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I hope work from home continues

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Re: I hope work from home continues

#291

Post by folkrav »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #177
folkrav wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And for the social aspect, weekend or week-long dev retreats are ideal. As much as I appreciate (most of) my coworkers, on nights and weekends I want to close my computer and spend quality time with my family, not see and talk to the same people I am already forced to talk to 35-40h a week. They might be ideal to you, but you're assuming quite a lot about everyone's situations if you think they work for everyone.

My thoughts as well. That said, I think an occasional company retreat during the work week is a nice compromise.

Yeah that can work. I've had a barbecue and games with my current full remote team before lockdowns, it was fun, and seeing them face to face was nice. But it was during work hours. And I still took my car and drove back home at the end of the day - maybe a bit later than usual, but I still could kiss my son goodbye. I've had two days/one night retreats at another role, too, they were fun. But they were planned in advance, exceptional events.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#292

Post by Johnny555 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #249
spurdoman77 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust issues. While 80% of employees could be more productive remote, 18% could have serious issues with productivity and 2% might actually turn nefarious while remote (steal company IPR or something like that). Or I would imagine thats what the fear is.

It's pretty easy to get two full time programming jobs and do both remotely. Being in the office at least ensures you're not in another office.

Being in the office at least ensures you're not in another office.

How? If I'm willing to work another job while I'm at my first job, no one would know if the code I'm working on my screen belongs to job #1 or job #2.

The employer could use screen monitoring, but then they could do that while I'm at home and see that either I'm working on a second project, or that my computer is idle for long periods of time when I'm supposedly "working".

Though I'm not sure it matters - if I can work 2 jobs and still provide adequate productivity to each employer, then why do they care?

I have so many meetings every day that I'm sure that I couldn't get away with working 2 jobs at once, even when fully remote.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#293

Post by kibleopard »

A pattern I notice (not necessarily directly related to this article) is that the people who loudly exclaim “I don’t want to go back to the office ever again!” are usually older folks who: > have a house > have a family

As a 20-something who lives alone in an apartment, I don’t get the luxury of having a nice backyard to go work in (like someone mentioned doing in another comment thread here). I don’t get the luxury of having a bunch of space to set up an office. And for that reason alone I’m excited to go back to an office setting. It’s nice that older people who have their lives figured out are enjoying WFH, but let’s not discount how WFH disproportionately is worse for early in career people.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#294

Post by iamacyborg »

blunte wrote: post #240
ramphastidae wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, to be clear, your plan is no different than all the other crappy companies people complain about: replace real process and professional management with calling yourself a family, “perks” the employees already pay for through reduced salary like food, and taking advantage of young, cheap labor that doesn’t know any better than to be exploited?

Is that what you read? No, I am creating the kind of company I would have loved to work for. Salary is fine, but I know firsthand that if there is good free food, I will stay and work through lunch (or at least talk with my colleagues about work challenges while eating the nice food). Look, if someone is not happy with their work, free food or free trips is only going to hold them in place for a short while. They abs…

How about just, you know, letting people have a lunch break that doesn’t involve work. By all means subsidise it if you want, but don't try drag people back to their desks with free food.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#295

Post by [deleted] »

fiftyfifty wrote: post #234
protonimitate wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a hard time wrapping my head around why companies are mandating 100% return to office. Cost issues aside, I've always maintained that the absolute best experience is a hybrid/flexible schedule and location policy. I'm currently full time remote (I'm on the East Coast working for a West Coast company). My previous company had its main office in my current city, but allowed a super flexible choose-where-you-work…

The company I work for actually suggested getting rid of our office and going 100% remote for our group. We actually voted on whether to keep leasing it after Covid or not. We voted to keep it as we generally like our office and it's nice to have a place to meet face to face sometimes. Since we voted to keep it corporate has told us we have to come in at least 3 days a week after Covid. So for us it's less an issue o…

[deleted]

Re: I hope work from home continues

#296

Post by armandososa »

benbristow wrote: post #11
mikece wrote: post #6

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 ba…

Lucky you. I live in a top-floor apartment so don't have the luxury of a garden and I'm isolated by myself as I live alone. It's not the same for everyone.

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.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#297

Post by cma »

ramphastidae wrote: post #194
blunte wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my remote experience, I definitely don't talk to my colleagues that much. But when you're trying to build a small company, one approach is to make it feel like a family. And families always have people we like and people we like not so much. But there's something special about one unit working toward a single goal. My design is for a startup with young people. This would not work nearly as well for older people an…

So, to be clear, your plan is no different than all the other crappy companies people complain about: replace real process and professional management with calling yourself a family, “perks” the employees already pay for through reduced salary like food, and taking advantage of young, cheap labor that doesn’t know any better than to be exploited?

> “perks” the employees already pay for through reduced salary like food,

Isn't it a big net tax advantage to provide this rather than they pay in after tax (and after employer's portion of payroll tax) dollars?

Re: I hope work from home continues

#298

Post by mradmin »

armandososa wrote: post #286

ITT: Everybody saying how awful OP's workplace is. But ~10mins of commuting? That's heaven! If I had to commute to a local company it would take me 90mins in a good day, or rent a place for half the salary such local company would be paying me. I've been working remotely for 14 years now and I'm never coming back. Ever.

It's "an hour a day(+/- 10 minutes)" which I read as "an hour a day give or take 10 minutes"

Re: I hope work from home continues

#299

Post by enricozb »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #51

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 some…

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.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#300

Post by mabbo »

benrbray wrote: post #33

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 t…

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.

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