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Is going to the office a broken way of working?

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Re: Is going to the office a broken way of working?

#371
post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

France, Germany and Italy have really disappointed with their heavyhanded approach against those that are not vaccinated. With that said, i think many are still a bit cautious after being bombarded with warnings of the Coronavirus for 12 months straight. To me though I'm back to normality and slowly but surely everyone else.

If everybody got the damn vaccine the thing would be over much faster. Not getting vaccinated or wearing a mask is an active effort to prolong the existence of a virus that doesn't give a damn about how people rationalize their bad decisions. And I stopped giving a damn about people who defend the metaphorical licking of rats during a plague. I have yet to hear a good rational reason for not getting a vaccine, that i…

well, considering how the pandemic went, a fire in a village is way more likely to directly impact you, compared to the covid directly impacting you. And it's not as if getting vaccinated prevented you from catching and transmitting the virus

Re: Is going to the office a broken way of working?

#373
post #7

IMHO no even if I've been working from home since 2006 when I became self employed. What's broken is having to go to the office every single day. In my experience before and after starting to work from home there is an absolute need to work face to face either to create some bonds between the team members or with a customer or in those rare phases when you have to create something and you need to go full speed with b…

What is broken is the open floor plan and the "put everyone in the same room" as a workaround for a disorganised and dysfunctional workplace.

Re: Is going to the office a broken way of working?

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the thing though: you should not socialize with anyone at the office. The healthiest thing anyone can do for their career is to not mix work and friends. Once you're friends, you're sharing political opinions, life stories, and religious views. People pick up on that, and while you might be pleasing one guy, you're pissing off someone else. No matter your stance on something, you're going to be pissing off som…

To each their own, but to be honest I'm always baffled, and quite saddened, by this "don't make friends at work" "advice". I've made many, many friends at work, and this near-paranoia level of "you might be pissing off someone else" - so what? I don't need, or want, to be friends with everyone, and I'm quite fine if some people don't like me.

Get cancer and die.

Re: Is going to the office a broken way of working?

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point of clarification, because you're spreading misinformation: being opposed to one specific vaccine type is NOT the same as being an "anti-vaxxer." It will behoove you to be clear on that point.

That is exactly what everyone means by anti-vaxxer right now. If you are opposed to the covid vaccine, you are an anti-vaxxer.

And if you're blindly supporting what your government muppets are throwing at you in a simulation of competence you are a believer.

Re: Is going to the office a broken way of working?

#376

I genuinely miss the office. Being in a different space for work (one that was pretty gorgeous), in a nice part of downtown, able to tap people on the shoulder for quick questions rather than having to ping them over chat, more spontaneous collaboration (right before we went remote again I overheard two people discussing an area I have some expertise in and was able to interject and provide useful insight), extra pro…

> able to tap people on the shoulder for quick questions rather than having to ping them over chat The ability for me to switch of chat/email and just get stuff done, without people tapping on my shoulder or standing next to me because they want something is one of the key reasons why I have been working from home for the past 10 years. I’ll come to the office for a week or two every 8 weeks or so, and that’s it. My…

I am ok with people switching off for a while, but then you really need to catch up, otherwise it's really painful for people working with you.

I've had colleagues who would maybe quickly look at their mail/chat once a day (usually early in the morning before most people arrived). Latency is high, but that's manageable. But the most annoying is that maybe you would get an answer, maybe not. So you would need to ping them several times over several media, hoping one catches their attention. In meetings you regularly have to re-state/explain stuff because it was sent in a email and they didn't read it, while everyone else is up to date.

A common example: assign them a MR. Gitlab is too noisy (by default), so they redirect every mail from Gitlab to the trash and don't get a notification. You ping them on chat about the MR, wait a couple of days, no review. So you re-ping them. This time a review happens, maybe the next day. There are some comments, so you fix/answer them. Of course they don't know that you did (and don't check), so you need to re-ping them and wait. Depending on how insistent you are, even a small MR can take a week or two. The end result (which might be what they want ultimately) is that you avoid collaborating with them as much as possible because of how painful it is.

Re: Is going to the office a broken way of working?

#377
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're correct, but one thing that is really missing nowadays, especially with phones and the internet, is active communities that exist in real life outside of work. Stuff like the elks lodge, rotary, bowling leagues, etc are just not as common anymore as I believe they used to be. Certainly there are many things that exist, but in a way societally it seems like they don't have very much cache, even as far a…

This is the other point I wanted to make (but frankly I was too scared that maybe it’s just because I suck at meeting people now that I haven’t socialized like a normal person in a year). It just seems harder to meet people _in general_ than it did even two years ago. Like where is everybody? Does everyone stay home literally all the time now?

[deleted]

Re: Is going to the office a broken way of working?

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a bunch of friends on IRC, we generally hang out in a single channel (it spun out of a topic specific channel but we sorta moved to been adjacent years ago). That acts as my digital water cooler since I'm remote forever.

IRC is becoming the HAM radio of our generation. Pretty soon there will just be a bunch of crusty old men who do it as a hobby but insist how vital and relevant it is.

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Re: Is going to the office a broken way of working?

#379
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things can be quite far from "the absolute worst" and still be quite far from perfect, too.

we're not that far from absolute worst. the world is savage. Continuing my rant, it's one of the things I like about Jordan Peterson. His ideas face this fact head-on. He reminds listeners and readers of this and then presents his ideas given this truth. It seems to me that a philosophical idea that doesn't incorporate that as a basis is fundamentally flawed as it's a pretty important detail.

We're absolutely quite far from the absolute worst. The world could've been entirely uninhabitable for example, think "without an athmosphere at all" kind of uninhabitable. That would've been a way worse outcome than what we have today. I see no reason to limit the range of "worst to best" outcomes to the ones usually imagined in political debates.

Re: Is going to the office a broken way of working?

#380
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're correct, but one thing that is really missing nowadays, especially with phones and the internet, is active communities that exist in real life outside of work. Stuff like the elks lodge, rotary, bowling leagues, etc are just not as common anymore as I believe they used to be. Certainly there are many things that exist, but in a way societally it seems like they don't have very much cache, even as far a…

Can you demystify what an elks lodge is? I’ve never really understood the concept of these lodges and they seem like some kind of closed off private club or something cult like. I’m guessing I have the wrong perception.

It sort of is/was a private club - they would have a lodge, functionally sometimes like a tavern, they might have a liquor license, and membership was fairly controlled/via word of mouth and voting by the existing members. Often members would do business deals, help each other if someone say lost a job, or helped out with things in the community.

Its not a great example for a model that would work now as a huge part was how exclusionary it was - white/male/believe in god/not a commie etc. - society has moved on somewhat from that era.

Still there’s a sort of sense of place that you get when actually involved in a community that is in a local area - I hope we can start to figure out how to do things more locally again.

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