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Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?
341–350 of 371 posts
Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I've seen this argument several times and while it's probably true for some segment of the population, it's definitely not for everyone (who feels this way). I have this sentiment, yet I hang out with one or two friends once or twice a week, occasionally some family every couple weeks or so, and constantly on a daily basis get to socialize with the parents of my dog's friends while on walks. None of that makes up for…
I think forming connections is very important... but it should be encouraged independently from working at the office or remotely.
I work remotely for a U.S. company with coworkers from Ethiopia and other countries.
Pre-pandemic, they flew me to the U.S. and I met the U.S. and Indian coworkers, and we went to a conference together. It was a HUGE help - but I think it's something that can be done a few times a year or even once a year, doesn't need to be an everyday thing.
Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?
#343There's a choice missing. I prefer working from the office but I also prefer saving the 350 hours of daily travel a year (god damn it, just realized that it's literally 10 weeks of works for me...).
Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally just my 0.02, but this reads a little like "opting out" instead of addressing issues interacting with other humans. Like yeah, humans are sometimes great, sometimes make you feel not great, sometimes are genuinely bad. I think life is learning to address and navigate all of that.
Never said that these people were bad. Just stating my reaction to them is blunted and no longer affects my productivity. Your framework of dealing with people seems different from mine. What in this post strikes you as “opting out”? That comment doesn’t make sense to me and some clarification would be great. Also, do these things not bother you or do you simply have a different way of dealing with it so that you don…
I think these kinds of difficulties with dealing with people are a common but "normal" and "intended" part of life, and my 0.02 is that it's better to learn how to navigate and live with these situations instead of solving the issue by removing people from the equation.
I brought up bad people in part because some people do just suck, are toxic, etc., and often just cutting those people out is the right move. You're not really getting anything by letting them influence or affect you; it's just negatively affecting your quality of life.
But I think ~most people have some good and some bad about them. Things about them will annoy, bother, anger, or distract you, but other parts of knowing them will be rewarding and fulfilling to your life overall. So I think it's valuable to learn how to weather the bad so you can benefit from the good.
Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?
#345WFH and prefer WFH with one major caveat. I've said this before, but really, I just want my own office. That's all. I'd be pretty okay with going in if I had my own office with 4 walls. First job of my career, they told me I would have an office of my own. First day I came back in for full time (I had interned there with my own office as well), they tell me they're switching buildings to go open office in about a mon…
Yeah, in all these polls about WFH or work-from-office preference, I'd really like to see it broken out by whether the respondent has an office in their WFH setup. I want to know if that changes the answer. I know my own opinion of WFH improved once I got a desk (once there was finally stock…) and a chair. It might be that the grass is always greener, but I feel like having the ability to close the door & have a priv…
I think it's just everyone trying to minimize their miserableness.
For a lot of people with long commutes or terrible work offices, "minimizing suffering" is working from home/a co-working space regardless of what those look like.
For a lot of people with terrible home office setups or lack of boundaries with family and short commutes, "minimizing suffering" is going to an employer's office.
Personally, I think work from "home" (anywhere) is the better path for most of the HN-types. At its core, it's us taking back _control_ over our workspace and we have the resources to make it better if we choose to. I can move somewhere with a spare room to use as an office. I can't make my employer give me a private office.
Which is all to say yes, I'd love to see a more in-depth poll/study on _why_ people are making the decisions they're making. My suspicion is that it largely comes down to which problems are easier to fix for that individual.
Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does "praise" mean "cash" or "promotion" (and if so, does "promotion" mean "more cash")? If not, why would you care about praise?
Benefit of the doubt if something takes longer than I estimate or if I decide to casually take an afternoon off to go talk to my aunt.
Is that not table stakes for any software engineering job?
Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 o…
> 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”.
I guess your company has a lower message rate than what I've seen. In current company there are 30+ channels and a message arrives on average about every minute.
Each of those "few seconds to read" is a mental interrupt. Happening every minute. This leads to not being able to switch onto concentration mode to do actual work all day long.
The only solution is to switch it off entirely, only check at specific times. But if the company culture is to expect prompt response at all times, that's a conflict.
Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I agree on everything you said and let me add: I get to pick my chair, desk, displays and overall computer peripherals in my home. I control the temperature, freshness of air, lighting, noise level, internet speed. And having your own toilet is cool too. Personally just being lifted from a 1h + 1h car commute has dramatically increased the quality of my day to day life, so much that friends and relatives noticed an u…
At face value, just commute time savings is HUGE and easily calculable. I also spent a significant amount of time figuring out what to wear, ironing, accounting for weather, packing my bag. It was 40 mins of "commute" but also like 40 mins of "getting ready". I'm saving 1:20 per day now which is almost a whole day per week.
Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But tools have their own culture as well.
I've loved email for 30+ years
With effort it can be tamed. Filters and so on. But I've never gotten to a great place with it in modern times. With new sources of crap pouring into my inbox every day it is, at best, something that can be tamed but requires constant attention and maintenance.
Of course, this is all subjective and personal. It's working for you! Kudos. =)
Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. I've never ask myself this question, but reading your post I have realized that I really don't like solving problem together in person with whiteboard etc. Realizing that this cannot be considered as a good trait from professional perspective I still cannot resist the bitter feeling of hours wasted that way. My memory definitely deceives me - it couldn't always be that bad, but I can't help the impressio…
> but reading your post I have realized that I really don't like solving problem together in person with whiteboard etc I used to really hate it, now I just hate it -- like letting someone else sample my food. I really hated it because of all of the pollitics and egos and because I was really passionate and brought a lot of insight to the table while 90% the time the others just brought their egos to the table. Now I…
> like letting someone else sample my food
Just let them do it before you taste it, and then pretend you're royalty and thank them for testing it for poison.