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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?

#311

Post by synthc »

I'm working from home now, but it gets lonely sometimes and for some discussions face to face contact is just better.

I'd love to work in an office if I had my own room, or share one with a few team members at most, but nearly all jobs have open offices with tons of distractions. My last office had 12 employees in a room designed for 6: it was draining my energy and cut my productivity in half.

I'd work in an office if it was actually a place conductive to work, but I'm never working in an open office again.

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

#312

Post by jjav »

JohnBooty wrote: post #211
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 extrem…

Once Slack becomes the default I’m pinged from every angle all day long. I recently began work on a team that has a brief "culture FAQ" regarding things like Slack messaging norms and expectations. We have an agreement that @'ing/DM'ing is expected to be asynchronous unless you explicitly let the recipient know otherwise - "hey, the server's down" or "hey, I'm blocked on this" etc. (above paragraph edited for clarity…

> We have an agreement that @'ing/DM'ing is expected to be asynchronous unless you explicitly let the recipient know otherwise

How does this work?

Becuase the problem as a recipient is that now I still need to read every.single.message.all.the.time to see what it says, which is ridiculous waste of time and source of continuous interruption.

I much prefer to check email + slack once or twice a day at most, batch process them then. It's the only way to get any work done.

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

#313

Post by jjav »

JohnBooty wrote: post #261
tmmx wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I want to focus, I pause slack notifications. Slack provide a way to still send it, but in my workplace people tend to respect that setting unless it is a real emergency.

Yeah, this is the key. Whenever I hear about somebody's hellish Slack culture at their workplace and they blame Slack I always think, "That sounds like a bad office culture that would be bad even if Slack was removed from the equation."

To some extent that's true. But tools have their own culture as well. I've loved email for 30+ years because the culture is inherently async. I'll reply when I get to it, which might be tomorrow.

Slack builds a culture of hyper-immediate distraction which seems difficult to avoid.

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

#314

Post by throwaway22032 »

My poll option isn't here, but I voted for "Work from home, prefer working from the office".

It's not really the _location_ that I care about but the environment. Going into the office and shooting the shit in a care-free manner with my co-workers.

My industry kind of just disappeared when WFH came in and I've been on a sabbatical since.

I don't want to go into an office and then do video calls, or have to work around some silly "if bit of paper says this then half the office does video calls", or listen to some sort of speech about responsible standing or whatever, so at least for the time being I've left software and I'm studying instead.

I was, for a while, waiting for 2019 office work, but that's probably just gone forever, which means I'm not a professional software developer any more, I think.

Basically I'd need to find an office in which everyone agrees with me that corona is an overblown threat. Most of my friendship groups and meet-ups are on the same page there, but barely any companies are if any.

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

#315

Post by tgaj »

rzz3 wrote: post #240
halestock wrote: post #113

I struggle with ADHD, and I know I work much more effectively from the office. I learned during the pandemic that I really need and missed the social interactions that occur in the office, both for my mental health and for my job (there's nothing wfh that beats a five minute hallway conversation to meet new people, learn about projects, brainstorm, problem solve, etc etc). I also need the commute to help force me to…

It’s interesting, I’m severely ADHD and I can focus much better at home. I find offices horribly distracting. I used to come to the office 1 or 2 days a week before the pandemic, and they were my least productive days by an order of magnitude.

I think it's just complicated with ADHD. On one side it's easier for me to focus in a home, when I don't have problems with my executive function. But if I have problem with choosing what to do and to just start, then being in office with other people is helpful. It gives me boost in the motivation.

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

#316

Post by TheGigaChad »

changxi_hn wrote: post #104
derekp7 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a story that explains this concept. A programmer goes to his manager, presenting a paper with a lengthy problem for the manager to solve. The manager looks over the paper, thinks for a few minutes, then writes down the answer. The employee then tells the manager "What were you doing for the last 5 minutes? It didn't look like you were working at all". The manager responds saying "I was thinking about the probl…

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.

No post body was provided.

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

#319

Post by wokwokwok »

jjav wrote: post #312
JohnBooty wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once Slack becomes the default I’m pinged from every angle all day long. I recently began work on a team that has a brief "culture FAQ" regarding things like Slack messaging norms and expectations. We have an agreement that @'ing/DM'ing is expected to be asynchronous unless you explicitly let the recipient know otherwise - "hey, the server's down" or "hey, I'm blocked on this" etc. (above paragraph edited for clarity…

> We have an agreement that @'ing/DM'ing is expected to be asynchronous unless you explicitly let the recipient know otherwise How does this work? Becuase the problem as a recipient is that now I still need to read every.single.message.all.the.time to see what it says, which is ridiculous waste of time and source of continuous interruption. I much prefer to check email + slack once or twice a day at most, batch proce…

I find this response (which I see a lot) mystifying.

When you have a moment, read the message.

Go back to what you were doing before.

It literally takes seconds to read a message and decide “is everything on fire and I need to respond to this or can it wait until later”.

Mostly, it can wait.

If it can wait, wait. Ignore it. Go back to what you were doing.

Take your time folk, you dont have to respond to every email or every message ten seconds after reading it.

…to be fair, it is a bit rude to leave it for 4 hours before you even look to see what it was.

But hey, as long as you set expectations with your coworkers, that’s fine too.

Slack is only a problem if you can’t control your Pavlovian response to the little red icon.

You’re not a dog; you can choose how you respond to this stuff.

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

#320

Post by shard »

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 love the lockdown, I get to WFH and not have to deal with small talk every day, mandatory company dinners, commuting through rush hour traffic smelling exhaust, getting up early and going home late, staying late because the boss is staying late, slamming coffee in the afternoon to stay awake instead of taking a nap, not getting any sunlight because I'm in the office during all the daylight hours, having to cram my errands into the same time as everyone else when the markets and stores are the busiest, eating whatever food you can get close to the office instead of eating healthy, dressing up for work, having to shop for work clothes, not feeling free to go on a non-work website because someone could see your monitor from over your shoulder, dealing with chatty coworkers who go on and on about nothing, dealing with coworkers who have loud phone conversations, not being able to listen to the music you want, breathing recycled indoor air constantly, not being able to adjust the temperature to what you like, not being able to inject comments into a conversation over someone who is dominating a room, not being able to yawn or close my eyes or pick my nose during a meeting... I should probably stop.
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