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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?

#361

Post by twayt »

alecbz wrote: post #344
twayt wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think being able to navigate these situations and not exposing yourself to them at the behest of your productivity and peace are mutually exclusive.

You might be able to tolerate something but choose not to expose yourself to it unnecessarily. In the other comment you posted, you mentioned how working from home makes you more sensitive to such issues. That seems to be a direct parallel of this situation. You should do what's most convenient for you, not forcefully expose yourself to a shitty situation for no reason.

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

#363

Post by donatj »

McNutty wrote: post #356
bckr wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Most of what I wrote centered around lack of social interaction, but your comments don’t touch on that at all. You got fixated on the very minor point about my alarm clock.

The comments have the tone of someone telling a person with depression to stop being so sad.

This has nothing to do with my alarm clock and I have no idea why you’re so stuck on it. If I set my alarm clock earlier, I do what? Stare at a wall for an hour I could be sleeping? Come on. The entire point I was making was the pandemic took my thing to do before work, my moment of Zen.

Kids would be great. Kids would give me something to do, something to live for. I don’t have kids, we can’t have kids, it’s a sore spot, thanks for bringing it up.

> My wife is happy to pop in her headphones if I ask her to while I'm working.

I’m not married to your wife. Different people have different relationships. My wife is going to want to use the entertainment center in her time off, and it wouldn’t be fair for me to put limits on her time off.

It’s also fine and dandy that you’re able to ignore your life duties at home, but not all of us have that luxury; not all of our minds work that way. It’s simply not a thing I can shut off. I am at home, my brain is in at home mode, which is consciously aware of all the responsibilities of being at home at all times.

My life has two states right now, trying to work in a place I find lonely, isolating and highly distracting, followed by hours of being alone after my wife leaves for work a little before 3pm. It’s not great, I do not like it, no matter how much you tell me I should and it’s my fault I don’t.

I love my wife very much, more than I had any idea I was capable of loving another person, but I go literal months where she is the only human interaction I have outside checkout clerks. I am losing my goddamn mind.

We got a dog early into the pandemic. She’s beautiful and the one saving grace of the entire thing. She’s not a great conversationalist though. And before you bring up walking the dog as something I could do before standup, my dog literally gets irritated if I wake her up before 10 AM. She’s a Shiba Inu, you can accurately read the irritation level from the amount of side-eye she’s giving you.

Here is her Instagram, my wife runs it https://www.instagram.com/yubabaandcompany/

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

#364

Post by JohnBooty »

jjav wrote: post #352
JohnBooty wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, se…

You're either luckier than me, had the wisdom to choose better workplaces, or both.

    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.
In my ~20 years in the industry, instead of politely scheduling discussions for the future, people did one or both of the following:

1. Physically walked over to my desk and interrupted me in person

2. Sent me an email, often expecting a near-instant reply, requiring me to choose between "getting work done" and "monitoring my email."

This is why I feel that it's more about company culture than the tools themselves.

To be clear, a couple years back I did work at a company with a horrible Slack culture. I don't mean to defend Slack per se, and I definitely don't think it's the answer, but I don't think it's the problem either. Inconsiderate coworkers gonna be inconsiderate.

    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.
Amen. This is why I strongly feel it's a culture issue and not a technology thing.

"Back in the day," generally it was the tech/engineer types using IRC. We all generally understood the concept of focus time and understood that IRC should not be used with the expectation of synchronous responses.

Now, with Slack, we have a lot of corporate/managerial/whatever types using an IRC-like tool, and they often just don't "get it." Much like my elderly father initially struggled to understand that text messaging wasn't something that guaranteed an instant response.

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

#365

Post by alecbz »

twayt wrote: post #361
alecbz wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think being able to navigate these situations and not exposing yourself to them at the behest of your productivity and peace are mutually exclusive. You might be able to tolerate something but choose not to expose yourself to it unnecessarily. In the other comment you posted, you mentioned how working from home makes you more sensitive to such issues. That seems to be a direct parallel of this situation. You…

> not forcefully expose yourself to a shitty situation for no reason.

Well my whole point is that there's not 'no reason'. (Except sometimes in the case of genuinely bad/toxic people, like I mention).

Maybe a more general way of saying what I'm saying: I think convenience-maximization finds local optima too aggressively. I think life oughta be a bit more like simulated annealing.

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

#366

Post by soheil »

ketzo wrote: post #239
soheil wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you WFH and others work from your home too and vice versa?

We actually did this a few times and it was really nice! Current living situations make it a little impractical, but we should try doing it again some time soon, that's a great idea.

It’ll be a big LAN party.

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

#367

Post by JohnBooty »

lamontcg wrote: post #268
JohnBooty wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. God. The ability to take an afternoon nap if you need it... there's no way to even put a monetary value on it. Can walk, get some exercise/sunshine, nap, even have a quickie with your partner or look at porn, etc. No matter how awesome one's office is, those things are generally not options.

There's also no pointless commute. No wear and tear on the car. No carbon emissions. No wasted time. Also no risk of injury if you get into an accident. And even if you bike to work that latter point still stands due to the passively homicidal assholes driving cars out there.

Yeah. With our environmental disaster unfolding, it's hard to sit there in a car burning fossil fuels for many hours per week and feel good about it. Even all-electric vehicles have a pretty significant environmental impact; they still have to be manufactured and the electricity still has to be generated elsewhere.

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

#368

Post by loco5niner »

Ever since my company moved our office to another state (upped my commute to 30 minutes both ways), and put us in a horrible open office design, I've been pushing hard to get to work from home. FINALLY it happened, and I never want to go back. With the success we've had WFH in the last 2 years, I think leadership is finally listening.

Happy employees are better employees.

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

#369

Post by loco5niner »

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 get to see my wife and 2 kids way more during the day, and my extended family lives just down the street. I'm not missing out on socialization. I imagine if I was still single and lived out of state, this might be a problem for me though.

I don't miss the office-loud-laugher, or the drive-by-tell-you-a-dumb-joke guy when "I'm just trying to get my work done please". My manager wisely scheduled a daily team meeting so I get to see my team every day via Teams.

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

#370

Post by grensley »

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.

Last Friday I went in and got a good education on some of our physical hardware. This knowledge is only held by people that have been with the company since Spring 2020 or work in that department.

I can only imagine the amount of institutional knowledge that is being lost right now. Workers that are low to the ground and sociable who form informal bonds between departments are hurt by being limited to only online interactions, and as a result, the organization suffers too.

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