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Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

bbc.com

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Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#141

Post by otikik »

xyzzy4747 wrote: post #42
ryanSrich wrote: post #3

Of course this is happening. I’m coming up on year 10 of working remotely, and year 2 of completely async. The only forced-commute job I ever had was for 6 months right out of college. I’ve been preaching remote work for almost the entire time I’ve been doing it. I thought it would catch on much sooner, but it’s here now. I think async is the next thing that will happen. If you’re building software there’s really no…

Incompetent engineers need to share work hours, otherwise they will get stuck and not get much done if nobody has overlapping times to help them. Not all engineers are high caliber.

You may be the best engineer in the world but if your newborn is teething and then spent the whole night crying, you are going to need some help the next day. Sadly this is often obvious only in hindsight.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#142

Post by sto_hristo »

spookthesunset wrote: post #31
sto_hristo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no silver lining and the next pandemic will play out raw, just like this one. Antivaxers will blame it on Bill Gate's son and 6G. That is because of human stupidity - it's immutable and ever present. So my hope is that science will come up with better vaccines quickly and natural selection will trim off the Enlightened to a more tolerable level.

Hopefully “the next pandemic” will not be like this one at all. Because how “the experts” handled this one was shamefully wrong. At virtually every decision point these “experts” did the exact wrong thing. From years of school closures to two years of forced masks to intentionally frightening the daylights out of people. They did everything wrong. History will not look fondly at what was done. I hope to god we never…

To judge the way the pandemic has been handled, you have to be an expert yourself. Because right now it's like telling a physicist how stupid his theory is while you're flipping his burger at BK. Sure, their theory may sound stupid to you, but that is your problem.

> frightening the daylights out of people

Yeah, infantilize the populations, shield them from reality, tell them "don't worry, Karen!" Virus will surely take notice and stop being so murderous.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#143

Post by seanp2k2 »

zdragnar wrote: post #52
xyzzy4747 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incompetent engineers need to share work hours, otherwise they will get stuck and not get much done if nobody has overlapping times to help them. Not all engineers are high caliber.

If needing help at some point in time means being incompetent, I think that describes everyone I've ever worked with, including some really high caliber folk. Even a simple rubber duck conversation can beat useful thing now and then.

No Google or Stack Oveflow, just everything from my memory into the IDE until the test case written into the JIRAs assigned to me all pass. No internet connection for employees, only test env access.

At least, that’s how too many places still do technical interviews.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#144

Post by lamontcg »

shakezula wrote: post #139
incrudible wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of structuring your team around the architecture of the software, you architect the software around the structure of your team. It is a corrolary of Conways law. Promote selfishness (call it ownership) and get just get rid of code review. As you may imagine, this approach has fat tail risk, but that is not necessarily a problem in a high failure rate environment.

> just get rid of code review You’ve lost me there and will never get me back. I can’t abide any workflow that doesn’t put code review as top priority, regardless of remote or in person, sync or async.

A lot of code review is needless nitpicking that doesn't help to produce bug free software and mostly provides friction.

Particularly with senior devs reviewing other senior devs work.

I don't think I'd say that code review needs to be abolished, but it often needs to be put on a bit of a diet.

And I've seen PRs where code beautification feedback has gotten so out of hand and the PR is now 10% code fixes and 90% unrelated cleanup in the class/module/whatever that I can no longer determine if its safe to merge or not and that no regressions were introduced by the code review process itself.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#145

Post by seanp2k2 »

shrubble wrote: post #112

I had to go into the office for the Fortune 500 company I work for; talked to the security guard and was told that every Monday they are handed a stack of security badges to process and remove from the system--people inform their managers they are leaving on Friday and hand in their badge. The commute time, the price of gas, and the nature of the work in this building (tech work for customers who are themselves remot…

Good; let them burn for poor management decisions.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#146

Post by seanp2k2 »

coffeedan wrote: post #136
parkingrift wrote: post #134

I’m loving the companies that are trying to force workers back to the office. I just troll on LI for the announcements and then target their devs. It’s never been easier to recruit. Employers can’t win this but I’m glad so many are trying.

Maybe? I think it will take time to know who the winners and losers are. It might be good for your recruiting numbers right now, but market performance over an extended period will decide winners and losers.

My prediction is that the places bleeding talent won’t do so well in the long run.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#147

Post by ubermonkey »

It's weird this is even NEWS. So many jobs could always have been done remotely, and now post-COVID we can see that.

The HN demographic is probably on the leading edge here. I work for a small software company, but I don't code anymore; I'm effectively the head of operations. I've been here 15 years. We have NEVER had an office anywhere. Our employees have been spread nationwide this whole time, working from home. It's fine.

I think the only thing we really miss about an office is that we think it would be difficult to onboard a baby dev. I DO think there's something to be said for learning the "professional programmer on commercial software" ropes in a place where you're physically near other people doing that.

But that's really just a suspicion; we don't actually KNOW, but hiring for us is still such a big deal (narrow expertise) that we're not likely to do so as an experiment.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#148

Post by ubermonkey »

ryanSrich wrote: post #3

Of course this is happening. I’m coming up on year 10 of working remotely, and year 2 of completely async. The only forced-commute job I ever had was for 6 months right out of college. I’ve been preaching remote work for almost the entire time I’ve been doing it. I thought it would catch on much sooner, but it’s here now. I think async is the next thing that will happen. If you’re building software there’s really no…

>I think async is the next thing that will happen. If you’re building software there’s really no reason you have to share working hours with anyone.

Whoooboy do I ever disagree with you there.

We have never had offices, so everyone has always been remote, but we absolutely could NOT get in a groove with our former Indian subsidiary. There were a LOT of issues with us and them, some cultural and some just expertise-based (I don't think we had a great lead over there, and I DO think he was afraid of hiring people smarter than he was), but a HUUUUUGE chunk of the issue was that any issue became much harder to resolve because of the lack of meaningful time zone overlap.

We ended the experiment and hired up more US folks, at greater cost, but with drastically better cohesion.

I get that anecdotes aren't data, but I do not think I would join any team that was spread over more than 4 or 5 time zones. The lack of overlap makes meaningful collaboration too difficult.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#149

Post by ryanSrich »

ubermonkey wrote: post #148
ryanSrich wrote: post #3

Of course this is happening. I’m coming up on year 10 of working remotely, and year 2 of completely async. The only forced-commute job I ever had was for 6 months right out of college. I’ve been preaching remote work for almost the entire time I’ve been doing it. I thought it would catch on much sooner, but it’s here now. I think async is the next thing that will happen. If you’re building software there’s really no…

>I think async is the next thing that will happen. If you’re building software there’s really no reason you have to share working hours with anyone. Whoooboy do I ever disagree with you there. We have never had offices, so everyone has always been remote, but we absolutely could NOT get in a groove with our former Indian subsidiary. There were a LOT of issues with us and them, some cultural and some just expertise-ba…

> The lack of overlap makes meaningful collaboration too difficult.

Please describe in detail what meaningful collaboration even means. The reason why people don’t often explain what it means (especially in threads like this) is because if they actually write it out, they’ll realize how completely unimportant and unnecessary it is.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#150

Post by pmoriarty »

gorgoiler wrote: post #39

Some types of tech work well with remote, largely unalignable staff. Some don’t. I’m finding that where I can build small modules, by myself, that allow lots of flexibility to make final integration possible, I’m getting a lot of work done. When I need to collaborate with a bunch of people and get small pieces of code landing in different places before I can start to see results, then I’m finding the remote angry ner…

"I’m finding the remote angry nerd keyboard warriors harder to work with. It’s much harder asking for trust and collaborating on a design when they don’t really care about anyones work except their own"

This is more of a problem with the people you work with, not with remote work itself.

When my coworkers were nice people, interacting remotely with them was not a problem.

The main problem with remote work I've experienced was loneliness and isolation.

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