If employees can apply for fully-remote or a closer office to them and, according to the article, about 85% of those applications are approved, then this doesn't seem as ominous as the headline makes it sound.
Google mandates workers back to Silicon Valley, other offices from April 4
501–510 of 1001 posts
Re: Google mandates workers back to Silicon Valley, other offices from April 4
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily. wut? 2 years on remote and in majority of the cases I've been able to talk to somebody wit…
The comment you’re replying to has nothing to do with response time. They’re specifying their preference for in-person communication even though it may affect individual productivity. I 100% agree with them. I’m more productive as a remote employee, my coworkers seem to greatly prefer remote work, and there is a 0% chance the next job I pursue will be at a remote company. It’s just not my preference.
>> The comment you’re replying to has nothing to do with response time.
I think you just hit the nail on the head right there.
There are a few things that I've realized make the difference between remote work and in person. When you are needing to talk to a team mate, working remotely you can just message them and get a response quickly, but this has the effect of interrupting them (or you), which can derail their train of thought. Sure, your still interrupting them when in person, but you can see that they are actively working on something and wait a minute or two for them to notice. They may also see you out of their pariferal vision, which alerts them without really interrupting them, so they can continue their thought before moving on to yours. It's possible to delay replying to a message, but for me personally this means I might take longer to reply to the message than I should because I forget to come back to it (also I swear Slack doesn't always play the notification sound).
The other thing I've noticed is that the lack of interruption can actually negatively affect me. Seeing others getting up for a break can trigger me to also take a break, which can prevent me from getting too lost down a tangent (or spending too much time on Reddit). Since it's in the preiphery though, this allows you to continue with your train of thought while still also being able to see it as a reminder. This allows you to better choose when (or if) to respond.
I think what message apps need, is to slowly fade in alerts, instead of harsh instant alerts. So you notice them, but aren't interrupted. This won't necessarily help with the tangent (or Reddit) problem, but it will help with the interruption of teammates.
Re: Google mandates workers back to Silicon Valley, other offices from April 4
#503After two years of mostly WFH, I think I'm ready to go back into the office. For me in particular, in the last six months, "work from home" has started to turn into "living at work". Work cadences are no longer meshing well with home cadences. I've gone in a few times a week in recent weeks and the structure of the day, including the quietude of driving home, is a relief. The only issue with returning to the office I'm running into is that drivers on the highways are considerably more aggressive now vs. pre-COVID.
Re: Google mandates workers back to Silicon Valley, other offices from April 4
#504Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft is doing something similar where you can choose hybrid work or fully remote. Personally, I think, with hybrid work, fully remote workers will go back to being second class citizens at those companies if most people choose to go back to the office (even part time).
Which will lead to the remote workers changing companies. If there is no substantial advantage, those companies will become second class companies.
This is totally unproven. We have no idea how the market as a whole is going to react. Most companies are going to follow the leaders on this one, and Microsoft and Google taking a clear stance will heavily influence the rest of the market.
Re: Google mandates workers back to Silicon Valley, other offices from April 4
#505An entire generation appears unaware of a QDU or delay and its effect on human communication. If we've re-learned what delay and jitter to tolerate in this last 10 years thats good, but personally I don't like the de-coherence from asymmetric delay with my companions online, and my own in-head foldback PA
"QDU" returns nothing relevant on a google search. What does this mean? > and my own in-head foldback PA What is this? I think you're saying you don't like Zoom, and I'm with you on that.
Quantified Distortion Unit. It's a telco measure of voice signal quality, from the 64kbps and before days. 1QDU was the maximum tolerated impact on a voice call, and was the goal for line card compression to try and mux voice calls together.
It's not just zoom. All digital av processing ads delay. Some removes av sync. Decoherence of visual lip sync and sound interferes with any perceptual clues you get looking at people and beyond 50ms we start to detect it.
In head bone conducted audio along with your own ear hears things as you say them. So your own speech is instantaneous unless you incur some DSP delay somehow wearing headphones and it then collides with bone conducted sound. Now in any teleconference system you have a visual of apparently local people and an actual of 200+ms of delay, loss of sync, and a confusing outcome.
I do hate zoom. I hate all of it. I also know it's the way of the future.
Re: Google mandates workers back to Silicon Valley, other offices from April 4
#506Earlier quoted context omitted.
But is a job just an exchange of labor for payment? I view it as so much more. Even if we look at it from a job perspective, its also an opportunity to build personal connections between team members; "I owe you one" - goes a long way. Yes you can absolutely build these personal connections online, and it may be easier for introverted people, but I would say for most people a handshake or a smile passing down the hal…
So don't replicate it online. Having a different venue beyond a job is also an option. That's the real part highlighted by the pandemic: people are extremely reliant on their jobs for social interaction. With all the problems that come with it. We're practically raised to be dependent on jobs for way too many things.
>So don't replicate it online. Having a different venue beyond a job is also an option.
Any examples that you've had success with?
Re: Google mandates workers back to Silicon Valley, other offices from April 4
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it. Agreed. We've proven that big tech companies can continue to be productive for up to two years going remote. I suspect that that doesn't generalize very well to being completely remote over the long term. It works well when you already have a bunch of personal relationships between teammates that were es…
Every single thread I see on this has this exact same comment. It's like a bot wrote it. Is it that hard to imagine that an onboarding experience remotely can actually be done well, or that you could actually make friends with people existing solely on zoom? I think people are making that assumption, just because it feels right or maybe because their own org is just throwing juniors by the wayside and hoping covid wi…
It's mostly a realisation most organisations are illogical, bloated, developer unfriendly and/or too undocumented.
We applaud ourselves for self-studying, being fairly educated on average with backgrounds in being taught to self-study effectively and finding information online. Yet somehow the idea of juniors doing those exact same things, with or without digital aid of seniors, is unthinkable to many.
Surely somewhere this story feels off.
Re: Google mandates workers back to Silicon Valley, other offices from April 4
#508The people advocating for a move back to the office are managers who's jobs seem more and more pointless the longer remote work is happening.
Re: Google mandates workers back to Silicon Valley, other offices from April 4
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's way more than just interruptions, travel, etc. I recently found /r/overemployed [1] on VC Twitter, and a lot of folks are using this setup to work two (or more) jobs. They know that they'll only need to dedicate 4 hours a day to any given job and as long as they can schedule non-overlapping meetings, they can get away with it. It's got me thinking though - this might be an opportunity for startups to knowingly h…
Plenty of people work more than one job. As long as someone does the work that's expected of them and performs their job duties well, it isn't any employer's business what someone does in their time off.
Actually, most tech companies have employment agreements that prevent exactly this sort of behavior. When you are dealing with IP, you don’t want this leaking to a competitor. And when you are a big tech company, almost any other tech company is potentially a competitor.
Re: Google mandates workers back to Silicon Valley, other offices from April 4
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I've worked at a startup where everyone being there was essential in how we worked. (We were all pair programming.) It was great. It beats code reviews any day. I learned a lot. I do pair programming very frequently with my coworkers remotely. We share a VNC connection to a Linux host. It works great.
Indeed - I pair program for much of the day with different people on the same team, and there is only (recently) one city which has two people in it. The notion that pairing need take place physically in the same room is just not correct.
I'd argue pairing is BETTER remote where you both have comfortable access to all your screens. While one person is writing production code, the other can be googling/writing repl style experiments/whatever and in easy communcation while they have the person writing code up on a second screen or at least a background window easily brought back to the foreground.