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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

#381

Post by joelbluminator »

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #273
joelbluminator wrote: post #68

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?

Sure but I think that's a good thing. I would rather we slowly lift millions of people out of literal poverty than sacrifice ~5% of our day (1/16 awake hours) in commute just to gatekeep our jobs. Plus there are other barriers. WFH can be every day except a monthly lunch or social event with the team. Or it's WFH save for on-prem things like hardware upgrades. WFH doesn't have to mean fully remote... just not an offi…

Lots of people took monetary obligations (mortgages mostly) thinking they'll make 6 figures for the next 20-30 years...what happens if that's no longer true?

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

#382

Post by nodejs_rulez_1 »

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…

With the 2 office days fully understood by all parties as fully non-productive days, more like team building?

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

#383

Post by alfiedotwtf »

IvanAchlaqullah wrote: post #170
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…

Yes, working from home is much better than working at open office. However there is some scenario where middle manager can make WFH as hellish as working at open office: by mandating everyone to install invasive spyware so they can "manage" you remotely. Bonus point if the company didn't want to give/loan company devices, so you have to install it on your own personal devices.

That's a 2-weeks notice event

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

#384

Post by momirlan »

moss2 wrote: post #312
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…

It sucks to read this because I feel targeted. I can not get any coding done at home and am 10x more productive if I have people around me working on the same project. I need to see the face of another person or I just go limp and become unmotivated. People work differently and I think that an employer should accommodate as many types of work environments as possible. There should be a choice between remote or in-off…

Do not feel targeted. We are all different, and what works for some doesn't for other. I feel better having people around and missed a lot of that interaction initially. After 1 year remote i hate people and love being alone at my desk. I also have no social life outside family. Something is not right.

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

#385

Post by Leszek »

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.

I'm a reasonably experienced person and I've found myself much _less_ productive at home, because despite my experience I still get value from being able to easily and quickly bounce ideas off people or get help in components that I'm less familiar with.

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

#386

Post by momirlan »

throwawaydeitz1 wrote: post #359
tut-urut-utut wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Trust me, keep work and friends separated. That's what you do by changing jobs. When you move on to the next company, those guys you met on the job become just "out of work friends".

Most people with > 3 jobs worth of experience will tell you that coworker-friends rarely transition to non-work friends after leaving said company. You will become too busy with making new coworker-friends at the new company, combined with non-work family/friend commitments filling the rest of your time.

One person with over 25 years in IT will tell you not to generalize. We're all different. I keep in touch with people i worked with 25 years ago, even across different countries and continents. I am a contractor so I change jobs roughly every year. I still go out with friends i met at work, and i have brought many of them into projects i started at other companies. I also have been hired by people i worked with previously. People are precious. The fact that you work with them 8 hours/day doesn't make them less so. I won't talk about the difficult ones, there's always that category too

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

#387

Post by Wowfunhappy »

Hamuko wrote: post #129
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #4

> 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.

Do you only have a single office? Because even back when we worked at the office, we had people split between multiple offices so we had to do teleconferencing anyways even if no one was remote (and usually at least one person was remote as well).

Yes. It's also a < 20 person company. I acknowledge that both of those may be coloring my view of things—because yeah, if half your team is on another continent, I really don't know what the point of an office is. I also don't think I'd want to work in a company like that.

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

#388

Post by Wowfunhappy »

sam0x17 wrote: post #94
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #4

> 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…

I think the environmental factor could go either way. It's much better for the environment if people are clustered in dense cities versus spread out in rural areas. If the result of the work-from-home boom is a massive exodus from cities, that's quite clearly going to be bad for the planet.

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

#389

Post by RHSeeger »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #198
tshaddox wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either you paid for more space or you lost space at your home during the 8 hours you were previously working at an office.

> you lost space at your home during the 8 hours I guess that's true, but I'm not sure why I would care about my home getting slightly smaller when I'm at work. It will affect some people, but I don't know if it's many.

I would expect it impacts a large number of people that work primarily remotely. A lot of us have a home office because working from the kitchen or other shared space just isn't effective. The cost of an extra room (even if a bonus room, not a full bedroom) can increase the cost of a house by a dramatic amount; and then you also have to consider utilities and the like. Every time I've done the math, working from home costs more (for the worker) than going into the office; usually my many thousands of dollars a year.

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

#390

Post by RHSeeger »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #164
RHSeeger wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the end of the day, like it or not, the majority of people working for a company of beyond a small size are going to be in some level of a collaborative environment. Logistically, it's easier to accomplish that in person. You say this like it's a foregone conclusion, a fact. I disagree with it completely. It's far easier to collaborate remotely. You don't need find a meeting room, you don't need to worry about m…

>You don't need find a meeting room, maybe it's just because I've never been the meeting room finding person but in most places I've worked it hasn't been a big problem. >you don't need to worry about making too much noise, I've never had the problem that a meeting was being too noisy for the people outside a meeting, but I have had the problem that kids in the house were being too noisy for the online meeting and ev…

> in most places I've worked it hasn't been a big problem

In every place I've worked, there's been a limited number of meeting rooms and you needed to plan ahead to get one. And if your meeting ran over, it wasn't uncommon to have a group of people standing outside waiting for you to vacate.

> I've never had the problem that a meeting was being too noisy for the people outside a meeting

Fair. I was really thinking about the impromptu meetings of 3-4 people around a desk (because getting a meeting room takes too much time). Those almost infallibly annoy other people in the area, even if they don't say anything.

> Why wouldn't this affect remote meetings?

Suddenly adding a remote person to a meeting that was planned to be in person is difficult at best. It's common for the people on location to just not "play well" with the remote person. When meetings are "remote first", adding one more remote person doesn't wind up with that person being an afterthought. This is a fairly well known issue, honestly.

> I would think for meeting quality an in person one is likely to work better as a meeting

Under optimal circumstances, the in person meeting does tend to be best. However, there are so many different variations from optimal, it's my experience that remote-first meetings wind up being better in nearly every _actual_ case.

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