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Employees are returning to the office to sit on zoom calls

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Re: Employees are returning to the office to sit on zoom calls

#241

Post by thewileyone »

xarope wrote: post #185
snakey wrote: post #163

Forgive me for this digression and for sounding selfish, but as a junior, I’ve really struggled for the last 2+ years to fully adapt to remote / hybrid working. I’m wondering if anyone has advice on how I can continue to grow and become a top-class engineer within a remote environment? Based on my experience so far, it’s very difficult to both onboard and mentor a junior from a remote setting. It’s not impossible, ho…

During COVID, as a CTO, I tell my team to DM me after stand-ups if they aren't sure about their tasks or work, or even how to get started. I'm more than happy to spend 2-3 hours on a separate remote call with an individual, where we go through a socratic'ish discovery, using things like draw.io or mermaid to quickly sketch out concepts and architecture. Often this then sparks them to go through their own discovery, a…

I try to do the same or I'll pair a junior with a senior if the hand-holding required is beyond my capacity.

Re: Employees are returning to the office to sit on zoom calls

#243

Post by llamajams »

snakey wrote: post #163

Forgive me for this digression and for sounding selfish, but as a junior, I’ve really struggled for the last 2+ years to fully adapt to remote / hybrid working. I’m wondering if anyone has advice on how I can continue to grow and become a top-class engineer within a remote environment? Based on my experience so far, it’s very difficult to both onboard and mentor a junior from a remote setting. It’s not impossible, ho…

Oh boy.We have this onboarding buddy system where the new hire get paired with someone HR just send out an email to connect the two of u and then that's that.Last month we got a new guy, and I was assigned as his buddy. I had a rough week and that email got buried. This man went a whole week under the radar, besides HR and group onboarding called he's had no communication with anyone. He didn't know what Dept or team he was on, or who his direct report was. It was only when I was cleaning up my inbox that I saw the email and reached out.

So moral of the story is to not be shy any take initiative to reach out. We have chats and emails and internal forums message boards, so use all of them. If you're nice, ppl will be nice to you and help out. I've noticed that most new hires are not comfortable with messaging people they don't know, but this needs to be overcome. Even couple years in I DM people knowing nothing but a keyword, and I get a lot of help, and I get to have a nice chat and bitch about the lack of documentation etc .

You are completely correct, orgs need to do a lot better but I don't have a lot of hope but you can totally take it upon yourself to be more forward. Also bring it up with your manager maybe they can find you a dedicated mentor

Re: Employees are returning to the office to sit on zoom calls

#244

Post by coffeefirst »

snakey wrote: post #163

Forgive me for this digression and for sounding selfish, but as a junior, I’ve really struggled for the last 2+ years to fully adapt to remote / hybrid working. I’m wondering if anyone has advice on how I can continue to grow and become a top-class engineer within a remote environment? Based on my experience so far, it’s very difficult to both onboard and mentor a junior from a remote setting. It’s not impossible, ho…

You're right.

What's weird is I've found collaboration works shockingly well remotely. You can jump on a Slack huddle and share your screen or use VSCode LiveShare to pair on hard problem, or a document, and while there's more fiction in drawing, it turns out my whiteboard handwriting is terrible anyway.

The thing is, you have to do this deliberately. You need a culture of teaching or you're going to be bad at teaching, and since it's harder to read the room, your experienced folks and managers might not even realize you feel stuck.

I'd suggest you raise your concerns to the people around you. "I don't feel like I'm learning this way, can we do more pairing or can I join on some of the harder projects" is a fine place to start.

Re: Employees are returning to the office to sit on zoom calls

#245

Post by djangelic »

asdff wrote: post #197
throwaway5371 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

of course you can waste time in the office as well, from people joining every meeting and asking "but does it scale" to people playing table tennis, but in general its harder to do than remote

It's pretty easy for people to come into work and get nothing done. Roll in at 9:30 and complain about traffic. Spend until 10 easy getting settled in for the day: making coffee, slowly sifting email, recollecting the weekend with others, bathroom break, etc. Now its the first meeting, totally irrelevant to anything you do so you zone out. Suddenly its lunch time. Another hour goes by. It's 1pm now. Check email. Anot…

While I completely agree with the point you are making, Recollecting the weekend with others counts as a type of bond building work so I would not count that time as unproductive.

It’s much easier to schmooze in the office than at home but it’s possible at home if you have good relationships with your colleagues, so when you’re not in meetings, slacking or doing slack huddles to talk about your weekend are good for morale and so good for productivity.

Granted this can completely be abused but I think it’s an important distinction.

Re: Employees are returning to the office to sit on zoom calls

#246

Post by JohnBooty »

jackstraw14 wrote: post #115
JohnBooty wrote: post #25

I recently spent a week in the office with my team. First time I'd had office time with any team since mid-2018. It was really, really, really nice. I've been a diehard work-from-home guy for ages. Why spend perhaps 10+ hours per week commuting? It's a productivity and environmental nightmare. But... sometimes? Yeah. It's nice to be in the room with other smart people, solving hard problems. I didn't realize I missed…

No offense, but your comment reads like it came from a script. Thing happened -> unexpected result -> wonder why -> learn more about yourself. And the moral of the story is that working in the office is not that bad, because we're human beings not... robots? Surely you're not so surprised to get these responses :)

I actually am surprised to get these responses, and I’ve sent a request to the mods to remove my account as I’m weirded out by what HN has become.

Re: Employees are returning to the office to sit on zoom calls

#247

Post by irrational »

simongray wrote: post #114
irrational wrote: post #51

Same. Half the people we hired during work from home are remote (that was never allowed before). Now all meetings are on zoom and all conversations are on slack. Being in an office is beyond pointless. It wastes time, gas, etc. the main take away from the past 2 years is working in an office is beyond stupid (at least for certain careers like developers). I drive to work, communicate with no one except on the compute…

> I drive to work, communicate with no one except on the computer, then drive home. You don't talk to people aside from at the meetings?

Not really. I come in, sit down, put on my headphones, and stare at my screen pretty much the entire day. I’ve never engaged in small talk in the hallway, even pre-pandemic. It pisses me off when people stand around talking and disturbing people around them trying to concentrate. If you want to have a conversation, schedule a conference room and close the door.

Re: Employees are returning to the office to sit on zoom calls

#248

Post by iamstupidsimple »

maxwelldone wrote: post #230
jiggawatts wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait till you see government organisations. There are meetings to decide who needs to turn up to a meeting. I thought that was a sick joke until I attended such a thing myself. On one project we had dozens(!) of meetings involving 5-10 people to decide what to call an API endpoint that no human being will ever see again after the initial implementation. A nearly cried. I told them that they could literally mash the k…

This reminds me of a great scene[1] from the British show "Yes, Minister". It's from an episode called The Compassionate Society where a minister for Department of Administrative Affairs learns about a newly built hospital which has some 500 employees but no doctors & patients. The scene I linked is a conversation between the minister & his private secretary where the latter explains why administrators are essential…

Wow, I was just thinking about this scene as well! It really is timeless. Especially the bit about measuring success by activity and not results.

Re: Employees are returning to the office to sit on zoom calls

#249

Post by squintychino »

While we as employees have more leverage to work remotely than we've ever had because of the pandemic, companies still have power to dictate work location and they know it.

It would not surprise me if down the road we get some kind of leak or revelation saying that top management of many large corporations colluded to force everyone back into the office. Of course that's just speculation at this point, but it really does feel like there's no good reason to force people back other than justifying their office space expense and a reason for middle management to exist.

The pandemic has let the cat out of the bag in terms of working remotely and being productive. But some c-level executives are stuck in the past and want to return to it.

Re: Employees are returning to the office to sit on zoom calls

#250

Post by dang »

JohnBooty wrote: post #112
dang wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. We want the opposite here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dang, I think you are the best moderator I have ever known, but respectfully strongly disagree with who you've fingered as the "flamewar-style" poster in this conversation. I, at worst, restated the parent poster's rude comment and stated I found it regrettable. Additionally there are many other unbelievably rude replies to a small, positive anecdote I chose to share. However, out of respect for your judgement I'll b…

I made a point not to single out one poster. Like most online conflicts, it was a co-creation.

Your original comment was great! And it got mostly positive responses, IIRC.

The problem is that negative responses hit harder than positive responses. If three people give you flowers and one explodes a bomb, the bomb makes the impact [1]. Unfortunately, the dynamics of internet discussion guarantee "bombs" on any divisive topic.

If you're not used to it, this has a dysregulating effect [2]. One gets sucked into a feedback loop where one can't help but respond to the outrage of being treated unfairly, but that just fuels the feedback loop. From my perspective, this is what happened here.

The important thing to understand is why your comment attracted negative responses in the first place. It had nothing to do with you, or your comment, or the community. It was just a mechanical consequence of it being the top-voted comment in a thread on a divisive topic—that's how the mechanics work. And it was the top-voted comment because it was interesting and thoughtful discussion (up to the point where it got derailed). Good things lead to bad things, so here's a cap on how good things can ever get [3], and all we can do is try to encourage the good and mitigate the bad.

[1] Lots of past explanation on that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] And getting used to it sucks—it's like being bitten by mosquitoes and wasps all over your body until you finally develop some sort of partial immunity to them, partial immunity being the best one can hope for. Most sane people wish to avoid that experience.

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

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