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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

#291

Post by twelve40 »

brailsafe wrote: post #232
ohhnoodont wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may just be my experience as a young person in San Francisco / Silicon Valley, but it's very common for office life and social life to be highly intertwined. I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing. Many of us moved here and joined competitive, demanding companies. People bond in these situations. I really look forward to being back in the office and having a significant part of my social life return. Don't…

It is a bad thing, for the reason you just eluded to. Your work goes away for any reason, and so does your social life. This is why many of my friends haven't made any real friends since highschool

What the OP has alluded to was that sometimes you just like the people you work with, and if you are in a situation with long hours and hard work, for some people it's more efficient to endure that in person and not in isolation, and it's not always a BS manager thing. Whether you choose for some reason to cling to those people, or fully realize that this is a team that gets together to get shit done, not a family, is a completely separate issue.

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

#292

Post by adreamingsoul »

I miss my office. It’s an actual room that has 3 desks, windows, lights, and a door. Although it does have a glass wall.

I’m so used (conditioned) to working in an open office plan that my desk faces a wall with my back to the room. Idk, it helps me focus.

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

#293

Post by slgeorge »

vinni2 wrote: post #112

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.

Absolutely. Remote working is absolutely devastating to the development of junior team members and people just getting started in the world of work.

If you're just getting started in your area (whether development, sales, marketing, devops) having immediate help and guidance from your peers and manager is really helpful - documentation helps, structured training helps but they're not the full solution. Those momentary 'quick' bits of guidance help, and whether we like it or not "face-to-face conversation" is the highest form of bandwidth we have.

The other element people don't talk about enough is that getting used to "working" is a journey in and of itself. There are lots of elements of being productive in the world of work - not just churning out code - and it's not obvious how it all works. In some areas I see a lot of "hollowing out" where we don't have as many entry roles.

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

#294

Post by rxhernandez »

tchalla wrote: post #275
rxhernandez wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.…

> Technical skills almost solely put me in the 1%. What percentile would you rate your technical skills?

I wish I knew. Besides generic praise (like saying I'm a rockstar at my job) a few of my managers said that they loved how they could drop me into a situation with little to no information and have me come out successful. Other than that I really don't know how to measure myself. Sometimes I've pulled off things that other engineers said (to the product manager) were impossible; a couple times I've had humiliating failures that still make me sad to think about; most of the time I get my work done.

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

#295

Post by zmmmmm »

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…

100%

My organisation just opted into open area hot desks instead of offices. One day in there and interrutped about 5 times in 30 minutes by people who otherwise would have pinged me on slack and allowed me to reply in a manner more respectful of my workload. They see this as a big advantage of the open area "instead of making meetings you can just go over and quickly chat to someone!"

When you think about what software people do when they are most productive it is almost a deep trance-like state, I would compare it to meditation. Imagine proposing that people go and do their meditation out in the corridor where everybody is walking past and talking to each other, getting coffee and randomly interrupting you. It's insane anybody ever thought it was a good idea.

Unfortunately closed offices are a huge status symbol now and asking for one is akin to declaring you think you're more important than everyone else in the office.

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

#296

Post by dynamite-ready »

foxpurple wrote: post #245
magic_carpet_ai wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dense cities with public transit: maybe not the best in times of pandemics

They clearly aren’t that bad. China has very dense cities and has not had much issue controlling spread. Masks and a respectful society seem to be highly effective at stoping viruses.

Not in London, or the tech hotspots of the US, I'm sure. I bet it's a free for all. It's a big reason for my apprehension of a return to the office. In London, at least, it's very common to find significant numbers of people on buses and trains without a mask.

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

#297

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

gregoriol wrote: post #124
sam0x17 wrote: post #94

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…

One of the nicest work environments I've had (in these specific terms only!) was when I worked 15-20 minutes away from where I lived. In summer months, I could walk in — and it helped that there was a park on the way. In the winter, or if I was really in a hurry, I could take local transport. That short commute was perfect to clear the head and prepare for the day. Unfortunately, it's a very difficult setup to achieve and my last commute — nearly 2 hours there and back — was the final straw before I decided to wfh pretty much full time.

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

#298

Post by monkeydust »

ohhnoodont wrote: post #160
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…

This may just be my experience as a young person in San Francisco / Silicon Valley, but it's very common for office life and social life to be highly intertwined. I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing. Many of us moved here and joined competitive, demanding companies. People bond in these situations. I really look forward to being back in the office and having a significant part of my social life return. Don't…

It's not a bad thing imho.

I joined a banking grad scheme many years ago in my first role out of uni. Have about 10 friends from there now 20 or so years on that I am in regular contact with.

I have moved to several different jobs since and pick up maybe one friend along the way but nothing as close as from our first job. Obviously age / place in life at the time was a big factor.

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

#299

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

MrScruff wrote: post #177
gregoriol wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

I don't think anyone is advocating for a position in which companies insist you work in the space you live in. The dichotomy here is between a) company forcing you to work in specific building and b) company giving you some say in the matter. People want different amounts of 'say', of course, but even a fully-remote company isn't going to prevent you from, for example, working from a shared office that's local to you.

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

#300

Post by caffeine »

jasondclinton wrote: post #144
vinni2 wrote: post #112

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…

Actually it sounds like it is hard, but you pulled off something of great value by thinking about it, taking ownership, and iterating towards solving a problem.
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