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38% of remote workers work from bed

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Re: 38% of remote workers work from bed

#221

Post by llharper »

holoduke wrote: post #203
scarecrowbob wrote: post #77

I've been working remote for about 10 years. I've had "real" offices. I've worked in open-plan offices. I've had a home office. I've worked from bed. There are tons of good ways to do it. Lately I swap between a kitchen table and a chair on my porch. I no longer use multiple screens, I've just gotten really fast at swapping windows on my 15" laptop; I've gotten good at figuring out how wide my terminal window breaks…

Working from home only possible with experienced devs. Once you have lots of juniors, it's very difficult to coach them. Juniors need to be able to contact fellow devs randomly and not via a zoom call.

I’ve been mentoring two juniors at work and I prefer zoom actually. It’s a lot easier for me to share my screen with the both of them than it is to all huddle around my desk. If they run into a problem they ping me on slack and we hop on a call together. It’s not any harder than strolling over to my desk.

Re: 38% of remote workers work from bed

#222

Post by mark_l_watson »

scarecrowbob wrote: post #77

I've been working remote for about 10 years. I've had "real" offices. I've worked in open-plan offices. I've had a home office. I've worked from bed. There are tons of good ways to do it. Lately I swap between a kitchen table and a chair on my porch. I no longer use multiple screens, I've just gotten really fast at swapping windows on my 15" laptop; I've gotten good at figuring out how wide my terminal window breaks…

You have summarized the good experiences I have had working from home (except onsite for a while at Google and Capital One) since my wife and I moved to a small town in the mountains of Central Arizona in 1998.

I have two areas of my yard where I can work, one is always shady, I have a dedicated office, but also work in the living room and kitchen table. I have a nice external monitor on my desk, but I don’t really need it for most writing or work tasks.

Re: 38% of remote workers work from bed

#223

Post by Cthulhu_ »

scarecrowbob wrote: post #77

I've been working remote for about 10 years. I've had "real" offices. I've worked in open-plan offices. I've had a home office. I've worked from bed. There are tons of good ways to do it. Lately I swap between a kitchen table and a chair on my porch. I no longer use multiple screens, I've just gotten really fast at swapping windows on my 15" laptop; I've gotten good at figuring out how wide my terminal window breaks…

I've done WFH for a year and a half now (and the odd day in the years before that), and I still kinda struggle; it's easy to let the distractions take hold, and it costs me energy to get started on work. Mind you, the work is not the most exciting at the moment either.

That said, as other commenters have mentioned, there is value (for me) to work in a team and to have others actually depend on me and my progress; I need a bit of external pressure. At the moment it's mainly self-pressure / self-motivation, which isn't the best.

I do think in the future I'll pursue jobs where I'm both independent but also replaceable, because at the moment I'm not replaceable so I don't feel like I can move on yet.

Re: 38% of remote workers work from bed

#224

Post by Cthulhu_ »

babesh wrote: post #101
daenz wrote: post #40

For the past 2 weeks, I've been working from a treadmill. It has been incredible. I got a small under-the-desk treadmill for my standing desk and I walk at about 2.5km/hour and get around 20,000 steps in per day. It has improved my mood, my clarity, and also has improved my sleep (because I'm tired of walking). I also find it easier to focus on tasks for some reason. If you can make a setup like this work for you, I…

Picture tech people walking on their treadmills for compensation and then picture gerbils running on wheels for food. Picture tech people drinking Soylent and then picture gerbils eating pellets. The world is whack. People are substituting artificial things for the natural things that made us happy in earlier times. Walking on a treadmill vs walking outside in the sun and shade amidst plants, trees, and other living…

I'm really happy for you that you either don't work or have a job that involves a lot of walking outside in the sun / nature.

Re: 38% of remote workers work from bed

#225

Post by smichel17 »

dsign wrote: post #140
mojuba wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's work from home brilliantly summarized, very true. However, I have my doubts about productivity in smaller teams and startups. Being in the same space physically I think speeds up a lot of things. In small teams and esp. at early stage startups your whole day is a meeting where things are discussed and resolved spontaneously. Sometimes it is important to have an environment where information is exchanged dynami…

> Being in the same space physically I think speeds up a lot of things. In small teams and esp. at early stage startups your whole day is a meeting where things are discussed and resolved spontaneously. Who's going to write the fine-detail code if they whole day is a meeting? It may change from case to case, but for some small teams the biggest challenge is to produce something so good that it out-competes the produc…

Huh. During my undergrad, one of the most time-consuming courses was almost entirely pair programming. Having another person there to pull you back on track when you get distracted, and vice versa, was definitely a productivity improvement. Also less time wasted going down the wrong rabbit hole.

The chance that one of us was feeling motivated to put in the work to deal with that corner case is higher than the same chance for either of us individually. Though I guess it depends if the distracted person is more able to derail the other person, vs being pulled back on track.

Re: 38% of remote workers work from bed

#226

Post by Cthulhu_ »

_y5hn wrote: post #180
xkeysc0re wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you make an analogy doesn't mean it's valid lol. Like there's obviously an entire category of differences between a person consciously choosing to use a treadmill desk versus a captive pet gerbil on a wheel.

Is it really a bad analogy though?

Is it? What do you think yourself?

Re: 38% of remote workers work from bed

#228

Post by mojuba »

dyadic wrote: post #220
mojuba wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's work from home brilliantly summarized, very true. However, I have my doubts about productivity in smaller teams and startups. Being in the same space physically I think speeds up a lot of things. In small teams and esp. at early stage startups your whole day is a meeting where things are discussed and resolved spontaneously. Sometimes it is important to have an environment where information is exchanged dynami…

I think that small teams with high throughput communication can work in place and remote. In place the high communication is there by default where the default remote position would probably be lower communication / more isolation. It doesn't have to be this way of course, but it would require the remote high communication model to be put into action intentionally. It's worth remembering that this high communication…

> this high communication method isn't really scalable too

True, from what I've seen the threshold lies somewhere at 10-12 people, assuming a mixed team engineering + marketing + etc.

But while you are small you can take advantage, remove all formalities and be in-place as much as possible. You can move so much faster, having trivial respect and ethics in mind, as in don't talk loudly about sales just next to an engineer who seems to be working on something. And vice versa.

Re: 38% of remote workers work from bed

#229

Post by mark_l_watson »

robbedpeter wrote: post #151
scarecrowbob wrote: post #77

I've been working remote for about 10 years. I've had "real" offices. I've worked in open-plan offices. I've had a home office. I've worked from bed. There are tons of good ways to do it. Lately I swap between a kitchen table and a chair on my porch. I no longer use multiple screens, I've just gotten really fast at swapping windows on my 15" laptop; I've gotten good at figuring out how wide my terminal window breaks…

>>... play banjo or accordion Being able to noodle on a guitar while stepping away from a problem is a super power for me. If you work from home, get an instrument you can distract yourself with. The music or drills can break you out of ruts, and if you do it half seriously, you can develop real skill. The oh so serious kabuki show we all play out in offices, especially open plans, wastes a lot of mental energy on "p…

+1 and I like your writing style: “””The oh so serious kabuki show we all play out in offices, especially open plans, wastes a lot of mental energy on "professionalism" and decor.”””

Re: 38% of remote workers work from bed

#230

Post by teekert »

mojuba wrote: post #125
scarecrowbob wrote: post #77

I've been working remote for about 10 years. I've had "real" offices. I've worked in open-plan offices. I've had a home office. I've worked from bed. There are tons of good ways to do it. Lately I swap between a kitchen table and a chair on my porch. I no longer use multiple screens, I've just gotten really fast at swapping windows on my 15" laptop; I've gotten good at figuring out how wide my terminal window breaks…

That's work from home brilliantly summarized, very true. However, I have my doubts about productivity in smaller teams and startups. Being in the same space physically I think speeds up a lot of things. In small teams and esp. at early stage startups your whole day is a meeting where things are discussed and resolved spontaneously. Sometimes it is important to have an environment where information is exchanged dynami…

I'm also divided, and I still go to office because of that (at the moment we can sort of choose it ourselves), 1 or 2 days a week. Sometimes 0. I enjoy the time in the office, I see who is there, try to gather a big group for a good lunch and talk as much as I can. At home I focus on coding, document writing etc. I'm all for letting teams hash it out among themselves.

One argument that I think fails in the long run is that creativity drops. Maybe it does, in the short term, but if people are happier at home, and more companies will support it, new ways of being creative or even together will be found. I wouldn't worry so much about losing the "classic, old" way creativity worked before, there is so much to be gained and so much yet to be learned. Give it some time, embrace it, see where it takes us.

One example of growing creativity for me has been: One colleague in our team is from the US, he's the only one. Pre-Covid he'd be on a speaker in our meeting room, no cam on. Since Covid he has his cam on, same as everyone else. We engage much more in small talk, recently we got a tour of his house and garden via webcam. What a nice guy! We wrote some patents together now too. Even though we are 8 hours flying away from each other. The talent pool for teams just grows much bigger.

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