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I hope work from home continues

ryanmercer.com

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Re: I hope work from home continues

#501

Post by zebnyc »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #361
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parents with small children at home often prefer the office because it provides some context switching. It’s really difficult to explain to a toddler why a parent is home but cannot play with them for half of the day. That said, you’re not alone in preferring to work in an office. It’s actually very common outside of Internet forums for people to prefer working in an office. It’s just not a popular opinion online rig…

> It’s really difficult to explain to a toddler why a parent is home but cannot play with them for half of the day. I've worked from home through 3 toddlers, and very rarely had a problem. But I've worked from home for their whole lives. This is probably something harder to transition into. Kids only really know what you introduce to them. If you've worked from home their whole lives they don't know anything differen…

Wow, I am amazed that worked for you. Maybe cause the kids can entertain each other.

We have a 3 year old and restricting him / telling him that he cannot do something makes makes that his entire focal point. Hell, he might even be playing by himself or with me but if the Mom disappears even for a cat nap, he has to go interrupt/play with her.

Has caused a huge amount of stress between my wife and I this past year. Thankfully the day care has opened and they are very careful & rigorous.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#503

Post by hackflip »

havelhovel wrote: post #153
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 seems to me that the issues you raised could be addressed through simple technological solutions or better management, assuming your company actually wants to embrace remote work. New hires afraid to ask for help? Make it clear that it's part of their job. Developers need to see another developer's screen? Screen share over Zoom. Multiple employees don't know how to use a tool? Provide a one-hour presentation. Rin…

They can be solved, but they often aren't. A lot of things that happen implicitly and organically in person need to be explicitly planned and scheduley in a virtual environment.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#504

Post by rabidrat »

vp8989 wrote: post #481
munificent wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

"sounds to me like raising a baby using a six-axis robotic arm" No it's like raising a baby using advice you read from books that are peer reviewed and revised over time vs. just listening to what your parents say.

No, it's like raising a baby using advice your parents wrote down for you because they were parenting remotely. "Peer review" is your stepdad quickly skimming through your mom's PR and saying 'sure looks good'.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#505

Post by edoceo »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #463
novok wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we didn't have managers, all the planning, negotiating, syncing, communication & meetings stuff overflows into the engineers themselves, who might get grumpy at doing something they really typically do not enjoy, which is management work. If you remove the managers, your staff engineers quickly start becoming defacto managers. PM work, management work and all of that is work, and someone has to do the work and if…

If we remove and automate away as much red tape as possible, is the remainder really that bad we still need a dedicated manager over a hybrid? Will somebody of the team not feel the urge or the will to pick it up instead? Do we still need a manager who has power over the developers and partially decides which jobs exist, giving them not only an incentive to create extra work, but have a trump card on anyone who would…

Manager as facilitator works awesome. Manager as controller sucks. One path gives the team power, the other gives the boss power.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#506

Post by raducu »

gffrd wrote: post #486
twobitshifter wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company promotes themselves as a “flat connected organization” yet our CEO has adamantly stated that work from home will not be possible as long as he is CEO. This is despite the company doing better than ever. He leans on a belief that some ephemeral energy and cultural value is being sapped away from working remotely and that we are “running on fumes” through COVID. I don’t believe any of it, and the company has…

> running on fumes I think management people are likely running on fumes … it's like the inverse of what introverts feel when they have to be in-office 5 days a week I suspect. I'd add that the second take is also kind of outmoded, in that it assumes that mentorship, friendship, business opportunities must flow through your company. I've actually found more of this during the pandemic, and apart from my company … Tru…

It's not (mainly) about introverts vs extroverts, it's about high status vs low status.

I guess not having your ass kissed daily must feel like "running on fumes".

Re: I hope work from home continues

#507

Post by necrotic_comp »

chakspak wrote: post #427
necrotic_comp wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as people don't like it, our current culture of having a video conference open all day with everyone in (breaking out into smaller calls when necessary) brings down the level of "hey, can I ask you a question?" bc we can see if someone is at their desk. I think this is something that would work for more junior people as well, and I'd be happy to break out / share a screen as needed.

Wow, all day? That's a lot! My team and others have been having "office hours" meetings where everyone is just working, but often the cameras are off, mics are muted most of the time, and we only do it for a few hours a week. I definitely agree that there is a lot of value in being able to jump in and ask questions in the moment. That's a big benefit of having these calls for us. Maybe we should try having them more…

It's really not been that bad - we had a few people who were remote initially and they had the cameras on in their home office so we could shout over and ask questions and it would feel like they were in the office.

Now we're all remote so we keep the same meeting open. I guess people have differing levels of comfort.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#508

Post by Jackpillar »

munificent wrote: post #447
vp8989 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Personally, I find it hilarious to use "humans are social animals" to justify office oriented mandatory wage labor.

Humans are social animals in the sense that they thrive when being social with whoever and wherever they want to be social. I don't know about you, but I have more time to be social with the people (friends, family, neighbors, volunteer groups, etc) that I actually want to be social with when WFH. Being forced to drive to an office under the pretense of "this is how our evolutionary ancestors preferred it" is low key gross.

You can - and should - be able to disseminate engineering culture through digital means.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#510

Post by ryanmercer »

mariorojas wrote: post #303

I'd like to add "Working out at home anytime"

So this is another benefit for me. If I'm feeling sluggish, I'll hammer out some light accessory work that compliments my programming for the day and I can do it while working. It takes me 30 seconds to hammer out a set of dumbell presses or hammer curls or whatever while I'm actively reading an email/teams message/looking at documents to figure out what to do with a case. Or sometimes I'll just go down and back up the basement stairs when I go to the kitchen to top my water off, takes less time than walking to the breakroom at the office and lets me fight gravity a little more than walking.

I can't do that at an office.

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