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I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it

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Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it

#261

Post by foxpurple »

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #141
foxes wrote: post #99

Seems like their life would be dramatically better if they didn’t have some horrible car hellscape based commute. Pity cities are designed and spread out so because of cars. Then making the office more comfortable and flexible without people micromanaging would be the next thing.

Rush hour sucks though even if you use the metro/tram/bus/train. The idea that the majority of the adult population should be travelling either in or out of the city centre at the same time seems quite preposterous now.

They shouldn’t be travelling that far at all. They should be within a walkable distance of where they need to go. Walking to work is never stressful and often does reverse.

Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it

#262

Post by brailsafe »

mrweasel wrote: post #199
aba_cz wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is U.S. thing, right? People in Europe are using public transportation to get to work from the edge of the city with no problems. Come visit Prague to see how it's done :D

> People in Europe are using public transportation No we don't. It would add 90 minutes each way for my 15km commute. We really need to stop with the idea that public transportation in Europe is awesome, it not, it actually pretty terrible outside a few select areas. It's actually faster to ride a bike to work in my case, except bikes aren't allowed on the motorway. Europe need to fix it's public transportation syste…

So you're saying that because you live rather far from work, and precariously located proximate to transit terminals, people in European cities don't use transit?

15km is far af. It's only not far af if you use a car. If your frame of reference though is not commuting by car, then you select employment and residence differently.

I currently don't have a car or a job, and walk or take transit everywhere (not in Europe), and as such I'm sure as hell not looking for jobs located 15km from my house. Sure, let me just thru-hike to work np.

Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it

#263

Post by eb0la »

Nbox9 wrote: post #37

Wow, that seems like a terrible place to work. Why is he going to a daily meeting if he doesn’t have to pay attention to the meeting? Why is there not an incentive to complete more than one card a day? If one card can take as little as two hours it seems like a massive waste to expect someone to only do one card. Why doesn’t he have proper equipment? If you spend XXX,XXX a year for an employee it makes sense to spend…

> Why doesn’t he have proper equipment? If you spend XXX,XXX a year for an employee it makes sense to spend X,XXX/yr for proper equipment. The company should provide high quality mouse/keyboard/headset.

Because it is an expense, not an investment.

If you are building a product, having good equipment is a force multiplier: You get more from your expense in people.

If you're just billing hours to a third party, good equipment is an expense and might be counterproductive.

Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it

#264

Post by DrBazza »

rococode wrote: post #131

I predict the balance we're heading towards for many office jobs is going to be something like 2 mandatory office days a week, 1 optional day, and 2 mandatory WFH days, with "mandatory" really meaning "highly encouraged". Like Monday and Wednesday are in-office, Tuesday and Thursday are WFH, Friday is optional. Preference for WFH depends on so many individual factors, not just personality but also your commute length…

In London, I'm inclined to agree with this. 2 days seems a fair balance.

The trouble is that the majority of employees have signed a legally binding contract that says "your legal place of employment is ", meaning that you are legally obliged to go back into the office.

Some companies think it is a "competitive advantage" to have people back in the office. A couple of banks and accountancy firms certainly seem to think so.

But as everyone has said "it depends".

I've worked in 7-to-a-row open plan offices in banks, to small companies.

I was more productive in open-plan when I was in my early 20s, and far more productive on my own or in smaller quieter offices as I've gotten older.

Going back to this from the other day [1] "Insulating developers from interruptions" is the best reason to wfh.

[1] https://hackernoon.com/the-generational-divide-in-software-d...

Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it

#265

Post by ehnto »

seanhandley wrote: post #230
solatic wrote: post #123

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…

Agreed. It's a false dichotomy that one is better than the other. The only useful way I know to think about it is what my ratio of solo focus time is vs time spent communicating with others. There is a place in the world for people who wait for requirements to appear in their ticket queue, code out solutions, then go home, ad infinitum. But software development tends to work better as a collaborative endeavour. As an…

Like you said, a false dichotomy, but after years of collaborative development with stakeholders, I still want well defined tickets. Things go missing constantly otherwise, people forget they asked for things, I forget they asked me, questions about the task end up lost across four different communication platforms, it's a mess.

At the end of a good meeting, I love seeing actionable tickets, I can relax knowing I have all the requirements so far captured and I can get to work as soon as it's time. In between now and then, I can forget allll about it.

Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it

#266

Post by andrewmackrodt »

foxpurple wrote: post #236
rococode wrote: post #131

I predict the balance we're heading towards for many office jobs is going to be something like 2 mandatory office days a week, 1 optional day, and 2 mandatory WFH days, with "mandatory" really meaning "highly encouraged". Like Monday and Wednesday are in-office, Tuesday and Thursday are WFH, Friday is optional. Preference for WFH depends on so many individual factors, not just personality but also your commute length…

I would suggest that Friday makes a good time for the mandatory day. Means people can go out for drinks at the end of the day. The in office days will never be as productive but they can be good socialising times so you may as well make use of that.

Throughout my career I've found Thursday is consistently "the day" when work people are most likely to go out together. In some places it may have been because the last Thursday of the month is payday, but largely I believe it's because the majority of people are likely to have commitments with other friends, partners, children etc on a Friday.

I'm also in favour of Thursday as the mandatory day if I need to be in the office as the last day of the week to do release management, e.g. minimise the risk of a bad deployment on a Friday affecting someone's weekend.

Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it

#267

Post by AmericanChopper »

tchvil wrote: post #128
midrus wrote: post #85

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…

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.

People tend to think this is some form of injustice, but the real reason is that most people work as part of a team, and your ability to deliver value as a team member is constrained by you ability to work as a team member.

The anecdote I have for my office is the complete opposite of the parents comments anecdote. The least productive members stayed at home as much as possible, and the most productive ones are in the office every day (because they all know that collaborative work is so much more efficient in person).

Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it

#268

Post by DrBazza »

beardface wrote: post #194
CephalopodMD wrote: post #119

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…

I work remotely and rent an office in town. It's a 15 minute walk from my house, a decent size (~22m^2), all my own, and well set up. I love it and pay gladly but I it's not possible for everyone. I used to have a garden office but my wife now needs her own space for her work so I took the rented space. A dedicated space is a must if you're working remotely. Either at home or offsite. I have no objection to going int…

> I work remotely and rent an office in town.

I live in a semi-rural commuter town outside London, and I've noticed on one of the few office-industrial estates around the town there's a new building which currently has the logo of one of those co-working companies. This isn't something I've ever seen outside of London (WeWork being the obvious one).

I'm curious to see if that style of working catches on post-COVID.

Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it

#269

Post by joelbluminator »

Apocryphon wrote: post #235
joelbluminator wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

South American and Mexico are in the same time zone, I'm sure there a couple million decent programmers in the entire South continent.

I've made that point before, but was told otherwise. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27356320

IDK, how important is culture on a fully remote team? Also, what IS culture exactly? Basecamp's employees were all from the same culture, yet they managed to start hating each other and almost dissolve the company.
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