Many people have decided in the last couple of months that it's safe to restart the war on remote working. I think the attacks are likely to get increasingly intense and blunt.
And, as a matter of fact, we now have the proof that remote work is efficient at large scale in our industry. It shatters all the false ideas about loss of productivity, lack of communication. I never communicated as efficiently as now as opposed to when I was in my open space, always disturbed by subjects that did not concern me.
I don’t think we have this proof? At best, we have evidence it works ‘well enough.’ There are still people who hate online meetings, who have a negative physical reaction to it and are unable to engage. The people playing online video games during the day I run into who have to go afk for a few moments to ‘get a work call’ are likely to have reduced productivity. (Probably double for kids who are doing online school.)
I also have seen productivity issues between two office locations that are suddenly resolved by having someone travel to the other site for a week. Sometimes this is even followed up with an writeup about the sudden revelations gleaned from the visit.
On the other hand, I’ve also seen engineers take vacation days so they can be heads down on a project they care about. So, I’m not sure what the ideal situation is, exactly.
It ought to be noticeable in terms of output if individuals play video games instead of working. If it's not, maybe they just manage their time differently than you expect, but still effectively.
If it is not noticeable, then it probably means that their work is some kind of bullshit, so why would they waste their time doing nothing instead of gaming ? I mean when your job is fullfulling you don't need to do something else during your work hours.
There are already employers committing to supporting remote. If your company isn’t one of them, and you need it, change employers. Frankly I want not only to go back to the office but also to not have to work with remote people, so I hope my employer does not allow remote and all of the hardcore WFHers leave the company.
It's a combination of some companies that want to return to mostly office and individuals who really want to go back to an office for various reasons, including social ones, who are afraid they'll be some combination of empty and teams having focused "off sites."
And those of us who want to work remote will take our services elsewhere, as there’ll be plenty more places available to work remote than we’re before even if FAANG goes back to the office forever.
I've come to hate being in my house, having worked from home for 3 years. My brain just associates it with work. I haven't got a very big house. I resent it so much I don't even have the will to do maintenance and repairs. I can't wait for on-site interviews to resume and find a job in an office.
EDIT: I've never worked at a job/office as hellish as the post describes. Better office jobs than that exist.
unsolicited advice- please pertain work to a desk/ one place of the house, and not spread it to the entire house.
This can help restrict resentment to that one spot and not your entire place.
The one where they make you waste 2 hours of your day traveling in potentially dangerous/uncomfortable/inconvenient circumstances so that you can physically sit a desk and do the same thing you would do at home, all in the name of optics.
I believe the parent is most likely referring to all the costs that are externalized on to the employee related to e.g., commuting; the office-induced inefficiencies related to lack of control of one's work environment; poor communication that relies on face-face happenstance vs intentional and document oriented exchanges; and the executive-induced mal-control syndrome, such as 'if I can't see you you aren't working' kinds of things.
With all of the horror stories about their warehouses I have to imagine the offices aren't great either. Like I would expect them to be as miserable as Amazon leadership thinks it can get away with.
From what I've heard there are nice parts of Amazon (as an office employee), but that on the whole they don't really see it as a priority.
There's the fairly normal things like charging for lunch at the office canteen (fine, but for a big tech company this is a little different), the slightly odd things like charging for parking at their office (seems like an easy win to not bother?), and then there's the downright crappy ("your role entitles you to 4GB RAM in your laptop, even though Excel needs much more, if you want more buy it yourself").
I think there are better companies to use as role models for creating a good working environment.
A lot of the big companies (Amazon, Google, etc) are pretty poor model for...almost everything.
While they may have been great at some point, they're largely carried by a few segments of their businesses and can no longer really fail. Google is mostly carried by their success in ads, and most of the non-ads things they pump out + the way they do it, is mediocre at best, extremely inefficient at worse. Their technological innovations are mostly meant to support these inefficiencies. Sure some stuff they do is cool, but they do a LOT of stuff. Most isn't. The same applies to all these other companies.
You'd think that the world's larges cloud provider, would have the tooling and policies in place to deal with this issue (creative inefficiencies). Because that's literally what they're asking their customers to deal with when they sign on to the concept of cloud-computing.
While the cross-pollination of ideas from different teams and departments is lost, along with interesting and serendipitous discussions, I'm also in the boat of hoping I never have to go back to an office. Not having a commute, being able to spend more time with my kids, not eating less-healthy fast-food rather than home-cooked meals, being able to spend my (lunch) breaks working in my garden... I never want to go back!
They are voicing a very US view on the relationship. From my understanding, in EU there are jurisdictions that any concession extracted from employees by employer is effectively done under duress because the employer controls employees livelihood, even if temporarily. Actual reality depends on how desirable your skills are and how good the existing employment is.
I expect the bigger legal pushback would be the other way around. I definitely heard some grumbling early in the pandemic when some still saw office closures as an over-reaction. The complaint was that companies were making a unilateral change to the working conditions agreed-upon when they were hired.
I'm not sure this "you can't make me X" attitude is particularly helpful. The reality is that lots of people have undesirable accommodations, and whether you do or not a lot of people do and don't want to go back into the office. IMO this has to be a group conversation not an individualistic one.
Full disclosure: I don't really want to return to 100% office requirement either. I'm really excited to see other humans again - though I suspect we'll see a 2-3 day a week in-person expectation and then 2-3 day flex moving forward.
I believe my company is going to end up maintaining a small office with a set of open desks that people can come in an work at. At least for us, this seems like the right balance. We've grown in the pandemic, so keeping a smaller office lets the company save money. Hiring remotely expands our pool of candidates. At the same time, employees who benefit on the whole from remote work get to keep it, while employees who thrive on in-person interaction and a dedicated space outside their home get to keep it. It's a little tricky to set up blended in-person and remote meetings, but once that's in place, the office can be much more fluid.
This. Plus, I myself am living in a top floor apt, but over the past year I learnt the power of just taking walks, having quality weekend times, taking trips, and exercising. Just because I'm supposed to work at home does not mean that I should stay home all the time. If anything, this has taught me what I was doing wrong in my pre-covid life.
Surely this works both ways though? Remote workers always bring an implied expectation that their coworkers will do a certain amount of extra work in order to bridge the larger communication boundary. This means more documentation, more aggressive status tracking, more time spent on communication (zoom calls and slack simply aren't as high fidelity as in person communication - body language is important), more independent investigation as the activation energy of a remote call is higher, etc.
Now, many of those things are probably good for the business anyway, but they are nevertheless obligations that remote workers force on their colleagues in order to achieve that cleaner, "API-like" working relationship that remote workers often need to succeed independently.
It's even more stressful if some employees are gelling well and some aren't. Many remote workers feel they should be treated like contractors but given fuzzier expectations like salaried workers - I've seen this misalignment of expectations about culture destroy teams, and in an office culture transitioning from full time in office to partially remote, all of this is fundamentally caused by the "benefits" that the remote workers are receiving at the cost of their colleagues. It's absolutely not a win-win.
While I will give full marks for your agency and initiative if appropriate, to think ANY of us (myself and all of us included) don't have a large amount of probability/luck/circumstance involved is hilarious.
Heck, I'm a refugee from a civil-war country who came to Canada with literally nothing but a loan for the ticket; I could try to make the claim that I "made it on my own".
Yet though I've certainly put in an effort, I'm extremely lucky compared to those who couldn't leave, didn't speak the language, don't have the skillset or capability, don't look or behave in career-enhancing ways, haven't been picked up by mentors and coaches, haven't moved to a country which accepts new people, with educational and business framework that's conducive to advances, haven't found or been given the same opportunities, etc. I've certainly had bad luck and obstacles and negative externalities, but I could spend all day counting things that went well too!
I mean, I agree that I don't want to necessarily go back to the office; but it's with full view of how lucky & privileged I am. Even on very granular level, even with decisions I've made and career I've chosen and skillset I've developed - I have colleagues with same skillset and position and broadly similar projects, which have not switched to remote nearly as much as my project has. That alone is luck/circumstance/beyond my control.
Meh, the network of choices and outcomes you took couldn't have been pre-planned, but the attitude and work ethic that made you work on the skills, capabilities, mindset, etc and made you take action despite major setbacks had nothing to do with luck. To think otherwise is to deny your own agency.
My point/perspective is that it's not a binary proposition. It's not all luck/circumstance, or all agency; it's a combination of the two.
The OP to which I replied implied that ONLY their agency mattered; I disagree with that sentiment vehemently. This is not to say that agency that does not matter - I'm not a fatalist and certainly enjoy my personal freedom and take personal responsibility :)
Really? It made a lot of difference to mine. If I didn't have a mild skeletal problem I'd probably be in the air force right now, rather than a software engineer.
Don't mistake pandemic conditions for forever. There is no reason you need to stay permanently isolated and can't get social needs filled somewhere other than an office.
Don't mistake the post pandemic conditions for granted. Even after isolation working alone in a small apartment can be miserable, I find myself in the same situation, getting out for a bar or club in non working hours is not the same as working in a office. There are some simple idiotic social needs like small talk, or throw some jokes or even curse out loud in frustration that are difficult to get right outside the office.
Anyways, any argument down playing a situation is futile, let's just agree that every one is in a different situation and the best is to analyze case by case
Isn't analyzing case-by-case exactly what remote work is though? Obviously some people really like working at home in isolation and some people like the social aspects of being in an office. But with a remote-first company you have the option. If you want to work at home you obviously can and if you want a more social work environment then you can rent a co-working space (hopefully your company could even foot the bill with all the money they are saving on office rent) or co-work with a group of friends, etc.
I think a lot of people who have worked remotely for the first time due to COVID have a misleading impression of what remote work is. In normal times you have ample options to be able to work in an environment with other people if that's what you want. You also have the option to spend the time you save on commuting doing other non-work social activities.
I dunno, I worked from home way before pandemic and the isolation was pretty bad as well. Nothing can really compare to meeting a lot of great people daily, face-to-face.
I am pretty much in the same boat, i cannot afford a house where i live, and probably will never be able to at least within the next couple of years. Unfortunately between the ongoing construction, and the fact our building is slowly renovating most of the units has hurt my productivity.
While people say "oh just move somewhere else outside the city", unfortunately that means i need to now buy/maintain a car on top of everything else. Then commute into the city to be social with my friends group, or to do physical activities.
Neither of those things appeal to me, and since our work is strongly leaning to switching to be fully remote, it is kind of frustrating. A bunch of coworkers are very much just move to a city where you can buy a house! That is what i did. Or even worse a lot of people who are just "buy a house!", and are completely ignorant of how insane the housing prices have become.
Honestly the end result is probably just going to lead to me finding employment at a company that still has the ability to work onsite. A few of my like mininded coworkers pitched the idea that we could rent a small office area for people like us, and were promptly shot down by management.
But isn't that the point? If your location doesn't matter you could live somewhere with a garden because you wouldn't be forced to live near the arbitrary location of the office.
You're cross polinating ideas right now! My company has been pushing yammer or some such garbage since it became available. There may finally be a use for it.
> not eating less-healthy fast-food rather than home-cooked meals
Anecdotally, the people I know reluctant to go back to the office have some combination of lovely homes into which they've put care, terrible offices reflecting zero care or empathy and/or introversion, sometimes to the point of social anxiety. (Stark minority in the third, but a life changer for them.)
Offices don't have to have terrible meal options. Nice homes can be chosen close to work, thereby negating commute. And co-workers don't have to be inept to the point of constantly interrupting your work flow.
There will always be a section of the population happier and more productive working from principally home. (Though for how long we can command a wage premium remains to be seen.) But I suspect, if offices were a bit more desirable and city center housing a bit more affordable, that slice would narrow quickly.
Do you live in Silicon Valley? Nice homes cannot be chosen close to work. All homes in the South Bay that aren’t literally falling down are multi-million-dollar. I personally know people who bought a $2.5m home with a rat infestation.
> Do you live in Silicon Valley? Nice homes cannot be chosen close to work.
Nope. Largely for this reason. And when I'm in the Bay Area, I'm strategic about when I travel, to where and for whom.
My point is that the hesitance to go back to the office is not something fundamental. It's rooted in a variety of personal and environmental factors that can and do change. Targeting those factors, directly or indirectly, personally or through policy, has not been a conversation I've heard of.
> Do you live in Silicon Valley? Nice homes cannot be chosen close to work.
And in large parts of the rest of the country, it's illegal to put homes close to work.
Where I work is on the edge of an office campus on the edge of a suburb of Seattle. By city ordinance, virtually no housing is allowed anywhere near where I work. If you live in the same municipality as this office and work at it, your only choice to get there is a twenty-minute drive (with pre-pandemic traffic levels). There is no local bus service that goes from the rest of the town to the office park. Bus service from Seattle to this office park exists, however, so I live in Seattle.
"Just live close to work" is a physical impossibility for so many people, and not solely because they want the stereotypical standalone house with a picket fence. My family has zero interest in that, yet there's no housing anywhere near where I work. What little exists is largely short-term corporate rentals and AirBnBs.
When we've lived in other places, the dynamic is the same. Office parks in the suburbs or all clumped together in a large downtown, with housing as far as you can get from them.
This is, in my opinion, one of the few things Amazon did right: plopping its office campus in the middle of a very mixed-use area with rental apartments and condominium units for ownership, shops, restaurants, parks, and so on. (Of course, after having run out of land there, now they're building traditional office towers in the suburban downtown with virtually no housing to speak of. And yes, it is sky-high expensive to live near Amazon because that's basically the only mixed-use office park in the whole county.)
> "By city ordinance, virtually no housing is allowed anywhere near where I work."
Must be specific to your suburb. I can look out the window of my downtown Seattle office straight into the windows of the condo complex across the street. As for the suburbs, having passed by innumerable times, the north edge of Microsoft's main campus is directly across the street from apartments and rowhomes.
I was wondering if someone would mention Microsoft in a reply.
Yes, there are apartments near there, but Redmond has the same failing as most other suburbs in the area: housing stock woefully inadequate for the number of people working there, and ordinances that artificially restrict building any more. Microsoft's campus is also adjacent to the Bellevue city limits, where residents on the other side of Bel-Red have fought vociferously against new housing for decades.
Meanwhile, SR 520 is a mess all the way back to the 405 interchange (and beyond, some mornings). After the much-vaunted light rail arrives, that station will serve fewer residences than the one in Angle Lake.
My point is that lots of people just throw out "well, live near where you work" as a panacea to life's commuting and office ills. Under our current idea of what counts as zoning and land use, it's not possible for any more than a small sliver of people to do that. So we have a choice: change how we do land use, change how we work with offices, or both.
The south bay has hordes of pretty nice apartment complexes for newly arrived renters, and newish condos and townhouses for entry level buyers.
Eventually you trade up to a 3 bedroom house or whatever you need.
I have worked at various tech companies since the 90s, am by no means rich but I've have always lived somewhere decent that's within 15 minutes drive of work.
Surely it is those people who demand to work from an office who should be worried about commanding a premium, if the employer start including the cost of providing an office, especially in a premium area.
> it is those people who demand to work from an office who should be worried about commanding a premium
Before the pandemic, certain employers had to pay a premium for real estate and a premium for talent in prime locations. The former no longer looks justified. That doesn't really give employee or employer any leverage. The latter, which was built on scarcity of accessible talent and the concentration of high-paying jobs in prime locations, however, solely reduces employees' leverage.
One of the barriers to this shift was the massive cost of installing remote-working infrastructure. Financially, technically and culturally. That's now done. How this shakes out, whether it results in lower prices for customers or better returns to shareholders or higher take-home pay for employees, remains to be seen.
I work in a company where without a boring meeting you are not going to get absolutely anything from anybody, even if you have a simple question. Working remotely helped a lot as we were forced to use MS Teams then information suddenly started free flowing. Meetings and walkthroughs can be recorded with everyone's permissions and the knowledge builds up. I am not looking forward at going back to the office at all! I'm even considering taking a break and then finding something remote only even with a reduced compensation.
> While the cross-pollination of ideas from different teams and departments is lost, along with interesting and serendipitous discussions
While this always sounds good, in my experience it rarely amounts to anything. A company I used to work for tried to make "hacks" and "hackathons" etc happen. People did make hacks, but they remained as hacks. Products were finished just like any other product is finished: as a result of hard, dedicated work.
While I'm sure there's some kernel of truth to the benefits of chit chatting about random stuff and coming up with better ideas through that, until I see some evidence that in-office work provides this to a substantial degree, I have a hard time believing it's as beneficial as it's made out to be. What it actually feels like is a hand wavy attempt for some old people in management to try to justify them holding onto their outdated ways.
For companies like Amazon there must be a huge element of the sunk cost fallacy coming into play. I'm sure they have spent hundreds of millions on office locations around the world. To suddenly decide that these are completely unnecessary would be a bold move, and there is unlikely to be a queue of people rushing to lease or buy unused office space in the immediate future.
If I understand your point, you are saying that Amazon has virtually made the data centre redundant, so the idea that offices are similarly redundant given the right tools shouldn't come as too much of a surprise to them?
I take that point but let me counter that there is presumably a sliding scale here between "traditional office space is redundant" and "when the dust settles everyone will be back at their cubicles". The majority of people, and the companies they work for, are probably somewhere in the middle. However, even if Amazon are 100% convinced their office space is now redundant, it is probably, from a game theory type point of view, not in their best interests to publicly declare that position. Because to do so would only weaken the value of their existing office spaces.
> While I'm sure there's some kernel of truth to the benefits of chit chatting about random stuff and coming up with better ideas through that, until I see some evidence that in-office work provides this to a substantial degree, I have a hard time believing it's as beneficial as it's made out to be. What it actually feels like is a hand wavy attempt for some old people in management to try to justify them holding onto their outdated ways.
Yup. I'm wondering how many people are taking advantage of the tools available to them. I've seen remote workers be online in a video chat room so you could "stop by and pitch an idea." This was well over a decade ago.
Those old school managers you mention are the ones I find most likely to stick with things like audio only teleconference, even when there are things like shared whiteboards/documents available, and then they'll talk to slides they didn't send out over email. Incredibly frustrating.
Sounds like an place I wouldn't want to go back to, either. If my office environment was anything even close to that, I think I'd be looking for another job. I actually look forward to going back in and seeing people again, but only like twice a week.
Hahaha, of course they aren't. Really, you should be able to calculate how much they paid for your facilities need (square footage of your workspace, connection, IT equipment, etc) and it should be directly reflected in your salary.....
My employer has been adding so many customer support positions and basing those in the office that we cannot bring the developer teams back into the office. That, combined with an INCREASE in productivity since working from home the plan for now is for all of the software dev teams to continue to work from home while the customer support team swells to occupy the whole space of the office.
My office is now in storage because they canceled the lease. When I get back to the office the developers and sys/net admins will be hotdesking until they can figure out what to do with us.
What kind of office was this person working in? Having to breathe jet exhaust fumes while suffering through 85 degree indoor temperatures and drinking algae-filled water is nowhere near normal.
The company he’s describing is severely broken if everything he’s describing is true. Most of what he describes are not normal office problems. Some of them are even health and safety violations. Working from home will only distance him from those problems, but it can’t fix an inherently broken company that doesn’t care about employees. He should be searching for another remote job ASAP
I believe they're describing a call center, and I agree vehemently: the title is broad and doesn't reflect the subject, someone on HN needs to hire this guy, not debate/agree with whether he needs to go back to the office
No, the solution to this isn’t “this guy seems cool so let’s hire him at our FAANG team.” (I mean, do what you want!) The solution to this is that OSHA or the appropriate counterpart needs to get involved.
Ah, good point, I was speaking allegorically and that wasn't clear, sounds like it implied I thought he's cool and thus needs to be come a software engineer. Thank you for clarifying.
Please do not try to launder him into FAANG! Passing someone to HR for interviews _certainly_ wouldn't be a way to help a call center worker :)
Heartily agree! You're right, my comment wasn't clear, I only addressed the article author rather than noting the workplace is unacceptable for _everyone_ at the workplace :)
Hate to inquire directly to your situation while you've been careful to avoid specifics about role, but: are you a programmer/coder/software engineer/whatever they call hackers these days? :)
OT: holy smokes, you'd have to be in pretty bad shape not to be able to ride a bicycle from your house to my old house close to Cascade High School. Both are a long way from our current home of Seattle.
Anyway, I worked industrial/mechanical jobs in that area back in the day and about my coworkers often wondered, "do you live like this at home?" Now I write software in a different part of the country and rarely (but no never) brush up against such problems. Hopefully, you can continue with your WFH and not be bothered with it, either.
Excellent, because if you doubt my story of living in the area, your wife can walk next door and see if the name of the track 3200m record holder matches my user name. It will also tell you how long ago it was that I lived there. :-) (Loooong time ago.)
Anyway, best of luck with your current work situation and may it only improve.
> Having to breathe jet exhaust fumes while suffering through 85 degree indoor temperatures and drinking algae-filled water is nowhere near normal.
I was told to suck it up and do at least 50+ hours (35h paid) when working at temps over 42c (110f).
Both are illegal here, they don't care, they will always find a poor sucker in a dire situation needing the job.
Could you clearify “don’t care”? Because here you simply report the company anonymously. You even have a person among the staff, who is extremely difficult to fire, that can do the reporting for you.
Companies will be fined for this kind of environment and the office will be closed if things aren’t improved. You can’t choose to not care.
If caring means you lose your job, yeah, you're not gonna care.
And losing your job in the USA means: hunger, homelessness, no internet, less chance of being hired with unemployment record, assumption that you did something terrible, low/no medical, etc.
For many, especially those whom can't save a nest egg of appreciable value (6 months out of work kind), then it's better to STFU, apply elsewhere, and THEN make complaints.
Sorry, I meant the company can’t choose to not care. I can certainly understand it from the employees point of view.
But even in the US I would assume that companies aren’t just allowed to break the laws regarding work environment. Isn’t there some control visits, some way of reporting a company?
So don't work in these industries if the pay isn't good enough. Employers shouldn't be subjecting their employees to illegal working conditions, but neither does anyone owe anyone else a job.
Likely only if/when someone complains to something like OSHA or the local Dept. of Labor. And that follows on whether you can handle looking for a new job.
If your name comes out, you might just loose your job, and most people in that situation aren't going to be able to pursue legal action regarding retaliation or the like unless they get lucky finding the right lawyer. Or, you could potentially cause the company to go under/get shut down (rightly so) which equally leaves you seeking a new job.
Total, complete nonsense and lies. We have unemployment here - paid by the employer - and its substantial. I know several people who are even able to increase their savings while unemployed.
Yes you are correct that unemployment insurance is taken out of a check, and paid in part by the company.
HOWEVER in many states, and the further republican/red it is, the more onerous it is to be granted it. It'd be a whole different story if it were really employment insurance". Much of the time, it's "unemployment insurance after 6-12 weeks if the systems to register you actually work, and you arent excluded for inane reasons, and you aren't later excluded for $reasons". And hope you can survive on what you have currently in the bank for the SLOW state procedures to give you a ruling.
Turns out, the state doesn't want to pay out just as much as insurance companies don't want to pay out.
And to counter your narrative, I've seen the state point at unemployed people the local state park as a temp job. When they took it (else they lost benefits), the temp job ended and were excluded from filing for unemployment since they knowingly took a temp job.
In the US, employers pay unemployment insurance premiums to the state. The state then pays unemployment benefits to qualifying individuals. Individuals who resign (quit) or are terminated for cause are not eligible for unemployment benefits.
For example, an employer can slowly ratchet up requirements at work to the point where they can document an employee is not performing, terminate them, and the employee is not eligible for unemployment benefits. (This benefits the employer by keeping their unemployment insurance premiums low).
Also, unemployment benefit amounts vary greatly by state. They are a pittance in the vast majority of the states, especially if you consider most people don't have the cheapest possible lease/mortgage, and they can't just move out of where they live the week after they are terminated.
There was a temporary supplement of unemployment benefits by the federal government due to COVID, but that is exceptional, and those are gone now.
Also, the process is the punishment. You should talk to people who had issues or who aren't proficient with the online applications how much of a pain it is to resolve issues with unemployment benefits over the past year. You have to call the minute the office opens up in the morning, and if you don't get in the hold queue immediately, you are told to call again the next day by the automated message. I know for a fact that this is still happening today, a year+ since COVID started.
Edit: I just tried Washington state's unemployment phone call line (open 8AM to 4PM). It's 9:07AM, and after 2m20s of various prompts on the phone, you are informed that "All agents are currently busy, call back at a later time". So imagine you have kids to take care of, jobs to look for, and you have to spend your time repeatedly calling the phone number, wait 2m20s each time to be told to call later. Your only chance is really to call at 7:59AM and hope you get through to the hold queue. If not, then your benefits are delayed one more day and you try the next day. As an American, it's embarrassing to me.
An employer who fires a whistleblower for cause is begging for an NRLB lawsuit (constructive dismissal) for no benefit. The employeer doesn't benefit from blocking unemployment except if they try to fire a LOT of people.
Obviously Covid is an extreme special case at the division of unemployment
Yes, that's why large employers will offer severance benefits or something else in exchange for laid off employees agreeing to forego unemployment benefit from the state.
And a large employer will be deterred by lawsuits, but smaller employers might have nothing to lose and/or the employees will be low wage and not in a position to deal with lawsuits and whatnot and have bigger things to worry about.
Not sure where you're located at, but I've never heard unemployment referred to as "substantial". I've known a number of people who ended up on it, and it's generally a percentage of your normal wage, so I don't know how someone can increase their savings while unemployed unless they were blowing money left & right while employed.
Additionally, in most states you petition for unemployment and then generally have to prove you are eligible. All it takes is one spiteful manager to create a paper trail that you were let go with cause, and in most jurisdictions renders you ineligible. Then it becomes your word against theirs unless you have your own proof to fight back with.
Good luck with that. I was fired for having cancer while working remotely. The state EEOC said I might have a case for suing the business for wrongful termination but that it would be difficult to win. Unemployment was something like $250 a week when I had been making 4x that.
Unless the company goes under this likely isn't going to happen. Half the things mentioned only cost a few hundred dollars to resolve. They'd have to be running on some crazy margins. And given that environment, anyone could have reported. It's anonymous.
It depends on the country/connectedness of the execs with the said authority. In a non-corrupt place, sure report away. In a slightly corrupt, what if the regulator plays golf with an exec at your company? Or went to the same grade school? Etc. Fully corrupt is the easiest to explain.
Golf is more of a US euphemism for connectedness/social shared sports, could be anything really - basketball, racketball, softball, whatever.
As for low level... I guess you have never lived in smaller cities/towns in Europe then. People know each other and afford those they know “courtesy” of a heads up. Word spreads, etc. From there, you are only one step away from someone retaliating against you. The kicker is that those involved might not even really understand this to be somewhat corrupt behavior.
An office on the property of an international airport. Our maintenance hanger happens to be behind our parking lot and immediately on the other side of it is an active runway.
If you work at an airport, not in the terminals, you get used to smelling aviation fuel/jet exhaust.
As far as the indoor temperatures, it's a leased building and the HVAC is just inadequate (my guess is when the HVAC was designed, the building probably wasn't largely an open office). The front of the building the HVAC works great, but it still has walls and doors blocking it from where the bulk of the staff is.
The algae in the pex tubing coming off of the water filter is because, for some reason, there's a random tube coming off that just terminates which allows some water to not get circulated. The chalky white of the water is just pure hard water, if you put some water in a dark coffee mug and let it sit for a few hours then dump it out and let it dry the inside will have a noticeable white film. This will rapidly build up day after day and actually start to flake off from thermal shock.
>Some of them are even health and safety violations.
They aren't. You might think they are, but they aren't. If they were, any hanger or warehouse at any significantly sized airport would have long since been shut down. Yes, I'm sure there is some unacceptable level that once measured can have legal action taken but I'd bet my kidney that we aren't anywhere near those exposure levels. It's not like a turbine is backed up 3 feet from our door, with the doors wide open, spewing exhaust. That doesn't mean you can't smell it though, you can smell jet exhaust at considerable distances not unlike diesel exhaust from larger vehicles.
Many on HN are accustomed to nice offices with a bunch of perks or remote work, but for a lot of us we work in conditions like this (or far worse) and it's just life. We have it much better than our people working at our sort facilities, they're exposed to the elements with minimal HVAC for example.
When I was 18 I worked at a cemetary, I had to wear a "backpack" full of diesel for a weed eater/whacker and trim weeds for hours at a time with no shade, then dig graves and cut grass with no shade. I'd go home sunburnt and smelling like diesel frequently, even getting sun poisoning at one point. My current job is so much better than that job 18 years ago, but it's also a far cry from what I saw a Y Combinator and Open AI a couple of years ago when I was visiting someone and I imagine that's how a lot of tech offices are like give or take some perks and creature comforts.
> Many on HN are accustomed to nice offices with a bunch of perks or remote work, but for a lot of us we work in conditions like this (or far worse) and it's just life.
I don’t know where you live, but I can assure you that what you’re describing is not “just life” in most developed countries. You’re not describing a normal office.
Offices like you describe continue to exist because employees put up with it. The tech job market is very hot right now. I would strongly encourage you to explore your options. What you’re describing is not normal or acceptable.
You don’t need to move to a Google type company with unlimited office budgets. Most companies are smart enough to know they need to address things like broken HVAC or not enough microwaves or unclean bathrooms by spending the relatively tiny amount of money to address the problem. It’s literally cheaper to address these issues than to lose good talent over such easily addressable frustrations.
When you move to a company that treats employees decently, you’ll find that you also get along with coworkers better because everyone is not already miserable and dreading their jobs.
Had to address the unclean bathroom comment. My company is a large insurance provider. Billions of dollars under management so money really isn't a big deal. You know how bad our cleaning us?
They have one guy per floor responsible for cleaning four large restrooms, vacuuming, dumping trash cans. The one who does my floor is a lazy idiot. The cleaning company tolerates this because they pay crap wages; they save their best employee for the 4th floor where the VPs and higher work. Everyone else gets a shitty bathroom. Once, a dude had explosive diarrhea in a stall. A year later, there were still shit stains on the wall...
Don't be surprised at how cheap even big successful business can be.
That’s funny.. when I read OP’s post, I was pretty underwhelmed by the complaints. He describes a pretty typical office environment, in my experience. The HVAC problems and disgusting facilities rang the most true to me. I remember a spider infestation in a break room that did not get addresses until an employee threatened to complain. (The place ended up spider-free but smelling of insecticide, and the complainer was fired for “poor performance”.) I agree that a lot of HN readers seem to have only been exposed to idyllic FAANG workspaces, and have no idea the conditions most office workers have to put up with.
My spouse, a flight attendant, comes home with a nice aroma smelling of perfume and jet exhaust. It might not be OSHA legal but it is what it is. Airports stink.
Yeah, OSHA recommends 76F as the maximum indoor temperature [0]. And there's indoor air quality guidelines too. It's not difficult to file a complaint [1], and I'm pretty sure any reasonable complaint is checked out. Even if the employer isn't fined, having an OSHA investigator come by will probably lead to some changes.
It also seems possible that an office with obvious jet exhaust fumes will be out of compliance with the fire marshal, who's more than capable of putting a chain and padlock on the building entrance until the problem is fixed.
I've been to offices in the middle of nowhere deep south that are far better than what you are describing. No, they don't have the free food, comfortable chairs, etc that nice companies in The Bay have, but they do have AC, heating, and drinkable water. What you're describing isn't because you're not in silicon valley, or even California. What you're describing isn't right anywhere. It isn't just life and you shouldn't stand for that kind of abuse.
I worked at a building that was right next to the runway under the flight path for a major international airport. We could wave to people in the windows.
Our AC went out (In las vegas - it gets to 120+ some days in summer) and they brought in portable A/C units that were louder than the planes.
Then they took our bottled water away.
While these issues aren't normal they are out there and they are replicated by employers who don't value the sanity of their workers. Yes I got out of there. Yes I'm working from home now and agree with practically everything on this list. Especially the bathroom.
Not OP, but usually "bottled" water is taken away for environmental reasons, replaced by filtered faucets, which are often non maintained and cleaned properly.
Most of us thought it was cost savings. It was at a university where even the cost of bottled water somehow would be pointed to as the culprit for why we needed to be furloughed.
Yeah, I understand the benefits of not having to commute, the peace and quite you get when working from home, but the complaint here is that the employer suck.
In this case, and depending on the country, working at this office is illegal. The assumption that working from home is better is a little naive. It’s a result of a terribly company, who will manage to make working from home equally terrible in the long run.
Regrading the jet fumes, yeah if you're within 3-5 miles of a major airport, there's definitely jet fumes drifting around.
Source: Helped someone one weekend re-roof their house that was probably 3 miles from Logan Airport in Boston. You'd get waves of fumes slowly drifting down from the big heavy jets taking off one after another after another.
My office building (the company owns it) is four stories. We have a backup diesel generator that is run every week during business hours for 1 hour. And every week the fumes waft upwards towards the air handlers on the roof. My first week I was shocked by how bad it smelled; kind of like a mown lawn that had rotted. After a few years, I stopped noticing it.
I've been at a job where projects have put us in vehicle bays with no insulation on the door, in Winter. Temperatures got down to 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Luckily, there was no dress code, so I would wear my mountain Winter gear, but even so, it was really hard to get any coding done as my fingers were too cold.
There are a lot of bad companies out there, and it's all well and good to say "find another job", but not everyone has that luxury.
Kidding aside, there's just not enough jobs in "not broken" offices for all the workers. I haven't seen an office which isn't broken in some way, even though I haven't seen many. And suggestion of looking for another job is just patronizing. If a person could done it easily, he would have done it long ago.
Sounds like your issues are with your particular company and not with the office life in general. Life in my office is absolutely nothing like that and I don't dread the return at all. If my office were like yours I'd be job hunting almost immediately.
Not to mention the reasons towards the end started to become quite a stretch.
Ditto for me. This is the loneliest I've ever been and worst my mental health has ever been. I had no idea this is how I would react to remote work, but I'm counting the days until I get to separate home and work again.
i really enjoy working from home and will change jobs if forced to go back in.
I know what you're talking about though, my wife has friends that are wfh now and that, along with the general isolation of the pandemic, is having a serious effect on them.
I think when this is over there will be various compromises that will probably not work out very well. If WFH works for you then it's great, if it doesn't then it's miserable. There's not a lot of middle ground.
a good compromise leaves everybody mad. - Calvin and Hobbes
Nobody seems to discuss this, but yeah for me working from home means working from my bedroom, the only room I can really work in in my small shared apartment. It definitely affects my productivity.
On the other hand, I've basically stopped getting sick. Open office plans are very bad for certain types of people, and not just those who struggle with distraction, so still a net positive for me
I hear you, but remember this is pandemic-enforced WFH, it's not normal.
Non-pandemic remote work gives you more time to socialize out and about with friends and family, travel (and maybe even work there), and do all sorts of fun things to relax and recharge that we can't really do right now because of the pandemic.
I'm pro-WFH/anti-RTO simply because I want us all to have the choice. Before the pandemic it was all office, during the pandemic it's all remote, and now it feels like the pendulum is swinging all the way back to all office, instead of landing in the middle ground of individual choice.
While I enjoy working from home (fewer distractions and interruptions) I miss the social aspect of the office. I consider many of my colleagues friends and having the occasional beer after work, coffee maker chit-chat and common lunch breaks added a lot of texture to my life as a "worker".
Biggest for me was "I don't actually like my job, but it's easy and pays well, and working from home gives me the time to pursue other interests so I don't feel the need to look for a new job to escape the boredom".
Even that didn't last too long though, and I ended up finding another job after a few years of working from home.
This comes down to individual preferences, but does anyone prefer going to the office? Here's my list of reasons why:
- Better relationships with co-workers. I enjoyed smalltalk, getting coffee, lunch, or drinks afterwards with them. It was also easier to interact with others outside your immediate team.
- Separation of a work environment and home environment.
- If I had a question, it is more likely and quicker to get answered in person instead of over slack/email/zoom.
- Had fewer meetings
- Company dependent but we got free food and other perks.
> it is more likely and quicker to get answered in person instead of over slack/email/zoom.
It was more likely quicker because you felt like you could just walk to the person's desk and interrupt whatever they were doing to demand that they solve your problem.
I keep in mind others may be focused on something and interrupting them would be detrimental. When wfh, it is easier to miss responding back to a quick question and I’m guilty of it myself.
I've been at a remote-first company for nine years now. I'll go back to an office as an absolute last resort. All of the wins the author described just begin to touch the surface of what's available to you. Once you can do your work even slightly asynchronously the quality of life improvements are just too overwhelming to go back.
Those of you who think that remote-work-by-default would be a good thing, can I ask how your companies are handling career progression and collaboration, as well as mentorship of junior developers?
Listen to Adam Savage [1] talk about his early career as a prop-maker. I just don't see how that sort of deep collaboration is possible remotely. As a recent graduate whose first full-time job has been full remote due to the pandemic, I'm terrified that this is going to kill my career progression, not only upwards but also laterally. I just don't have the same opportunities to 1) learn from people or 2) bump into new people as I would if we're all forced to be in the same place.
If it's any consolation, I've spent most of my career working remote and I'd say probably the richest experiences I've learned from depended on who and what they were working on WAY more than them being there in person, and those richer experiences didn't really have a hell of a lot of zoom meeting and other distracting nonsense. The communication simply shifts to text based chat with a nice handy record of communication to look back on and consider over a longer period of time, where the information is more salient.
Basically -- how do you think open source has been doing it since practically the 90s?
I do get the issues with onboarding/mentorship (as well as social) especially right out of school. I suspect that many companies are just trying to do business as usual rather than adapting. It's also worth pointing out that we're talking about remote during a pandemic. In normal times, there's nothing to keep teams from traveling to a location for a week. (Yes, some people have travel issues for various reasons but in general the statement stands.)
I think the tough part is that fresh grads will benefit a lot from the senior developers being physically present, but I get the impression that many senior devs will choose not to come to the office unless they are required to.
So, I don't think it's as simple as letting people choose when and how often to come to the office. I could see a hybrid 2 days local / 3 days remote model working if physical presence is mandatory on those two days.
The challenge with a hybrid model is that you pretty much want housing that has a comfortable private work area and an at least semi-reasonable commute. That's probably fairly doable in a lot of suburban areas but it's harder for an urban office.
That said, I expect this will be quite common and people are probably more willing to have a 90 minute each way commute, say, if they only have to do it once or twice a week. (That's about what I'd be to go into our Boston office. That would be lousy to do most days--as I can attest to from a prior company--but it's not that bad to do once a week especially in the nicer weather.)
> Basically -- how do you think open source has been doing it since practically the 90s?
This! I don't get how HN, a community of hackers who can't but be aware of FLOSS, could claim with a straight face that "remote doesn't work" in the face of things like LKML.
Sure. The company I work at has always been remote-only, and I've been at it for over 5 years.
We pair new hires, regardless of ability, with a mentor. They have access to a full checklist of on-boarding tasks and an actively maintained Basecamp.
Perhaps the key point is that we do not have "hidden" discussions. Even the voice discussions have notes taken and recorded, and planning sessions are done via a recorded Miro board. Day-to-day project management is entirely in Basecamp and Slack. Anything in Slack that's worth noting is made into a Basecamp task for posterity.
We're a flat hierarchy, and we encourage team members to be vocal about what they want to work on. The entire team plans quarterly targets and goals.
It's, honestly, kinda awesome.
Edit: we're less than 50 people, and that makes it easier not to have a hierarchy since most features are built by one or two people.
Yes, and it comes with the opposite problem of hierarchy - working for a manager who has 30-50 direct reports and no time for you or anyone on the team.
Same here. I've worked at a few companies like that, and it's always a ton of office politics with senior employees never being held accountable because they're not technically in charge. It's a prime example of "some are more equal than others".
Thanks for sharing, I think the "no hidden discussions" idea is important. I had a few internships in the before times, and I learned the most by pulling up a chair to other engineers / researchers who were already talking about something, and just listening to how they talk through problems. In my remote job I don't really get a chance to eavesdrop on someone's zoom call.
I think there are a lot of "implicit" benefits of being in-person that remote companies need to make more "explicit" to be successful. It sounds like your company has the right idea!
If you don’t mind me sharing, I’m also building something for making discussions more transparent and discoverable. https://AsyncGo.com just launched and I’d love to hear your feedback.
> We're a flat hierarchy, and we encourage team members to be vocal about what they want to work on. The entire team plans quarterly targets and goals.
To be quite sincere, I've heard this before. And it ALWAYS ends like Animal Farm. Some are "more equal" than others, especially if your company has the usual upper management.
I think it works fine for smaller organizations with less than 50 people. It may not work so well with companies that are rapidly going and already stretching their culture to its limits. It still greatly depends on who is running the company, what the goals are, etc. At your average tech company, mentorship and autonomy matter way more than someone assigning you a direct manager that simply checks boxes on some annual review form. I believe in a strong technical leadership model while keeping the "management hierarchy" flat. E.g. having "direct reports" becomes important when you have enough people that upper management can't give someone dedicated time. There are plenty of ways to keep things flatter and not fall into the traps of having a traditional management hierarchy. It simply takes some thought. You can't absolve your organization of needing management by simply declaring yourself "flat", but there are benefits to how agile an organization can be the flatter they can get, IMO.
This is definitely an issue in any team or organization. Unless you're smaller than 10 employees, eventually office/career politics will dominate. It's inevitable human nature.
This is the frustration I have with my current role. The company is great and the team is awesome. But getting to work on anything that interests me is impossible. All of the great, fun projects go to other team members. The issue compounds itself because now that I don't work on the stuff that I'm good at / want to do, people on my team have pigeonholed me into Team Garbageman (person who does the projects that nobody else wants).
It's killing me slowly right now. I got hired in the middle of the pandemic and I think just 6 people even know I exist. I've spent more time talking with HR than my team members. Not for what you think, I respond to their emails and chats so we get along great. My team is mostly on DnD, no idea what their working on and emails take 24-48 hours to respond.
I feel you, it's been really tough on me too, for many of the same reasons. I don't feel like part of the team, and it's not really clear what my purpose is. When this is all over maybe I'll take a break from this lonely career and spend some time in a more human-facing role like teaching.
Start making 1-1 meetings just to get to know people better and the kind of things they do. Make sure you mostly work on projects where you can collaborate closely with 1-3 other people.
I'd like to but unfortunately they are using that stupid department billing system. For me to collaborate I have to be invited in, basically. Can't have an engineer working on a project they aren't billing for no matter how interesting it looks.
I'm trying to find the project managers so they know I'm available and to include me on future projects. The current projects are staffed up and any change in manpower is a change request, client approval, etc.
Interns we've on-boarded, especially from non-CS background programs, all have had these kinds of issues.
It's been getting better, but I don't see how it's possible to have anything close to "real" mentor-ship schemes with full WFH. When I was interning most of learning happened not with my project but with interacting with the team and seeing/understanding what they did.
I have a sneaking feeling that the productivity boosts due to WFH mostly come from more senior devs w/ specific workstreams that are benefiting from more "head down" time, but without mentoring/training new ppl the quality hiring pool will go down over time.
Thanks for sharing. Your company definitely needs some “how to WFH” training. Taking 24-48 hours to respond to an e-mail is totally, absurdly unacceptable, and if I (as a fairly senior guy) saw this regularly happening, I’d bring it to the offender’s attention and to their manager if they didn’t take corrective action. If someone is too busy to respond to their e-mail, they need to discuss their workload with their manager.
We’ve had several onboarded some right out of college since quarantine started and they are all doing well.
Bumping into people is actually a problem, but career progression is less so, as there is a lot more time for 1-1 mentorship, pairing, etc.
The bumping into people part can be solved though, especially with occasional in person events. We’ve had whole teams not located within our area and have worked with them just fine. Being noticed is also fine - people still give presentations, do launch events, and connect with others through managers, pms, etc.
>We’ve had whole teams not located within our area and have worked with them just fine.
A lot of people look at in-office through the lens of entire companies or at least pretty much everyone they interact with being co-located. I, on the other hand, am on a broader team spread over about 9 time zones and, on a given day, I can be talking with people in 5 different offices plus remote/traveling. If I went into a local office pre-pandemic, there was a good chance I wouldn't run into anyone I knew.
I worked in distributed teams (though in a local office) for about 10 years. The organization was fairly good at this, in terms of structure and policy and procedure. In fact, we would very frequently run short-term projects where teams formed, and then broke up at the end. Furthermore, we frequently did collaboration with external groups (particularly when we were collaborating with a client).
I really miss working there, and wish I could go back. Switching to a traditional in-office company 3 years ago, I really tried to impress upon them how badly run they are, and how they could improve their processes - but the culture was just too ossified and toxic. People have to want to change, and the people I have worked with since then just don't want to, and they're comfortable with the inefficiencies, and enabling of toxic team members. Don't get me wrong, we have some really smart coders, but as team-mates, they're hell to work with.
That said: I don't really want to go back to the office, even if it helps smooth out projects with my passive-aggressive team mates. I'd rather tough it out until I can find my way into a better employer with a sane work environment, and if that's 100% remote, that's cool.
Not the parent but I actually have a lot more flexible time at the moment because I'm not traveling and I'm just dipping in and out of virtual events rather than attending them.
>Those of you who think that remote-work-by-default would be a good thing, can I ask how your companies are handling career progression and collaboration, as well as mentorship of junior developers?
Frankly, my employer sucks-ass at this anyway. So no real difference. I suspect there are a LOT of small-time employers that are like this.
I've worked at other companies where they do much better at collaboration and even have formal mentorship programs (Lockheed-Martin). Yes, I very much miss working for those companies, but given that I've relocated since then, it's really not an option.
Your concerns are valid. I think this is really an opportunity to get intentional about networking and learning within your company. Everyone else is presumably in the same boat, so if I was early in my career I would focus on becoming the best remote networker and learner possible.
Most people will just go with the flow and not really adapt intentionally to the situation so in some ways you may be able to actually stand out more than normal with less effort.
I feel like making a career change to teaching as well. But the horror stories I hear about how hostile parents are towards teachers, and the fact that I'd take a pay-cut to about 1/3 of what I'm making have prevented me from considering it seriously.
I'm working towards my promotion to Senior engineer right now. My manager and I have weekly video-call one on ones, discussing my progress.
I'm also mentoring a new hire, fresh from college. He's kicking ass and it's going really well. We mostly talk over slack, but we also do weekly video calls, or ad-hoc when he's stuck on something.
I'm not saying it's as good at this as it was in-person, but we find ways to make it work.
Remember, the goal is to find the best solution possible, not to discount any solution that doesn't have 100% coverage of the old solution. We may lose ground in some respects in order to gain it in many more.
This is a valid concern, but I don't think WFH affects it much. A company that values employee career progression and collaboration will do so regardless of work arrangement. most of the companies I've worked for haven't been very effective at managing any sort of career progression.
Some companies will force return to the office, some companies won’t. Then all the people complaining about one or the other will have to switch employers. There will be some grumbling but then we will get a long-term nonrandomized comparison of remote vs in-office companies.
I don't think I have worked in an office this disgusting before in my life, I would have left. I live in a tropical country where people are clean and care about hygiene which probably has a lot to do with it because otherwise you just end up having roaches everywhere. I get the sense people higher in the northern hemisphere get away with a lot of disgusting stuff because they don't get infested with roaches and flies right away.
Oh, you're right. But when you have to cycle to get to work whether you want to or not, its easier to get that exercise in.
I'm not a leisure cyclist. I don't dress up in spandex and ride an expensive bike. In fact, I have difficulty containing my derision for leisure cyclists. I know that the equipment they use has utility, but it also signals: I don't have to ride a bike. I have an expensive SUV at home, and I didn't lose my drivers license to a DUI.
If anything, I would think “i didn’t lose my license to a DUI but I like to get some cardio” is a good thing, and any derision should be aimed at people who actually did endanger themselves and others by driving under the influence. I am very confused by your attitude.
The information it signals is fine. I like people without DUIs who are getting cardio too. What I don't like is the signalling. I come from a poor neighborhood. The signalling is tightly wrapped up in class attitudes. Frankly, its also something that poor people can't afford to participate in. And I believe it also gets in the way of greater acceptance of bicycling as commuting.
I remember several years ago, my work place had a "bike to work day". The gear and getups on display looked like a parade of peacocks, and certainly had very little to do in spirit with biking to work.
Perhaps it also irks me that these leisure cyclists will say crap about my cheap bike ... as I pass them on the road.
What? How did you get around to such an explicit and unfounded gate-keeping of cycling?
Cycling is only 'good' if it has the purpose of commute? Cycling is only 'good' if you have a cheap bicycle? Sorry to be this direct, but this is utter nonsense!
I do not have an expensive SUV at home, I don't even own a driver's license, and I don't own a super expensive bike either, but I still go out in lycra to use my road bike as a training utility (almost) every day.
Why is it that we as cyclists have to gate-keep each other at every step and corner? Both hating on cyclists in general and and gate-keeping in cycling itself is stupid and should not exist, let's just embrace cycling whether we are on a super expensive road bike or a cheap mountain bike we bought second-hand.
In a post complaining about gate-keeping in cycling--that leisure cycling reinforces the idea that there is only kind of cycling that is totally above board, not sketchy--I get criticized for gate keeping. Maybe instead, gear head cyclists should introspect more on their hobby and how it reinforces class barriers.
Is it possible that maybe, just maybe, people dress in spandex to ride because that's what they've found works best for them, and not because they want to make you feel insecure about your your bike or your clothing or that you should get off the road? What you're saying is analogous to saying that because there are people who can't afford nice clothes you should dress as cheaply as possible, otherwise someone might feel that you're gatekeeping being dressed out in public.
As a fairly experienced road cyclist, I honestly don't care in the least what people ride or how they dress, I only care that they don't act stupid things around me. At the most I might compliment someone on their speed and that's about it.
I cannot speak for you, but there are consequences to making cycling a specialized activity that is only respectably done for leisure and with the proper equipment and clothing. There is a symbol economy here that I feel you are just not willing to contemplate.
>There is a symbol economy here that I feel you are just not willing to contemplate.
Okay, so let's see. I go out for a ride in shorts and I get a saddle sore. I look online and see that wearing cycling shorts prevents chafing, so I buy a pair and I don't get sores anymore. Exactly what am I signalling? That I have enough money to buy cycling shorts? I'm not really signalling that, it's just that I have no way to wear the shorts without making it plainly obvious that I'm wearing them.
But fine, I don't want to "signal" that, so what are my options? I have to stop going on long rides that would give me sores because someone might feel bad that they can't afford my cycling shorts? Should I also get the cheapest possible bike I can find? Should I just walk everywhere barefoot in whatever rags I can find in a dumpster?
Seriously asking, what do you want? It seems you're not asking for a world without poverty, but rather a world where everyone lives like they're poor, even if they don't have to. Hopefully I completely misunderstood what you meant.
>making cycling a specialized activity that is only respectably done for leisure and with the proper equipment and clothing
"Respectably". Look, man, honestly: people do not give a toss about your bike or what you wear. When I'm out in traffic I have enough on my mind trying not to get killed to look if there's anyone plodding along on an old beater bike in shorts and a t-shirt to make fun of. Just do your thing and let other people do their thing. You're like those guys who get insecure at the gym because they see the buff guys bench press 70 kg instead of focusing on their own routine.
I've never had a DUI. But I come from a neighborhood with many problems. I see many things.
Maybe leisure cyclists should spend more time critiquing their own culture a bit more. Have a little more introspection into how their hobby affects other people, reinforces class barriers.
I am having a hard time following what you are trying to communicate. Apparently some one performing an activity cause it is leisure / you come from a poor neighborhood / they can afford nice(r) things, invites your derision. Did I understand you correctly? I am not sure how those factors are related but apparently they are to you.
Must be hard to find someone / something which escapes your contempt.
I expected defensiveness when I said what I did. Its also what I got. After all, no one likes to hear that the groups they belong to are the object of ridicule, contempt or derision, or that some one might think that their hobby is a problem; it might come as a short of shock that other people might think that way about them. Get over it.
It is not simply a matter of some people getting to do what they enjoy. It is the system of symbols tied to a specific activity. Everyone likes to ride bikes, poor, middle class, and rich. How do the middle class and rich make sure that no-one mistakes them for the kind of person who cannot afford a car? By the price of the bike, and all the specialized equipment they use along with it. Of course that equipment has practical utility--no one says that it doesn't--but that equipment is playing another, probably more important role as a signal of status (if you don't believe me, go biking with your cyclist buddies wearing jeans and riding $400 bike.)
So why is it a problem? Because it creates an environment that is not positive, possibly even dangerous, for other cyclists who cannot afford to, or are not willing to, participate in that cycling economy. It isn't really that complicated. Let me put it another way. Who do the police stop when riding through the neighborhood. The cyclist on his or her expensive bike, wearing their expensive equipment, that practically scream: I'm participating in a lifestyle activity? Or the cyclist on a cheap bike, wearing jeans and a t-shirt? Maybe with the wrong skin color. The answer quite obviously is the second.
Do you feel the same way about people that wear cleats for soccer? Or should they just tough it out in dress shoes? Like i get you read it as some sort class signaling, but i think that says more about you than the person wearing it.
Seriously cycling kit can be super cheap and makes a huge difference in comfort.
An immediately visible purpose. Saving for your retirement is important, as well, but spending money on food (which you need) is still more fun.
Also, cycling on your commute forces you to do so. For your health, cycling a tour "tomorrow" is just as fine. But it does not serve well as a motivator. Cycling to work, on the other hand, forces you to do that now.
Yes, exactly; it's completely up to you. Having exercise as part of your commute means that you don't get to put it off because you're busy with work, or you've got chores to run, or you don't feel like it, and then a few days go by and you've lost the habit.
Exactly! You can go both ways with this: at my house, I have exercise equipment, up to and including a barbell and plates. If I feel like grinding out some sets real quick, I can. There is absolutely no comparison to working in an office.
Chin up bar, dumb bells, etc, etc. Just too much to have at an office.
And the mention of the kitchen in the post is spot on too - it's just way too convenient to have my full kitchen at home for a quick smoothie. Some projects at my job don't even have a refrigerator for Pete's sake!
For everyone that complains about interacting with colleagues. I feel that this can be addressed by having managers do periodic offsite meet-ups.
However there are those people that comes to the office to talk all day, and honestly, for everyone else's productivity, it's better they work from home.
My boss on a project roped me into hobby chat as I was taking a five minute break to stretch my legs. He turned it into 40 (!) minutes of non-work chit chat.
I don't want to be unfriendly, but I'm at work to get shit done because I'm getting paid. If someone wants to talk hobbies, we can do that another time.
>My boss on a project roped me into hobby chat as I was taking a five minute break to stretch my legs. He turned it into 40 (!) minutes of non-work chit chat.
I've had this happen in the past with managers doing reviews. While in these cases I've usually enjoyed the conversation and been at least as guilty as them as derailing the focus, it's still time where I could be doing work instead of discussing common interests/experiences with them. It's not like we're ever going to hang out outside of work so us discussing local shows we both were at two decades ago, or our morel hunting success this year, or what variety of potatoes we're planting, is just taking us both away from work (sure, sometime that is needed just to get in a different headspace, but the shareholders probably don't care about that).
Pandemic is the only thing preventing organized lunch with coworkers. Nothing about wfh prevents it - just agree on a place and time.
Internet is a problem, but a solvable one - assuming you are in the US, we need competition for ISPs. I had ATT fiber for a while and it was for all practical purposes as good as office (symmetric gigabit).
Cycling has been covered :)
Separation - door closed to the space I work in works great for me. When I didn’t have that, putting everything away and leaving the work space for a few hours did the trick - it’s all in mental discipline.
It would require a commute longer than that of going to the office. An average employee has already organized their life around the necessity of commuting to the office. Office is probably a central location.
Most workers will be found within a circle of the tolerable commute time (isotropy assumption). Let for simplicity assume that all workers live at the same distance R from the office, and are distributed uniformly along that circle. The angular distance between any two employees is distributed uniformly in [0, pi]. Chord length is R 2 sin (theta/2). Integrating, we calculate the average distance between two employees: 4R/pi > R.
But in practice it is will happen less frequently, and will be a longer commute for most. Not least because many people live in the suburbs, but work in places where places to eat are nearby.
On the plus, many more lunches with spouse and children.
Before the pandemic it was hard enough to get people to stick around for a few hours after work to grab a beer. I can't imagine having people drop what they are doing for over an hour just to have a half hour lunch in a central spot. Adult coworkers do not drop everything in front of them for a short good time like college friends would have.
Sounds like those coworkers weren’t really looking to socialize and had other priorities.
But again, it’s being setup as a false choice - if it’s important to your orgs culture all you need to do is setup pre-arranged times for it, much like you pre-arrange a working schedule and have expectations on when people are in the office. It’s just not every day.
The absolute best thing about WFH: naps whenever I need it. No more slogging through the post-lunch mid-afternoon slump. I take a 15 minute nap and am good to go for the rest of the afternoon. Also, early meetings at 6~7AM scheduled to work with European coworkers can be followed by a short nap afterwards as well. This has done wonders for my energy throughout the day.
I mean, "working 12 hour days, six days a week" - "naps after lunch" = "in the office 12 hours a day, six days a week, but only working 11 hours a day."
The dedicated space is the problem. Where can you go that is quiet, and that if you snore, you don't bother those around you? I used to skip out to my car for a nap in order to fulfill those two requirements.
- my commute: I cycled into work, and the daily exercise was great- my commute: I cycled into work, and the daily ride was sometimes a grind, in cold or wet weather. And it takes a lot of time
I too used to bike in to work, but since the pandemic, I've replaced that commute ride with riding on my own (which is nicer than the commute was since I can stick to off road paths and not ride the busy roads near work). But now that I'm full time remote, I have another option -- I have a spinning bike, so when the weather is bad, I can ride indoors.
I used to run quite a bit but my knees can't take it anymore, biking (so far) is fine. Based on family history, there's probably knee surgery in my future, but for now I'm fine with biking.
As a WFH advocate, I totally support you having the option to work from the office. A lot of people really like the office and have been having a really bad time this past year and you should totally go back.
We just want the choice, too!
Almost no WFH advocates are asking to force everyone to WFH. They just want the option to do what works best for themselves. The people pushing to return to the office, however, tend to want to force everyone back to the office. That’s what we’re complaining about.
I like WFH. But I also feel like it would be nice to go in occasionally. Some things are just easier that way. But my commute is 40 minute bike ride, or 15 min car ride. Not like the hour commute I used to have in Los Angeles.
"Almost no WFH advocates are asking to force everyone to WFH."
*raises hand* the hybrid model of WFH is likely to revert to everyone back in the office as people realise that those that go into the office have an advantage over remote employees via side of desk conversations, building rapport with management and the general perception that those in the office are "working harder".
I think the option of being in-office does not have to be incompatible with having remote workers not be disadvantaged, but I think it might be the result of 'doing nothing', if that makes sense. The default option, if you will. Explicitly stating that remote workers are first-class citizens along with the infrastructure to make that come true I think is doable.
Regarding communication, I find I actually communicate with people more when remote than not. Walking over to someone's desk is pretty distracting, while firing a quick message and waiting for when they're free has nearly zero cost. Plus with video chat we can share both our screens at the same time so we can see what the other person sees, which is very valuable for diagnosing problems that only happen to one person. I can't videochat at the office because the noise will absolutely disturb my other colleagues, but it's trivial at home. It's almost like having infinite quiet isolated meeting rooms that you don't have to reserve in advance.
Covid WFH is a real issue for our new developers. Especially the ones who are fresh out of college. They're missing out on so much institutional knowledge transfer. Especially the kind of monkey-see-monkey-do experience you need to build confidence using tools such as git.
They're also hesitant to ping coworkers and ask for screen sharing time because they can't sense if the more senior developers are working on something. Mentorship has also been difficult when the mentor and mentee cannot work side by side.
Management is looking into alternatives, such as having volunteers come into the office on a rotating basis.
> Covid WFH is a real issue for our new developers
I'm seeing this across the board. Learning curves are shallower. Matt Levine commented on it with respect to the Goldman Sachs B.S.:
"...it's usually that 100 hours of work for a first year analyst is probably closer to 80 hours of work for a second year analyst. But first years aren't learning as quickly working remotely, so the time isn't being shaved down, it's just staying at 100 hours a week."
For sure. The job I had during March 2020 was difficult because my boss came off as unwelcoming to questions at points (even in the office I could see him open my slack messages and ignore them), which made working much more difficult when you're adapting to new systems. Thankfully, I had some great coworkers who were very welcoming and helped me a lot. If there is anything I learned from that, it's that being welcoming and open to questions from a coworker is extremely important. Sometimes it's easy to get frustrated with a coworker, but being able help them kindly is such a huge skill I will continue to appreciate and reciprocate.
Interesting...I'm not a fan of read receipts and typing indicators for messaging applications for reasons like this. If I need to craft a lengthy reply, it could take a day depending on the schedule. If someone never replies though when it is the de-facto-company messaging platform, that is highly problematic.
A coworker even mentioned how anxiety-inducing typing a lengthy reply is that involves some lengthier research.
It seems to me that the issues you raised could be addressed through simple technological solutions or better management, assuming your company actually wants to embrace remote work.
New hires afraid to ask for help? Make it clear that it's part of their job. Developers need to see another developer's screen? Screen share over Zoom. Multiple employees don't know how to use a tool? Provide a one-hour presentation. Rinse. Repeat.
If the senior developers are grumbling about not wanting to be in the same room as their coworkers, I wouldn't be surprised if the junior devs feel nervous about asking for a few minutes of their time.
It is the job of senior devs to make new employees feel like part of the team.
Even worse when you're in an isolated zoom meeting with a senior dev, and they're talking trash about other developers on your team. There's constructive criticism, and there's macho posturing by fucking douchebags. Even worse when you mention it to management, and they do nothing.
In addition to this, I can wholeheartedly recommend 'screen control sharing' (maybe there's a better name for the category of software I'm referring to?) such as Tuple or Drovio. Being able to pair program with two sets of input devices for the same screen is kind of revolutionary, actually, and has been a key part of collaborating remotely for our team.
They can be solved, but they often aren't. A lot of things that happen implicitly and organically in person need to be explicitly planned and scheduley in a virtual environment.
Honestly I don't see this (and I'm currently working in a large organization onboarding many newer developers every week). It feels easier to communicate knowledge and practices via Slack and Zoom shared screen sessions than it would be trekking around some cube-farm to find someone who probably isn't there because they're playing roller hockey in the parking lot.
I agree that this seems to be an issue for new hires that I've seen.
But I think the blame for this lies in management and the seniors on the team. If a fresh out of college grad feels hesitant to ping a coworker then that coworker is doing something wrong. I'm seeing a lot of companies and teams seem to shift this blame to the WFH situation, where really it is a failure of the team to not integrate and work well together in a shifting situation.
Plenty of companies that are remote first have no issue mentoring junior engineers, so I don't see what the excuse is for companies that are not.
> the blame for this lies in management and the seniors on the team
It absolutely does. Point is a lot of industries never formalized training, instead relying on osmosis across teams. That creates a--hopefully temporary--disadvantage for new hires. Again, in some fields.
> They're also hesitant to ping coworkers and ask for screen sharing time because they can't sense if the more senior developers are working on something.
My team's solution is for one developer to just ping another when needed and if they don't reply for a while, they are busy. Don't be afraid to ask, but don't take a lack of a quick reply personally.
With Slack, whether they are currently working on something is not important. If they are busy, the message can just sit there until they have time.
It almost sounds like this has exposed flaws in co-working, where nothing gets written down, people are not inviting others to request help/collaboration, and training has to be done manually.
This is a big problem. More often than not "institutional knowledge" is short hand for "I'm too lazy to write this down, hope I don't get hit by a bus!"
People pretend like writing wasn't invented thousands of years ago.
My $BIG_CO has access to third-party online training materials for things like Git. I've shamelessly used them to learn quickly about new topics, like GraphQL. They'd be a great tool to fill the gap for junior developers. Even for mid-level developers who want to brush up.
While those are useful. I've learned so much from watching more senior developers use their tools. The things you couldn't ask about because you didn't know it existed. Productivity hacks, IDE shortcuts, custom key mappings, codebase traversal, git commands/shortcuts.
I'm not exactly in that position, but I am in the more junior side of things
In my opinion, what helped me the most is: when an issue arises, like something during an on-call, have the person resolving the issue share their screen and talk through the workflow/debugging process, to whomever is being mentored. The tools/logic/reasoning they use during a live debugging session is invaluable knowledge for incoming engineers.
I think that this is something senior devs/admins need to try and influence. I've made it a goal to actively mentor the less experienced on my team (and even some senior admins) during COVID. Sometimes I phrase this as "Check out this stupid thing I did." That lowers everyone's guard, and then you can explain how you solved an issue, or how you dealt with a stakeholder in a professional manner. If us senior folks want to have WFH, then we have an obligation to other employees to help them adjust and learn.
> They're missing out on so much institutional knowledge transfer.
What this sounds like to me is your organization isn't documenting things properly. I know, because I've run into this exact same problem on projects at my organization.
"Send me your coding standard."
"Uh, we don't have one."
"Okay, well what's your code review process for integrating changes?"
"It's not written down, I'll have to walk you through it."
"What's my tasking?"
"I'll need to sit down with you in person to discuss that."
The lack of communication skills in software people has never been more obvious than during the quarantines. It's a serious deficit that needs to be addressed. I mean, what happens when one of these people leave, either for greener pastures, something happens to them, or they just simply retire?
There’s no shortage of git training available, go send them on a day or two. I guarantee that they’ll be much better teachers than your senior engineers.
There should be no hesitation to ping via email. The recipient can respond as quickly as they're able. If they aren't busy that should ideally be within a couple minutes, and the response given will frequently be of higher quality than an off the cuff answer, since external resources can be consulted.
There are many situations in which synchronous feedback won't be possible, wfh or not. For example, when the coworker in question is in a meeting or on vacation. All developers must be able to handle this situation and avoid blockages by switching to another task or an unblocked portion of the same task. The sooner new devs learn to juggle their time and attention in this way, the better.
Not only would I not like to go back to the office described in this article, I would have left ages ago (and am lucky enough to be able to choose that).
One interesting thing about all this should-we shouldn't-we discussion about offices is that it gives everyone a bit better view - positive and negative - of how different people work lives can be.
627 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 372 ms ] threadI also have seen productivity issues between two office locations that are suddenly resolved by having someone travel to the other site for a week. Sometimes this is even followed up with an writeup about the sudden revelations gleaned from the visit.
On the other hand, I’ve also seen engineers take vacation days so they can be heads down on a project they care about. So, I’m not sure what the ideal situation is, exactly.
they can't make you put your butt in a seat!
EDIT: I've never worked at a job/office as hellish as the post describes. Better office jobs than that exist.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/31/amazon-expects-some-employee...
With all of the horror stories about their warehouses I have to imagine the offices aren't great either. Like I would expect them to be as miserable as Amazon leadership thinks it can get away with.
It depends. If you are a shareholder then it is a model company. If you have to work there, then not so much.
There's the fairly normal things like charging for lunch at the office canteen (fine, but for a big tech company this is a little different), the slightly odd things like charging for parking at their office (seems like an easy win to not bother?), and then there's the downright crappy ("your role entitles you to 4GB RAM in your laptop, even though Excel needs much more, if you want more buy it yourself").
I think there are better companies to use as role models for creating a good working environment.
While they may have been great at some point, they're largely carried by a few segments of their businesses and can no longer really fail. Google is mostly carried by their success in ads, and most of the non-ads things they pump out + the way they do it, is mediocre at best, extremely inefficient at worse. Their technological innovations are mostly meant to support these inefficiencies. Sure some stuff they do is cool, but they do a LOT of stuff. Most isn't. The same applies to all these other companies.
You'd think that the world's larges cloud provider, would have the tooling and policies in place to deal with this issue (creative inefficiencies). Because that's literally what they're asking their customers to deal with when they sign on to the concept of cloud-computing.
It's not the same for everyone.
Full disclosure: I don't really want to return to 100% office requirement either. I'm really excited to see other humans again - though I suspect we'll see a 2-3 day a week in-person expectation and then 2-3 day flex moving forward.
Now, many of those things are probably good for the business anyway, but they are nevertheless obligations that remote workers force on their colleagues in order to achieve that cleaner, "API-like" working relationship that remote workers often need to succeed independently.
It's even more stressful if some employees are gelling well and some aren't. Many remote workers feel they should be treated like contractors but given fuzzier expectations like salaried workers - I've seen this misalignment of expectations about culture destroy teams, and in an office culture transitioning from full time in office to partially remote, all of this is fundamentally caused by the "benefits" that the remote workers are receiving at the cost of their colleagues. It's absolutely not a win-win.
Intentions and planning matter too, of course.
My career was made by someone finding my resume in a trash can.
While I will give full marks for your agency and initiative if appropriate, to think ANY of us (myself and all of us included) don't have a large amount of probability/luck/circumstance involved is hilarious.
Heck, I'm a refugee from a civil-war country who came to Canada with literally nothing but a loan for the ticket; I could try to make the claim that I "made it on my own". Yet though I've certainly put in an effort, I'm extremely lucky compared to those who couldn't leave, didn't speak the language, don't have the skillset or capability, don't look or behave in career-enhancing ways, haven't been picked up by mentors and coaches, haven't moved to a country which accepts new people, with educational and business framework that's conducive to advances, haven't found or been given the same opportunities, etc. I've certainly had bad luck and obstacles and negative externalities, but I could spend all day counting things that went well too!
I mean, I agree that I don't want to necessarily go back to the office; but it's with full view of how lucky & privileged I am. Even on very granular level, even with decisions I've made and career I've chosen and skillset I've developed - I have colleagues with same skillset and position and broadly similar projects, which have not switched to remote nearly as much as my project has. That alone is luck/circumstance/beyond my control.
The OP to which I replied implied that ONLY their agency mattered; I disagree with that sentiment vehemently. This is not to say that agency that does not matter - I'm not a fatalist and certainly enjoy my personal freedom and take personal responsibility :)
Anyways, any argument down playing a situation is futile, let's just agree that every one is in a different situation and the best is to analyze case by case
I think a lot of people who have worked remotely for the first time due to COVID have a misleading impression of what remote work is. In normal times you have ample options to be able to work in an environment with other people if that's what you want. You also have the option to spend the time you save on commuting doing other non-work social activities.
While people say "oh just move somewhere else outside the city", unfortunately that means i need to now buy/maintain a car on top of everything else. Then commute into the city to be social with my friends group, or to do physical activities.
Neither of those things appeal to me, and since our work is strongly leaning to switching to be fully remote, it is kind of frustrating. A bunch of coworkers are very much just move to a city where you can buy a house! That is what i did. Or even worse a lot of people who are just "buy a house!", and are completely ignorant of how insane the housing prices have become.
Honestly the end result is probably just going to lead to me finding employment at a company that still has the ability to work onsite. A few of my like mininded coworkers pitched the idea that we could rent a small office area for people like us, and were promptly shot down by management.
I've loved it so far, being able to be around family more and take care of them and just be around.
If full-time remote becomes more the norm, I hope people are able to take the opportunity to be closer to family and friends.
Not to mention that a pandemic is not an accurate reflection of what real remote work looks like.
Anecdotally, the people I know reluctant to go back to the office have some combination of lovely homes into which they've put care, terrible offices reflecting zero care or empathy and/or introversion, sometimes to the point of social anxiety. (Stark minority in the third, but a life changer for them.)
Offices don't have to have terrible meal options. Nice homes can be chosen close to work, thereby negating commute. And co-workers don't have to be inept to the point of constantly interrupting your work flow.
There will always be a section of the population happier and more productive working from principally home. (Though for how long we can command a wage premium remains to be seen.) But I suspect, if offices were a bit more desirable and city center housing a bit more affordable, that slice would narrow quickly.
Nope. Largely for this reason. And when I'm in the Bay Area, I'm strategic about when I travel, to where and for whom.
My point is that the hesitance to go back to the office is not something fundamental. It's rooted in a variety of personal and environmental factors that can and do change. Targeting those factors, directly or indirectly, personally or through policy, has not been a conversation I've heard of.
And in large parts of the rest of the country, it's illegal to put homes close to work.
Where I work is on the edge of an office campus on the edge of a suburb of Seattle. By city ordinance, virtually no housing is allowed anywhere near where I work. If you live in the same municipality as this office and work at it, your only choice to get there is a twenty-minute drive (with pre-pandemic traffic levels). There is no local bus service that goes from the rest of the town to the office park. Bus service from Seattle to this office park exists, however, so I live in Seattle.
"Just live close to work" is a physical impossibility for so many people, and not solely because they want the stereotypical standalone house with a picket fence. My family has zero interest in that, yet there's no housing anywhere near where I work. What little exists is largely short-term corporate rentals and AirBnBs.
When we've lived in other places, the dynamic is the same. Office parks in the suburbs or all clumped together in a large downtown, with housing as far as you can get from them.
This is, in my opinion, one of the few things Amazon did right: plopping its office campus in the middle of a very mixed-use area with rental apartments and condominium units for ownership, shops, restaurants, parks, and so on. (Of course, after having run out of land there, now they're building traditional office towers in the suburban downtown with virtually no housing to speak of. And yes, it is sky-high expensive to live near Amazon because that's basically the only mixed-use office park in the whole county.)
Must be specific to your suburb. I can look out the window of my downtown Seattle office straight into the windows of the condo complex across the street. As for the suburbs, having passed by innumerable times, the north edge of Microsoft's main campus is directly across the street from apartments and rowhomes.
I was wondering if someone would mention Microsoft in a reply.
Yes, there are apartments near there, but Redmond has the same failing as most other suburbs in the area: housing stock woefully inadequate for the number of people working there, and ordinances that artificially restrict building any more. Microsoft's campus is also adjacent to the Bellevue city limits, where residents on the other side of Bel-Red have fought vociferously against new housing for decades.
Meanwhile, SR 520 is a mess all the way back to the 405 interchange (and beyond, some mornings). After the much-vaunted light rail arrives, that station will serve fewer residences than the one in Angle Lake.
My point is that lots of people just throw out "well, live near where you work" as a panacea to life's commuting and office ills. Under our current idea of what counts as zoning and land use, it's not possible for any more than a small sliver of people to do that. So we have a choice: change how we do land use, change how we work with offices, or both.
I have worked at various tech companies since the 90s, am by no means rich but I've have always lived somewhere decent that's within 15 minutes drive of work.
Before the pandemic, certain employers had to pay a premium for real estate and a premium for talent in prime locations. The former no longer looks justified. That doesn't really give employee or employer any leverage. The latter, which was built on scarcity of accessible talent and the concentration of high-paying jobs in prime locations, however, solely reduces employees' leverage.
One of the barriers to this shift was the massive cost of installing remote-working infrastructure. Financially, technically and culturally. That's now done. How this shakes out, whether it results in lower prices for customers or better returns to shareholders or higher take-home pay for employees, remains to be seen.
While this always sounds good, in my experience it rarely amounts to anything. A company I used to work for tried to make "hacks" and "hackathons" etc happen. People did make hacks, but they remained as hacks. Products were finished just like any other product is finished: as a result of hard, dedicated work.
Not a very bold move for the world's largest cloud provider.
I take that point but let me counter that there is presumably a sliding scale here between "traditional office space is redundant" and "when the dust settles everyone will be back at their cubicles". The majority of people, and the companies they work for, are probably somewhere in the middle. However, even if Amazon are 100% convinced their office space is now redundant, it is probably, from a game theory type point of view, not in their best interests to publicly declare that position. Because to do so would only weaken the value of their existing office spaces.
Yup. I'm wondering how many people are taking advantage of the tools available to them. I've seen remote workers be online in a video chat room so you could "stop by and pitch an idea." This was well over a decade ago.
Those old school managers you mention are the ones I find most likely to stick with things like audio only teleconference, even when there are things like shared whiteboards/documents available, and then they'll talk to slides they didn't send out over email. Incredibly frustrating.
I don't think this needs to be lost. It just needs to be done more deliberately now if it is desired.
Remote work basically tosses out anything extra beyond your tasks as nothing happens naturally. You then get to craft what you want.
The company he’s describing is severely broken if everything he’s describing is true. Most of what he describes are not normal office problems. Some of them are even health and safety violations. Working from home will only distance him from those problems, but it can’t fix an inherently broken company that doesn’t care about employees. He should be searching for another remote job ASAP
Please do not try to launder him into FAANG! Passing someone to HR for interviews _certainly_ wouldn't be a way to help a call center worker :)
Nope, definitely not a call center. In fact only team leads and higher have phones.
> someone on HN needs to hire this guy,
I wish. GED + 15 years doing a job that doesn't translate to much of anything else doesn't help one's jobs prospects sadly.
Anyway, I worked industrial/mechanical jobs in that area back in the day and about my coworkers often wondered, "do you live like this at home?" Now I write software in a different part of the country and rarely (but no never) brush up against such problems. Hopefully, you can continue with your WFH and not be bothered with it, either.
Anyway, best of luck with your current work situation and may it only improve.
I was told to suck it up and do at least 50+ hours (35h paid) when working at temps over 42c (110f). Both are illegal here, they don't care, they will always find a poor sucker in a dire situation needing the job.
I hope you left that shithole company and glassdoored their management hard.
I hope you meant reported to regulators
Companies will be fined for this kind of environment and the office will be closed if things aren’t improved. You can’t choose to not care.
It's all a matter of priorities.
If caring means you lose your job, yeah, you're not gonna care.
And losing your job in the USA means: hunger, homelessness, no internet, less chance of being hired with unemployment record, assumption that you did something terrible, low/no medical, etc.
For many, especially those whom can't save a nest egg of appreciable value (6 months out of work kind), then it's better to STFU, apply elsewhere, and THEN make complaints.
But even in the US I would assume that companies aren’t just allowed to break the laws regarding work environment. Isn’t there some control visits, some way of reporting a company?
We have a legal system that greatly benefits rich people (companies are legally people).
Unions have the lowest numbers in our history.
Laws in different states like "Right to work" and similar kneecap workers rights.
And worst is the "gig work" which pays sub-minimum wage of 7.25$/hr or $2.35 for restaurant server work (and the min wage hasnt increased since 2009).
But if you're in software, it's a good life. Usually.
If your name comes out, you might just loose your job, and most people in that situation aren't going to be able to pursue legal action regarding retaliation or the like unless they get lucky finding the right lawyer. Or, you could potentially cause the company to go under/get shut down (rightly so) which equally leaves you seeking a new job.
HOWEVER in many states, and the further republican/red it is, the more onerous it is to be granted it. It'd be a whole different story if it were really employment insurance". Much of the time, it's "unemployment insurance after 6-12 weeks if the systems to register you actually work, and you arent excluded for inane reasons, and you aren't later excluded for $reasons". And hope you can survive on what you have currently in the bank for the SLOW state procedures to give you a ruling.
Turns out, the state doesn't want to pay out just as much as insurance companies don't want to pay out.
And to counter your narrative, I've seen the state point at unemployed people the local state park as a temp job. When they took it (else they lost benefits), the temp job ended and were excluded from filing for unemployment since they knowingly took a temp job.
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-states-unemployment-insu...
For example, an employer can slowly ratchet up requirements at work to the point where they can document an employee is not performing, terminate them, and the employee is not eligible for unemployment benefits. (This benefits the employer by keeping their unemployment insurance premiums low).
Also, unemployment benefit amounts vary greatly by state. They are a pittance in the vast majority of the states, especially if you consider most people don't have the cheapest possible lease/mortgage, and they can't just move out of where they live the week after they are terminated.
https://savingtoinvest.com/maximum-weekly-unemployment-benef...
There was a temporary supplement of unemployment benefits by the federal government due to COVID, but that is exceptional, and those are gone now.
Also, the process is the punishment. You should talk to people who had issues or who aren't proficient with the online applications how much of a pain it is to resolve issues with unemployment benefits over the past year. You have to call the minute the office opens up in the morning, and if you don't get in the hold queue immediately, you are told to call again the next day by the automated message. I know for a fact that this is still happening today, a year+ since COVID started.
Edit: I just tried Washington state's unemployment phone call line (open 8AM to 4PM). It's 9:07AM, and after 2m20s of various prompts on the phone, you are informed that "All agents are currently busy, call back at a later time". So imagine you have kids to take care of, jobs to look for, and you have to spend your time repeatedly calling the phone number, wait 2m20s each time to be told to call later. Your only chance is really to call at 7:59AM and hope you get through to the hold queue. If not, then your benefits are delayed one more day and you try the next day. As an American, it's embarrassing to me.
Obviously Covid is an extreme special case at the division of unemployment
And a large employer will be deterred by lawsuits, but smaller employers might have nothing to lose and/or the employees will be low wage and not in a position to deal with lawsuits and whatnot and have bigger things to worry about.
https://blog.dol.gov/2021/01/11/unemployment-benefits-answer...
Additionally, in most states you petition for unemployment and then generally have to prove you are eligible. All it takes is one spiteful manager to create a paper trail that you were let go with cause, and in most jurisdictions renders you ineligible. Then it becomes your word against theirs unless you have your own proof to fight back with.
As for low level... I guess you have never lived in smaller cities/towns in Europe then. People know each other and afford those they know “courtesy” of a heads up. Word spreads, etc. From there, you are only one step away from someone retaliating against you. The kicker is that those involved might not even really understand this to be somewhat corrupt behavior.
An office on the property of an international airport. Our maintenance hanger happens to be behind our parking lot and immediately on the other side of it is an active runway.
If you work at an airport, not in the terminals, you get used to smelling aviation fuel/jet exhaust.
As far as the indoor temperatures, it's a leased building and the HVAC is just inadequate (my guess is when the HVAC was designed, the building probably wasn't largely an open office). The front of the building the HVAC works great, but it still has walls and doors blocking it from where the bulk of the staff is.
The algae in the pex tubing coming off of the water filter is because, for some reason, there's a random tube coming off that just terminates which allows some water to not get circulated. The chalky white of the water is just pure hard water, if you put some water in a dark coffee mug and let it sit for a few hours then dump it out and let it dry the inside will have a noticeable white film. This will rapidly build up day after day and actually start to flake off from thermal shock.
>Some of them are even health and safety violations.
They aren't. You might think they are, but they aren't. If they were, any hanger or warehouse at any significantly sized airport would have long since been shut down. Yes, I'm sure there is some unacceptable level that once measured can have legal action taken but I'd bet my kidney that we aren't anywhere near those exposure levels. It's not like a turbine is backed up 3 feet from our door, with the doors wide open, spewing exhaust. That doesn't mean you can't smell it though, you can smell jet exhaust at considerable distances not unlike diesel exhaust from larger vehicles.
Many on HN are accustomed to nice offices with a bunch of perks or remote work, but for a lot of us we work in conditions like this (or far worse) and it's just life. We have it much better than our people working at our sort facilities, they're exposed to the elements with minimal HVAC for example.
When I was 18 I worked at a cemetary, I had to wear a "backpack" full of diesel for a weed eater/whacker and trim weeds for hours at a time with no shade, then dig graves and cut grass with no shade. I'd go home sunburnt and smelling like diesel frequently, even getting sun poisoning at one point. My current job is so much better than that job 18 years ago, but it's also a far cry from what I saw a Y Combinator and Open AI a couple of years ago when I was visiting someone and I imagine that's how a lot of tech offices are like give or take some perks and creature comforts.
I don’t know where you live, but I can assure you that what you’re describing is not “just life” in most developed countries. You’re not describing a normal office.
Offices like you describe continue to exist because employees put up with it. The tech job market is very hot right now. I would strongly encourage you to explore your options. What you’re describing is not normal or acceptable.
You don’t need to move to a Google type company with unlimited office budgets. Most companies are smart enough to know they need to address things like broken HVAC or not enough microwaves or unclean bathrooms by spending the relatively tiny amount of money to address the problem. It’s literally cheaper to address these issues than to lose good talent over such easily addressable frustrations.
When you move to a company that treats employees decently, you’ll find that you also get along with coworkers better because everyone is not already miserable and dreading their jobs.
It is 'just life' the world that we get in tech is significantly different than what most people experience in a workplace.
They have one guy per floor responsible for cleaning four large restrooms, vacuuming, dumping trash cans. The one who does my floor is a lazy idiot. The cleaning company tolerates this because they pay crap wages; they save their best employee for the 4th floor where the VPs and higher work. Everyone else gets a shitty bathroom. Once, a dude had explosive diarrhea in a stall. A year later, there were still shit stains on the wall...
Don't be surprised at how cheap even big successful business can be.
Yeah, OSHA recommends 76F as the maximum indoor temperature [0]. And there's indoor air quality guidelines too. It's not difficult to file a complaint [1], and I'm pretty sure any reasonable complaint is checked out. Even if the employer isn't fined, having an OSHA investigator come by will probably lead to some changes.
It also seems possible that an office with obvious jet exhaust fumes will be out of compliance with the fire marshal, who's more than capable of putting a chain and padlock on the building entrance until the problem is fixed.
[0] https://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_document?p_tab...
[1] https://www.osha.gov/workers/file-complaint
Our AC went out (In las vegas - it gets to 120+ some days in summer) and they brought in portable A/C units that were louder than the planes.
Then they took our bottled water away.
While these issues aren't normal they are out there and they are replicated by employers who don't value the sanity of their workers. Yes I got out of there. Yes I'm working from home now and agree with practically everything on this list. Especially the bathroom.
In this case, and depending on the country, working at this office is illegal. The assumption that working from home is better is a little naive. It’s a result of a terribly company, who will manage to make working from home equally terrible in the long run.
Source: Helped someone one weekend re-roof their house that was probably 3 miles from Logan Airport in Boston. You'd get waves of fumes slowly drifting down from the big heavy jets taking off one after another after another.
There are a lot of bad companies out there, and it's all well and good to say "find another job", but not everyone has that luxury.
That point was clearly about his home
"Working from home I:
...
• Breathe jet exhaust..."
Kidding aside, there's just not enough jobs in "not broken" offices for all the workers. I haven't seen an office which isn't broken in some way, even though I haven't seen many. And suggestion of looking for another job is just patronizing. If a person could done it easily, he would have done it long ago.
Not to mention the reasons towards the end started to become quite a stretch.
I’ve found working from home lonely and isolating, and am badly missing the structure of getting up, showered and going into an office!
For people at a certain stage of life, I’m sure working from home is great, but have some empathy for those of us it sucks for.
I know what you're talking about though, my wife has friends that are wfh now and that, along with the general isolation of the pandemic, is having a serious effect on them.
I think when this is over there will be various compromises that will probably not work out very well. If WFH works for you then it's great, if it doesn't then it's miserable. There's not a lot of middle ground.
a good compromise leaves everybody mad. - Calvin and Hobbes
Nobody seems to discuss this, but yeah for me working from home means working from my bedroom, the only room I can really work in in my small shared apartment. It definitely affects my productivity.
On the other hand, I've basically stopped getting sick. Open office plans are very bad for certain types of people, and not just those who struggle with distraction, so still a net positive for me
Non-pandemic remote work gives you more time to socialize out and about with friends and family, travel (and maybe even work there), and do all sorts of fun things to relax and recharge that we can't really do right now because of the pandemic.
I'm pro-WFH/anti-RTO simply because I want us all to have the choice. Before the pandemic it was all office, during the pandemic it's all remote, and now it feels like the pendulum is swinging all the way back to all office, instead of landing in the middle ground of individual choice.
Even that didn't last too long though, and I ended up finding another job after a few years of working from home.
- Better relationships with co-workers. I enjoyed smalltalk, getting coffee, lunch, or drinks afterwards with them. It was also easier to interact with others outside your immediate team.
- Separation of a work environment and home environment.
- If I had a question, it is more likely and quicker to get answered in person instead of over slack/email/zoom.
- Had fewer meetings
- Company dependent but we got free food and other perks.
It was more likely quicker because you felt like you could just walk to the person's desk and interrupt whatever they were doing to demand that they solve your problem.
Listen to Adam Savage [1] talk about his early career as a prop-maker. I just don't see how that sort of deep collaboration is possible remotely. As a recent graduate whose first full-time job has been full remote due to the pandemic, I'm terrified that this is going to kill my career progression, not only upwards but also laterally. I just don't have the same opportunities to 1) learn from people or 2) bump into new people as I would if we're all forced to be in the same place.
[1]: https://youtu.be/qvU5PZgSowk?t=148
Basically -- how do you think open source has been doing it since practically the 90s?
So, I don't think it's as simple as letting people choose when and how often to come to the office. I could see a hybrid 2 days local / 3 days remote model working if physical presence is mandatory on those two days.
That said, I expect this will be quite common and people are probably more willing to have a 90 minute each way commute, say, if they only have to do it once or twice a week. (That's about what I'd be to go into our Boston office. That would be lousy to do most days--as I can attest to from a prior company--but it's not that bad to do once a week especially in the nicer weather.)
This! I don't get how HN, a community of hackers who can't but be aware of FLOSS, could claim with a straight face that "remote doesn't work" in the face of things like LKML.
We pair new hires, regardless of ability, with a mentor. They have access to a full checklist of on-boarding tasks and an actively maintained Basecamp.
Perhaps the key point is that we do not have "hidden" discussions. Even the voice discussions have notes taken and recorded, and planning sessions are done via a recorded Miro board. Day-to-day project management is entirely in Basecamp and Slack. Anything in Slack that's worth noting is made into a Basecamp task for posterity.
We're a flat hierarchy, and we encourage team members to be vocal about what they want to work on. The entire team plans quarterly targets and goals.
It's, honestly, kinda awesome.
Edit: we're less than 50 people, and that makes it easier not to have a hierarchy since most features are built by one or two people.
I think there are a lot of "implicit" benefits of being in-person that remote companies need to make more "explicit" to be successful. It sounds like your company has the right idea!
To be quite sincere, I've heard this before. And it ALWAYS ends like Animal Farm. Some are "more equal" than others, especially if your company has the usual upper management.
I'm trying to find the project managers so they know I'm available and to include me on future projects. The current projects are staffed up and any change in manpower is a change request, client approval, etc.
Interns we've on-boarded, especially from non-CS background programs, all have had these kinds of issues.
It's been getting better, but I don't see how it's possible to have anything close to "real" mentor-ship schemes with full WFH. When I was interning most of learning happened not with my project but with interacting with the team and seeing/understanding what they did.
I have a sneaking feeling that the productivity boosts due to WFH mostly come from more senior devs w/ specific workstreams that are benefiting from more "head down" time, but without mentoring/training new ppl the quality hiring pool will go down over time.
Bumping into people is actually a problem, but career progression is less so, as there is a lot more time for 1-1 mentorship, pairing, etc.
The bumping into people part can be solved though, especially with occasional in person events. We’ve had whole teams not located within our area and have worked with them just fine. Being noticed is also fine - people still give presentations, do launch events, and connect with others through managers, pms, etc.
A lot of people look at in-office through the lens of entire companies or at least pretty much everyone they interact with being co-located. I, on the other hand, am on a broader team spread over about 9 time zones and, on a given day, I can be talking with people in 5 different offices plus remote/traveling. If I went into a local office pre-pandemic, there was a good chance I wouldn't run into anyone I knew.
I really miss working there, and wish I could go back. Switching to a traditional in-office company 3 years ago, I really tried to impress upon them how badly run they are, and how they could improve their processes - but the culture was just too ossified and toxic. People have to want to change, and the people I have worked with since then just don't want to, and they're comfortable with the inefficiencies, and enabling of toxic team members. Don't get me wrong, we have some really smart coders, but as team-mates, they're hell to work with.
That said: I don't really want to go back to the office, even if it helps smooth out projects with my passive-aggressive team mates. I'd rather tough it out until I can find my way into a better employer with a sane work environment, and if that's 100% remote, that's cool.
Frankly, my employer sucks-ass at this anyway. So no real difference. I suspect there are a LOT of small-time employers that are like this.
I've worked at other companies where they do much better at collaboration and even have formal mentorship programs (Lockheed-Martin). Yes, I very much miss working for those companies, but given that I've relocated since then, it's really not an option.
Most people will just go with the flow and not really adapt intentionally to the situation so in some ways you may be able to actually stand out more than normal with less effort.
I'm also mentoring a new hire, fresh from college. He's kicking ass and it's going really well. We mostly talk over slack, but we also do weekly video calls, or ad-hoc when he's stuck on something.
I'm not saying it's as good at this as it was in-person, but we find ways to make it work.
Remember, the goal is to find the best solution possible, not to discount any solution that doesn't have 100% coverage of the old solution. We may lose ground in some respects in order to gain it in many more.
On the other hand alot of the other points stand
- interacting with my colleagues, going out to lunch
- the very high-speed and reliability of being on the network wire
- dedicated work-space outside of my home where home-chores don't press on my mind while I'm trying to work
- my commute: I cycled into work, and the daily exercise was great
- a clearer separation of work and home life
Things I don't miss:
- interacting with my colleagues, when i don't want to (group office, oy)
- having my boss pop in over my shoulder (my bosses are great though)
- my commute: I cycled into work, and the daily ride was sometimes a grind, in cold or wet weather. And it takes a lot of time
- not having my work at home when I need to work late (I have a work laptop, but still)
- having the campus police officer give me the eye when they see me working at 2am
I'm considering coming in Thursday/Fridays.
This one is not like the others, it's completely up to you to have a bike ride e.g. at lunch time around the block when you WFH.
I'm not a leisure cyclist. I don't dress up in spandex and ride an expensive bike. In fact, I have difficulty containing my derision for leisure cyclists. I know that the equipment they use has utility, but it also signals: I don't have to ride a bike. I have an expensive SUV at home, and I didn't lose my drivers license to a DUI.
I remember several years ago, my work place had a "bike to work day". The gear and getups on display looked like a parade of peacocks, and certainly had very little to do in spirit with biking to work.
Perhaps it also irks me that these leisure cyclists will say crap about my cheap bike ... as I pass them on the road.
What? How did you get around to such an explicit and unfounded gate-keeping of cycling? Cycling is only 'good' if it has the purpose of commute? Cycling is only 'good' if you have a cheap bicycle? Sorry to be this direct, but this is utter nonsense!
I do not have an expensive SUV at home, I don't even own a driver's license, and I don't own a super expensive bike either, but I still go out in lycra to use my road bike as a training utility (almost) every day.
Why is it that we as cyclists have to gate-keep each other at every step and corner? Both hating on cyclists in general and and gate-keeping in cycling itself is stupid and should not exist, let's just embrace cycling whether we are on a super expensive road bike or a cheap mountain bike we bought second-hand.
In a post complaining about gate-keeping in cycling--that leisure cycling reinforces the idea that there is only kind of cycling that is totally above board, not sketchy--I get criticized for gate keeping. Maybe instead, gear head cyclists should introspect more on their hobby and how it reinforces class barriers.
As a fairly experienced road cyclist, I honestly don't care in the least what people ride or how they dress, I only care that they don't act stupid things around me. At the most I might compliment someone on their speed and that's about it.
I cannot speak for you, but there are consequences to making cycling a specialized activity that is only respectably done for leisure and with the proper equipment and clothing. There is a symbol economy here that I feel you are just not willing to contemplate.
>There is a symbol economy here that I feel you are just not willing to contemplate.
Okay, so let's see. I go out for a ride in shorts and I get a saddle sore. I look online and see that wearing cycling shorts prevents chafing, so I buy a pair and I don't get sores anymore. Exactly what am I signalling? That I have enough money to buy cycling shorts? I'm not really signalling that, it's just that I have no way to wear the shorts without making it plainly obvious that I'm wearing them.
But fine, I don't want to "signal" that, so what are my options? I have to stop going on long rides that would give me sores because someone might feel bad that they can't afford my cycling shorts? Should I also get the cheapest possible bike I can find? Should I just walk everywhere barefoot in whatever rags I can find in a dumpster?
Seriously asking, what do you want? It seems you're not asking for a world without poverty, but rather a world where everyone lives like they're poor, even if they don't have to. Hopefully I completely misunderstood what you meant.
>making cycling a specialized activity that is only respectably done for leisure and with the proper equipment and clothing
"Respectably". Look, man, honestly: people do not give a toss about your bike or what you wear. When I'm out in traffic I have enough on my mind trying not to get killed to look if there's anyone plodding along on an old beater bike in shorts and a t-shirt to make fun of. Just do your thing and let other people do their thing. You're like those guys who get insecure at the gym because they see the buff guys bench press 70 kg instead of focusing on their own routine.
Maybe leisure cyclists should spend more time critiquing their own culture a bit more. Have a little more introspection into how their hobby affects other people, reinforces class barriers.
Must be hard to find someone / something which escapes your contempt.
It is not simply a matter of some people getting to do what they enjoy. It is the system of symbols tied to a specific activity. Everyone likes to ride bikes, poor, middle class, and rich. How do the middle class and rich make sure that no-one mistakes them for the kind of person who cannot afford a car? By the price of the bike, and all the specialized equipment they use along with it. Of course that equipment has practical utility--no one says that it doesn't--but that equipment is playing another, probably more important role as a signal of status (if you don't believe me, go biking with your cyclist buddies wearing jeans and riding $400 bike.)
So why is it a problem? Because it creates an environment that is not positive, possibly even dangerous, for other cyclists who cannot afford to, or are not willing to, participate in that cycling economy. It isn't really that complicated. Let me put it another way. Who do the police stop when riding through the neighborhood. The cyclist on his or her expensive bike, wearing their expensive equipment, that practically scream: I'm participating in a lifestyle activity? Or the cyclist on a cheap bike, wearing jeans and a t-shirt? Maybe with the wrong skin color. The answer quite obviously is the second.
Seriously cycling kit can be super cheap and makes a huge difference in comfort.
Also, cycling on your commute forces you to do so. For your health, cycling a tour "tomorrow" is just as fine. But it does not serve well as a motivator. Cycling to work, on the other hand, forces you to do that now.
And the mention of the kitchen in the post is spot on too - it's just way too convenient to have my full kitchen at home for a quick smoothie. Some projects at my job don't even have a refrigerator for Pete's sake!
However there are those people that comes to the office to talk all day, and honestly, for everyone else's productivity, it's better they work from home.
I don't want to be unfriendly, but I'm at work to get shit done because I'm getting paid. If someone wants to talk hobbies, we can do that another time.
I've had this happen in the past with managers doing reviews. While in these cases I've usually enjoyed the conversation and been at least as guilty as them as derailing the focus, it's still time where I could be doing work instead of discussing common interests/experiences with them. It's not like we're ever going to hang out outside of work so us discussing local shows we both were at two decades ago, or our morel hunting success this year, or what variety of potatoes we're planting, is just taking us both away from work (sure, sometime that is needed just to get in a different headspace, but the shareholders probably don't care about that).
Internet is a problem, but a solvable one - assuming you are in the US, we need competition for ISPs. I had ATT fiber for a while and it was for all practical purposes as good as office (symmetric gigabit).
Cycling has been covered :)
Separation - door closed to the space I work in works great for me. When I didn’t have that, putting everything away and leaving the work space for a few hours did the trick - it’s all in mental discipline.
It would require a commute longer than that of going to the office. An average employee has already organized their life around the necessity of commuting to the office. Office is probably a central location.
Most workers will be found within a circle of the tolerable commute time (isotropy assumption). Let for simplicity assume that all workers live at the same distance R from the office, and are distributed uniformly along that circle. The angular distance between any two employees is distributed uniformly in [0, pi]. Chord length is R 2 sin (theta/2). Integrating, we calculate the average distance between two employees: 4R/pi > R.
On the plus, many more lunches with spouse and children.
But again, it’s being setup as a false choice - if it’s important to your orgs culture all you need to do is setup pre-arranged times for it, much like you pre-arrange a working schedule and have expectations on when people are in the office. It’s just not every day.
* The office hotties
Not a trade that I'd make.
In my office, nobody really bats an eye if someone decides that they're too sleepy to be productive and just takes a short nap.
I too used to bike in to work, but since the pandemic, I've replaced that commute ride with riding on my own (which is nicer than the commute was since I can stick to off road paths and not ride the busy roads near work). But now that I'm full time remote, I have another option -- I have a spinning bike, so when the weather is bad, I can ride indoors.
We just want the choice, too!
Almost no WFH advocates are asking to force everyone to WFH. They just want the option to do what works best for themselves. The people pushing to return to the office, however, tend to want to force everyone back to the office. That’s what we’re complaining about.
*raises hand* the hybrid model of WFH is likely to revert to everyone back in the office as people realise that those that go into the office have an advantage over remote employees via side of desk conversations, building rapport with management and the general perception that those in the office are "working harder".
Get everyone in the office for 1 or 2 days/week. When your company isn't there, another company is using the space.
I have a big house, a space just for work.
I worked with folks who didn't work from home because they simply didn't have the space to do so. I wonder how they're doing.
They're also hesitant to ping coworkers and ask for screen sharing time because they can't sense if the more senior developers are working on something. Mentorship has also been difficult when the mentor and mentee cannot work side by side.
Management is looking into alternatives, such as having volunteers come into the office on a rotating basis.
I'm seeing this across the board. Learning curves are shallower. Matt Levine commented on it with respect to the Goldman Sachs B.S.:
"...it's usually that 100 hours of work for a first year analyst is probably closer to 80 hours of work for a second year analyst. But first years aren't learning as quickly working remotely, so the time isn't being shaved down, it's just staying at 100 hours a week."
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-25/matt-l...
build tutorials for things like git
allocate hours of their week to pairing
encourage juniors to ping seniors. and encourage seniors to respond promptly in efficient ways (written communication compounds over time)
etc
New hires afraid to ask for help? Make it clear that it's part of their job. Developers need to see another developer's screen? Screen share over Zoom. Multiple employees don't know how to use a tool? Provide a one-hour presentation. Rinse. Repeat.
It is the job of senior devs to make new employees feel like part of the team.
But I think the blame for this lies in management and the seniors on the team. If a fresh out of college grad feels hesitant to ping a coworker then that coworker is doing something wrong. I'm seeing a lot of companies and teams seem to shift this blame to the WFH situation, where really it is a failure of the team to not integrate and work well together in a shifting situation.
Plenty of companies that are remote first have no issue mentoring junior engineers, so I don't see what the excuse is for companies that are not.
It absolutely does. Point is a lot of industries never formalized training, instead relying on osmosis across teams. That creates a--hopefully temporary--disadvantage for new hires. Again, in some fields.
My team's solution is for one developer to just ping another when needed and if they don't reply for a while, they are busy. Don't be afraid to ask, but don't take a lack of a quick reply personally.
With Slack, whether they are currently working on something is not important. If they are busy, the message can just sit there until they have time.
This is a big problem. More often than not "institutional knowledge" is short hand for "I'm too lazy to write this down, hope I don't get hit by a bus!"
People pretend like writing wasn't invented thousands of years ago.
In my opinion, what helped me the most is: when an issue arises, like something during an on-call, have the person resolving the issue share their screen and talk through the workflow/debugging process, to whomever is being mentored. The tools/logic/reasoning they use during a live debugging session is invaluable knowledge for incoming engineers.
What this sounds like to me is your organization isn't documenting things properly. I know, because I've run into this exact same problem on projects at my organization.
"Send me your coding standard."
"Uh, we don't have one."
"Okay, well what's your code review process for integrating changes?"
"It's not written down, I'll have to walk you through it."
"What's my tasking?"
"I'll need to sit down with you in person to discuss that."
The lack of communication skills in software people has never been more obvious than during the quarantines. It's a serious deficit that needs to be addressed. I mean, what happens when one of these people leave, either for greener pastures, something happens to them, or they just simply retire?
There are many situations in which synchronous feedback won't be possible, wfh or not. For example, when the coworker in question is in a meeting or on vacation. All developers must be able to handle this situation and avoid blockages by switching to another task or an unblocked portion of the same task. The sooner new devs learn to juggle their time and attention in this way, the better.
One interesting thing about all this should-we shouldn't-we discussion about offices is that it gives everyone a bit better view - positive and negative - of how different people work lives can be.