Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home? • Hacker News Board

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

#351

Post by JohnBooty » Mon, Feb 07, 2022, 6:44 PM UTC

jjav wrote: post #347

wokwokwok wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 swi…

    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.

Hopefully you're not being DM'd or @'d every minute.

Regular vanilla channel messages should never be expected to be synchronous. As you noted, that's completely unworkable.

DM's and mentions should be IMO be "semi-synchronous." Don't expect an immediate reply unless you've explicitly told the recipient that there's a blocker or there's some other time-critical situation.

Admittedly yes, that does require some attention on the recipient's part, because they have to scan the incoming message to see if it's critical. And some discipline on the sender's part. And even a few seconds of interruption can (worst-case) result in 20-30 minutes of lost productivity if one has to dump their entire mental stack.

So, yes it doesn't scale up endlessly. Multiple "semi-synchronous" mentions/DMs per hour would be a real attention drain. Possibly appropriate for managers, but a real deal breaker for individual contributors.

But at that point I would see it as an issue with the role or with the culture itself.

    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.

How would you establish a healthy office communication culture? If everybody is always asynchronous, how could anybody be notified of time-critical stuff like blockers etc?

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

#352

Post by jjav » Mon, Feb 07, 2022, 7:05 PM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #351

jjav wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 swi…

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. Hopefully you're not being DM'd or @'d every minute. Regular vanilla channel messages should never be expected to be synchronous. As you noted, that's completely unworkable. DM's and mentions should be IMO be "semi-synchronous." Don't expect an immediate rep…

> Regular vanilla channel messages should never be expected to be synchronous. As you noted, that's completely unworkable.

It is unworkable! But becomes the expectation.

> How would you establish a healthy office communication culture?

The same way it has worked well for the ~30 years of my career before slack-obsession. Have something to discuss, put it on the calendar for the relevant people. For smaller things, send email and don't expect an immediate response. If things are truly on fire right now, make a phone call.

Curiously, in decades past we always used IRC which is basically same thing as slack. But IRC never grew this culture of obligated insta-response, it was more for chatter that one could read or ignore depending on how busy. Not sure why. Perhaps because slack is a paid product, it's now part of the business so everyone is expected to take it Very Seriously and be on it all the time.

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

#353

Post by jjav » Mon, Feb 07, 2022, 7:09 PM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #349

jjav wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Yeah, admittedly, this is very true. Any tool encourages some behaviors and discourages others. I've loved email for 30+ years Email feels like a firehose to me. I can't get any value from it these days. 100's of emails per day of notifications and such. 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 so…

> With effort it can be tamed. Filters and so on.

Yes, that is the key.

Beauty of email is that it can be done because it's all open protocols.

I've been dragged into a signal channel and that's one untamable firehose. Sequential stream of messages via proprietary UI so there is nothing I can do to automatically file messaged into various folders. Nothing I can do to auto-process certain messages, nothing I can do to mark some things read and some unread, etc..

Email allows for infinite flexibility in configuring it just how you need to work best.

If you have just one inbox and everything lands there all the time, I can see how that's a firehose that's not going to be pleasant. But with email the tools exist to customize this away.

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

#354

Post by hh3k0 » Mon, Feb 07, 2022, 7:23 PM UTC

alecbz wrote: post #124

hh3k0 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hanging out with coworkers would be my own personal hell, to be frank. And there's nothing wrong with my coworkers, I'd like to emphasize that, but I have friends and family that I'd rather hang out with. Coworkers are just coworkers to me.

I'm confused, what makes it hell if nothing's wrong with them?

Spending time socializing with people that aren't part of my social life by my own (direct) choosing feels like a chore to me, I suppose. A work party, to me, does not resemble actual work in many ways… and yet it does not resemble a party either. I would certainly enjoy to play volleyball on the beach with friends and family but would rather avoid it as a reward or team-building activity.

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

#355

Post by jdmoreira » Mon, Feb 07, 2022, 7:41 PM UTC

I love working from home and it has made made me at least 1.5 times more productive.

That being said… some people lack the mental fortitude and responsibility to sit by themselves at a desk and deliver their work when no one is watching. I notice people all the time that must be slacking a lot! There can't be any other explanation. They simply can't work by themselves.

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

#356

Post by McNutty » Mon, Feb 07, 2022, 9:27 PM UTC

bckr wrote: post #213

McNutty wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Now I roll out of bed when my alarm goes off and do daily stand-up on zoom in my home office literally 5 minutes later. My brain is literally still asleep. You can fix this yourself, incredibly easily. Personally I have never changed my alarm clock based on if I'm WFH. My wife is happy to pop in her headphones if I ask her to while I'm working. I keep scheduled breaks. If I decide in the morning that the dirty dishe…

It's interesting to see how the pro-WFH folks largely seem to sneer at pro-office folks' complaints, regarding them as trivial. I'm not seeing the other way around in this or other recent threads. Of course, this may be partially explained by the structural pressure against WFH, which has left its proponents on the defensive. But it strikes me as anti-compassionate.

I certainly can empathize with people who have genuine WFH issues like having kids at home, no separate working areas available.

But seeing people complaining because they refuse to set their alarm clock or take any basic ownership of their own lives, c'mon!

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

#357

Post by Melchizedek » Mon, Feb 07, 2022, 10:00 PM UTC

raducu wrote: post #304

hansel_der wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure, obnoxious coworkers suck, but the 'oh noes, my concentration/flow' argument has been done to death imo. thanks to hybrid work, ppl can hide at home all they want. ps: pls also consider parents that get interrupted far more frequently when working from home.

> sure, obnoxious coworkers suck, but the 'oh noes, my concentration/flow' argument has been done to death imo. But why do such people say such silly things if it's not true? Do I think it's 100% true? No, but it feels that way for them. I f*king hate useless meetings where my time is wasted. I had a coleague express the same thing about a topic. Business replied "well, we only had 4 meetings and at least 2 were real…

But it just so happens that one preference is highly correlated with doing useful work, and the other to chatting, butt-in-seat mentality, and having others do your job (asking for "help").

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

#358

Post by coryfklein » Mon, Feb 07, 2022, 10:32 PM UTC

My ideal is working remotely from home, but coming into the office once a quarter for the whole week, and spending that time doing interpersonal things. I come away from that week feeling very refreshed and enabled to dive into work again with solid focus.

I'll rarely make any progress on my "sprint" tasks during the in-office week, but I organize fun social events after-hours for all the other remotes that fly in at the same time (and any locals that want to spend after-hours together). Last time I did a screening of Princess Mononoke in the main office gathering area, and then we went out for drinks & dinner 2-3 times that week. One evening we all went out to play ping-pong.

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

#359

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Feb 07, 2022, 10:52 PM UTC

Hippocrates wrote: post #348

thefz wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#360

Post by shard » Mon, Feb 07, 2022, 11:09 PM UTC

croh wrote: post #228

tastysandwich wrote: post #222

I'm torn between the two. On the one hand, I feel like working in the office makes me more productive and is better for my mental health. It's a change of environment, and I'm working around colleagues who keep me a bit more focussed (less likely waste 30 minutes watching YouTube if a coworker is right beside you). Also, on the hour-long commute I tend to read, which is terrific. So many of these books have changed m…

Agree with this. And as day passes, pressure gets built to finish work and if you don't, you can't enjoy remaining day & night. At least with office setup, once you leave it physically, you also leave it mentally but with work from home setup that is not possible. Still it is good to have wfh option for emergencies. so yeah mix of both.

Regarding tastysandwich's comment about having no time to read, my hack is to put the book I want to read in the bathroom, and never bring my phone with me. This give me some time to read every day, and I've polished off several books this way.

Regarding your comment about work/home separation, similar to what someone else has mentioned in another thread, I have the work laptop that my company provides to me, and my personal laptop. I have no personal files on my work laptop and no work files on my personal laptop. I don't even have any work-related app (Teams, Slack etc) on my personal phone (my thinking is that if the company wants to reach me through those on a phone, they need to provide me with the phone). I only have my work laptop turned on when I am working. When I close my work laptop, I am done for the day.