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Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

#131

Post by changxi_hn »

alecbz wrote: post #122
changxi_hn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a software manager and this isn't what happens in practice at all. The more comfortable they are, the sloppier and lazy their resulting code as they feel no pressure to take their work seriously. I can, and will, stand behind devs for hours to keep them determined and on-task.

I think maybe this is some kind of local optimum, but a poor one. Like if your devs already don't give two shits about anything, pressure from you watching over them might improve things somewhat. But like the real fix is a path to a much better optimum, which is giving employees autonomy, trusting them, rewarding them adequately, getting them to actually care, so that they don't need to be watched over as individual…

No. I'm the manager, they're the dev. If they want autonomy, become an artist.

Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

#134

Post by alecbz »

paulmooreparks wrote: post #119
chc4 wrote: post #38

Working from home was very bad for both my productivity and my mental health. Going in and seeing coworkers every day as mandatory social interaction is a godsend, and I now know I don't want to work for any company that is 100% WFH. The lower friction to just talk to people sitting next to me over having to DM them, and overhearing them complain or talk about whatever random thing they are working on is also a subst…

It is interesting to me how big of a gulf there is between the pro-office and pro-WFH groups. It isn't the case that one is completely right and one is completely wrong. Clearly, there are different working styles, different personalities, and different social needs. How do we build work environments that can accommodate both?

I'm not sure we can, or should. I imagine the future looks more like different companies/teams with different working cultures.

True "remote as an office" and "working from office" work styles are inherently incompatible. And trying to compromise will probably make everyone unhappy.

Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

#137

Post by PragmaticPulp »

dleslie wrote: post #18

Working from home means I get to see my wife and children for more hours of the day. It also means that I get to choose when I will allow myself to be interrupted, rather than sitting in an open concept office and being _continually_ interrupted. I've been working from home for over six years. I never want to return to the office. I will change careers before I return to a software development office.

> It also means that I get to choose when I will allow myself to be interrupted, rather than sitting in an open concept office and being _continually_ interrupted.

This is extremely situational. When I was in a larger house and had no kids, WFH was an easy way to avoid interruptions.

Moving to a smaller house (more expensive city) and having kids flipped the situation around. Avoiding interruptions at home was extremely difficult because I was always only a door away from someone asking a “quick favor”.

It’s not just me: As a remote manger I can almost always tell when summer break starts for everyone’s area because there’s a stepwise decline in productive when people’s kids aren’t in school.

Likewise, the office environment makes all the difference. I’ve worked in open-office spaces where everybody respected each other and concentration was the default. I’ve also worked in private-office spaces where I could expect knocks on my door every 15 minutes or less because the culture was so bad that interrupting the engineers was the default practice.

Lately, I’ve felt that fully remote has been the worst of all worlds. Once Slack becomes the default I’m pinged from every angle all day long. It’s hard to push back against people who want answers now now now and know they can get your attention by typing the right few characters into Slack. Comes down to culture, but Slack makes it easy for people to quietly interrupt people directly whereas it was much easier to police the interruptions (as a manager) when I could literally see the offenders bothering the engineers.

Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

#138

Post by paulmooreparks »

Work from home for me. I moved to Singapore in 2017 and I was already 80% WFH pre-Covid. The other 20% was just because some more senior people wanted to see faces in the office and possibly justify having as large an office as we did.

Now I'm in a new company, still in Singapore but doing basically the same job. I work in retail POS professional services, and my reports and colleagues are scattered all over Asia and Australia. This is because our customers are also equally distributed, and most of our time is spent engaging customers and collaborating remotely.

My manager is in Utrecht but soon will be in Sydney. Fortunately, she doesn't care where I work as long as I get the work done. That's also my message to my reports.

It's a unique job and set of circumstances that lends itself to WFH, but it suits me perfectly. Now I can't imagine going to an office every day.

Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

#139

Post by Dobrila »

paulcole wrote: post #87
xwdv wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of makes you a bad coworker. I would be annoyed if someone actually needed to pester me in person regularly to function. I work from home to avoid people like that now. If I was in the office I would not want to talk to anybody unless we had some prearranged meeting on a specific topic.

> If I was in the office I would not want to talk to anybody unless we had some prearranged meeting on a specific topic. This is the sort of honesty I’d love to hear when interviewing candidates.

And if a candidate said that, how would that influence your hiring decision?

Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

#140

Post by toomanydoubts »

changxi_hn wrote: post #131
alecbz wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think maybe this is some kind of local optimum, but a poor one. Like if your devs already don't give two shits about anything, pressure from you watching over them might improve things somewhat. But like the real fix is a path to a much better optimum, which is giving employees autonomy, trusting them, rewarding them adequately, getting them to actually care, so that they don't need to be watched over as individual…

No. I'm the manager, they're the dev. If they want autonomy, become an artist.

Small wiener energy.
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