291–300 of 326 posts
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> We went from offices to cubicles to open space and nobody stopped to think if it was a good idea. People have been complaining about this development since forever. I'm not sure who that 'nobody' in your sentence is?
My point is that we are invoking this alleged benefits when it serves a narrative but just ignore it when it's convenient for the "bottom" line
I think gaming is very similar to remote working. You log in when you sit down, put in your headset and typically are available. Work isn’t much different. My team leaves zoom standup open all day, we break into conversations all the time. It both (a) keeps everyone engaged and (b) removes blockers fast. That said, we setup side “rooms” we can move in and out of. There is also the option not to be accessible, but it’…
How long have you been doing this? Curious, bc many teams tried something like this but it fizzled after 3-4 months. (full disclosure, we're building a platform that integrates with Zoom to visualize all these rooms, and who is in them, so people can hop into the rooms where people currently are, and know when someone isn't available before joining, etc. would love to interview you for user research if you're up for…
To answer your question — many years
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> We went from offices to cubicles to open space and nobody stopped to think if it was a good idea. People have been complaining about this development since forever. I'm not sure who that 'nobody' in your sentence is?
That nobody is obviously within the people making the decisions. The people complaining were a whole different set of nobodies.
Mark Zuckerberg might be a true believer in open plan offices (judging by his public comments). But your average Fortune 500 company might only be into it for the savings in office space expenditure to be had from cramming people tighter. And some companies, like SAP (at least when I did an internship with them ages ago), still have offices (shared amongst eg 4 people) instead of going open plan.
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No, it doesn’t. Again, nothing against you if you dislike being asked how things are going by a coworker — but if that is the culture of the company you work at, there’s nothing wrong with it. It might be wrong for you , so you either get a different job or learn to deal with it.
There are common etiquettes across cultures that transcend age/location/rank, etc. Wasting people's time is objectively, universally bad. Even if it wasn't universally bad, it would be at least overwhelmingly bad in the context of a productive enterprise, which most workplaces are.
It’s less fine to be that person and work somewhere where the culture values being asked randomly by coworkers, “How’s it going?” But it might be something you can live with.
It might be a conscious choice to trade off short-term productivity in favor of long-term balance. It might be a way to weed out anti-social people who they don’t want working there.
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I had the rare privilege of pair-programming 40 hours a week for several years early in my career. This follows the extreme programming ethos of "everything in the limit," where pairing is "code review in the limit" and "mentorship in the limit," to say nothing of the oral tradition it imparts[0]. Even pair-programming with my fellow juniors was both more productive and more educational than a rubber duck[1]. I had t…
Meh, I don't think this is an intrinsic quality of working in the same space. Sometimes it is, if you're very lucky, but my experience in offices was mostly wasteful interactions with people who weren't satisfied with me checking my messages periodically instead of instantly.
It's certainly not.
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I still think that is a culture problem. I have a team of engineers that frequently has a lot of junior engineers. I find it really REALLY important to reinforce the culture of "software development is a team sport" and provide concrete mechanisms to do so. Junior engineers need help as the same rate they did before. They still need to ask for help. Remote work lets it: - happen asynchronously & synchronously - creat…
It's always difficult for people to ask for help. The best thing senior engineers can do is set the example and ask for help when they get stuck on something--even if it's something they could figure out on their own with some time.
> Remote work requires communicating more, less frequently, because asynchronous communication involves less frequent, but richer communication, meaning there is less time talking about the work and more time doing it, allowing the system to optimize for throughput and flow. This whole thing seems to be what people struggle with about remote work. Communication is way, way more important, and being an effective commu…
There's a bit of a challenge today with chat, though. I work 4 timezones away from most of my team and we all prefer to swap e-mails, but chat seems to have stripped away some folks' ability to methodically go through topics, explain options and summarise next steps, leading to the usual "let's set up a call [to actually discuss everything in the e-mail thread]". Reading through old mailing-lists (and even older e-ma…
People use the same thread to speak about unrelated to the thread topics which makes those communications impossible to find.
I’ve introduced and use basecamp with my team. It’s genius is in collecting things into projects, and in intentionally resisting complexity. Frictionless flowing focused communication - with everything in its right place, providing just enough information in activity feeds etc.
It’s for high trust teams who are trying to find all needed info to get their work done, and delivers.
Truly signal over noise.
I am a total fanboy after trying a bunch of systems trying to be too clever, track time, create Gantt charts etc.
> Remote work requires communicating more, less frequently, because asynchronous communication involves less frequent, but richer communication, meaning there is less time talking about the work and more time doing it, allowing the system to optimize for throughput and flow. This whole thing seems to be what people struggle with about remote work. Communication is way, way more important, and being an effective commu…
There's a bit of a challenge today with chat, though. I work 4 timezones away from most of my team and we all prefer to swap e-mails, but chat seems to have stripped away some folks' ability to methodically go through topics, explain options and summarise next steps, leading to the usual "let's set up a call [to actually discuss everything in the e-mail thread]". Reading through old mailing-lists (and even older e-ma…
Chat/email is solely for semi-live discussions ("is this a bug ? how do you do X ? where's the doc ?") and decision making ("can we release this feature this friday ?")
Anything else that requires bullet points, graphs and/or more than 5 min of thinking goes into a Notion page where the team comments and argues the topic. Sometimes the Notion page will even start with Slack snippets for context, as the topic just happened to require a more constructed discussion. The magic of it is that people switch mode and write complete, coherent arguments if they're on a page, vs small the chatty style they have on Slack.
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find the social outside of work? Work has always been work for me and nothing more, not really looking for socialising. In fairness I've been fully remote for 10 years but I see friends during the day for coffees, lunch, exercise. And then multiple sports clubs in the evenings
> Work has always been work for me and nothing more, not really looking for socialising. But work is 40-50 hours of my week. That's a HUGE portion of my life. Almost half my waking hours are at work. (7x16=112 waking hours a week. 35-45% of it at work). Not taking time to socialize during that period is draining as hell for me. I guess what I'm trying to say is you're way overestimating the percentage of people who c…
You'll have no commitment to come everyday, have people to talk to, and still hopefully be close enough to home to get back anytime you need pure calm or a full dedicated environment.
To note, for many people WFH means their family is around one door away, which makes it a widely different experience from people living alone.
This sounds great for experienced engineers, but in my experience junior workers often require bite-sized guidance in order to avoid going down rabbit holes. A 10 second conversation could easily save hours of head-banging-into-wall type work for a junior SWE (not even exaggerating). Accordingly, during the pandemic I think it was mostly the less experienced engineers suffering from low productivity and lack of confi…