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Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?

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Re: Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?

#341

Post by benjaminwootton »

wokwokwok wrote: post #116
benjaminwootton wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem for us office advocates is that you travel into an empty office and sit on Zoom calls anyway. Of course we shouldn't drag you into the office just to appease us, but the experience of working together is effectively not available right now.

This is why it’s controversial. For someone working remotely, a meeting with someone remote or in an office is irrelevant. For someone working in an office, it makes their “in the office” experience irrelevant and meaningless. It is not controversial because of the people who like working remotely; it’s controversial because of the people who dont , because they force their choice on other people. You know how many p…

I even said in the second line of my two line post that it’s not fair or realistic to expect everyone to come back to the office.

My point was that the 2019 style office experience is not available (or much harder to find) even if we want it.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?

#342

Post by hardware2win »

wokwokwok wrote: post #116
benjaminwootton wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem for us office advocates is that you travel into an empty office and sit on Zoom calls anyway. Of course we shouldn't drag you into the office just to appease us, but the experience of working together is effectively not available right now.

This is why it’s controversial. For someone working remotely, a meeting with someone remote or in an office is irrelevant. For someone working in an office, it makes their “in the office” experience irrelevant and meaningless. It is not controversial because of the people who like working remotely; it’s controversial because of the people who dont , because they force their choice on other people. You know how many p…

>You know how many people have to work remotely before it has to be a zoom meeting to be inclusive?

>1.

People on site are together in conf room with lap on table so remote person can hear?

Re: Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?

#343

Post by watwut »

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #180
bodge5000 wrote: post #118

With all due respect, this is mostly my problem with the "work-from-office" (WFO for ease) crowd. Generally, the stance of the WFH crowd is that each individual should get a choice of what makes that individual happy. Very few, if any, of the WFH crowd want mandatated WFH, it would make no sense. But then the WFO crowd often says no, I don't care what makes you happy, because you being in makes me happy. That doesn't…

I'd also add that comments like this: > Now, I am fully aware that there's a low of people for whom the horror of commute doesn't make up for the gains of socializing and others that just abhor having to talk to real-life people. Then there are people who work mainly to get paid and do not care to invest themselves beyond what is necessary. Are remarkably condescending. Folks opting for a better work-life balance, wh…

> Then there are people who work mainly to get paid and do not care to invest themselves beyond what is necessary.

And then are people who are fully invested, but also aware that a lot of time in office is spend on ... other people trying to get socialization. Cause they don't build relationships outside of work, but still need to talk to people, so they drag meetings and discussions forever.

And that is not being invested more, but it is awful common. WFH greatly minimizes that. In return you get spend more time with actual friends/family.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?

#344

Post by AlwaysRock »

hirvi74 wrote: post #329
UnpossibleJim wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to hop on the train of criticism, but there are plenty of other ways to invest yourself in your career other than being a social butterfly around the coffee pot. Admittedly I'm a bit socially awkward and fully aware of my flaws, but that's part of the reason I enjoy terminal work in the first place. Commits and Slack are about as social as I was in the office, anyway and when I was social, people wished I would k…

Maybe I have some sort of Office-PTSD or something, but I make it very clear to my coworkers that we can be friendly, but we aren't friends. You don't need my cellphone number, we don't need to go grab drinks after work, etc.. I've just noticed that if you turn your back for a second, then out come the wolves. Less coffee pot talk the better as far as I am concerned. I have my friends and life outside of work, and I…

Yup. So much this. I'm friendly with folks at work. I'm not friends with people at work.

Maybe some people truly are but I suspect most people who think their coworkers are friends are pretending like that friendship wont go away rapidly when one of them no longer works for the company.

So much of OPs post is trying to get from coworkers what many get from friends.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?

#345

Post by User23 »

stingraycharles wrote: post #172
bodge5000 wrote: post #118

With all due respect, this is mostly my problem with the "work-from-office" (WFO for ease) crowd. Generally, the stance of the WFH crowd is that each individual should get a choice of what makes that individual happy. Very few, if any, of the WFH crowd want mandatated WFH, it would make no sense. But then the WFO crowd often says no, I don't care what makes you happy, because you being in makes me happy. That doesn't…

I think there are many “subcultures” (for lack of better description) within WFH and WFO. You’re describing two of them, but there’s also a group of WFH’ers that believes the whole organization should be remote as to standardize the processes to be asynchronous, and there are WFO’ers that still like to work from home one or two days a week. There’s also WFH but within the same country, WFH globally across all timezon…

It's best viewed as a continuum between nearly no control over your working environment and nearly total control over your working environment. On that continuum, WFO is clearly closer to the latter pole and WFH is clearly closer to the former pole. It's not a binary though. The best WFO experience I had was where I had, shocker, an actual office, just like I do when I WFH. I could shut the door, shut out noise and visual distraction, and get stuff done. On the other hand so-called offices today aim to replicate the experience of a high school lunchroom and are about as good a place for me to get work done. They are very close to the nearly no control pole and I and many others frankly despise them with good reason.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?

#346

Post by Ancalagon »

criddell wrote: post #314
addicted wrote: post #300

My biggest frustration with the WFH discussion has been that the vast majority of people say that the #1 (and sometimes only) reason they prefer WFH is to save time on the commute. But this has not led to any discussions on how we can actually improve the commute, improve housing policy so people can live closer to work, etc. Instead, people have simply decided that theh will WFH instead, an option which isn’t availa…

> improve housing policy so people can live closer to work Or, improve labor policy so work becomes a much smaller part of most people's lives.

Hot take this is the right line of thought. Restructure society so we work less, not so that we can work more.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?

#347

Post by distances »

bearmode wrote: post #262
BaseballPhysics wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd also add that comments like this: > Now, I am fully aware that there's a low of people for whom the horror of commute doesn't make up for the gains of socializing and others that just abhor having to talk to real-life people. Then there are people who work mainly to get paid and do not care to invest themselves beyond what is necessary. Are remarkably condescending. Folks opting for a better work-life balance, wh…

I worked out that for me, even accounting for energy bills and such, working from home full time would be equivalent to a 15% pay rise. And on top of that, I'd have 2 hours of extra free time every day. I can't understand the kind of person who wouldn't want that.

Is that just from commuting? For me the cost is 50-100€ per month depending on the cost of the public transport ticket, and that I can deduct from taxes anyway. Plus a couple of extra lunches I would buy with WFO. So basically negligible.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?

#348

Post by camgunz »

As SWEs, we're generally privileged enough to experience "work as an aesthetic choice", which is to say we can choose the way we want to work from a lot of different companies. This isn't always true though, some parameters dramatically shrink your pool (you want to make > $300k yr total comp, there's maybe a dozen companies like that, for example).

It sounds like you just need to find a company that's a bunch of extroverts who like working together. I get that part of your point is that it seems like a lot of those companies suddenly went remote and introverted, but, I don't think there's a lot to be done about that.

Alternatively, you could look for this kind of camaraderie outside of work, maybe at dev meetups, hackerspaces, or local volunteering.

---

The WFH/WFO debate reminds me a lot of code style debates where the choices are deeply personal and no one choice will make enough people happy to really "win". In these kinds of situations, I think we need to take a step back and let people choose what works for them. In the case of code style debates, that's running your own personally-configured code formatter on your local machine whenever you check something out, and having pre-commit hooks to format it in the "company" style whenever you commit something.

In the WFH/WFO debate, it sounds like the best thing to do is let people find the kind of working environment that works for them. Trying to convince people that your way is objectively best is a losing proposition.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?

#349

Post by dont__panic »

addicted wrote: post #300

My biggest frustration with the WFH discussion has been that the vast majority of people say that the #1 (and sometimes only) reason they prefer WFH is to save time on the commute. But this has not led to any discussions on how we can actually improve the commute, improve housing policy so people can live closer to work, etc. Instead, people have simply decided that theh will WFH instead, an option which isn’t availa…

On the other hand, allowing those who can WFH to do so clears up road space so that people who must WFO don't have as much traffic to deal with. When you live in a society like the USA that has already created a car-dominated dystopia, and those cars don't scale for everyone to commute at the same time without massive traffic problems... it does take some of the pressure off the system, and ought to help some of those WFO people's commutes.

I think you're right that public transit won't fare well with WFH. But it was already so bad in the USA I'm not sure it can death spiral much more.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?

#350

Post by pdntspa »

ianbutler wrote: post #317
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The closest work-related argument I've heard is that some people work better when they're free of distractions at the office. That takes us back to companies being collaborative human endeavors. One may feel they work better in isolation, but part of ones job is to interact with others, even if that's not fun. Have you worked in an open office or cubical farm? My hearing the sales guys isn't 'collaboration', it's d…

So without hopefully coming off too flippant, noise canceling headphones can solve all of that, they did for me in an open office space at least.

They don't necessarily, many prefer music through speakers and not headphones, or silence
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