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I hope work from home continues

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Re: I hope work from home continues

#441

Post by arcbyte »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #137
mikece wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luck had nothing to do with the choices I made in my career and life.

Oooh BOOOOY is that a self-unaware statement :-> While I will give full marks for your agency and initiative if appropriate, to think ANY of us (myself and all of us included) don't have a large amount of probability/luck/circumstance involved is hilarious. Heck, I'm a refugee from a civil-war country who came to Canada with literally nothing but a loan for the ticket; I could try to make the claim that I "made it on…

Meh, the network of choices and outcomes you took couldn't have been pre-planned, but the attitude and work ethic that made you work on the skills, capabilities, mindset, etc and made you take action despite major setbacks had nothing to do with luck. To think otherwise is to deny your own agency.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#442

Post by leetcrew »

kibleopard wrote: post #293

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…

I am a 20-something who lives alone in a small studio apartment. I work at a tiny desk and barely have room for all my work equipment. still, I love working from home and I hope never to go back to the office. as soon as I get the message that this situation can go on indefinitely, I will buy a bigger desk and possibly shop for a larger apartment when my lease is up.

your experience is valid, but don't assume you speak for everyone in our cohort. I hope once quarantine is over, you and I will both have the freedom to find the work environment that suits each of us best.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#443

Post by npsimons »

throwaway823882 wrote: post #268
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…

It almost sounds like this has exposed flaws in co-working, where nothing gets written down, people are not inviting others to request help/collaboration, and training has to be done manually.

> where nothing gets written down

This is a big problem. More often than not "institutional knowledge" is short hand for "I'm too lazy to write this down, hope I don't get hit by a bus!"

People pretend like writing wasn't invented thousands of years ago.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#444

Post by Johnny555 »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #424
Johnny555 wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- my commute: I cycled into work, and the daily exercise was great - my commute: I cycled into work, and the daily ride was sometimes a grind, in cold or wet weather. And it takes a lot of time I too used to bike in to work, but since the pandemic, I've replaced that commute ride with riding on my own (which is nicer than the commute was since I can stick to off road paths and not ride the busy roads near work). But…

I've taken up jogging. Their are some trails nearby, and a highschool running track.

I used to run quite a bit but my knees can't take it anymore, biking (so far) is fine. Based on family history, there's probably knee surgery in my future, but for now I'm fine with biking.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#445

Post by ghaff »

sologoub wrote: post #214
tomca32 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the only option to stay remote is to quit then that's the definition of "My employer is making me return to the office".

They are voicing a very US view on the relationship. From my understanding, in EU there are jurisdictions that any concession extracted from employees by employer is effectively done under duress because the employer controls employees livelihood, even if temporarily. Actual reality depends on how desirable your skills are and how good the existing employment is.

I expect the bigger legal pushback would be the other way around. I definitely heard some grumbling early in the pandemic when some still saw office closures as an over-reaction. The complaint was that companies were making a unilateral change to the working conditions agreed-upon when they were hired.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#446

Post by austincheney »

trentnix wrote: post #182
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…

I have a hard time wrapping my head around why companies are mandating 100% return to office. I doubt it lasts, at least in software. Talented people are going to have lots of remote options making it harder to find good people willing to show up for daily cubicle warfare. I was someone who preferred to be in the office every day prior to the pandemic. But after adjusting, I really, really like working from home. Tru…

> I doubt it lasts, at least in software.

History suggests that talent is not a cause to warp office culture. Office culture will out weather a loss of talent until the business implodes. If the need for talent becomes clearly paramount then it will be outsourced.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#447

Post by munificent »

vp8989 wrote: post #420
munificent wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Talented people are going to have lots of remote options making it harder to find good people willing to show up for daily cubicle warfare. I worry a lot about how this cuts the bottom rungs off the ladder for junior developers. Senior developers can be very productive without frequent access to in-person help, and are valuable enough that they can get work-from-home if they want. But junior developers have more fr…

Engineering culture should be disseminated via documents rather than oral lore. If it's disseminated via oral lore it's expensive to change and is often misinterpreted across a large enough org. A silent killer of engineering orgs is bad practices that stick around because that's the way it's always been done. No one knows why because it wasn't written down. The only way to fix that is for someone high enough to prov…

> Engineering culture should be disseminated via documents rather than oral lore.

I'm always startled by comments like this because it's so counter to how I understand humanity. We are social mammals. No amount of good grammar and excellent font choice can substitute for sharing the same physical space together, an act that has been core to what it means to be human literally since we first speciated.

Yeah, writing stuff down is important. But engineering culture is a culture in the real sense of the word and trying to transmit that entirely through text sounds to me like raising a baby using a six-axis robotic arm.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#448

Post by ryandrake »

kibleopard wrote: post #293

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…

Nobody wants to force you to work from home. I think if you work better from the office you should work from the office, and if I work better from home I should work from home.

The execs advocating for work from office aren’t proposing this though: they are instead insisting everyone work from the office, regardless of preference. That’s what chafes people.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#449

Post by matwood »

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.

Sure, you can't have two physical jobs at the same time, but I've worked in multiple offices with people with more than one job. It's almost a given that everyone has some sort of side hustle nowadays.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#450

Post by ghaff »

csa wrote: post #428
ghaff wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People on my broader distributed team accept that periodic multi-day weekday off-sites are part of the deal. Can't really avoid some weeknights traveling. But, then, all of us normally do a lot of business travel anyway. Periodic F2F is important and there's no way to do it just on company time if everyone isn't in the same location. If someone really can't, they can dial in but that's inevitably not a great experien…

> Can't really avoid some weeknights traveling. Just curious... does your leadership go out of their way to offer comp time for travel outside of business hours? For example, they say or strongly suggest that folks who have to travel at night take the next morning off. I imagine that this may not be common, but it seems like it would generate a lot of goodwill for folks who have to travel.

It's probably on a manager by manager basis. If I work a weekend day on business--whether because of travel or because there's a software community event on the weekend--I can take a comp day. For nights not really. But if I get home late at night, no one's going to bat an eye if I take it easy in the morning so long as there's nothing I have to do. My time is usually pretty flexible.
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