201–210 of 282 posts
I've noticed a similar effect from tall management hierarchies in my career. You end up spending hours every week making presentations to managers, working with managers to make presentations to higher-up managers, etc. Everything is done in terms of "What will Jim (the VP) think of this?"
I have the same experience. How can we avoid this?
> > Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely. This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week. This requires further study, but our hypothesis…
Why does there need to be a metric? People with management experience can decide these things based on intuition. It's practically impossible to quantify anything in this industry, but 'data-driven decisionmaking' is fetishized to the extreme. Ultimately it just becomes another buzzword and method for people with little or no experience to override people with experience. Phrasing the whole discussion in terms of 'me…
And these people never ever mentioned using of intuition during making decisions because...
because no one believe that using intuition is actually working?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We have our own take on exactly how we do it, but the gist is that all our software engineers are in a video conference with each other as much as possible and focus on a single task. This is a pretty fucked up way of working. People can't get anything useful done if there is a mob of people on a zoom call. It's just a talkfest or more likely an opportunity for 1-2 people to dominate the conversation while the othe…
I've found it to be quite the opposite. It's also important to note that mob programming recommends rotating who is "driving" the session, so we change who is sharing every 15 minutes. I don't think this approach scales to more than a team of 4-6 people but we've been able to forge strong bonds on our team, solve complex problems (in domain definition, actual code, ci/cd issues, and more) in ways that the entire team…
This piece goes from talking about meta layoffs to an indictment of remote work surprisingly quick. I love remote work, because I grew up in a small city with no companies operating in my industry and when covid hit I was able to go full remote, move back home, and be around my friends and family while contributing to my company and to my local economy. The biggest thing that has helped my dev team thrive and be able…
The problem w mob programming is that measured purely on a man-hour cost it sounds extremely stupid and expensive for a company. It has always sounded to me like a hare brained idea that a dev shop came up with to sell more man hours per feature delivered.
This piece goes from talking about meta layoffs to an indictment of remote work surprisingly quick. I love remote work, because I grew up in a small city with no companies operating in my industry and when covid hit I was able to go full remote, move back home, and be around my friends and family while contributing to my company and to my local economy. The biggest thing that has helped my dev team thrive and be able…
WFH is very good and convenient for the _worker_! It's great being at your small town, or beach at Bali, or your favourite coffee. I just don't think it's very good for the company and for the overall productivity.
I just never understood how come “tech” companies never used the same concept used within their products, async communications!! Sync communication is a blocking one, you need to block all involved parties to discuss X that most of the times is useless, just use async ones, I email/text/or even video record when I have the time, and you respond when you do, not really that hard!
Because a lot of work needs sync and is inefficient to do in an async manner. Even for software engineers, let alone other people centric roles. Most obvious example would be designing nuances of a complex system. That discussion is needed at least once every 4-6 weeks and I wish we are around a whiteboard at that time.
In this case communication ability is crucial, since it requires written documents. Many people (managers and developers) lack the discipline, patience, and incentives to adopt this style of work.
TFA sez: But as we see, companies like Meta have been making an effort to quantify the effect of remote work on productivity, and concluded not only that there is some, but that it’s significant enough to warrant encouraging an unpopular return. [End TFA.] But they have failed to do this. When they actually provide such data (a rarity), it’s cherry-picked to justify getting asses back in seats for egocentric reasons.…
This is good fanfiction, but doesn't really reflect reality. Employees have mostly gone along with RTO/hybrid strategies and there hasn't been a mass exodus where it's happened, especially in this job market. Most people are probably assuming RTO is a matter of when, not if, for most companies anyhow. And remember that 40,000+ tech workers have been laid off in the past 6 months, and the specter of ChatGPT is lurking…
> > Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely. This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week. This requires further study, but our hypothesis…
Why does there need to be a metric? People with management experience can decide these things based on intuition. It's practically impossible to quantify anything in this industry, but 'data-driven decisionmaking' is fetishized to the extreme. Ultimately it just becomes another buzzword and method for people with little or no experience to override people with experience. Phrasing the whole discussion in terms of 'me…
I see this being repeated ad-nauseam. I don't really buy that at all. I have seen junior employees that performed and evolved fine on remote settings, on teams that had effective remote collaboration.
IMO, this is a lie that people that really miss working from offices grasping at straws to muddy the conversation with some kind of plausible deniability.
> > Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely. This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week. This requires further study, but our hypothesis…
Why would they search of a reason if they see their employees being more productive WFH and they can save a significant share of their capex by getting rid of their real estate footprints? HackerNews needs to stop with the motivated reasoning when it comes to arguing against RTO. Every single major tech company clearly has bucket loads of data showing some portion of their employees being more productive working from…
People (managers and execs in this case) don't primarily make data driven decisions.
They do what's good for themselves personally
Sometimes that means following whatewer the data says -- in other cases they might rather not want to look at any data
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are plenty of companies that focus on remote work and have no issues with onboarding or failing performance. Can you please name a few of those? Mine has gone all in and sincerely trying to make it work. And it still sucks. So curious to know some successful examples.
A couple of well-known ones are Automattic (WordPress.com) and Gitlab. Gitlab even has its employee handbook publicly available https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/