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

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

#201

Post by bckr »

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?

> How do we build work environments that can accommodate both?

Maybe we don't need to. Maybe different companies can have different cultures. Or, in a compromise with your idea, maybe you split up teams in a company by their preference.

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

#202

Post by alwaysanon »

Part of why working from home was soo effective for me at first is all the good will and camaraderie that I'd built up with my coworkers over many years - and vice versa. I imagine that if I had started a new role during the pandemic it'd have been quite different.

When people ping you on Slack or email and ask you in a really curt/terse way for something it can feel very transactional without the occasional small talk to humanise your coworkers. And I find it really hard to do that sort of small talk remotely/virtually.

So I think personally I need to have a day every week or two when you have a coffee/lunch/beer with people and get a chance to really have the small talk and put a face with the name. I also love huddling around a whiteboard for certain problems. Before Omicron I started going in one day a week and focusing it on the socialising and the meetings where in-person felt useful.

The catch with that is that it means 'work from home' can't be 'work from anywhere' - as everybody needs to be an occasionally commutable distance from the office for it to work. I also realise that it doesn't save the company money on the office if every team comes in the same day - so you might need a roster kind of thing to maximise the space. That sounds solvable to me though - enough so where it is my preference if we can make it work for 2022...

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

#203

Post by unobatbayar »

_9omd wrote: post #162
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 seriously hope this is sarcasm. The best devs I know are the ones that goof off the most, because they're the ones that know they're good at what they do. The crappy devs are the ones who sit quietly at their desks all day and pretend to get work done. I think you should seriously reconsider your management style.

This is exactly what I've seen and experienced. The best devs that are goofing off, are the bedrock of a great work environment.

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

#206

Post by LAC-Tech »

alecbz wrote: post #103
toomanydoubts wrote: post #6

Going to an office to write software is absolutely insane. I like going on fridays and leaving early to drink beer with coworkers.

> Going to an office to write software is absolutely insane. Why? Writing software, especially in a large organization, is often an inherently social job, just like many others. You often need heads down time to actually get into flow and produce code, but that doesn't mean interaction with others isn't a significant part of it as well.

Linux kernel team seems to manage fine. Or maybe they'd all do better if they were in a big open office with Linus Torvalds.

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

#208

Post by johnwalkr »

abap_rocky wrote: post #69

The pandemic really helped me confirm that I prefer the office. I always sought to establish a clear distinction between my work life and home life and the enforced work from home due to COVID has made the two blur to a point now where I feel like I've lost all rhythm. Now living through a pandemic itself has a way of disrupting the rhythm of life but I feel that the collapsing of space into a singular living and wor…

I feel the same way. Most of my commute is sitting on the train and I read on my phone during that time and then don’t have much urge to do this throughout the day. Working from home, I will always sleep a bit longer instead of make time for this, and then throughout the day I am constantly taking 5-10 minute breaks that waste time but done actually feel like a break. Even after so long of WFH, I haven’t managed to find my groove without the structure of going to the office.

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

#209

Post by amyjess »

I didn't realize how much I love working from home till the pandemic began.

Last spring, I left a company I'd been at for five years and had made several friends at because they wanted us to return to the office. I ended up landing at an all-remote subsidiary of a multinational that's super cautious about covid and hasn't even started to reopen their offices at all aside from a small handful of people who do shipping and receiving and need to do physical stuff in person. I don't regret it one iota. I ended up getting a drastic pay increase and a seriously more impressive title out of the switch.

Back in October, I went out drinking with my former boss and he told me my old company cancelled their return to the office and went all-remote again when the delta surge started. I'm enjoying my new company too much to go back, though (and, no, they haven't replaced me, and that's a long story).

Some clarification on the subsidiary I work for: they were remote-first even before covid, and while they had an office, nobody was required to work there in person even well before the pandemic started. While our parent company wasn't remote-first, as soon as covid began, they immediately told my subsidiary's landlord that they wouldn't be renewing the lease. I've also been told that the parent company has 100% committed that all meetings will be Zoom-only forever even after offices reopen, because they've found that, as a multinational company, Zoom-only meetings have solved a problem where, pre-covid, if a team had 1-2 members in a different office than everyone else, those 1-2 members would be marginalized on the team and cut out of major decisions. Zoom has been the great equalizer.

Edit: Oh yeah, the best part is that I'm in Texas but everyone else on my team is on the east coast. So I get to work from 8-4 and then close my laptop and enjoy the rest of my afternoon. Getting off at 4 every day has done wonders for my mental health.

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

#210

Post by Salgat »

ketzo wrote: post #13

At the start of the pandemic, I knew I would miss working with people in person, but thought I would be totally great with WFH. Now, I know that I badly need some amount of in-person time with my coworkers on a weekly basis, or I go crazy. It's a motivational thing for me. I thrive on solving problems for and with other people, and there's an "out of sight, out of mind" effect for me over zoom. It's just harder for m…

I think the biggest issue is that people are lonely due to the pandemic, and are conflating that with working from home. You can have a strong social life and working from home. For others, unfortunately the only socialization they can get is forced interaction with coworkers at the office.
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