status symbol now and asking for one is akin to declaring you think you're more important than everyone else in the office.
I work remotely and rent an office in town. It's a 15 minute walk from my house, a decent size (~22m^2), all my own, and well set up. I love it and pay gladly but I it's not possible for everyone.
I used to have a garden office but my wife now needs her own space for her work so I took the rented space.
A dedicated space is a must if you're working remotely. Either at home or offsite.
I have no objection to going into the office for well defined, productive meetings like project kick-offs though. I still believe they're the best way to collaborate on big planning tasks, even after having worked remotely for over 10 years.
Perhaps companies that require physical offices could try to offer a compromise incentive: personal offices or actual cubicles instead of open office layouts. At least that would solve many of the pain points of physically working in tech.
Maybe personal offices are too expensive, but how much does it cost to set up cubes?
Indeed, this is backed by Real Data! Back in the 1970s or thereabouts, IBM did a study where they put one group in an open office and another in individual offices and quantified the productivity difference. The "individual office" group was (iirc) something like 15% more productive.
All from memory, so I may have misremembered bits... As I recall it, they actually built purpose-designed buildings for the study, such was IBM's cashflow, power and arrogance back then.
Yes, working from home is much better than working at open office. However there is some scenario where middle manager can make WFH as hellish as working at open office: by mandating everyone to install invasive spyware so they can "manage" you remotely.
Bonus point if the company didn't want to give/loan company devices, so you have to install it on your own personal devices.
I actually do enjoy being in the office. I would much rather the hours be a little better - like 6 hours not 8 to take into account the commute.
But being in an open office and not in my own person office is painful. So many distractions.
I had my own office (as a manager) for 2 years, and it was bloody glorious. After I switched jobs and still was a team lead / manager, I no longer did due to those companies cultures and it was so much worse.
Sounds like the relationship is dysfunctional in both directions.
On the one hand, the employer set up a panopticon in the office, with crappy furniture, lots of interruptions, a crappy office kitchen, no decent food (i.e. needing to bring food from home). Garbage in, garbage out. Of course nobody is happy to sit in traffic to come to an environment like that.
Then we have the author, who has the mistaken idea that the number one most important thing that you do at your job is your directly measurable productivity. Not relationship-building, just pure "shut up and let me sit down and get my work done." Personally, I'd prefer it if engineering work didn't go the way of Amazon warehouse workers, because if "productivity" is the sole metric of an employee's performance, just wait until your employer decides to try and optimize it.
Best of luck to the OP at the dice roll that is the next company he works for.
Do you see where the author is coming from? I believe he is a developer (or even junior) that has a scrum master or some kind of manager and has tasks and sprint points assigned to him. If he does not finish his "commitment" in points in their designated time, people will ask him "why it took so long?" and maybe put him on improvement plan.
Productivity is the most important for him and people like him, because that is expected from him and he is measured against that. No one is going to nag about him not paying attention in one or the other meeting. He will get people nagging when he does not deliver.
He dislikes things that get in a way of what he is supposed to do. Then we all know you cannot say you did not made your commitment because you had to attend 10 meetings, this will be taken as making up excuses.
It's a false dichotomy that one is better than the other.
The only useful way I know to think about it is what my ratio of solo focus time is vs time spent communicating with others.
There is a place in the world for people who wait for requirements to appear in their ticket queue, code out solutions, then go home, ad infinitum. But software development tends to work better as a collaborative endeavour.
As an IC you should expect to spend 70-80% of your time on focus work (either solo or pairing) and 20-30% on communicating/planning/overhead.
The writing of the code itself happens in the middle of a much longer conversation and to deny the programmer visibility of this is to deny them context.
Designing working spaces to allow this is possible, but easier if you let people choose where to work for 4 out of 5 days a week.
> Then we have the author, who has the mistaken idea that the number one most important thing that you do at your job is your directly measurable productivity. Not relationship-building, just pure "shut up and let me sit down and get my work done."
To be fair, that's been a popular view among software engineers long before ubiquitous WFH was a reality. And programmers are definitely keen on not getting their flow interrupted.
> Then we have the author, who has the mistaken idea that the number one most important thing that you do at your job is your directly measurable productivity. Not relationship-building, just pure "shut up and let me sit down and get my work done."
Well, the most important thing is certainly NOT relationship-building either.
> Not relationship-building, just pure "shut up and let me sit down and get my work done."
It's entirely possible to build relationships remotely.
I'm sort of a job hopper and also work 80% remotely on average, with two-week-long visits to the office. Throughout the years I always stayed in touch with at least one person from the previous projects.
Most of these relationships were built entirely remotely and were much stronger than those made during my time at the office.
It's likely a question of preference, but it's not like someone working remotely has to necessarily have a "business only" approach.
> Then we have the author, who has the mistaken idea that the number one most important thing that you do at your job is your directly measurable productivity. Not relationship-building, just pure "shut up and let me sit down and get my work done."
Relationship-building sounds like something my manager would say. And I’d still have to code XYZ, make sure it works, and make a presentation about it. Not sure how relationships help me in a technical role.
> if "productivity" is the sole metric of an employee's performance, just wait until your employer decides to try and optimize it.
Productivity is the sole metric of your performance, it is the job of management to come up with meaningful metrics. If they try to optimise for something stupid like LOC or mouse movements or hours logged, they will get the hell they planned for themselves.
The very last thing I want to happen is being judged by how popular I am.
One thing I noticed is that while more experienced people are productive working from home, it is devastating for fresh starting employees. Work from home eliminates learning through osmosis. If anyone has a work around this let me know. I am surprised no one else has mentioned it here.
> If you like/prefer going to the office that is fine. I am not trying to say we should all be remote. Companies should offer FLEXIBILITY to let employees choose where to work from.
That doesn’t work. I prefer working in the office, but only if the rest of my team is actually there with me. If some people are remote, then we have to do Zoom meetings, so I may as well be remote too.
I hate that people keep framing it as a "preference" issue. There are HUGE economic and environmental costs that go along with working in and (often) commuting to an office. Not to mention the consistent 20-30% productivity drain working in an office seems to have across the board at most tech orgs.
We don't need to destroy our planet, dramatically increase costs, and dramatically lower productivity just to appease the minority of people that prefer playing office space, and I think more and more people are starting to see it that way.
I totally feel the draw to both. Personally, I really like the freedom of WFH and it wins out against the benefits of being in office for me. But I can see the appeal to being in office too; there's something really nice about working with your teammates, especially if you get along with them and learn from each other.
The thing with your attitude though, is that you're saying it only works for you if everyone is in office. Basically that everyone has to be in office for you to enjoy your office environment. This only works on teams where everyone feels this way. And that's a perfectly reasonable approach to hiring for a new company. The problem is that people have been WFH long enough that every team is likely split on 'team-in-office' sentiment. If a company wants to require staff in office at this point, it should be for building new teams, not applied to existing teams. Then people with the same sentiment as you can choose to transfer to those teams if desired.
Why should your preferences dictate what other people do? What makes your preference for having people in the office more important than their preference to want to work from home?
This is why I have doubts about hybrid. I work for an aggressively hybrid company. All it means is that I have to go in and have meetings at by desk beside other people having meetings at their desks.
Are you in SW? Over the last 20ish years of being a SWE, most of the time I had the option to work 40-100% from home. That's as an embedded SWE, which often means I'm dealing with HW. I just setup remote controls and measurement devices and WFH. I keep hearing people talk like they're going to be forced to sit at a desk 100% of the time. Is that really the case?
That does work. Before the pandemics I worked many years with the majority of my team being overseas, in multiple companies. There's nothing wrong with the hybrid approach and never was. For many companies it's always been the default approach, for global companies specifically. I am also not sure why you put "that doesn't work" and "I prefer" together - your preferences are not really relevant to this case.
I dont mind being in office, but I meetings are much much better online. Especially those long ones. You can stretch legs, exercise a little, eat or whatever.
Do you only have a single office? Because even back when we worked at the office, we had people split between multiple offices so we had to do teleconferencing anyways even if no one was remote (and usually at least one person was remote as well).
> The best part is that the cubicle doesn't have tall walls so I can literally see/hear everything, including other people's monitors.
Open offices are awful. In my experience most people end up wearing headphones all day, and I did too. My ears would get red and irritated after a while. But I'd keep them on because it was like an unspoken social rule; that if you looked busy and had headphones on, people won't interrupt you as much.
I predict the balance we're heading towards for many office jobs is going to be something like 2 mandatory office days a week, 1 optional day, and 2 mandatory WFH days, with "mandatory" really meaning "highly encouraged". Like Monday and Wednesday are in-office, Tuesday and Thursday are WFH, Friday is optional.
Preference for WFH depends on so many individual factors, not just personality but also your commute length, home size, children, neighborhood, friends, etc. Although a lot of discussions on HN seem to be dominated by "I prefer WFH", I reckon in reality the divide is probably pretty close to 50/50, just like with introverts and extroverts. Companies will find strong candidates in both types of people and find out they can't fully satisfy them all, and the end result will be everyone compromises.
Encourage some days to be WFH so that WFHers won't feel career pressure from missing out on office politics. Encourage some days to be in-office so that office-lovers won't go to the office to socialize and find it half empty. Have a flexible day or two where people can do whatever they want. Maybe throw in some flexibility on start and end hours so that people can avoid peak traffic.
Like most people, I enjoy being physically around my colleagues from time to time. There is real value in that sort of interaction. It is not, however, an essential component of most jobs that traditionally have been conducted in an office. This fact has been indisputably proven over the last 18 months.
If you want to go to an office every day of the week, go ahead! That’s great, who’s stopping you? But if you think everyone you work with should also be there in order to interact with you? In the environment where you like to work, regardless of how productive your colleagues are there? I shouldn’t have to tell you that you are the one who is being unreasonable.
Seems like their life would be dramatically better if they didn’t have some horrible car hellscape based commute. Pity cities are designed and spread out so because of cars.
Then making the office more comfortable and flexible without people micromanaging would be the next thing.
I miss being able to tell if I'm interrupting a coworker's state of flow or not with a quick message.
When everyone's in the office, I can _see_ when they get back to their desk and haven't gotten into anything again. I can see that my question isn't going to interrupt them.
As it stands, I interrupt everyone and they interrupt me. I haven't been able to get into flow during office hours in 18months.
Code review discussions which would take 5 minutes take 3 days. You have to write multiple paragraphs instead of walking over and saying "dude, look at this right there, like _seriously_."
Nothing like a little pair programming to work through a code review.
Why is he going to a daily meeting if he doesn’t have to pay attention to the meeting?
Why is there not an incentive to complete more than one card a day? If one card can take as little as two hours it seems like a massive waste to expect someone to only do one card.
Why doesn’t he have proper equipment? If you spend XXX,XXX a year for an employee it makes sense to spend X,XXX/yr for proper equipment. The company should provide high quality mouse/keyboard/headset.
The simple model I have personally is that my preferences are:
1. Good office environment (including convenient commute).
2. Working from home.
3. Bad office environment.
Some people love WFH simply because they experienced an improvement from 3 to 2 and they don't even know that 1 is possible. For others the order is genuinely different from mine and they would pick WFH over any office. I think this is helpful because office experiences vary a lot and people often end up talking past each other in threads like this one.
In my case, I worked in offices for over 30 years. I was pretty damn productive (at least, I didn’t get fired, and was steadily promoted, so I guess I did OK). For the first dozen years, it was “shirt and tie.” I learned to keep a couple of suits up to date; even after going “business casual” (I never worked in jeans and T-shirt).
Since working from home for almost the last 4 years, my productivity has gone stratospheric. It’s freaking amazing.
I still maintain a lot of personal “office discipline,” like dressing in jeans and a button-down shirt, even though I may not be going out anywhere. I also limit breaks (but I take them whenever I want, and sometimes, they may be an hour or so).
I work whenever I want. Early morning is my most productive time. I often get more done by 8:30AM, than I used to get done all day, in the office (8:30 was my usual starting time).
But not everyone is able to work this way. I don’t have small children (if you don’t count the cats), and I spend just about every second of work time, coding.
I have a dedicated office space, with a standing desk. No sitting on the couch, with a laptop. No Starbucks tables. My equipment is top-notch. I have a monitor that extends across my entire desk. I have a decent laptop, but its screen seems ridiculously small. My next laptop will be even smaller. I’m spoiled rotten.
I have tremendous self-discipline; partly because I’m a high-school dropout with a GED, and have had to fight for Every. Damn. Thing. in my career. I’ve never had one blessed thing handed to me. It was infuriating, but it taught me to stay disciplined, focused and productive; despite almost ceaseless adversity. Not everyone’s experience, but it made me who I am today.
I have no idea if things would be better for me by now, if I’d had a smoother road. I could easily see myself “going to fat,” so to speak. I probably would not have been so well-prepared for at-home work.
It is my opinion that if you are against remote work being the norm, you're a dinosaur and best get out of the way of progress. The amount of time people would win back to spend their life however they want by not commuting is astronomical, the environmental impact of not having so many transportation devices on the roads as a result would also be massive. If you somehow think that your need for water-cooler talk is as important as that, well, it isn't.
Unfortunately, there is a drop in empathy and trust (to varying degrees) when interacting with those who one hasn't met in person. Being in office, talking to your teammates face-to-face is super valuable when the team members are new to each other. Once the rapport is established, let each person do what works the best for them.
i wonder how companies survived until now with all kinds of outsourcing, outstaffing, contractors in 5 different timezones, vendors in 12 different timezones, regulators in 3 different time zones, separate divisions for APAC, EMEA, US and so on...?
...but just can't handle remote employees that they have so much more control over?
Sounds like complete nonsense to me. If they can handle vendors located on a different continent - they can handle remote employees, full stop.
I'll believe the complaints about WFH when they'll ban offshoring.
I started at a company in February and was basically remote-only until June.
A drop in empathy, trust, relationships for me was very small. It's there, but for work related stuff, I believe it didn't actually matter. Everyone was nice with me and we got things done. Whenever I had questions, they would help me out.
We were since then a couple of times in the office and talking to them in person was nice, I felt I could ask more questions, I got to listen to their unfiltered opinions as we could have spontaneous 1-1 conversations in the office. It was also because we didn't make time to "just chat" online, except for online watercooler team calls, but with 3-4 people in the call, we pay more attention to what we are allowed to say.
The open office space plan is silly when "normal" companies want to imitate office cost saving from Silicon valley startups. I feel nobody really questioned why.
Open floor plan is good for cost saving but not for anything else. Collaboration is less in open plan than a traditional office.
Most of the people posting these sort of articles fail to realize people have different preferences. Some people prefer WFH, some the office, some something in between.
Smart companies understand that and tailor their approach to fit. Dumb ones will dictate The One True Way and see half their people leave.
If anyone can do your work remotely...ANYONE can do your work remotely. Do you guys think maybe when the next recession happens we will see unprecedented offshoring due to companies not being able to pay 160K to a developer with 3 years experience? Its all nice and well when every startup can raise as much money as it wants. What happens when/if that pops?
For all the upsides of working remotely and especially for 100% remote I think the downside is it can become very transactional. Write code for x hours, the clock ticks to 6pm and you leave to do something else. I'm not saying everyone has to have a great passion for their work and ultimately we're all doing it to put food on the table but it seems to me that it's a recipe for becoming disillusioned with it all.
You don't have to be great friends with your colleagues but if you're enjoying your work or the atmosphere of work, having a chat to people over lunch, going to pub every now and then, the odd team pizza trip or whatever, then after 10 years you may still be enjoying it. At the very least it breaks up the days so they aren't all the same. But clocking on at 9am to write code for 8 hours while talking to a moving image of someone's face once a day is a recipe for hating it in the long term.
If your work is so locked down they give out cards that take 2-4 hours to jr. devs, then working from home is probably just as productive if not more than the office - for the reasons eloquently laid out in the reddit post.
But if you want to work on new technology with a ton of unknowns (which I personally get more job satisfaction out of), in my experience you need that human connection and in-person collaboration - at least at first. Maybe that can work fully remote. But my fully remote startup experiences have been abysmal.
[+] [-] CephalopodMD|4 years ago|reply
First job of my career, they told me I would have an office of my own. First day I come back do for full time (I had interned there too with my own office), they tell me they're switching buildings to go open office in about a month's time. I got a precious few weeks with a personal office, and then it was all gone. I hated this change of scenery mmediately, but I guess I got used to it after a few years.
Working from home took me back to that zen. I didn't even know how much I missed it - how much I needed my own space to feel productive.
I've since changed jobs, and I kinda dread having to go to the open office nightmare once this is all over. The facilities are way nicer than my last job, but it's still an open office.
Open. Office. As. Implemented. In. Our. Industry. Is. Stupid.
[+] [-] thevagrant|4 years ago|reply
2. Pristine bathrooms
3. Clean kitchen and good supply of tea/coffee (with ample space for those to store or prepare their food hygenically).
The amount of places I've worked that can't provide 2 and 3 is saddening. Nothing worse than being stuck in a dirty smelly place, hanging around to get points for presenteeism.
No I'm gonna get on a rant.
Why is it that my home network is superior to the crappy wifi at the office?
Why with my limited salary can I setup a better desk with much better screens / computing equipment than my employer provides?
[+] [-] zmmmmm|4 years ago|reply
My organisation just opted into open area hot desks instead of offices. One day in there and interrutped about 5 times in 30 minutes by people who otherwise would have pinged me on slack and allowed me to reply in a manner more respectful of my workload. They see this as a big advantage of the open area "instead of making meetings you can just go over and quickly chat to someone!"
When you think about what software people do when they are most productive it is almost a deep trance-like state, I would compare it to meditation. Imagine proposing that people go and do their meditation out in the corridor where everybody is walking past and talking to each other, getting coffee and randomly interrupting you. It's insane anybody ever thought it was a good idea.
Unfortunately closed offices are a huge status symbol now and asking for one is akin to declaring you think you're more important than everyone else in the office.
[+] [-] beardface|4 years ago|reply
I used to have a garden office but my wife now needs her own space for her work so I took the rented space.
A dedicated space is a must if you're working remotely. Either at home or offsite.
I have no objection to going into the office for well defined, productive meetings like project kick-offs though. I still believe they're the best way to collaborate on big planning tasks, even after having worked remotely for over 10 years.
[+] [-] Apocryphon|4 years ago|reply
Maybe personal offices are too expensive, but how much does it cost to set up cubes?
[+] [-] mikro2nd|4 years ago|reply
All from memory, so I may have misremembered bits... As I recall it, they actually built purpose-designed buildings for the study, such was IBM's cashflow, power and arrogance back then.
[+] [-] IvanAchlaqullah|4 years ago|reply
Bonus point if the company didn't want to give/loan company devices, so you have to install it on your own personal devices.
[+] [-] bariswheel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apple4ever|4 years ago|reply
I actually do enjoy being in the office. I would much rather the hours be a little better - like 6 hours not 8 to take into account the commute.
But being in an open office and not in my own person office is painful. So many distractions.
I had my own office (as a manager) for 2 years, and it was bloody glorious. After I switched jobs and still was a team lead / manager, I no longer did due to those companies cultures and it was so much worse.
[+] [-] solatic|4 years ago|reply
On the one hand, the employer set up a panopticon in the office, with crappy furniture, lots of interruptions, a crappy office kitchen, no decent food (i.e. needing to bring food from home). Garbage in, garbage out. Of course nobody is happy to sit in traffic to come to an environment like that.
Then we have the author, who has the mistaken idea that the number one most important thing that you do at your job is your directly measurable productivity. Not relationship-building, just pure "shut up and let me sit down and get my work done." Personally, I'd prefer it if engineering work didn't go the way of Amazon warehouse workers, because if "productivity" is the sole metric of an employee's performance, just wait until your employer decides to try and optimize it.
Best of luck to the OP at the dice roll that is the next company he works for.
[+] [-] ozim|4 years ago|reply
Productivity is the most important for him and people like him, because that is expected from him and he is measured against that. No one is going to nag about him not paying attention in one or the other meeting. He will get people nagging when he does not deliver.
He dislikes things that get in a way of what he is supposed to do. Then we all know you cannot say you did not made your commitment because you had to attend 10 meetings, this will be taken as making up excuses.
[+] [-] seanhandley|4 years ago|reply
It's a false dichotomy that one is better than the other.
The only useful way I know to think about it is what my ratio of solo focus time is vs time spent communicating with others.
There is a place in the world for people who wait for requirements to appear in their ticket queue, code out solutions, then go home, ad infinitum. But software development tends to work better as a collaborative endeavour.
As an IC you should expect to spend 70-80% of your time on focus work (either solo or pairing) and 20-30% on communicating/planning/overhead.
The writing of the code itself happens in the middle of a much longer conversation and to deny the programmer visibility of this is to deny them context.
Designing working spaces to allow this is possible, but easier if you let people choose where to work for 4 out of 5 days a week.
[+] [-] Apocryphon|4 years ago|reply
To be fair, that's been a popular view among software engineers long before ubiquitous WFH was a reality. And programmers are definitely keen on not getting their flow interrupted.
[+] [-] jeddy3|4 years ago|reply
Well, the most important thing is certainly NOT relationship-building either.
[+] [-] Tade0|4 years ago|reply
It's entirely possible to build relationships remotely.
I'm sort of a job hopper and also work 80% remotely on average, with two-week-long visits to the office. Throughout the years I always stayed in touch with at least one person from the previous projects.
Most of these relationships were built entirely remotely and were much stronger than those made during my time at the office.
It's likely a question of preference, but it's not like someone working remotely has to necessarily have a "business only" approach.
[+] [-] refactor_master|4 years ago|reply
Relationship-building sounds like something my manager would say. And I’d still have to code XYZ, make sure it works, and make a presentation about it. Not sure how relationships help me in a technical role.
[+] [-] mmarq|4 years ago|reply
Productivity is the sole metric of your performance, it is the job of management to come up with meaningful metrics. If they try to optimise for something stupid like LOC or mouse movements or hours logged, they will get the hell they planned for themselves.
The very last thing I want to happen is being judged by how popular I am.
[+] [-] Zababa|4 years ago|reply
I think there's just no food at all at the office. Most offices work that way, at least where I live (France).
[+] [-] LQexplanation|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vinni2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Wowfunhappy|4 years ago|reply
That doesn’t work. I prefer working in the office, but only if the rest of my team is actually there with me. If some people are remote, then we have to do Zoom meetings, so I may as well be remote too.
[+] [-] sam0x17|4 years ago|reply
We don't need to destroy our planet, dramatically increase costs, and dramatically lower productivity just to appease the minority of people that prefer playing office space, and I think more and more people are starting to see it that way.
[+] [-] pcthrowaway|4 years ago|reply
The thing with your attitude though, is that you're saying it only works for you if everyone is in office. Basically that everyone has to be in office for you to enjoy your office environment. This only works on teams where everyone feels this way. And that's a perfectly reasonable approach to hiring for a new company. The problem is that people have been WFH long enough that every team is likely split on 'team-in-office' sentiment. If a company wants to require staff in office at this point, it should be for building new teams, not applied to existing teams. Then people with the same sentiment as you can choose to transfer to those teams if desired.
[+] [-] cradcore|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] midrus|4 years ago|reply
I think we should all just switch jobs to remote companies if we like that and our company is not, and vice versa.
[+] [-] MattGaiser|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 01100011|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allarm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] watwut|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hamuko|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ekianjo|4 years ago|reply
so no reason to go back to the office at all.
[+] [-] neolog|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amdelamar|4 years ago|reply
Open offices are awful. In my experience most people end up wearing headphones all day, and I did too. My ears would get red and irritated after a while. But I'd keep them on because it was like an unspoken social rule; that if you looked busy and had headphones on, people won't interrupt you as much.
[+] [-] rococode|4 years ago|reply
Preference for WFH depends on so many individual factors, not just personality but also your commute length, home size, children, neighborhood, friends, etc. Although a lot of discussions on HN seem to be dominated by "I prefer WFH", I reckon in reality the divide is probably pretty close to 50/50, just like with introverts and extroverts. Companies will find strong candidates in both types of people and find out they can't fully satisfy them all, and the end result will be everyone compromises.
Encourage some days to be WFH so that WFHers won't feel career pressure from missing out on office politics. Encourage some days to be in-office so that office-lovers won't go to the office to socialize and find it half empty. Have a flexible day or two where people can do whatever they want. Maybe throw in some flexibility on start and end hours so that people can avoid peak traffic.
[+] [-] kumarvvr|4 years ago|reply
I work in the engineering industry and am lucky enough that I get to have privacy and my manager is good. I ensure I do my work and well at that.
But I know friends in IT who absolutely loathe the feeling of being in a monitored jail cell.
[+] [-] bww|4 years ago|reply
If you want to go to an office every day of the week, go ahead! That’s great, who’s stopping you? But if you think everyone you work with should also be there in order to interact with you? In the environment where you like to work, regardless of how productive your colleagues are there? I shouldn’t have to tell you that you are the one who is being unreasonable.
[+] [-] foxes|4 years ago|reply
Then making the office more comfortable and flexible without people micromanaging would be the next thing.
[+] [-] jpollock|4 years ago|reply
When everyone's in the office, I can _see_ when they get back to their desk and haven't gotten into anything again. I can see that my question isn't going to interrupt them.
As it stands, I interrupt everyone and they interrupt me. I haven't been able to get into flow during office hours in 18months.
Code review discussions which would take 5 minutes take 3 days. You have to write multiple paragraphs instead of walking over and saying "dude, look at this right there, like _seriously_."
Nothing like a little pair programming to work through a code review.
[+] [-] Nbox9|4 years ago|reply
Why is he going to a daily meeting if he doesn’t have to pay attention to the meeting?
Why is there not an incentive to complete more than one card a day? If one card can take as little as two hours it seems like a massive waste to expect someone to only do one card.
Why doesn’t he have proper equipment? If you spend XXX,XXX a year for an employee it makes sense to spend X,XXX/yr for proper equipment. The company should provide high quality mouse/keyboard/headset.
[+] [-] jstx1|4 years ago|reply
1. Good office environment (including convenient commute).
2. Working from home.
3. Bad office environment.
Some people love WFH simply because they experienced an improvement from 3 to 2 and they don't even know that 1 is possible. For others the order is genuinely different from mine and they would pick WFH over any office. I think this is helpful because office experiences vary a lot and people often end up talking past each other in threads like this one.
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|4 years ago|reply
Since working from home for almost the last 4 years, my productivity has gone stratospheric. It’s freaking amazing.
I still maintain a lot of personal “office discipline,” like dressing in jeans and a button-down shirt, even though I may not be going out anywhere. I also limit breaks (but I take them whenever I want, and sometimes, they may be an hour or so).
I work whenever I want. Early morning is my most productive time. I often get more done by 8:30AM, than I used to get done all day, in the office (8:30 was my usual starting time).
But not everyone is able to work this way. I don’t have small children (if you don’t count the cats), and I spend just about every second of work time, coding.
I have a dedicated office space, with a standing desk. No sitting on the couch, with a laptop. No Starbucks tables. My equipment is top-notch. I have a monitor that extends across my entire desk. I have a decent laptop, but its screen seems ridiculously small. My next laptop will be even smaller. I’m spoiled rotten.
I have tremendous self-discipline; partly because I’m a high-school dropout with a GED, and have had to fight for Every. Damn. Thing. in my career. I’ve never had one blessed thing handed to me. It was infuriating, but it taught me to stay disciplined, focused and productive; despite almost ceaseless adversity. Not everyone’s experience, but it made me who I am today.
I have no idea if things would be better for me by now, if I’d had a smoother road. I could easily see myself “going to fat,” so to speak. I probably would not have been so well-prepared for at-home work.
But that was just my experience. YMMV.
[+] [-] askonomm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vallavaraiyan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inter_netuser|4 years ago|reply
...but just can't handle remote employees that they have so much more control over?
Sounds like complete nonsense to me. If they can handle vendors located on a different continent - they can handle remote employees, full stop.
I'll believe the complaints about WFH when they'll ban offshoring.
[+] [-] serial_dev|4 years ago|reply
A drop in empathy, trust, relationships for me was very small. It's there, but for work related stuff, I believe it didn't actually matter. Everyone was nice with me and we got things done. Whenever I had questions, they would help me out.
We were since then a couple of times in the office and talking to them in person was nice, I felt I could ask more questions, I got to listen to their unfiltered opinions as we could have spontaneous 1-1 conversations in the office. It was also because we didn't make time to "just chat" online, except for online watercooler team calls, but with 3-4 people in the call, we pay more attention to what we are allowed to say.
[+] [-] acd|4 years ago|reply
Open floor plan is good for cost saving but not for anything else. Collaboration is less in open plan than a traditional office.
Here is Harvard research on Open Office plan https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-truth-about-open-offices
"When the firms switched to open offices, face-to-face interactions fell by 70%." https://www.hbs.edu/news/articles/Pages/bernstein-open-offic...
[+] [-] gorbachev|4 years ago|reply
Smart companies understand that and tailor their approach to fit. Dumb ones will dictate The One True Way and see half their people leave.
[+] [-] joelbluminator|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sumo89|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] suzzer99|4 years ago|reply
But if you want to work on new technology with a ton of unknowns (which I personally get more job satisfaction out of), in my experience you need that human connection and in-person collaboration - at least at first. Maybe that can work fully remote. But my fully remote startup experiences have been abysmal.