The social and economic costs borne by young people without offices • Hacker News Board

Re: The social and economic costs borne by young people without offices

#141

Post by civilized » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 2:08 PM UTC

supernova87a wrote: post #5

WFH has a huge difference in result depending on who you are, when you are (in your career), and where you are in a company (of organization). -- For the budding young developer who can't wait to show ideas to teammates and demonstrate being a go-getter by asking random questions and finding unaddressed issues to innovate on, WFH might be terrible. You're going to schedule time to fortuitously run into the senior per…

People really don't seem to think the working parent thing through. Unless there is a stay-at-home parent, commuting to an office does nothing to eliminate childcare-related disruptions of your work time. It just makes you completely dependent on institutional child care, regardless of the pandemic related risks to your family.

And what kind of lame company culture only allows the proles to come into contact with Very Important Senior Team Members via "fortuitous" in-person collisions? For God's sake, just Slack them.

IME in-person meetings are so overrated. They always end up at "yeah we should totally do these things" and nothing actually happens.

Honestly people, there is nothing you can do in an office culture that you can't do equally well in a remote culture, if you take the time to adapt. But the people who don't understand or care how to adapt will continue to propagate their urban legends about the unique magic of fortuitous shoulder taps, hallway collisions and lunch meetings. Whatever.

Re: The social and economic costs borne by young people without offices

#142

Post by RandoHolmes » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 3:46 PM UTC

alexbanks wrote: post #107

RandoHolmes wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most children do not take on the responsibility of setting an alarm, getting up in the morning, cooking for themselves, and then walking to the bus stop to take the bus to school (or their own car). Pretty much every adult does this as a matter of course.

Right but we’re not talking about children. We’re talking about recently hired software engineers? And if you’re saying “pretty much every adult”, doesn’t that include those engineers?

Are you claiming that a 21 year old engineer is obviously going to be as experienced at life as a 40 year old engineer?

Because that's what you're implying here, and I don't think any reasonable person would make the claim that's obvious.

Re: The social and economic costs borne by young people without offices

#143

Post by RandoHolmes » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 3:47 PM UTC

gbear605 wrote: post #100

RandoHolmes wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most children do not take on the responsibility of setting an alarm, getting up in the morning, cooking for themselves, and then walking to the bus stop to take the bus to school (or their own car). Pretty much every adult does this as a matter of course.

...perhaps other than the breakfast part, that’s exactly what most teenagers do every morning (at least in non-COVID) times. Certainly children don’t, if you’re only talking about prepubescent children, but they’re also not particularly relevant to a discussion about working from home.

> Certainly children don’t, if you’re only talking about prepubescent children, but they’re also not particularly relevant to a discussion about working from home.

Then I think it's pretty clear that's not what I meant when I said children... It becomes even more clear when you realize I said "or their own car", or did you think it was my belief that 5 year olds were driving themselves to school?

Re: The social and economic costs borne by young people without offices

#144

Post by AdrianB1 » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 3:49 PM UTC

slykar wrote: post #137

AdrianB1 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was raised on IM. I'm fine communicating like this. If I need to talk I can always call someone. It is not about you being comfortable with IM, it is about doing an A/B comparison of the 2 options. You don't know what you don't know, if you don't compare with being in the office then "being fine" does not mean "it's better", it can be worse and you don't know it. I am working from home a lot for ~ 12 years, I sti…

> I talk to people all day long, the kind of discussions you don't plan and send invites with an agenda upfront For what reason? You say it's a total waste of time productivity wise. Imagine having this all the time, because it's how it looks like in an open space office. This might be the reason why we are expected to work 8h/day. We simply waste most of our work time. It would be much better to be paid 2x more per…

It's all about the context. I am a senior IT manager in a very large US-based non-IT company. I am in the top 1% in the company as IT expertise (and in the bottom half of the people here, for perspective), that makes me a technical guru of the local organization. I will never be promoted to the next level (Director), but I can be a fellow if I want; this creates the expectation that people can reach me for guidance and help and this is what I do in the days I go to the office: be there and talk to anyone that needs me.

The huge advantage for me is that it makes me almost intangible to people like the local Director (technically incompetent and an ass) and I don't have to spend time with bullshit corporate "organizational work" like going to recruiting events and explain why we hire and promote only women (because targets). My yearly evaluation is also just a formality that I never spend more than 15 minutes for and I have the flexibility to pick the most interesting projects we have. If spending a couple of days per month in the office is the price, I am willing to pay it.

Re: The social and economic costs borne by young people without offices

#145

Post by austincheney » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 3:49 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #129

austincheney wrote: post #97

For some people writing software is an inherently social experience: contributing to a team, learning from colleagues, exchanging ideas in person. For others software is an experience of research and crafting which requires minimal feedback and no social interaction to grow and experiment. Like everything else in life this comes down to personal needs and expectations. To say working from home results in a lost gener…

> For others software is an experience of research and crafting which requires minimal feedback and no social interaction to grow and experiment. If you are young and new in your career, I don’t see how it could not stunt your career or lead to being an “expert beginner” without getting feedback. This definitely happened to me for the first decade of my career. Not working remotely, working either as a sole developer…

> I don’t see how

As a self-taught developer I promise you it never stunted my skills, and most probably made me a much stronger developer. I have been a professional developer for 12 years (10 of those as a senior) and during that time I have spent 4 years on military deployments overseas and another 1 year in a military school. As a result of intense self-training away from the corporate world I have learned to become a stronger and more independent developer than most of my peers.

When you are writing software on a small netbook traveling around Afghanistan with no internet you have to learn to be self-reliant, portable, efficient, and cheap with system resources. Given the right set of expectations and personality you just figure it out. Based on this perspective its my thought expert beginners are precisely so because they are too reliant on social reinforcement over original decisions.

Re: The social and economic costs borne by young people without offices

#146

Post by scarface74 » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 3:57 PM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #145

scarface74 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For others software is an experience of research and crafting which requires minimal feedback and no social interaction to grow and experiment. If you are young and new in your career, I don’t see how it could not stunt your career or lead to being an “expert beginner” without getting feedback. This definitely happened to me for the first decade of my career. Not working remotely, working either as a sole developer…

> I don’t see how As a self-taught developer I promise you it never stunted my skills, and most probably made me a much stronger developer. I have been a professional developer for 12 years (10 of those as a senior) and during that time I have spent 4 years on military deployments overseas and another 1 year in a military school. As a result of intense self-training away from the corporate world I have learned to bec…

How do you know that you areas good as other developers? How do you know that you haven’t missed something from getting other’s perspectives? In other words, without interacting with other people, how do you know what you don’t know? If you don’t have Internet, how do you know where the industry is and that you are following best practices of the ecosystem you are involved in?

As far as “original decisions”. How do you know that your “original decisions” are the best ones? How do you know that you are reinventing the wheel by taking advantage of the experience of the broader community that has already solved the problem you are trying to solve?

A senior developer could just be someone who outlasted everyone else at a company - that is the definition of an expert beginner.

I was a “senior developer” in 2008 working at the same company for nine years with two other “senior developers” who were self taught. I was also spending a non insignificant amount of time doing VB6 six years after it had been abandoned by MS, Perl and didn’t use source control.

I also “learned how to be independent”. That was actually a detriment when I first worked at a large company with a team and didn’t have the social skills to get my ideas adopted by the rest of the team, didn’t have the lack of ego to listen to others, and got PIPd for not being a team player.

Re: The social and economic costs borne by young people without offices

#147

Post by RandoHolmes » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 4:03 PM UTC

petra wrote: post #108

frankpf wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's been observed by many psychology studies that conscientiousness (the personality trait that determines self discipline and self control) tends to increase with age. Excerpt from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2562318/ : "Agreeableness demonstrated a fairly linear increase with age whereas the pattern for Conscientiousness was curvilinear: scores increased up to a peak somewhere between the…

Accorindg to your link, mean Conscientiousness raises by only 16% over age, with the standard deviation stays the same. Doesn't sound that large. But intuitively, people who have families will work significantly harder than a teenagers. So i think we're measuring something incorrectly here.

> But intuitively, people who have families will work significantly harder than a teenagers. So i think we're measuring something incorrectly here.

Exactly right. The sort of discipline I'm discussing here isn't conscientiousness.

Someone who scores low in conscientiousness, but then has children, is going to be a lot more responsible than they were before they had children.

Someone else accused me of reverse ageism. As if I'm biased against young people because I believe that people generally get better at life the more life experience they have. My rule of thumb is that if you're dealing with someone 10+ years older than you, it's generally good to assume they can read you better than you can read them.

Re: The social and economic costs borne by young people without offices

#148

Post by austincheney » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 11:27 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #146

austincheney wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t see how As a self-taught developer I promise you it never stunted my skills, and most probably made me a much stronger developer. I have been a professional developer for 12 years (10 of those as a senior) and during that time I have spent 4 years on military deployments overseas and another 1 year in a military school. As a result of intense self-training away from the corporate world I have learned to bec…

How do you know that you areas good as other developers? How do you know that you haven’t missed something from getting other’s perspectives? In other words, without interacting with other people, how do you know what you don’t know? If you don’t have Internet, how do you know where the industry is and that you are following best practices of the ecosystem you are involved in? As far as “original decisions”. How do y…

> How do you know

You know when you are solving a given technical problem. With practice your solutions become more refined with increased performance.

> A senior developer could just be someone who outlasted everyone else at a company - that is the definition of an expert beginner.

I don’t believe those are the preferred or common definitions. Independence is not related to arrogance.

Re: The social and economic costs borne by young people without offices

#149

Post by scarface74 » Sun, Sep 06, 2020, 2:16 AM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #148

scarface74 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that you areas good as other developers? How do you know that you haven’t missed something from getting other’s perspectives? In other words, without interacting with other people, how do you know what you don’t know? If you don’t have Internet, how do you know where the industry is and that you are following best practices of the ecosystem you are involved in? As far as “original decisions”. How do y…

> How do you know You know when you are solving a given technical problem. With practice your solutions become more refined with increased performance. > A senior developer could just be someone who outlasted everyone else at a company - that is the definition of an expert beginner. I don’t believe those are the preferred or common definitions. Independence is not related to arrogance.

> You know when you are solving a given technical problem. With practice your solutions become more refined with increased performance.

Whether those are common definitions, someone who lasts a company for years gets to be a “senior developer”.

I knew an “architect” who was the first developer at a startup, who had been there for over a decade and as the company grew, he got promoted as newer people cane in. He made every mistake in the book of an “expert beginner”. Writing bespoke unmaintainable ORMs and logging frameworks, and treating a database as a queue, etc.

I was optimizing assembly language in middle school by counting clock cycles in the 80s on my 65C02 (ie the 74 in my username).

Was I a “senior developer” in 8th grade because I knew how to make my assembly language programs 33% faster by reading a writing from the 1st page of memory and using branch instructions instead of JMP instructions?

I was writing inline x86 assembly in the early 2000s when I looked at the decompiled assembly and I knew I could squeeze some performance out of it.

You know what I didn’t know because I thought I was so smart and didn’t learn from other people?

I didn’t know the ecosystem of my chosen platform so I would know what I shouldn’t write at all and just pull down from Nuget or the package manager of the platform I was using.

I didn’t know when I should build versus outsource because it didn’t add business value and wasn’t what gave us an “unfair advantage”.

I didn’t know how to mentor junior developers to be a force multiplier.

I didn’t know how to make choices that was best for the team or the business.

I didn’t know how to talk to end users to solve XYProblems.

I didn’t have the social skills to know how to “disagree and commit”.

Writing the wrong thing “optimally” is not the definition of a senior developer.

Re: The social and economic costs borne by young people without offices

#150

Post by alexbanks » Sun, Sep 06, 2020, 3:06 AM UTC

RandoHolmes wrote: post #147

petra wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accorindg to your link, mean Conscientiousness raises by only 16% over age, with the standard deviation stays the same. Doesn't sound that large. But intuitively, people who have families will work significantly harder than a teenagers. So i think we're measuring something incorrectly here.

> But intuitively, people who have families will work significantly harder than a teenagers. So i think we're measuring something incorrectly here. Exactly right. The sort of discipline I'm discussing here isn't conscientiousness. Someone who scores low in conscientiousness, but then has children, is going to be a lot more responsible than they were before they had children. Someone else accused me of reverse ageism.…

> My rule of thumb is that if you're dealing with someone 10+ years older than you, it's generally good to assume they can read you better than you can read them.

This is giving a lot of people undue credit, is the problem.