141–150 of 921 posts
People need social connections with their peers to work together successfully. It's much easier to build these connections in the office than virtually. Seeing each other a couple times per quarter for an extended period could also work, but it's easier--if you already have an office space--to bring people together in the office once or twice a week.
This isn't self-evident to me at all.
Real estate.
Additionally to all the comments, I think it is a challenge for most middle managers and up. Because it becomes obvious who can manage people and who can not. Who is capable of planning tasks and who is not. They have less personal/social leverage => they need to be professionals... and 50% are not ... In the office there is always an illusion of control and it's easier to come up with ad-hoc tasks. But in my opinion…
Let's talk about resources and overhead. If you WFH, then you're paying rent, utilities, you have a kitchen, you may well be BYOD, your ISP is a consumer-grade connection, you've got renter's or homeowner's insurance covering your stuff. That's all miles different from working in an office. They've got cleaning staff and a maintenance team. They've got an enterprise-class high-speed redundant Internet connection (and…
Such as?
There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes. That’s the sort of thing that isn’t immediately obvious, but becomes more noticeable as time goes on. The first months of the pandemic people were able to coast on their existing connections, but it becomes harder years on, especially if half your team has _never_ met in person or come to company HQ. In the before tim…
If you can connect or collaborate in a hallway, you can also do so in a Discord channel (or whatever tool). There are also several good applications for internet collaboration that simulate a rich shared 2d or 3d or video space. Or things like GitHub issues and Wikis. Networking, mentorship, company culture, etc. can all happen over the internet. You make it part of the company culture to use the remote collaboration…
I don't believe that, those are very different modes of communications.
> There are also several good applications for internet collaboration that simulate a rich shared 2d or 3d or video space.
I think, this could potentially help, but we seem to be still very far from it technologically. It's still impossible to achieve a realistic eye contact. Audio in calls is still tragically bad - it's actually somewhat shocking that nobody was able to figure this out yet, it feels like there was hardly any progress in the last 15 years.
Personally, participating in a remote meeting is very noticeably more demanding for me than an in-person meeting.
> Networking, mentorship, company culture, etc. can all happen over the internet.
Might work in theory, but in my experience not in practice. My company tried to organize some socializing remotely, but the attendance was dramatically lower than in the in person events.
Let's talk about resources and overhead. If you WFH, then you're paying rent, utilities, you have a kitchen, you may well be BYOD, your ISP is a consumer-grade connection, you've got renter's or homeowner's insurance covering your stuff. That's all miles different from working in an office. They've got cleaning staff and a maintenance team. They've got an enterprise-class high-speed redundant Internet connection (and…
By saving on office costs you can just offer those benefits to your remote employees. You can hire someone to clean a residential bathroom too!
There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes. That’s the sort of thing that isn’t immediately obvious, but becomes more noticeable as time goes on. The first months of the pandemic people were able to coast on their existing connections, but it becomes harder years on, especially if half your team has _never_ met in person or come to company HQ. In the before tim…
"There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes." I've seen this idea repeated many times, but in over 20 years in the tech industry, I've never once seen a meaningful collaboration spring up in a kitchenette or hallway. It's invariably "how was your weekend?" fare. Don't get me wrong, there's value in connecting that way, but it's never the sort of thing that dire…
Employees that perform just fine without being micromanaged are a threat to the livelihoods of people whose entire jobs are scheduling meetings and arranging office pizza parties.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Caring about the raw amount of time people put into their jobs sounds like a middle management thing to do -- rewarding showing up and putting in hours like it was PR. If the results are there, and in accordance with the employment contract, time shouldn't matter.
Except that they also take advantage of the flexibility of agile. If a story is pointed for 2 days and it takes 3 it's better to take that as a missed estimate than a developer not producing as much as they should. Hammering them because they let a deadline slip leads to all sorts of bad things. But, again, even as a fellow team member I can't tell if they worked for 2 days and fucked off for one or it legitimately j…