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We Can't Let People Work from Home, for Stupid Reasons

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Re: We Can't Let People Work from Home, for Stupid Reasons

#81

Post by i_haz_rabies »

MattGaiser wrote: post #24
lastofthemojito wrote: post #12

I think a lot of the responses to the straw man's questions are reasonable and thoughtful. But I think this sentiment: >I don't want to change the way I work, I just want people to join me in the office. My kids are driving me crazy. Is it weird to say I'm lonely; I miss my office friends. Deserves more respect. There are lot of types of people out there, and it seems like at least some of them are energized by being…

WFH opinion seems to split between people who see work as where you achieve corporate goals for pay and those who see it as a far more encompassing mixture of human experience.

This is a really great way of summarizing it.

Re: We Can't Let People Work from Home, for Stupid Reasons

#83

Post by lm28469 »

grawprog wrote: post #69
luckydata wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, but kids are going back to school. The "i'm lonely" part is an effect of how bad US cities are for social interaction. I guarantee you if you live in a European city you're not starved for social interaction, you can go to your neighborhood watering hole, or square, and meet with your actual friends anytime.

I have to ask, how realistic has it been to do such things in most places over the last year? I mean WFH or not, most places, governments have not allowed people to do any of those things for the better part of a year.

I'm in Berlin and haven't changed a thing in my social life besides the occasional bar/restaurant

I still enjoyed drinks and meals with friends outside. People made it much worse to themselves than they had to.

There was a few weeks of crazy lockdown rules but even during these the police never bothered me when I was walking out at night with a friend. Most laws were passed so that they could have the legal rights to break up parties and large groups.

Besides France I don't know a lot of places that enforced a "stay at home and don't meet anyone at any time for any reasons" lockdown for very long

Re: We Can't Let People Work from Home, for Stupid Reasons

#84

Post by lm28469 »

system16 wrote: post #10

I have a ridiculous sounding but very important to me reason for my preference to work at home: bowel movements. I worked with a small team in a small office. Everybody is typically at their desk in silence with the occasional manager or sales person on the phone. At predictable intervals throughout the day, someone will get up and be gone extra long. You know, and everybody else knows, they've gone for a number 2. O…

Aren't adults aware that everyone poops and there is no shame in going to the bathroom?

Re: We Can't Let People Work from Home, for Stupid Reasons

#85

Post by grillvogel »

ecf wrote: post #55
lastofthemojito wrote: post #12

I think a lot of the responses to the straw man's questions are reasonable and thoughtful. But I think this sentiment: >I don't want to change the way I work, I just want people to join me in the office. My kids are driving me crazy. Is it weird to say I'm lonely; I miss my office friends. Deserves more respect. There are lot of types of people out there, and it seems like at least some of them are energized by being…

On the contrary, I feel it deserves LESS respect. Treating the office as an escape from an undesirable at-home situation and then having the audacity to try to force more people to be in-person is incredibly selfish behavior. If these people truly need that social interaction, how about putting more effort into community/personal relationships instead of workplace relationships?

humans collaborating together, in person, to work on a common goal, has been a thing since humans existed. everyone working individually at home by themselves, only interacting with others digitally is pretty far removed from that. i might go so far as to suggest preferring the latter is what is not normal.

having distracting kids at home is not an "undesirable home situation", in fact its a great home sitaution, so great that it makes it impossible to focus on getting work done because i'd rather just play with my kids. there is a reason most workplaces don't typically have your children in them.

the fact that so many are happy being isolated at home with no real interactions with any peers is concerning in itself.

Re: We Can't Let People Work from Home, for Stupid Reasons

#86

Post by librish »

luffapi wrote: post #77
librish wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that assumes that you have reasonably self-motivating employees and work that is often interesting which definitely isn't always the case. How do you suggest a non-technical manager tells slacking apart from when things just take unexpectedly longer?

Things take as long as they take. Certainly, they will take longer if a “non technical manager” is cracking the whip on the team. Hire good people, managers included. Keep trust high. Keep motivation high and keep autonomy high and I assure you software will get produced at a high quality. Software development is a high leverage creative field. You want to maximize for developer flow, creativity and comfort.

Not everyone can afford or attract top level developers. Saying Keep motivation high and keep autonomy high and I assure you software will get produced at a high quality. is handwaving some extremely hard problems, especially if you're not working on an exciting problem and can't afford $200K salaries.

You didn't really answer the question. Say I'm a non-technical manager and I suspect one of my employees is slacking off, they just respond with "oh, the load router was misconfigured, luckily I caught it in time. I'll need to hot patch it, it will probably take another 2 weeks" what do I do?

Re: We Can't Let People Work from Home, for Stupid Reasons

#87

Post by Uhhrrr »

topspin wrote: post #67
lastofthemojito wrote: post #12

I think a lot of the responses to the straw man's questions are reasonable and thoughtful. But I think this sentiment: >I don't want to change the way I work, I just want people to join me in the office. My kids are driving me crazy. Is it weird to say I'm lonely; I miss my office friends. Deserves more respect. There are lot of types of people out there, and it seems like at least some of them are energized by being…

You quoted part of that without comment on something I think is crucial: "My kids are driving me crazy." I've seen that in practice. Long ago I watched a manager of mine on a lengthy call with his wife discussing the absolute chaos going on at home with the kids, the school, etc. When he hung up he said the most sincere thing I ever heard from him; "Thank God for work." And he had a wife at home to referee it all. If…

My data point is that it sucks, distance learning sucked, and my wife just quit her full time job so we could at least get to your manager's state.

None of this bears on whether people should be allowed to work remotely, of course.

Re: We Can't Let People Work from Home, for Stupid Reasons

#88

Post by com2kid »

EduardoBautista wrote: post #27
MattGaiser wrote: post #3

> I can't imagine another day of long Zoom meetings. The pandemic really reinforced to me that so many of these are pointless, at least for many participants. I have played games with co-workers, gone to sleep, done freelance work, had lunch (away from my desk), and all manner of other things through pretty much every meeting over 1 hour that I have had this pandemic. Especially the ceremonies like retro (exercise in…

I agree a lot with your comment. No amount of planning or estimates will ever change that a feature will be done when it's done. My previous job had about a 4th of the total work week dedicated to meetings. As someone with ADHD, this was very difficult for me. What made matters worse is that they were sometimes spread out and I could lose an entire day of productivity and I was just unable to work when my meds ran ou…

> No amount of planning or estimates will ever change that a feature will be done when it's done.

I've been on teams where we got good enough at estimating that we were +/- a couple of hours each sprint on our burn down charts.

Long tenure, good knowledge of the code, and a healthy amount of time spent on reducing technical debt all combine to make accurate estimations possible.

Of course things can go awry in regards to partner team or 3rd party API integrations, those are always wild cards, but that is why you first do an exploratory task to figure out how hard integration will be (my current team calls these stories "spikes" in our workflow), which de-risks future estimates around the work.

And it also makes more sense. "Spend this week learning how to use this API and figuring out its warts, then come back and give an estimate next week on how much work it'll be to get it up and running for real."

A rather reasonable way to do things.

Re: We Can't Let People Work from Home, for Stupid Reasons

#89

Post by saiojd »

MattGaiser wrote: post #24
lastofthemojito wrote: post #12

I think a lot of the responses to the straw man's questions are reasonable and thoughtful. But I think this sentiment: >I don't want to change the way I work, I just want people to join me in the office. My kids are driving me crazy. Is it weird to say I'm lonely; I miss my office friends. Deserves more respect. There are lot of types of people out there, and it seems like at least some of them are energized by being…

WFH opinion seems to split between people who see work as where you achieve corporate goals for pay and those who see it as a far more encompassing mixture of human experience.

Your description summarizes what I've been trying to express so concisely – it's almost shocking. I'm left wondering on what side of the split you stand on.

Re: We Can't Let People Work from Home, for Stupid Reasons

#90

Post by ASinclair »

mywittyname wrote: post #71
lastofthemojito wrote: post #12

I think a lot of the responses to the straw man's questions are reasonable and thoughtful. But I think this sentiment: >I don't want to change the way I work, I just want people to join me in the office. My kids are driving me crazy. Is it weird to say I'm lonely; I miss my office friends. Deserves more respect. There are lot of types of people out there, and it seems like at least some of them are energized by being…

What ever happened to social clubs? I remember my grandpa was a member of the Knights of Columbus and would frequently go there to socialize / network. I feel like these clubs used to be pretty common: Scouts, Rotary Club, Moose/Elk Lodge, KoC, Veterans of Foreign Wars (which no longer requires members to be former military), and local cultural/historical clubs are pretty prevalent. I've been to a lot of these clubs…

Many of them are affiliated with some organized religion which has been waning for a while now.
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