211–220 of 479 posts
Some people like things. Some people don't like things. Can we just accept that different people are different and move on?
Sometimes I even feel a little schadenfreude when my opposite claims they are suffering.
Sounds like the relationship is dysfunctional in both directions. 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 t…
I just want my own office. That's all. I'd be pretty okay with going in if I had my own office with 4 walls. First job of my career, they told me I would have an office of my own. First day I come back do for full time (I had interned there too with my own office), they tell me they're switching buildings to go open office in about a month's time. I got a precious few weeks with a personal office, and then it was all…
This person has never worked in an office, and has a quiet environment at home. Ah, young and childless.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One programming teacher told me 20 years ago: "you think your technical skills will make you advance your career, wrong, it is your interpersonal ones that will do". I'm not very good at it, but since then I try to work on both sides.
On my second job, I made 2.5x what I made at my first engineering job (which ended 3.5 years ago). At my 3rd job I jumped my salary by 10s of thousands of dollars over what I was making at my 2nd job. At my 4th job, I now make 8x my first job. I am now consulting (with way too many clients) and have the choice of making six figures by working less than 4 months a year. Technical skills almost solely put me in the 1%.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Completely agree. I'm actually working full time in the office just so I have a working environment that's actually optimised for focusing on work, even though it's primarily empty. There's no way I'd work for a company that insisted I work in the same space I live in. I cycle in and my commute is one of the highlights of my day. When some colleagues are occasionally in the office they all comment on how much being b…
This sounds like a business opportunity for WeWork.
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.
The solution is obvious: structured training and mentoring. When the pandemic hit, I was hiring a team of 5 new engineers. What was I going to do? Throw up my hands? I implemented a weekly technical training program that morphed into the 250 person org official onboarding. Weekly, I literally just get someone on a VC for 30 minutes and record having a conversation about a technical topic at a noobie level. 16 months…
Sounds like the relationship is dysfunctional in both directions. 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 t…
Well, the most important thing is certainly NOT relationship-building either.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Well, there are also huge human costs that go along with working alone all day, and in the same environment as the rest of your life. 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…
About the only thing that I have noticed, is that having the ability to immediately communicate and that communication method being text, it is very easy for complaints about the organisation to get a little more heated than would happen if we were in person.
If you are working from home and you feel alone, then just reach out to your co-workers and spend some time just chewing the fat.
I miss being able to tell if I'm interrupting a coworker's state of flow or not with a quick message. When everyone's in the office, I can _see_ when they get back to their desk and haven't gotten into anything again. I can see that my question isn't going to interrupt them. As it stands, I interrupt everyone and they interrupt me. I haven't been able to get into flow during office hours in 18months. Code review disc…
Screen sharing works better for me for that kind of thing.