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I hope work from home continues

ryanmercer.com

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Re: I hope work from home continues

#351

Post by metamet »

nvilcins wrote: post #244
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.

People underestimate how unproductive (or nefarious) one can be in office.

I feel like it's much easier to not do anything when it looks like you're doing something at your desk all day. Mix in a few meetings and random chats, it's very easy to go incognito, productivity wise.

I think we've all had days where we've gotten to the office and had a problem we're working on that doesn't get solved that day. It is actually really taxing and feels really bad to not accomplish anything, as if you've wasted the day.

I've found that the ability to more strictly control distractions at home--not needing to deal with the pressure to chat with co-workers and eat lunch together, for example--has led to far, far fewer days of no-solution. At the same time, it becomes even hard to "give up" on that day's productivity and clock out, since there's no real leaving the office.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#352

Post by comeonseriously »

protonimitate wrote: post #143
blunte wrote: post #64

Wow, the author has a pretty miserable company :(. That said, I share most of the opinions even though I quite like the office environment of my company. I abso-fking-love choosing where I work (and to some degree, when). Being able to take my laptop and go sit under a canopy in my back yard when the weather is nice, seeing my rabbits hopping around the yard, my cats avoiding the aggressive she-rabbit, hearing the bi…

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…

>I have a hard time wrapping my head around why companies are mandating 100% return to office.

Because most managers have a reactionary style of management. They are like IRQ handlers. Their state doesn't change until they receive an email from their boss or a phone call from a customer. At that point they react to it by running down the hall to find someone. Now, because they do not understand cooperative multitasking they preemptively interrupt YOU and now your day is f*cked.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#353

Post by sabujp »

blunte wrote: post #64

Wow, the author has a pretty miserable company :(. That said, I share most of the opinions even though I quite like the office environment of my company. I abso-fking-love choosing where I work (and to some degree, when). Being able to take my laptop and go sit under a canopy in my back yard when the weather is nice, seeing my rabbits hopping around the yard, my cats avoiding the aggressive she-rabbit, hearing the bi…

this is like the norm outside of fang

Re: I hope work from home continues

#354

Post by techsupporter »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #238
techsupporter wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you live in Silicon Valley? Nice homes cannot be chosen close to work. And in large parts of the rest of the country, it's illegal to put homes close to work. Where I work is on the edge of an office campus on the edge of a suburb of Seattle. By city ordinance, virtually no housing is allowed anywhere near where I work. If you live in the same municipality as this office and work at it, your only choice to get t…

> " By city ordinance, virtually no housing is allowed anywhere near where I work. " Must be specific to your suburb. I can look out the window of my downtown Seattle office straight into the windows of the condo complex across the street. As for the suburbs, having passed by innumerable times, the north edge of Microsoft's main campus is directly across the street from apartments and rowhomes.

> Microsoft's main campus

I was wondering if someone would mention Microsoft in a reply.

Yes, there are apartments near there, but Redmond has the same failing as most other suburbs in the area: housing stock woefully inadequate for the number of people working there, and ordinances that artificially restrict building any more. Microsoft's campus is also adjacent to the Bellevue city limits, where residents on the other side of Bel-Red have fought vociferously against new housing for decades.

Meanwhile, SR 520 is a mess all the way back to the 405 interchange (and beyond, some mornings). After the much-vaunted light rail arrives, that station will serve fewer residences than the one in Angle Lake.

My point is that lots of people just throw out "well, live near where you work" as a panacea to life's commuting and office ills. Under our current idea of what counts as zoning and land use, it's not possible for any more than a small sliver of people to do that. So we have a choice: change how we do land use, change how we work with offices, or both.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#355

Post by npsimons »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #12

What kind of office was this person working in? Having to breathe jet exhaust fumes while suffering through 85 degree indoor temperatures and drinking algae-filled water is nowhere near normal. The company he’s describing is severely broken if everything he’s describing is true. Most of what he describes are not normal office problems. Some of them are even health and safety violations. Working from home will only di…

I've been at a job where projects have put us in vehicle bays with no insulation on the door, in Winter. Temperatures got down to 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Luckily, there was no dress code, so I would wear my mountain Winter gear, but even so, it was really hard to get any coding done as my fingers were too cold.

There are a lot of bad companies out there, and it's all well and good to say "find another job", but not everyone has that luxury.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#356

Post by bhandziuk »

mrweasel wrote: post #129
l-p wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having to breathe jet exhaust fumes while suffering through 85 degree indoor temperatures and drinking algae-filled water is nowhere near normal. I was told to suck it up and do at least 50+ hours (35h paid) when working at temps over 42c (110f). Both are illegal here, they don't care, they will always find a poor sucker in a dire situation needing the job.

Could you clearify “don’t care”? Because here you simply report the company anonymously. You even have a person among the staff, who is extremely difficult to fire, that can do the reporting for you. Companies will be fined for this kind of environment and the office will be closed if things aren’t improved. You can’t choose to not care.

Where is "here"?

Re: I hope work from home continues

#357

Post by aidenn0 »

blunte wrote: post #64

Wow, the author has a pretty miserable company :(. That said, I share most of the opinions even though I quite like the office environment of my company. I abso-fking-love choosing where I work (and to some degree, when). Being able to take my laptop and go sit under a canopy in my back yard when the weather is nice, seeing my rabbits hopping around the yard, my cats avoiding the aggressive she-rabbit, hearing the bi…

If I had an open-office setting, that alone would get me to sign on to what the author is saying. With my private office, being closer to the hardware and coworkers can outweigh the benefits of working from home.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#358

Post by Pokepokalypse »

nomy99 wrote: post #4

Amazon is bringing back their office employees as the default operating mode; citing inefficiencies in the creative process. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/31/amazon-expects-some-employee...

Can't say I'm surprised by this.

You'd think that the world's larges cloud provider, would have the tooling and policies in place to deal with this issue (creative inefficiencies). Because that's literally what they're asking their customers to deal with when they sign on to the concept of cloud-computing.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#359

Post by blunte »

paganel wrote: post #256
blunte wrote: post #64

Wow, the author has a pretty miserable company :(. That said, I share most of the opinions even though I quite like the office environment of my company. I abso-fking-love choosing where I work (and to some degree, when). Being able to take my laptop and go sit under a canopy in my back yard when the weather is nice, seeing my rabbits hopping around the yard, my cats avoiding the aggressive she-rabbit, hearing the bi…

For what it’s worth you have a yard, most of the people wanting to go back to the office live in a more cramped conditions. Not having something like a yard to fall back to has also make it way harder for those people in terms of mental well-being, seeing people around them instead of the same four walls would be like going back to normal for them.

This is true, and forgive me - I do forget this often. When I lived in one room of a shared apartment, I probably would have jumped off the balcony by now due to too much time with my roommate.

But! If remote is the new way, then we don't have to live in the city center. Especially in nice countries with good train systems, we can live in more distant places where rents are cheaper and we can have an entire place with yard to spare. I'm in NL, and I have about 150 square meters of indoor space plus a big yard for less than 800 eur. Previously I spent 700 for 35sq meters and no yard. The difference now is that I'm in a village 2.5 hours from Amsterdam. As long as there are trains, I can go to the office on occasion.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#360

Post by ozim »

mrweasel wrote: post #129
l-p wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having to breathe jet exhaust fumes while suffering through 85 degree indoor temperatures and drinking algae-filled water is nowhere near normal. I was told to suck it up and do at least 50+ hours (35h paid) when working at temps over 42c (110f). Both are illegal here, they don't care, they will always find a poor sucker in a dire situation needing the job.

Could you clearify “don’t care”? Because here you simply report the company anonymously. You even have a person among the staff, who is extremely difficult to fire, that can do the reporting for you. Companies will be fined for this kind of environment and the office will be closed if things aren’t improved. You can’t choose to not care.

Good luck "reporting anonymously" after rising issue multiple times in good faith in the first place.
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