Slack + Dropbox: Let's embrace WFH Microsoft: Getting tired of WFH. Shows who really believes in their own "Team" tools and remote working software :)
Not sure what you’re talking about. Microsoft came out with their plans to let employees work remotely days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24728887
Dropbox Converts to Permanent WFH
101–110 of 490 posts
Re: Dropbox Converts to Permanent WFH
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
not trying to sound like a dick... everyone has to get out of the house and making actual friends in life. co-workers aren't friends, bosses aren't friends, clients aren't friends, work relationships aren't friends. we all need human interaction... join a club, a gym, yoga, bike club, whatever, just interact with people that doesn't involve talking about work. and sitting home and playing video games while good, isn'…
>co-workers aren't friends, bosses aren't friends, clients aren't friends, work relationships aren't friends. It really saddens me whenever I see this (apparently common) sentiment on HN. Through every job I've had, I've met some of my very best life-long friends. My wedding party is over half people that I met at work. A couple of my former bosses are people I see every couple of months (pre-covid) and are invited t…
I would look at this from a different angle. Work friends have extreme pressure to be around you. They get paid to be around and collaborate with you. You can't easily determine the extent of a relationship standing on its own merit if someone is literally being paid to collaborate with you. With that said some of my best friends came from former jobs as well, but if we're talking about emotionally vulnerable people they especially need relationships outside of work. Imagine all of your relationships being tied to work and inevitably you get fired (as most people will experience in their life). That would be devastating without support outside of work. What if it turns out your friendships only lasted because of the financial incentives to be around each other and common in-office conversations?
tl;dr; relationships outside of work are important and that's not sad to me because it doesn't prevent anyone from also having friends inside of work.
Re: Dropbox Converts to Permanent WFH
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I completely agree. I'm single and have worked from home for years, minus a brief contracting gig in an office a few years ago. I made sure to make time for seeing people though. I have friends in my neighborhood and we would meet up for lunch or tea during the week and I would always go out on the weekends. With social distancing it's been really challenging. I'm fortunate that I have friends that are also careful t…
I'm not telling you to completely isolate, but this is wrong: > I keep telling my friends that you can't eliminate risk, just mitigate it to an amount that you're comfortable with, and that amount is different for everyone This is a pandemic, any risks you consciously take are risks you're forcing the people around you to take too. No single person can set the amount of risks he wants to take, it has to be decided gl…
There are other risks around mental health, so you have to balance them. I’m a single person who is an extrovert and I get depressed when I’m not around people — to the point it’s hard to function.
The balance is different for each person. Being intentional about the people we share space with goes a long way; nobody I know is going to concerts or crowded bars which makes contact tracing a lot easier.
Re: Dropbox Converts to Permanent WFH
#104To be clear (if you only read the headline :)), not entirely remote. Solo work at home, collaborative work in "studios", basically reimagining the offices into collaborative/convening spaces that you go into from ~once/week to once a quarter depending on team/role. Remote-only cuts out the in-person experience entirely, which is problematic for building teams and culture; and ad hoc "WFH whenever you feel like it" ge…
I have done this for years. I have seen that some people don't like it for the following reasons. 1. They prefer a predictable schedule. 2. They don't like being at home ( family or workspace issues) 3. They are good at or enjoy office politics. 4. They are incompetent managers and they don't know how to manage engineers other than looking over shoulders and taking attendence.
> 3. They are good at or enjoy office politics.
As a counterpoint, we had a mix of remote department and in-office departments at my last company. Transitioning to fully remote made marked an increase in politics every time.
It sounds counterintuitive at first, but fully remote moves even more conversations to side channels. At the office it’s hard to have secret exclusionary meetings without other people noticing eventually. Online, you can create a private Slack channel or even a separate off-Slack group for the in-crowd where you exclude others, and no one can see it.
The politicians also developed a habit of meeting up in person (lunch, shared work days, etc) in ways that strengthened their political power. Ironically, having everyone go remote was a catalyst for giving the politicians a leg up on relationship building.
We still saw upsides of remote work, but I’ve lost all illusions that remote work is an improvement for office politics. If anything, the extra effort required for relationship-building in remote teams just gives the politicians more of a moat to protect their political domain.
Re: Dropbox Converts to Permanent WFH
#105The list as it stands for permanent remote work:
- Microsoft - Twitter - Facebook - Shopify - Slack - Upwork
Re: Dropbox Converts to Permanent WFH
#106As someone who has worked from home for a decade, I predict a mental health apocalypse in the near future. Working from home permanently requires support infrastructure not everyone has access to. It also requires a different approach to work altogether which, again, not everyone is capable of adopting. If you have family, work from home is great. But if you're single, staying cooped up alone at home can be a disaste…
I think we are already seeing it. I think the increased polarization I am seeing this US election cycle and here in Canada is partly due to this effect.
There’s a whole industry pushing for polarization - I don’t think you can blame wfh for that
Re: Dropbox Converts to Permanent WFH
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I completely agree. I'm single and have worked from home for years, minus a brief contracting gig in an office a few years ago. I made sure to make time for seeing people though. I have friends in my neighborhood and we would meet up for lunch or tea during the week and I would always go out on the weekends. With social distancing it's been really challenging. I'm fortunate that I have friends that are also careful t…
I'm not telling you to completely isolate, but this is wrong: > I keep telling my friends that you can't eliminate risk, just mitigate it to an amount that you're comfortable with, and that amount is different for everyone This is a pandemic, any risks you consciously take are risks you're forcing the people around you to take too. No single person can set the amount of risks he wants to take, it has to be decided gl…
> No single person can set the amount of risks he wants to take, it has to be decided globally.
globally is a bit of a stretch, but people already do this on a local level. this is what is happening when the government imposes/relaxes restrictions on the number of people that can be at an indoor gathering, the types of businesses that are allowed to be open, whether restaurants can offer indoor seating, etc. as long as the person isn't exceeding the limits set by their democratically elected government, shouldn't they be free to set their own risk tolerance?
Re: Dropbox Converts to Permanent WFH
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
...and that managers don't need to be hovering around their employees in close physical proximity to make sure they do work?
Don't be so optimistic. The next thing you know SaaS business that let managers monitor employees will be all the rage.
It's already happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22728971
Re: Dropbox Converts to Permanent WFH
#109To be clear (if you only read the headline :)), not entirely remote. Solo work at home, collaborative work in "studios", basically reimagining the offices into collaborative/convening spaces that you go into from ~once/week to once a quarter depending on team/role. Remote-only cuts out the in-person experience entirely, which is problematic for building teams and culture; and ad hoc "WFH whenever you feel like it" ge…
> collaborative work in "studios", basically reimagining the offices into collaborative/convening spaces that you go into from ~once/week to once a quarter depending on team/role.
I’m forgetting their name for them, but IBM has been doing this for decades now. They buy up office space in every major city, and then, rather than permanently stationing any teams there, essentially make all such spaces into private-access coworking spaces.
In these IBM offices, there’s cubicles, hot desks, and meeting rooms, all set up with runs of Intranet-accessible Ethernet + wi-fi + softphones; and you can either just drop in to work, or freely reserve any amount of these from the office’s concierge for days/weeks/months at a time — for yourself, or for your entire team, if you’ve brought your whole team with you to another city/country to do a high-touch customer deployment or something.
At least in the office I went to (Burnaby BC), it was almost entirely empty most of the time. So there was plenty of spare “capacity” in this network for any random need a team or individual might have.
It’s a very nice model. Slap an API on it and you could call it “elastic office-space IaaS.” :)
Re: Dropbox Converts to Permanent WFH
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's a bad precedent when workers pay the company they're working for
You may not realize that the $500 chair, the ping pong table and the beer fridge effectively comes out of everyone's paycheck.
Right, but is that money coming back to employees in the form of pay bumps now that those things are gone?