601–610 of 610 posts
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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.
You had more than a year now to get out of your top floor apartment lease. Not to mention that a pandemic is not an accurate reflection of what real remote work looks like.
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I always find this position to be really interesting because as an adult I've had a really hard time making new friends. So working in an environment that values and supports employees creating friendships that extend outside of the office has been a huge benefit for me.
Maybe our definition of what counts as a friend differ? I don't really consider work acquaintances (some of those I loved working with and would do again in a heartbeat if the occasion presented itself) "friends". A friend is someone I feel I can confide in and would not hesitate to call if I ever needed help with something personal. I can count those on a single hand, and in my case, none of those came from work, an…
I have a close group of friends that I made at my current company. Some of them have moved on, others are still here but pre-covid we made time to hang out on the weekends or after work and during covid we've done zoom hangouts and stuff like that. A number of them were at my wedding, we were all there for support when someone's mom died during the pandemic and she couldn't travel home for the funeral, and we all supported each other when one of our friend group took his own life last year.
Obviously you won't find that applicable to every job or company, but I see a lot of similarities to making friends at work and when you're in school. You spend a lot of time with the same people everyday and you probably have a shared interest or two. Sometimes that means you find people you can be friends with outside of the time you're "forced" to spend together with.
Being in an office is useless unless you: -Need to synthesize lots of stuff daily -Truly enjoy being around your coworkers -Have a terrible homeworking environment If you just have jiras and you sit down, drink some coffee, music, code, chat people once every few hours to ask about something... it's useless lol. Think of all the wasted energy going to and from the office, to do the same thing but less efficiently. So…
I personally really like the chatting with coworkers and I find it helps refresh me between tasks at work. It's hard to replicate "water-cooler" or "coffee-maker" talk remotely, but I imagine a lot of people don't feel the same way. That's actually something I'd love to see. A good way to replicate water-cooler talk remotely. I don't see a good way to do it initially, but I'm interested in the idea.
Things I miss: - interacting with my colleagues, going out to lunch - the very high-speed and reliability of being on the network wire - dedicated work-space outside of my home where home-chores don't press on my mind while I'm trying to work - my commute: I cycled into work, and the daily exercise was great - a clearer separation of work and home life Things I don't miss: - interacting with my colleagues, when i don…
The absolute best thing about WFH: naps whenever I need it. No more slogging through the post-lunch mid-afternoon slump. I take a 15 minute nap and am good to go for the rest of the afternoon. Also, early meetings at 6~7AM scheduled to work with European coworkers can be followed by a short nap afterwards as well. This has done wonders for my energy throughout the day.
In my office, nobody really bats an eye if someone decides that they're too sleepy to be productive and just takes a short nap.
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Managing a highly self-motivated team of engineers is different than managing a team of undermotivated slackers. For the former, a great manager will regularly ask, "What can I do to help you do your job well?" This person fights the political battles that need to be fought, takes bullets for the team, gets the team the resources they need, removes roadblocks, recruits, etc. The team already wants to work hard, wants…
>you really want to foster a kind of contagious, optimistic busy-bee state Is that really how american workplaces look? Sounds incredibly dystopian.
Working in a faster-paced environment probably isn't the hellscape you're imagining: most foreigners I've worked with like it. Some don't. It is different, though - in England the slower pace of everything irritated me.
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> 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. Bein…
At almost no point in human history has that ever been true. Only in the very recent past has any notion of mobility and sufficient population density existed where one could choose who they socialized with. For all of our evolutionary history, you lived and died within your tribe.
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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".
Fair. My comment did imply that managers / those who feel "drained" by remote working are extroverts , which may be untrue. On that: I think extroverts can tend to derive value from external factors, which may make them more hungry for praise (especially public). (Edited because earlier version was murky)
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> 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.
I cannot imagine telling my very busy, more stressed than me, top level exec wife that she was on her own for a week so I could bang out some code. She wants me to be successful but that's a little too much to ask.
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The absolute best thing about WFH: naps whenever I need it. No more slogging through the post-lunch mid-afternoon slump. I take a 15 minute nap and am good to go for the rest of the afternoon. Also, early meetings at 6~7AM scheduled to work with European coworkers can be followed by a short nap afterwards as well. This has done wonders for my energy throughout the day.
You can have this in an office setting too, just a matter of not having a stigma around it, and perhaps some dedicated spaces. In my office, nobody really bats an eye if someone decides that they're too sleepy to be productive and just takes a short nap.
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The south bay has hordes of pretty nice apartment complexes for newly arrived renters, and newish condos and townhouses for entry level buyers. Eventually you trade up to a 3 bedroom house or whatever you need. I have worked at various tech companies since the 90s, am by no means rich but I've have always lived somewhere decent that's within 15 minutes drive of work.
(Yes I know my bio says "Oakland" right now. I am working out of my partner's house during Covid. I still own a place in the South Bay).