851–860 of 921 posts
Some problems are solved faster by multiple people getting together in front of a whiteboard and drawing. For those kinds of problems it’s useful to have people in the same room until we have AR solutions that can fill that need. Also for some people, not leaving their home caused significant issues in their performance. People aren’t solitary creatures, so for some - the office fills that role. For others, home offi…
Sorry but in my opinion you can't beat free styling with Excalidraw and a bunch of nerds leaning back in their own basements and home offices thinking deeply and being critical of ideas. The overhead of having such meetings is next to nothing in remote compared to the office. No one has to get up to go to a meeting or book a meeting room. Did you just have a eureka moment 5 minutes after a meeting ended? No problem!…
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In my experience the only thing helping people work better as a team is just working better as a team. Be patient, kind, and spend an extra minute writing a more detailed email that is helpful to your colleagues. If you're a manager, give them the right tools and empower them. But this is completely orthogonal to whether the work is in an office or remote.
Part of the in-person experience is the opportunity for people to correct mistakes in communication. Many people are not effective writers, and so pushing for async or writing-heavy communication is difficult at best. Having one-on-ones by voice or video often helps cut down misunderstandings, and in-person is a way to help reduce the barrier to entry for such interactions.
If people are bad at writing, they can get better at it, like any other skill. I have a bad memory for voice/video conversations, so my preference is to always have a written email to go back to for reference.
But I'll still attempt to do what my other team members are comfortable with.
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Yep. This. I can't believe HN zeitgeist cannot understand this. Why would I hire a US employee for twice the cost when I can hire someone 95% as good remotely in a low cost area of the world and actually get an employee that sticks around for a decade vs. a year? It's honestly not even really a decision at this point if you have the management infrastructure in place.
> when I can hire someone 95% as good remotely in a low cost area of the world and actually get an employee that sticks around for a decade vs. a year This is fantasy.
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Yep. This. I can't believe HN zeitgeist cannot understand this. Why would I hire a US employee for twice the cost when I can hire someone 95% as good remotely in a low cost area of the world and actually get an employee that sticks around for a decade vs. a year? It's honestly not even really a decision at this point if you have the management infrastructure in place.
Why would an offshore employee stick around any longer than a US one? They too would move as soon as they find a better offer.
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This is exactly wrong. The people you want to take care of are the top 25% of your team. When you let someone go, it’s often because someone in the top 25% is complaining that they do not trust the low performer and the low performer increases the workload of the high performer. When you have a team of high performers, new high performing candidates recognize that and see that as a huge plus for recruitment. No great…
For some reason coming back to this thread, its really wild how sociopathic c-suite types have to be.
I'm in my 20s. I live alone in a city where I don't know anyone. Remote work destroyed my mental health. 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…
I think you're the most honest pro-office person here. Everyone else is making justifications that dance around this idea that they need the office for the human connection. What you describe is very real and I understand that it hurts. I think what's happening is that we're in the shaking out phase where companies are deciding whether they'll be remote/hybrid/office. Each company will make that decision based on the…
However open plan, sales folks yelling on a phone, demands that I don't wear headphones to drown it out, is all so draining.
I remember the lead up to Christmas 2019, some fucking idiots decided that what we really needed in the open plan office, where I'm already positioned near the café, was removal of mini-meeting rooms, and 2 hours of carollers.
I don't want to listen to some people singing their echoing Christmas songs in a "jazzy" way. I still had to do calls and support other teams who I couldn't hear over the noise.
If working from the office actually meant having a small closed off space for my team so we could collaborate, have meetings, design sessions and planning it would be great.
If going to the office meant having other teams available to whiteboard their problems in an available meeting room, come up with a plan and roadmap the improvements it would be great.
However they got rid of offices for teams, they got rid of cubicles so that other people's calls would at least be muffled, they got rid of partitions between people's breakout spaces and the rest of the floor so I have to listen to inane conversations at other people standups.
If this kid wants an office because he needs social interaction, that's fine. We can do a hacking session once a week. We can go to the office to plan and design fortnightly. I've done paired programming, problem investigation, where we have just an open call between two people and a screenshare so that you aren't alone and we can talk it through.
In principle the office is a social space with productivity possibilities. In practice, most companies appear to want to make the office the most unpleasant location to be.
The experienced professional has a track record of coming up the ranks in both position and skillset. He doesn't need to talk to people as much to get work done. He has a good understanding of the domain and has strong analytical skills, able to break down complex problems by himself or with another experienced engineer.
Then there is everyone else. Everyone else does not have the above characteristics. They do not have the skills needed to work by themselves or even learn by themselves. Juniors get frustrated because they don't have the necessary number of synchronous experiences, relying on async forms of knowledge without the ability to piece it together (or at least do it quickly). Furthermore, everyone else accounts for a bigger percentage of the organisation. Most people do not have the skills I mentioned above.
To conclude, some people manage equally well or better remotely. But it's not the case for the whole organisation.
Follow on question: I wonder what the long term effects on company juniors are of working fully remote. I estimate it takes each individual 3-5X more time to get upskilled.
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This is exactly wrong. The people you want to take care of are the top 25% of your team. When you let someone go, it’s often because someone in the top 25% is complaining that they do not trust the low performer and the low performer increases the workload of the high performer. When you have a team of high performers, new high performing candidates recognize that and see that as a huge plus for recruitment. No great…
For some reason coming back to this thread, its really wild how sociopathic c-suite types have to be.
Like I said in a sibling post, the best we can do is: first, don't give our talent or time to these people. Second, start our own companies built on treating human beings with respect.
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Like you, I appreciated his comment. It was honest, and I have been there. We are in the shaking-out phase of this change. The bigger problem is management isn't across-the-board good at determining productivity in-person or remote. Good managers are rare, and staring over someone's shoulder to make sure the work is getting done correctly is harder in remote work. The systems to provide this checking and oversight ar…
> I've been at the other end of the spectrum where I don't get work done in the office. Open offices are what destroyed the experience of going to work. When I had a private office (the first 17 years of my career) I loved going to the office. I had all the silence and privacy to get work done, but at the same time I could step out of the office 2-3 times a day and hang out with the team, chitchat about work, project…
I don't need necessarily a personal office. But I need them to be reasonable.
A closed off space for just the 6 folks in the team would be fine, and a separate small space for someone to go to for a call or a 1:1.