41–50 of 366 posts
This is yet another sign that Google is in ruin …
Is that so? WFH is still a largely a COVID thing, even 3 times a day is still better than going to office 5 times week, as before?
After going back and forth between in-person and remote jobs, my conclusion: * Remote work is much better if you know what you're building and "just" need to execute. * In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other. Obvious, right? But I think what I've realize is the d…
Not everyone is the same office - it’s a joke
I attended a HR conference a few months ago with several Fortune 500 company heads of people, etc. Most of the sentiment in the room was that WFH flexibility is valuable but so is collaborative time in office. Some more 'forward-thinking' leaders were all in on remote though it was clear this was the minority. The leaders talked a lot about pressures from other execs on wanting to go back in-office even though they k…
I think it's relatively well known that heads of people/whatever fancy name HR peeps come up with for themselves are generally sociopathic scumbags, so it's not surprising to me that this was the case.
It might be useful to "all be in the room" when brainstorming. Once the coding starts, this is just a set of distractions I don't need. I suspect many/most of the developers reading HN want peace and quiet far more than the chance of magical hallway conversations. And it's only an anecdote, but we debugged a problem today where people were in two provinces of Canada and the UK. Were perfectly able to share screens, r…
Fully remote with 2-3 day quarterly in-person meet ups would provide tech companies with the in person collaboration they seek and be cheaper. Remote first companies do this all the time. Employees feel way better about it if the company provides hotel and accommodations when doing destination meet ups.
I am a fan of hybrid (people can choose whether or not they're in the office).
However, you want to be able to collaborate effectively at any time and not have to wait for quarterly gatherings. I've got complex problems to solve together with my team mates!
It might be useful to "all be in the room" when brainstorming. Once the coding starts, this is just a set of distractions I don't need. I suspect many/most of the developers reading HN want peace and quiet far more than the chance of magical hallway conversations. And it's only an anecdote, but we debugged a problem today where people were in two provinces of Canada and the UK. Were perfectly able to share screens, r…
>It might be useful to "all be in the room" when brainstorming. Hasn't every study on brainstorming found that it's not a good way to generate good ideas? With having people breathing the same air in a small space believed to be a contributing factor to that.
A friend of mine who is a PM at google was telling me about this the other week. Her job situation sounded so tenuous, in that a lot of it hinged on how cool her manager was with her living situation not being in SF. Also having to ask a friend to swipe her badge because she couldn't afford living in SF.
> PM at google > couldn't afford living in SF
After going back and forth between in-person and remote jobs, my conclusion: * Remote work is much better if you know what you're building and "just" need to execute. * In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other. Obvious, right? But I think what I've realize is the d…
Or sharing a zoom session. Bonus is that I don’t have to commute to an office on another continent to engage in this second modality - more than half of my teammates are in other cities and I don’t see a benefit in the standing next to each other.
I never cease to be amazed the extent to which companies are trying to squeeze the remote work genie back into the bottle. They're desperate to find ways to make that expensive office space seem justified. "See, look! The people are using it. They love it." (Just out of frame, guns are pointed at the workers.)
I never cease to be amazed at the extent to which knowledge workers want to make "replace us with Eastern Europeans/Latin Americans/Indians" as painless a drop in as possible.
Outsourcing/offshoring is old news.
After going back and forth between in-person and remote jobs, my conclusion: * Remote work is much better if you know what you're building and "just" need to execute. * In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other. Obvious, right? But I think what I've realize is the d…
Remotely, I’m vastly more productive in getting coding work done. I’m sure most people would agree. But that productivity is almost erased by onboarding new hires. There are so many aspects of software engineering where it’s so much easier to be sitting next to someone, pointing at their monitor, and discussing what and why you are doing something. Instead, you need to hop on a call and awkwardly screen share on a call or write out paragraphs of text to impart the knowledge. In my experience, having such barriers to doing these things makes new hires much less likely to reach out and put themselves into the situations where they can learn, no matter how much they are told it’s ok to bother people.
To me, this is why remote works so much better at smaller companies with less bespoke tooling and legacy code. There’s no better way to learn than in person and there is a huge productivity boost when doing so. That said, personally, I’m willing to deal with the lower productivity in my work life to get the higher productivity in my real life by being able to do laundry during the day and not sit in traffic.