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I will always prefer to work from home

shavingtheyak.com

231–240 of 273 posts

Re: I will always prefer to work from home

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find Zoom so much more exhausting that being in the office, I am way more wiped out by my 2023 job than by my 2019 job

Yeah - last job I had was a nightmare of 5-6 hours per day meetings. Not a good fit at all. Current one is much better, better team, maybe 1 meeting 4 days a week at most (who does standup on Friday anyway? Nobody)

We do standup once a week and I think even that is too much. Our team is too big. There's like 30 of us, we barely fit in even the large meeting rooms. No one listens to what anyone else has to say. I don't know who the meeting is for. It's not like any of us are even working on the same project. One person per project or you'll never get promoted; even the managers admit that.

Re: I will always prefer to work from home

#232
post #222
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People here talk a lot about being able to have closing doors. My experience with private offices was, barring confidential conversations or rarely going really heads down for a few hours, the unwritten policy was you kept your door open. I've never worked anyplace where private offices generally had their doors shut.

It may be cultural, but in here offices are usually closed. It is kind of "weird" to see them with open doors.

I don't have a large sample size but across multiple companies in both New Orleans and New England, closed doors sort of meant: "I have a specific reason not to be disturbed." Which didn't include I just prefer to be in "flow" or whatever. The situation is probably different if you're on a busy public corridor as can be the case in universities, etc.

Re: I will always prefer to work from home

#233
post #222
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People here talk a lot about being able to have closing doors. My experience with private offices was, barring confidential conversations or rarely going really heads down for a few hours, the unwritten policy was you kept your door open. I've never worked anyplace where private offices generally had their doors shut.

It may be cultural, but in here offices are usually closed. It is kind of "weird" to see them with open doors.

When I have work I'm focusing on, I close the door. When I'm OK with being interrupted (work or casual), I leave the door open.

Re: I will always prefer to work from home

#234
post #33

Who is this meant to convince? Has anyone ever changed their mind as a result of reading a listicle of complaints? This seems more like something for people who already agree with the author to read and self righteously think "yeah, this is THE way" There isn't some objective right answer here. Different people value different things, and that's ok. Companies can set their RTO policies as they see fit, and that's ok.…

It's not meant to convince anyone, it's meant to build the author's brand. They're the hip work-from-home type and they're never going back! And they really, really need you to know that because otherwise they'd have to admit to themselves that they're shouting into the void.

Some people write or blog just because they want to. I have a blog I post on sometimes. Do I care if people read it? Not really. Certainly not trying to build a brand.

Re: I will always prefer to work from home

#235

I’ll admit that I do miss when everyone else wasn’t remote. Once Covid handed everyone remote on a silver platter it diminished some of the perks. Everything used to be completely empty during normal work hours. This is was one of my big life lessons that it’s better to not advertise things that are truly great in order to help prevent the utility of it from being crowded away. Case in point are “day in the life” Tik…

At the same time I see “day in the life” TikTok’s about working onsite at a FAANG and they are the biggest jokes of software devs I’ve ever seen.

Re: I will always prefer to work from home

#236

I have a very short commute, 5 min walk from door to work. So that's 10 minutes a day. With 260 workdays a year, for me that's 2600 minutes - or 43.3 hours, just over 5 workdays, spent to and from work. One of my colleagues has a 1 hour commute, so for him that's whooping 520 hours / 65 workdays spent on commuting! But anyway, the commute isn't the only factor for me: During my 30 min lunch, I spend maybe 10 minutes…

I do dishes when I need a break from the computer too. I kinda like it. Or midday shower? Glorious. Pupper enjoys the extra walks too.

Re: I will always prefer to work from home

#237
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's cool. I've known people who have had something in that general vein built. Given that this is probably something north of $25K by the time you pay for everything though, it's not obviously a better deal than just getting something custom built from some plans.

I could definitely build something less nice but just as functional for a fraction of that price. It is basically a shed with a nice front window, as it says on the tin.

I'd also probably go with a different design for a northern climate, depending upon the lighting of the locale.

Re: I will always prefer to work from home

#238
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open floor plans are super loud and distracting… what issues would this solve exactly? I think it only creates more issues.

>what issues would this solve exactly? Other people not knowing that he is in deep focus.

They still interrupt you even with headphones on.

Re: I will always prefer to work from home

#239

Here's a reason I never see brought up in discussions like this. For me, it's as important as the others: Being an introvert, I always used to be exhausted at the end of the work week. I liked my coworkers a lot, and I liked spending time around them, but it didn't matter, I'd still feel wrung out at the end of the day. And by the end of the week, each day's exhaustion would have accumulated to the point where I need…

Similar here. I like being around other people to some degree, and it can be energizing in some ways, but it also uses energy.

It also uses attention, and maybe engages different kinds of thinking, so I can't focus as deeply on hard problems.

One of my programming styles, for example, is "meticulous zero-defect and resilient", and when someone is in social proximity, it gets noticeably much harder, to impossible. I can do a routine UI design and coding when someone is right next to me, but even then, don't expect me to flash on a brilliant insight into creative UI design or application opportunity -- only to do something that I don't have to think about much.

(This is also one of the many problems with Leetcode hazings/shibboleths -- if you're trying to think, rather than just instantiate the interview ritual you've memorized and practiced so much, that you can do it in your sleep.)

(A related poor awareness of interviewers is that I'm pretty sure many don't realize how much signal interviewers can pickup on intuitively, from language, voice, and body language. That note at the start of the syllable in the middle of innocuous-sounding sentence the Leetcode whip-cracker just said... can tell some interviewers quite a lot about what the person is really thinking, or can even be a concerning flag about their personality. Which can be very distracting when you're thinking about an algorithm that suddenly doesn't seem like the biggest problem at the moment. And if you have to also break your focused thinking to keep up a real-time expository narrative of your process for interview ritual purposes (which isn't going to match actual cognition, so extra load)... careful not to start also narrating how you simultaneously need to figure out how to gently show them something they seem to misunderstand, without risking an insecure backlash when they do the interview writeup, because they're coming across like that might be a risk.)

Re: I will always prefer to work from home

#240

As a mechanical engineer, I want to offer some perspective on how specific this is for people working exclusively in software. I would never ever even consider working fully remotely, mainly because my job involves designing physical things. The prototypes and models for them are not and cannot be in my home. A big part of my job involves making sure the technician can actually assemble the things I design, which req…

This is fair, but I think software engineering is more typical of most knowledge work in this respect than mechanical engineering is. Most knowledge workers aren't handling physical objects for their work beyond a keyboard, mouse, and possibly a high-quality headset. Software is probably rare among engineering disciplines in never requiring physical access to specialized equipment, but it's pretty normal in the scope…

I'm not so sure about that, scientists need labs, academics have labs and lecture theatres, lawyers (some of the time) need courts and to meet clients or counterparties, very few doctors can work from home a non-trivial amount, etc.

I agree it's unusual for something we call engineering, but I don't think needing more than a computer is that unusual for 'knowledge work'. A lot of finance has been more changed by computers than professions like accounting say which you could roughly say just swapped paper for computers and always could've been done from home to a similar extent. I suppose it's the internet being the significant piece, or just needed as well as computers themselves.

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