Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever • Hacker News Board

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

#261

Post by webkike » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 1:01 AM UTC

stjohnswarts wrote: post #202

webkike wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, cities offer public transportation and a lot of enjoyable things to do. They were a thing before large corporations were seated there.

This is why I'm in a suburb working from home. I do not want to ever not be near a city with things to do. I grew up in a very rural area and I hated it. There is a nostalgia uptick every now for the simple life now and then and I remember how terrible it was to be around uneducated rednecks and push it from my mind.

completely agree

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

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Post by doopy-loopy2 » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 1:04 AM UTC

znpy wrote: post #98

rootusrootus wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it may be premature to celebrate the demise of the office. An awful lot of people still like them. And aside from some big names, how many companies are really looking to give up their office work? I work for a mid-size (10000 employees) software company and we are working from home for the forseeable future, but management has been very clear that they think collaboration works best in an office environment,…

> I think it may be premature to celebrate the demise of the office. I agree, but mostly because high speed internet connections aren't that widespread yet.

lol, I think it might have more to do with the fact that humans are inherently social creatures.

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

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Post by adrr » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 1:12 AM UTC

celdon25 wrote: post #247

laurent92 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hipchat memes were the main upside of the product, differenciating it from the market. They were 500x500 squares, not tiny emojimemes like in Discord or Slack. You could truely express an opinion. It was heartwarming. Then they decided that they wanted to look serious, and reduced the meme size to 32px. That’s when the product fell out of fashion, because it was just like Slack with fewer features.

IIRC Hipchat had a lot of outages when Slack was becoming popular. I'm sure there was more to it than the meme image size.

Thats why we switched from Hipchat to Slack. Slack's client for the Mac was so terrible at the time but we couldn't deal with the outages of Hipchat. I remember you could see the underlying browsers context menu if you right clicked in the original Slack app.

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

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Post by cheerlessbog » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 1:19 AM UTC

macNchz wrote: post #248

ryanSrich wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is hilarious to me as someone that has hired devs from Europe for a while now. Why compete with FAANG trying to pay new grads $300k when you can pay an experienced developer from Europe $100k? I honestly never understood it.

I’m a big remote work advocate and have worked with some amazing European engineers. That said, having worked as an engineer in the US office of a early stage startup with a European office, the 5-9 hour time difference is a not-insignificant impediment when you’re resource constrained and moving fast. Even with great communication and good management, having little overlap during the day for realtime conversations m…

It’s worked better for me in teams that work on open source. Such projects tend to be intrinsically asynchronous and conducted via email, chat etc which is what you need to make a distributed team work well.

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

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Post by cheerlessbog » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 1:22 AM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #189

cblconfederate wrote: post #162

One thing that is not often mentioned is these threads is how this is particularly beneficial for European workers. They live in cities that are already small and dense, generally don't depend on the office for their socialization, internet speeds are good (due to density probably) and family life is balanced. Plus a lot of them are already accustomed to working remotely. They 'll probably be able to compete for a lo…

Timezones are challenging between US West Coast and Europe. But, at my company, we do a lot of collaboration between US East Coast and Central Europe--which seems manageable synchronously but is probably approaching the limit where it's fairly straightforward (on a frequent basis).

What makes it truly hard (speaking from US location) is having a team in both directions. If you’re an Eastward team, or Westward team, but not attempting both, there is enough overlap that with some flexibility you can have meetings when everyone is awake.

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

#266

Post by JoshuaDavid » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 1:26 AM UTC

stjohnswarts wrote: post #210

JoshuaDavid wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're underestimating how bad the "something" people can come up with is. Think "weekly status reports to describe how you're doing on fixing a problem that was described through email, or an in-person meeting with someone, or a phone call, and never entered into a ticketing system at all". Also the mandatory fields are definitely a per-organization thing. At my org we have I think 3 mandatory fields, which…

If you don't have scripts that will fetch all your parameters and just have to fill in a couple of fields then you're doing it wrong.

I do in fact have such scripts :). Also to automatically tag my git commits with the ticket, transition the jira issues appropriately when the relevant things happen with those branches or pull requests, etc. I don't actually interact with JIRA-the-application all that much these days, but in the rare cases when I do it's because I'm doing something non-trivial, and in those cases the UI seems relatively straightforward.

... I suppose that might be the main difference between people who hate JIRA and people who find it a little bit clunky but generally acceptable: people who mostly have the baseline stuff happen automatically are fine with it, and people who spend a lot of time interacting with the web frontend in repetitive ways hate it.

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

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Post by jayd16 » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 1:33 AM UTC

summitsummit wrote: post #246

jayd16 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is no inherent advantage to "working in person." I really miss whiteboard sessions and and being able to chat without lag.

yeah, that 80ms lag for DMs to go through really cuts on productivity

I'm more referring to natural conversation in group video calls. The cross talk caused by lag can get pretty grating.

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

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Post by google234123 » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 1:35 AM UTC

doopy-loopy2 wrote: post #257

colordrops wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If self driving cars ever actually work, coupled with ubiquitous remote work, it seems to me that the major disincentives for living far away from the urban center are mostly gone. If you can sleep or working during your two hour automated commute, it would be a game changer.

You can already do that. It's called trains and buses, lol. Sitting in an enclosed space for 3 hours is still sitting in an enclosed space for 3 hours.

Buses and trains are able to privately transport on arbitrary point to point journeys now? Also an enclosed space alone seems more attractive in a psot-COVID world.

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

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Post by sushshshsh » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 1:37 AM UTC

Side rant, I'm convinced that companies who say the office helps communication are just really bad at communication.

If I send you an email with some pithy questions that you need to answer for me to complete my task, you should respond to them. If you don't respond to them, even with a "I can't help you", then you aren't hiring people who are good at communicatimg.

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

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Post by sushshshsh » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 1:39 AM UTC

e40 wrote: post #253

emddudley wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of experienced developers in the U.S. you can hire for 100k too, outside the large metropolitan areas.

Not my experience. 4 years ago I offered 3 people in the US a job. All declined it. They were looking north of $175k. All were in very low cost of living places. They would live like a king or queen on that salary there. I was offering $125k. It was a very quick conversation, too. Once they knew that, they bailed.

Hire me instead :) You just didn't poll the queue enough.