121–130 of 479 posts
If anyone can do your work remotely...ANYONE can do your work remotely. Do you guys think maybe when the next recession happens we will see unprecedented offshoring due to companies not being able to pay 160K to a developer with 3 years experience? Its all nice and well when every startup can raise as much money as it wants. What happens when/if that pops?
But if you want to work on new technology with a ton of unknowns (which I personally get more job satisfaction out of), in my experience you need that human connection and in-person collaboration - at least at first. Maybe that can work fully remote. But my fully remote startup experiences have been abysmal.
On the one hand, the employer set up a panopticon in the office, with crappy furniture, lots of interruptions, a crappy office kitchen, no decent food (i.e. needing to bring food from home). Garbage in, garbage out. Of course nobody is happy to sit in traffic to come to an environment like that.
Then we have the author, who has the mistaken idea that the number one most important thing that you do at your job is your directly measurable productivity. Not relationship-building, just pure "shut up and let me sit down and get my work done." Personally, I'd prefer it if engineering work didn't go the way of Amazon warehouse workers, because if "productivity" is the sole metric of an employee's performance, just wait until your employer decides to try and optimize it.
Best of luck to the OP at the dice roll that is the next company he works for.
> If you like/prefer going to the office that is fine. I am not trying to say we should all be remote. Companies should offer FLEXIBILITY to let employees choose where to work from. That doesn’t work. I prefer working in the office, but only if the rest of my team is actually there with me. If some people are remote, then we have to do Zoom meetings, so I may as well be remote too.
I hate that people keep framing it as a "preference" issue. There are HUGE economic and environmental costs that go along with working in and (often) commuting to an office. Not to mention the consistent 20-30% productivity drain working in an office seems to have across the board at most tech orgs. We don't need to destroy our planet, dramatically increase costs, and dramatically lower productivity just to appease t…
For example, commuting, while not nice most of the time, has one great impact on life: it allows you to break from work, which is not happening when you have sleep/work/hobbies/life at the same place. I'm not saying you should spend 1h in traffic or subway, but 20min and walking would be a great way to change thoughts and separate work from life.
Also seeing your colleagues for real, and spending some time with them, as they are humans, is a great way to have better empathy and better work relations: using only remote tools doesn't provide such a human behavior.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Then learn to socialize or get another job. I rarely rant on hn or espouse strong feelings, but you've made a couple of dismissive comments like this so I'm afraid I've lost my composure. Socializing isn't the problem. The problem is an open office plan filled with constant noise, the stench of whatever the guy five desks over is eating for lunch, the music being played loudly through four different peoples' headse…
“ the constant backlash of people with attitudes like yours who somehow think this is better” This reeks of bitterness and projecting. I never claimed wfh is worse, to your suprise I actually prefer working from home. If you do not like the environment you work in, adapt or leave. Or you know, complain about it on a programming forum, go on some sanctimonious rant, totally not childish.
And if it doesn't work for you after trying, quit batching and change your situation.
> The best part is that the cubicle doesn't have tall walls so I can literally see/hear everything, including other people's monitors. Open offices are awful. In my experience most people end up wearing headphones all day, and I did too. My ears would get red and irritated after a while. But I'd keep them on because it was like an unspoken social rule; that if you looked busy and had headphones on, people won't inter…
I have worked at Google and a cubicle would have been better than the open source we had.
One thing I noticed is that while more experienced people are productive working from home, it is devastating for fresh starting employees. Work from home eliminates learning through osmosis. If anyone has a work around this let me know. I am surprised no one else has mentioned it here.
In my company the only ones that want to go back to the office are those engineers and managers that spend most of their day just walking around, talking to everyone about non important stuff, inviting you to have a coffee, and making jokes until 5pm. Just the people that have nothing to show at the end of the quarter. The most productive engineers, and the ones I enjoy working the most are the remote ones. The only…
I'm not very good at it, but since then I try to work on both sides.
> If you like/prefer going to the office that is fine. I am not trying to say we should all be remote. Companies should offer FLEXIBILITY to let employees choose where to work from. That doesn’t work. I prefer working in the office, but only if the rest of my team is actually there with me. If some people are remote, then we have to do Zoom meetings, so I may as well be remote too.
In my company the only ones that want to go back to the office are those engineers and managers that spend most of their day just walking around, talking to everyone about non important stuff, inviting you to have a coffee, and making jokes until 5pm. Just the people that have nothing to show at the end of the quarter. The most productive engineers, and the ones I enjoy working the most are the remote ones. The only…