Once the elite convert their offices to housing or cut their losses WFH will not be debated anymore.
The damaging results of mandated return to office
181–190 of 348 posts
Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Virtually the entire VFX industry has shifted to remote. Let that sync in. The most hardware/GPU intensive industry of creatives dealing with ungodly complex technical pipelines, terabytes of 32bit EXR frames of rendered data, Houdini fluid simulations, compositing, color grading, the whole works... is almost entirely distributed now. They've done it. Everyone can do it. And are doing it.
I'm curious (and not really familiar with modern VFX workflows). Do they work with a mostly thin client approach now? I'm assuming it's impractical for them to regularly transmit terabytes of data back and forth over residential connections.
My wife works from home in a related industry, and she is quite frequently transmitting work files (up to 100s of GiB) over our residential connection. We have multi-gigabit symmetric FTTH though.
Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office
#183I would be interested in seeing differences across countries and culture with working from home.
The protestant work ethic in the USA essentially makes a worker feel guilty not working hard, or to feel good by working lots. In other places, doing as little as possible "manana" is viewed as a more humane way of life. Some places are more communal even to the level of prioritising the mother company they work for. Maybe ex Communist countries have differences too.
Anyhow I imagine it will be skewed as techies may be culturally more American and generally the west is more techy.
Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having the tech to allow a few employees to work remotely is one thing. Having an organisational and operational structure to allow everyone to work remotely is another thing entirely . You have to transform a lot of things like: * On-boarding - new employees are no longer able to suss out the company by chatting to people they bump into. They need well-defined ways to meet other teams and to learn how to communicate…
To add to that about Slack — speaking is a distinct skill from writing, engaging in different part of the brain. The skills you use for speaking in person does not automatically translates to writing, let alone the various social nuances that comes with text based communication. The skills you might have picked up to be someone effective while in person doesn’t mean you will be effective working through Slack. Zoom i…
True. Anticipating context is one example of a skill that verbal communicators sometimes lack. For someone to understand your statement/question, it needs to be framed in the language they use everyday, and not to lack any crucial information.
In a verbal conversation, you can whittle down to this by asking questions and rephrasing the other person. In remote situations you need to spend time thinking about what information to include and how to phrase it, before even touching the keyboard.
I still get messages along the lines of "Hi, I'm trying to do X but it's not working! Can you look into it?". With a bit of forethought this can become "Hi. I'm trying to do X because client C wants to be able to do Y. I've tried action A but I'm getting issue I. I looked into the logs and found L, so then I also tried action A2 but ran into issue I2. Here is a screenshot of what I mean. I am on environment E and using configuration C. Do you have any suggestions for how I could proceed?"
Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office
#185Once you’ve tasted the fruits of WFH and you like the taste, you’ll never go back. It’s like going from a black and white TV to a color one, from a dummy phone to a smartphone, from dialup internet to fiber to the home. You never go the other way round, unless there is a very strong reason and personal decision. People like to improve their lives in whatever way is best for them and will strongly object to a “downgra…
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Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office
#186I worked from home since covid drama and I don't have issues coming to work from time to time, we have to come at least once a week but generally that day my productivity is almost zero since we talk, eat, drink etc. and if I don7t want to come even that one day, nobody would say a thing. International company with over 5k employers. I wanted to change job last year and they told me I need to come to office art least first 6 months... I declined job offer since it's just pain in the ass to get to office. One hour travel to work, one hour travel from work and that's on a good day traffic. I need to buy expensive shitty food on job and pay for train tickets. So yeah I will never accept to come to office 5 day in a row. I might be spoiled but that's how it is.
Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except almost all white-collar offices (in the US at least) went remote during the first 2-3 years of COVID. Most did so successfully. Yet, many now want to return to traditional office work with little evidence that’s a better way to work.
I don't think most did so successfully. A lot of companies did it without any sort of software or procedures to support remote working and never managed to implement it during the time. They still rely on Skype. Tech companies are not representative.
When I started working remotely we had icq and a private irc server :)
Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many people do you know? When WFH was mandated, I hated it. When the mandate was finally kicked, I loved going back to the office, and have spent almost every workday at the office, despite having the possibility to do 40% WFH if I wanted. No, I don't want that, thank you. Not a coder, working as admin. I like people, that is why I work in an office. And personal experience is definitely that working together wit…
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Sure, as a disabled person, I totally like it when abled-body people like you call me "ableist", that is so funny that I almost forget how shitty that move is. Yes, you didnt know, I know, but, keep disability out of your arguments please, people with real disabilities will thank you for that.
And there is a difference between "care duties" and the "papa is at home so we can pester him with family stuff all day long". We have 2 weeks of extra leave for parents, they already have extra priviledges compared to non-parents. If someone declares a few days off because they have to fix something important with their family, that is fine and never was an issue.
But WFH people suddenly realizing at 10 AM that they can not be bothered to work for the next 3 hours is definitely unfair and overstretching the priviledges.
Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office
#189I recently changed jobs and had the choice between a senior IC role at a FAANG and an engineering director position at an open-source company that is fully remote. While working in fully remote culture would be intellectually interesting, I opted for the FAANG and enjoying going back to the (incredibly cushy) office, after 3 years of WFH that I found isolating and depressing, even though I am an introvert and possibly even on the spectrum.
Perhaps I would be singing a different tune if I didn't live in London with its obscenely overpriced chicken coops of houses and had a spacious home office, but somehow I doubt it.
Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've been lucky and haven't experienced a regular company that is not remote ready. I'm sure most tech companies are in a much better position then the ones where the only communication software is Skype. It's a serious uphill to convert such a company to a remote one.
You have to work it even within tech companies. I have been working remote for years before the pandemic made it mainstream. In one of the companies I worked for, I was not the first remote worker. The first person in the company pioneered the tech, practices, and culture to make it work as a hybrid. After I came in, bit by bit, the engineering team went remote. So when the pandemic hit, the company had already had a…
I'd be grateful to read a little more detail about what those best practices are, if you have a chance?