341–350 of 921 posts
Because we're all paranoid that the other companies will somehow gain some sort of economic/productivity advantage from bringing their guys back into the office and leverage this to push us out of the market.
Even though we keep seeing research that this absolutely isn't the case, the only way to be sure is to preemptively bring our guys back into the office too. Ya know.. just in case.
All I wanted was to be able to go into an office and talk to a real life person. I would go weeks at a time not talking to a single person in real life.
I don't think people understand the plight of the young office worker until they've experienced the torture of solitary confinement. Day in, day out. All alone. I don't have a girlfriend, friends, or a life in this city.
I tried to join clubs and a maker space, but no time - I was working all day. The maker space closed early. I'm creative, I like working. I just wanted to go to an office. That's all I wanted. I wanted a routine. I wanted to commute and people watch. I wanted to feel like I was living life. But no, I had a remote job.
I got a new job that's supposed to be 3 days a week in office. Guess what? My team can't get enough remote work - they're not going to go into the office. And here I am, again, in the torture of solitary confinement.
I've been thinking about getting a new career, going into the trades. Anything that would allow me to have consistent interaction with other people.
I've become anti-technology, anti-society. I'm an optimistic person, yet I slip into depression because the only thing I want - to be able to go into an office - will not happen for me.
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I’ve not had mentorship or real guidance offered in my career. I would say I’ve made connections, but my experience was very much just “you’re in charge of this team now because someone left. Why are you sucking at being a lead? Geez, we even sent you on a single day management course! I don’t get it!”. And the same for being a manager. People are very complimentary about me when I’m just doing programming because I…
Have you ever received constructive feedback that did not feel like criticism?
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Five years in office. Five years fully remote with a team of dozens of fully remote engineers. I find the latter, in my experience, to be strictly superior in all ways including working together successfully despite being remote. I think we overrate the need to build in-person social rapports. Just be a professional. I think there’s a concept where often work colleagues become friends and we misidentify that as being…
To whit, open source projects have been run for decades over nothing but email mailing lists. People participating in these projects feel a strong social connection.
All the while not forgetting that people contributing to free software have altogether different motivations: they are (almost) all in it because they want to contribute their own time to something they believe in.
Quite different from what majority of people in any company are there for.
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That's exactly how managers advance. Through good personal relationships across the organization, rapport, "alignment".
Maybe for managers. But really it should be about delivering completed projects, especially for technical folks.
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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.
Contractors get to set their hours. Employees are expected to be performing services for their employers for a minimum of 30 hours per week: https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/employers/identifyin... . If you're signed into Teams but playing a game or watching a movie, it could probably be challenged in court whether you're performing a service for your employer.
My experience since 2020 has pushed me against working from home, in particular research seminars are far worse online. The quality of questions is much worse, and engagement is visibly worse than when we have them in person.
As for research... a lot of research ideas come from corridor chat. If you have an idea for a paper and Dave down the corridor is an expert in the area, it's much easier to test the idea out on him as you walk back together from a seminar than to email him. Maybe it shouldn't make a difference, but it does.
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sounds like it would be effective if the cto was in latam too
Right? Funny how C-level employees never think they’ll get outsourced. Ten or twenty years from now there will be great CTO level talent founding companies in Latam if they aren’t already. Then the whole company can operate in a cheaper country with lower taxes and benefits. Good luck competing with that in the US.
Plenty C level people know this is the eventual outcome. They just also know that the runway is likely to extend beyond their working career because they control most business decisions for the foreseeable future.
They still operate on a relationship basis with ownership/capital while managing the company on a Netflix performance model for everyone else. Those relationships are likely to stay in place until both sides age out of the industry.
I've worked with a number of C level folks hired into companies from low cost regions and they have all been utterly stellar. This is coming, just not for the current generation of senior execs.
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Is it an in-person job? Then no one who wants that job would be stupid enough to say otherwise.
Seriously, if you're junior then you're more desperate and you're going to straight face lie about your opinions to make yourself more hireable.
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>Brainstorming and creative collaboration activities seem more effective when done in person Let me tell you, I hate these. And I will take vacation days to avoid going to them. And I also think they're not very productive no matter how many 'How To Run A Sprint' classes the organizers take.
I can imagine how one could arrive at such conclusion, but I have seen somewhat useful stuff come out of those. Some key components for me are: - don't impose too much structure, or God forbid, try to make it fun. It's work, let's complain about work and hopefully some useful ideas might come up - Bring in relevant people, that actually get work done. The less managers the better. - Don't be afraid of being negative.…