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don't dip your pen in the company ink. and plenty of reason to socialize with coworkers even if not for dating. you can still have "watercooler chats" with coworkers remotely. "how bout those _____" still works before big group calls, for example.
For many people these conversations are irritating and exhausting
I miss when WFH wasn't a religious war and was just about whether you could deliver enough that no one missed you so you wouldn't get called out for slacking. Now if it's a war in the office, managers need to pick a side and the freedom is reduced even if you get some WFH days or whatever. Full remote is a whole other can of worms.
WFH is not a "religious" war. For many people it's definitely a huge battle but for workers' rights, the same we had to do for the 8-hour day 100 years ago. When people realized they don't have to be packed like animals every day in order to do their work, they revolted. So yes, it is a full-scale war, but has nothing to do with religion or some dogmas, just realizing the absurdity of the pre-pandemic situation (espe…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I miss when WFH wasn't a religious war and was just about whether you could deliver enough that no one missed you so you wouldn't get called out for slacking. Well, if you're slacking you can be fired, it doesn't matter if you work from home or from the office.
Not exactly easy to fire someone (even with reason) in some EU countries due to (in some cases very needed) regulation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't believe in it before the lockdowns, but WFH has really improved my productivity. The only downside is that there's no clear moment to stop working. It's tempting to check later in the evening whether a build or test succeeded or kick off a new job.
Have a separate work space from your hobby stuffs (if your hobbies involve computers) or separate computers. Never connect your work accounts to your personal devices. When I had a full-time WFH job, I'd disconnect the office laptop and put it aside at the end of day. No temptation to look at it again, then I'd go row for 30 minutes and run and if I went back to the desk the only option was my own computer. Current w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
WFH is not a "religious" war. For many people it's definitely a huge battle but for workers' rights, the same we had to do for the 8-hour day 100 years ago. When people realized they don't have to be packed like animals every day in order to do their work, they revolted. So yes, it is a full-scale war, but has nothing to do with religion or some dogmas, just realizing the absurdity of the pre-pandemic situation (espe…
More flexibility should be a workers right. But WFH 5-days a week - I'm not sure about that. I was previously an ardent remote worker and did so on a hybrid basis pre-Covid. These days I'm not so sure it's the best thing. I know so many people not working for half the day. And their results show it and their colleagues suffer for it. But in countries where we have strong protections against being fired, getting rid o…
WFH really doesn't change this that much. I remember offices where half the people were fucking around on Facebook at their office workstations, pretty much all day when they weren't in meetings. Or talking about Sportsball in the break room.
As an introvert I have, like any other introvert, been forced to work the extrovert way because that was the norm. Now the wind has changed and you hear extroverts crying that they can't work without the social connection and they miss the cooler chat. Good. We have been forced to do things your way until now. Now times have changed. You do things our way. Take your ten minute talk about kid soccer elsewhere and let…
Otherwise, we'd just be remote first and spend that amount of money on hiring.
But then again, we might get a better offer hiring Israelis or Indians (5-10 year tax holidays depending on the region)
It's local government that makes these incentives at the end of the day.
Anyhow, we only hire Israeli, Indian, Czech, Romanian, Pole, etc engineers because of the right mix of talent and salary arbitrage compared to American talent.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More flexibility should be a workers right. But WFH 5-days a week - I'm not sure about that. I was previously an ardent remote worker and did so on a hybrid basis pre-Covid. These days I'm not so sure it's the best thing. I know so many people not working for half the day. And their results show it and their colleagues suffer for it. But in countries where we have strong protections against being fired, getting rid o…
> These days I'm not so sure it's the best thing. I know so many people not working for half the day. And their results show it and their colleagues suffer for it. WFH really doesn't change this that much. I remember offices where half the people were fucking around on Facebook at their office workstations, pretty much all day when they weren't in meetings. Or talking about Sportsball in the break room.
The individualism correlation with higher remote work is an interesting (weird/suss) one. During peak pandemic there were parallels drawn between areas of high individualism and higher chance of ignoring quarantine, lockdown, and masking laws (or guidelines). This makes logical sense to me: "rules for thee and rules for me" is a very individualist way of looking at things. Meanwhile all the people I know who are more…
- being able to live in a nice natural place, with a good climate and so on, not in a dense city;
- being able to avoid wasting energy and health to commute, getting myself uselessly busy in such activities;
- having a larger market, at least a nationwide one, with more potential competition but also more offers;
- being able to evolve. Something I can't do perpetrating past models, that have had very good reasons to be in the past, where doing certain things was needed, but they have no more reasons now;
- being MORE social, IRL, separating work and life, instead of navigate a sea of unknowing humans, most of them isolated in the crowd with noise-canceling devices and macrobugs aka smartphones to better avoid the others.
I choose a technical path because I want to explore, create something new even if that's happen rarely compared to the ordinary things. Even if it's hard and demand failures and sacrifices. I do not call that individualism vs collectivism I call simply love for tech and science vs love for a certain kind of business. It's an absurd waste of time, energy, health to commute simply because financial capitalism needs to sell ready made ultra-processed food, mobile macro-bugs as status symbols and so on. It's a nonsense build big buildings that we use for less than 12h/day moving all around them for the rest of the time just to be exposed to physicals ads (that's are shop windows, not only physical ads).
That's not collectivism because the collective are the flock of sheep, while the shepherds are away and decide. Remember "in 2030 you'll nothing" means that the publisher count to own anything, witch is far from a collective society vs an individualist one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is that when you're not slacking, no one should care. But now they do care because its a war.
It's only "war" because people's ego is tied up in their work because they make it their identity, and WFH challenges that, very similar to people who brag about 60-100 work weeks like it is a badge of pride. Some work to live, others live to work, and there is a whole lot of inefficiency to be squeezed out that is hard to squeeze out because of the lizard brain [1] [2]. It would be great if it wasn't a war, just mea…
Similarly someone who do work less at home typically is someone who can't be productive anyway, who sell his/her own time/presence but not much competence, again that's not always true but I'm pretty confident it's true in the mean.
However the real war is not about being remote or in person, but live in cities vs live outside, because with WFH as the way to work for all eligible jobs the big of real estate go bankrupts quickly, similarly many bit tech service player like Uber, Just Eat and so on, together with the cloud+mobile model. The rest is marginal.
Some do like the office because they have tough familiar situations and being "separated" for a significant part of the day means for them have a way to keep their family, witch sounds good for them, but IMVHO it's just a way to torture themselves more, some other do like the office simply because they can't afford a good home and they have a better setup in the office, again it's not a good thing to have IMVHO but all such examples are marginal.
The individualism correlation with higher remote work is an interesting (weird/suss) one. During peak pandemic there were parallels drawn between areas of high individualism and higher chance of ignoring quarantine, lockdown, and masking laws (or guidelines). This makes logical sense to me: "rules for thee and rules for me" is a very individualist way of looking at things. Meanwhile all the people I know who are more…
I WFH and my reasons to have ZERO reasons to go to an office are: - being able to live in a nice natural place, with a good climate and so on, not in a dense city; - being able to avoid wasting energy and health to commute, getting myself uselessly busy in such activities; - having a larger market, at least a nationwide one, with more potential competition but also more offers; - being able to evolve. Something I can…
Wasn't where I was coming from at all.
My personal opinions on the matter are skewed as I have worked remotely (home, overseas, or while on the move) for more of my career than not. But that's still personal preference and I'm not going to pretend my opinion is some objective truth.
The point I was drilling into in my original comment was something specifically mentioned in the article which I found intriguing: the potentially misleading correlation between societies deemed "individualist" and the fallacious presupposition that one can only be a team player when physically collocated.
It's never going to be a simple answer - some people yearn for the open plan office, some wish they had a private office (but still at work), some wish they were at home exclusively.
The dangerous thing (which intrigues me just slightly more than it makes me uncomfortable) is when people start saying one way or the other is "right" (or worse, implying that one is selfish and the other selfless)
I've my own take, and I could easily make arguments for the opposing view - but far more interested in the meta-conversations than the bluster.