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Why is remote work seen as a gift?

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Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#551

Post by nikau »

brigandish wrote: post #513
nikau wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've dealt with lots of code which could be fixed permanently - ie. put in proper error handling and rearchitect to be robust and maintenance free. More so than ever with the push for MVP and agile ticket stat chasing.

MVP's are supposed to be temporary, that's a weird cherry pick. Regardless, code is contextual and relies on so many things other than its own quality at the time of that assessment being made that to say it's been fixed permanently, as if there's some Platonic ideal code that can be written, is, in my view, something I'd only hear from someone new to the industry or not in the industry at all, like Graeber. The job…

I've been in the industry over 20 years, and in my experience agile steers everything to be MVP in the pursuit of velocity, even on projects where they are replacing an existing platform and there is no time to market benefits to rush it.

And it looks great at the start, the project is making great progress until people start to leave and the tech debt starts to kick in. By that stage all the "high performance" agile rock stars have pissed off to another company and left behind their legacy.

And then its death by 1000 cuts, things aren't logged correctly, no proper exception handling rather just do a print(e) and falling over, any integrations with 3rd parties aren't documented when they break and its just a mess.

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#552

Post by dang »

simplotek wrote: post #523
pelasaco wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> new guy got hired and they;re making 10k more than me and I've been here 5 years Your mistake is to assume that you (being there 5 year) is doing your work well and over the expectations, becoming an important piece to your team. Important enough that your manager wants to secure you as part of the team. Maybe you are just average. Regardless of being 2, 5 or 10 years there.

> Your mistake is to assume that you (being there 5 year) is doing your work well and over the expectations, You're willing to go the extent of accusing people you never met nor have any idea who and how they are of being incompetent at a job you don't even know just to preserve your cognitive dissonance. > Important enough that your manager wants to secure you as part of the team. Straight out of college I worked at…

Personal attack and flamewar comments will get you banned here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not post like this to Hacker News again, we'd appreciate it.

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#553

Post by dang »

pelasaco wrote: post #529
simplotek wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your mistake is to assume that you (being there 5 year) is doing your work well and over the expectations, You're willing to go the extent of accusing people you never met nor have any idea who and how they are of being incompetent at a job you don't even know just to preserve your cognitive dissonance. > Important enough that your manager wants to secure you as part of the team. Straight out of college I worked at…

Just reading how you write, I can Tell you: you are an average, lonely, angry and spoiled dev. IMO, Twitter is a better place for you to voice such rants. For sure I assume that everyone did their homework and found a great company to work. That's the step 1! The step 2 is to be the best version of you. That's the most important factor on your salary, assuming the step 1! Good luck

Personal attack and flamewar comments will get you banned here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not post like this to Hacker News again, we'd appreciate it.

Edit: we've asked you more than once before not to post like this. If you don't want to be banned on HN, we need you to heed these warnings.

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#554

Post by HowTheStoryEnds »

Aeolun wrote: post #511
autoexec wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until the moment companies once again collude to drive and hold prices down. Suddenly those competitors aren't too low after all and the "tried and true" isn't so useful. Corporations have enough staff that they can lay off hundreds or thousands of workers without a single worry. They can hold out not paying you the rate you want for much longer than you can afford not paying your bills and eating. Eventually, you wi…

You need only one company to not go along to hoover up all the great talent. The large problem with the collusion before was that the 3-4 that already paid top of the market salaries colluded to keep them the same. It doesn’t mean they weren’t still top of the market for someone with a given level of experience.

No because the pool of workers at that company vs the others combined is small. This in turn will make entry in that pool excessively competitive which again will serve to drive down the wages in that pool. Once the tiny pool is saturated they might as well benefit from entering with the others in agreement as well.

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#555

Post by bsenftner »

danaris wrote: post #544
eru wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People always like to complain that times are getting worse.

I mean, yes, this is true, but it doesn't follow that times never actually get worse. This is a case where, at least in certain respects, times are provably getting worse than they were before. If politics are too fuzzy and nebulous for you, look at generational economics: I don't recall the precise figures off the top of my head, but the baby boomers are still holding wealth vastly disproportionate to their share of…

"Being a scientist, I had to check the math. Turns out it's even worse. You could have made $53,000 (£44,000) a day or $20 million per year since Jesus was born and still not make the profits Shell did in 2022." - Prof. Katharine Hayhoe, Climate Scientist, Chief Scientist @nature_org , Prof @TexasTech

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#556

Post by throwaway675309 »

paulcole wrote: post #497
ryanmcgarvey wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This dilemma is precisely what people who benefit from remote work went through when most companies weren't remote friendly. My honest opinion is that most people that enjoy the office enjoy it because it's where they've gotten most of their socialization in their adult lives. As a result, they haven't built up lives outside of work. To make matters worse, our communities haven't developed to support people having "l…

It surprises me that the biggest knock on HN against people who prefer the office generally boils down to "get a life." Honestly, it's pretty insulting. And I've never seen someone comment, "I'm pro-office because I have no social life." So why is that the prevailing sentiment? To me it's more like those in favor of remote work find people who prefer office work very threatening and really look to knock them down a p…

You're taking what OP said in bad faith. But in my experience most of the people who want to come into an office is precisely because they're lacking a certain social component in their normal lives.

There are so many quantifiably superior reasons to want to work remotely:

- Commute time

– gasoline savings

– can walk one's pets

The only pros I can think of for going into an office are a little more contextual to the specific employee:

- Poor home environment (noisy, distracting, etc)

– Loneliness

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#557

Post by throwaway675309 »

baxtr wrote: post #476
thinknubpad wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow. If you're working remotely, you don't need to spend 8h of your waking time with other office drones. You can spend it near people you care about, interacting with your coworkers briefly as needed.

So you have a job with no zoom meetings and no slack interactions with colleagues (sorry office drones)?

Do your zoom meetings occupy eight hours a day? because that's what working in an office is.

When I work from home I might have a few meetings in a day, but I'm just a few steps away from hugging my wife, and nuzzling my dog any time I want. While the people at my office might be casual acquaintances and in some cases friends, they'll never ever compare to the bonds of family.

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#558

Post by Sateeshm »

andsoitis wrote: post #122
phoronixrly wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I beg to differ. We've grown accustomed to the insane idea that someone else should provide childcare for our children while we are away for 8-10 hours a day.

if childcare requires constant attention and presence, how can you do that while also working?

How are the childcare needs managed when you are at office?

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#559

Post by sdiacom »

regularfry wrote: post #168
sdiacom wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By saying "serendipity" here, we abstract it into its own unique cutesy concept, preventing proper analysis of its actual tangible benefits. This leads people to talk about it as if it's some magical emergent property of water coolers. When we talk about some of the tangible things that we might actually want this "serendipity" for, these are the ones that I constantly see pop up: - Spontaneously detecting and addres…

No, "serendipity" here has value primarily not within a single team, but as a discovery mechanism between teams. There's research on this. It has its highest value for new starters trying to figure out how the org fits together, but is also useful for inter-team workflow discovery and reinforcement, especially at the start of projects. You shouldn't need it within a single team unless that team is already dysfunction…

Oh, thanks for pointing this out! I hadn't thought of it explicitly in that way, so I didn't write it down. But all the concrete examples I was running in my mind were indeed examples of inter-team collaboration: "helping the HR team fix their workflow", "addressing issues that the customer support team keeps getting complaints about", "fixing some minor product oversight that leads to a worse experience"

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#560

Post by paulcole »

throwaway675309 wrote: post #556
paulcole wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It surprises me that the biggest knock on HN against people who prefer the office generally boils down to "get a life." Honestly, it's pretty insulting. And I've never seen someone comment, "I'm pro-office because I have no social life." So why is that the prevailing sentiment? To me it's more like those in favor of remote work find people who prefer office work very threatening and really look to knock them down a p…

You're taking what OP said in bad faith. But in my experience most of the people who want to come into an office is precisely because they're lacking a certain social component in their normal lives. There are so many quantifiably superior reasons to want to work remotely: - Commute time – gasoline savings – can walk one's pets The only pros I can think of for going into an office are a little more contextual to the…

> Poor home environment (noisy, distracting, etc)

> Loneliness

I mean those can be pretty huge issues.

And no, I’m not taking what OP said in bad faith. I’m taking it as exactly how they meant it.

They have no actual evidence (besides their keen observation and desire to discredit in-office work) and to say that people who prefer office work have poor/nonexistent social lives.

Yet they claim that people who prefer office work have poor/nonexistent social lives. I’m not sure but the traditional context of saying someone has a poor/nonexistent social life is rarely that of a compliment.

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