331–340 of 434 posts
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At the very least, crowding the most intelligent and ambitious people into the country’s lowest fertility metro (the Bay Area) certainly seems like not a good idea from an inter-generational perspective.
The entire west is not having children, it’s not just the Bay Area.
Managers are getting a pretty bad rap in these threads, and maybe (or maybe not) in BigCo’s that’s reasonable, but I run a tiny shop and I’ve asked my team to come to the office as often as possible, despite the fact that half of us have been working together for years - and we get on just fine online. The reason is that the other half of the team haven’t got this experience; they are young and relatively inexperienc…
Have you actually asked your team if they feel the same way, though? (and I mean actually asked, not just "hey bud, you're happy with coming into the office, right?") I used to whiteboard out problems with the whole team. I loved it. We had a couple of star employees who were really good at coming up with ideas and sketching them out. Being able to get the whole team on-side for a problem and understanding the answer…
Many traditional companies are bound to the office for a simple reason: they have offices as a financial investment. This is true even for super rich tech companies, who went into a big real estate buying spree during the last few years. If they don't have use for these offices, the value of such real estate will go down precipitously. They are forced to keep the office style, at least for a majority of their employe…
But why? Isn't that a sunk cost fallacy? In fact, running those offices is going to cost more in operations and maintenance that having them under-utilized? Presumably they bought empty commercial real estate. If it remains empty they'll get back most of that investment when they sell.
If one corp transitions to full WFH, their office just keeps their value.
If all corps go WFH, nobody would want offices like that, and all offices would plummet in value.
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I find in person meetings more effective. I’d rather meet once a week or 2 and get all the big meetings done then go away to code, than have Zoom meetings every single day. I predict that in all the full time WFH companies, some small group will start having in person meets once every X. Or some other startup will innovate past an incumbent by having a hybrid model. Then hybrid will be the next “new” thing.
Zoom meetings have made me appreciate in-person meetings so much. It seems phrases like these, "Can you hear me?", "Sorry I was on mute", "You are breaking up", "Sorry can you repeat that", "Sorry my internet connection is bad today", take up way too much time. Then people speaking over each other and you cannot understand anyone at all. I think once a week in-person meetings and rest of week heads down WFH would be…
Internet quality and speed is a function of a few things, including where people live. I wouldn't want to extrapolate but I've not been finding connectivity to be an issue for internal meetings. Yes, occasionally there are hardware issues (e.g. I had a flaky WiFi chip in my laptop). These may be unfortunate for a particular meeting but tend to get fixed and so "can you hear me?" is definitely not a recurring pattern in my experience.
Sometimes people choose to join video calls from their phone while, for example, walking their dog (a completely acceptable thing culturally). In those instances video and audio quality can be variable; it's up to the individuals to make sensible choices around which meetings are suitable for this sort of thing.
Finally, there's a phone backup, where you can dial into a meeting (audio only) over a phone line. Some people use this if they need to take a meeting from somewhere with particularly bad connectivity. I personally have not needed to use it once in the 15+ months of WFH but I've seen others use it.
People unintentionally speaking over each other was definitely a thing in the beginning, especially in larger meetings. I've been founding it happen less and less over time, as people learned when to pause and we developed better ways to moderate large online meetings. Video makes this much easier compared to audio-only.
Overall, I think I've come to prefer video calls to in-person meetings, at least when _everyone_ joins over video. It'll be interesting to see how well the original, hybrid model (some participants joining in person and some over video) will work.
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A lot of meetings are also a complete waste of many people's time.
This is something great about video conferencing. Forced to attend a meeting that has no bearing on your work. If you are there in person, banging away on your keyboard the whole time in the corner is considered rude. On video conferencing you can just mute yourself, turn down the volume and just keep your ears perked for your name and keep working.
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Whiteboard area in a conference room has some challenges to recreate. That said, we've found collaborative editing replaces a lot of sloppy handwriting and people capturing with smartphones and recreating after the meeting. To say nothing of the fact, that wealthy SV companies complaining that they have to structure their entire companies arounf in-person because virtual whiteboards are a really hard problem should b…
Having used said virtual whiteboards - they suck. Most of ‘whiteboarding’ is the low lag communication, body language, ease of just ‘doing something’ by hand. In my experience, the connection issues, lack of ability to get good fidelity in communication, random glitches and other issues, just ruins the majority of it. Not having a terrible commute or paying 10x the national average for a closet to live in are definit…
For capturing bullet points, and other terse text, a Google doc is far superior.
Managers are getting a pretty bad rap in these threads, and maybe (or maybe not) in BigCo’s that’s reasonable, but I run a tiny shop and I’ve asked my team to come to the office as often as possible, despite the fact that half of us have been working together for years - and we get on just fine online. The reason is that the other half of the team haven’t got this experience; they are young and relatively inexperienc…
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I switched my tech company to full WFH. I also implemented detailed surveillance on all employees, which I don’t disclose. It shows me keyboard/mouse activity levels and window update rates. It’s very interesting information, I have much better insight how and when people work, which are very different from each other. I also have other productivity measures and now I can really understand when someone is not working…
^ this is a troll post
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I think you are very much correct - for all the people lambasting working in an office, I hope they realize it will mean they will be competing against a much larger swath of humanity. Also, I'm glad you highlighted "Mexico or Brazil". Unlike decades past where lots of outsourcing was done to India, I think many people now realize the inherent inefficiencies when teams are 12 time zones apart. The Americas don't have…
I think realistically this is very far a way. South America does not have schools that compete with MIT and Stanford.
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Has it ever occurred to you, to measure the actual work?
Of course I do that to and did that before the pandemic. I review all code commits and review reports and results from the system. I also track completed tasks and assign them complexity level. Am I stupid or something? How would I know who is completing tasks or not. This was how we operated before WFH, the change is implementing direct surveillance telemetry on employee activity on the system. Another improvement i…