I hope work from home continues • Hacker News Board

Re: I hope work from home continues

#121

Post by globular-toast » Tue, Apr 06, 2021, 3:31 PM UTC

mikece wrote: post #6

While the cross-pollination of ideas from different teams and departments is lost, along with interesting and serendipitous discussions, I'm also in the boat of hoping I never have to go back to an office. Not having a commute, being able to spend more time with my kids, not eating less-healthy fast-food rather than home-cooked meals, being able to spend my (lunch) breaks working in my garden... I never want to go ba…

> While the cross-pollination of ideas from different teams and departments is lost, along with interesting and serendipitous discussions

While this always sounds good, in my experience it rarely amounts to anything. A company I used to work for tried to make "hacks" and "hackathons" etc happen. People did make hacks, but they remained as hacks. Products were finished just like any other product is finished: as a result of hard, dedicated work.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#122

Post by benrbray » Tue, Apr 06, 2021, 3:31 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #93

jamal-kumar wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's any consolation, I've spent most of my career working remote and I'd say probably the richest experiences I've learned from depended on who and what they were working on WAY more than them being there in person, and those richer experiences didn't really have a hell of a lot of zoom meeting and other distracting nonsense. The communication simply shifts to text based chat with a nice handy record of communica…

I do get the issues with onboarding/mentorship (as well as social) especially right out of school. I suspect that many companies are just trying to do business as usual rather than adapting. It's also worth pointing out that we're talking about remote during a pandemic . In normal times, there's nothing to keep teams from traveling to a location for a week. (Yes, some people have travel issues for various reasons but…

I think the tough part is that fresh grads will benefit a lot from the senior developers being physically present, but I get the impression that many senior devs will choose not to come to the office unless they are required to.

So, I don't think it's as simple as letting people choose when and how often to come to the office. I could see a hybrid 2 days local / 3 days remote model working if physical presence is mandatory on those two days.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#123

Post by whateveracct » Tue, Apr 06, 2021, 3:31 PM UTC

BitwiseFool wrote: post #51

Covid WFH is a real issue for our new developers. Especially the ones who are fresh out of college. They're missing out on so much institutional knowledge transfer. Especially the kind of monkey-see-monkey-do experience you need to build confidence using tools such as git. They're also hesitant to ping coworkers and ask for screen sharing time because they can't sense if the more senior developers are working on some…

management should explicitly invest senior developers' time

build tutorials for things like git

allocate hours of their week to pairing

encourage juniors to ping seniors. and encourage seniors to respond promptly in efficient ways (written communication compounds over time)

etc

Re: I hope work from home continues

#124

Post by taurath » Tue, Apr 06, 2021, 3:31 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #2

Many people have decided in the last couple of months that it's safe to restart the war on remote working. I think the attacks are likely to get increasingly intense and blunt.

And those of us who want to work remote will take our services elsewhere, as there’ll be plenty more places available to work remote than we’re before even if FAANG goes back to the office forever.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#125

Post by techsupporter » Tue, Apr 06, 2021, 3:32 PM UTC

bigcorp-slave wrote: post #70

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not eating less-healthy fast-food rather than home-cooked meals Anecdotally, the people I know reluctant to go back to the office have some combination of lovely homes into which they've put care, terrible offices reflecting zero care or empathy and/or introversion, sometimes to the point of social anxiety. (Stark minority in the third, but a life changer for them.) Offices don't have to have terrible meal options.…

Do you live in Silicon Valley? Nice homes cannot be chosen close to work. All homes in the South Bay that aren’t literally falling down are multi-million-dollar. I personally know people who bought a $2.5m home with a rat infestation.

> Do you live in Silicon Valley? Nice homes cannot be chosen close to work.

And in large parts of the rest of the country, it's illegal to put homes close to work.

Where I work is on the edge of an office campus on the edge of a suburb of Seattle. By city ordinance, virtually no housing is allowed anywhere near where I work. If you live in the same municipality as this office and work at it, your only choice to get there is a twenty-minute drive (with pre-pandemic traffic levels). There is no local bus service that goes from the rest of the town to the office park. Bus service from Seattle to this office park exists, however, so I live in Seattle.

"Just live close to work" is a physical impossibility for so many people, and not solely because they want the stereotypical standalone house with a picket fence. My family has zero interest in that, yet there's no housing anywhere near where I work. What little exists is largely short-term corporate rentals and AirBnBs.

When we've lived in other places, the dynamic is the same. Office parks in the suburbs or all clumped together in a large downtown, with housing as far as you can get from them.

This is, in my opinion, one of the few things Amazon did right: plopping its office campus in the middle of a very mixed-use area with rental apartments and condominium units for ownership, shops, restaurants, parks, and so on. (Of course, after having run out of land there, now they're building traditional office towers in the suburban downtown with virtually no housing to speak of. And yes, it is sky-high expensive to live near Amazon because that's basically the only mixed-use office park in the whole county.)

Re: I hope work from home continues

#126

Post by throwaway0a5e » Tue, Apr 06, 2021, 3:32 PM UTC

jjice wrote: post #97

Something I've noticed without formal study is that people my age (college seniors and recent grads) don't like working from home. I was working at a new internship (8 months, starting January 2020) and the initial working from home was draining, unmotivating, and a bit depressing (that's partially due to being alone during the start of the pandemic). I thought I was in the minority because all of HN and Reddit seeme…

What you're seeing is the demographics that are over-represented on different platforms.

Working people in their 20s mostly live in cheap apartments whereas a huge chunk of Reddit lives with their parents (if they're employed at all) and HN skews older and wealthier to the point where people have nice houses in nice suburbs or can justify a higher end apartment.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#127

Post by antiterra » Tue, Apr 06, 2021, 3:32 PM UTC

Hypergraphe wrote: post #37

chrisseaton wrote: post #2

Many people have decided in the last couple of months that it's safe to restart the war on remote working. I think the attacks are likely to get increasingly intense and blunt.

And, as a matter of fact, we now have the proof that remote work is efficient at large scale in our industry. It shatters all the false ideas about loss of productivity, lack of communication. I never communicated as efficiently as now as opposed to when I was in my open space, always disturbed by subjects that did not concern me.

I don’t think we have this proof? At best, we have evidence it works ‘well enough.’ There are still people who hate online meetings, who have a negative physical reaction to it and are unable to engage. The people playing online video games during the day I run into who have to go afk for a few moments to ‘get a work call’ are likely to have reduced productivity. (Probably double for kids who are doing online school.)

I also have seen productivity issues between two office locations that are suddenly resolved by having someone travel to the other site for a week. Sometimes this is even followed up with an writeup about the sudden revelations gleaned from the visit.

On the other hand, I’ve also seen engineers take vacation days so they can be heads down on a project they care about. So, I’m not sure what the ideal situation is, exactly.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#128

Post by sadturnip » Tue, Apr 06, 2021, 3:32 PM UTC

benbristow wrote: post #11

mikece wrote: post #6

While the cross-pollination of ideas from different teams and departments is lost, along with interesting and serendipitous discussions, I'm also in the boat of hoping I never have to go back to an office. Not having a commute, being able to spend more time with my kids, not eating less-healthy fast-food rather than home-cooked meals, being able to spend my (lunch) breaks working in my garden... I never want to go ba…

Lucky you. I live in a top-floor apartment so don't have the luxury of a garden and I'm isolated by myself as I live alone. It's not the same for everyone.

I am pretty much in the same boat, i cannot afford a house where i live, and probably will never be able to at least within the next couple of years. Unfortunately between the ongoing construction, and the fact our building is slowly renovating most of the units has hurt my productivity.

While people say "oh just move somewhere else outside the city", unfortunately that means i need to now buy/maintain a car on top of everything else. Then commute into the city to be social with my friends group, or to do physical activities.

Neither of those things appeal to me, and since our work is strongly leaning to switching to be fully remote, it is kind of frustrating. A bunch of coworkers are very much just move to a city where you can buy a house! That is what i did. Or even worse a lot of people who are just "buy a house!", and are completely ignorant of how insane the housing prices have become.

Honestly the end result is probably just going to lead to me finding employment at a company that still has the ability to work onsite. A few of my like mininded coworkers pitched the idea that we could rent a small office area for people like us, and were promptly shot down by management.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#129

Post by mrweasel » Tue, Apr 06, 2021, 3:33 PM UTC

l-p wrote: post #58

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #12

What kind of office was this person working in? Having to breathe jet exhaust fumes while suffering through 85 degree indoor temperatures and drinking algae-filled water is nowhere near normal. The company he’s describing is severely broken if everything he’s describing is true. Most of what he describes are not normal office problems. Some of them are even health and safety violations. Working from home will only di…

> Having to breathe jet exhaust fumes while suffering through 85 degree indoor temperatures and drinking algae-filled water is nowhere near normal. I was told to suck it up and do at least 50+ hours (35h paid) when working at temps over 42c (110f). Both are illegal here, they don't care, they will always find a poor sucker in a dire situation needing the job.

Could you clearify “don’t care”? Because here you simply report the company anonymously. You even have a person among the staff, who is extremely difficult to fire, that can do the reporting for you.

Companies will be fined for this kind of environment and the office will be closed if things aren’t improved. You can’t choose to not care.

Re: I hope work from home continues

#130

Post by JumpCrisscross » Tue, Apr 06, 2021, 3:33 PM UTC

VBprogrammer wrote: post #83

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not eating less-healthy fast-food rather than home-cooked meals Anecdotally, the people I know reluctant to go back to the office have some combination of lovely homes into which they've put care, terrible offices reflecting zero care or empathy and/or introversion, sometimes to the point of social anxiety. (Stark minority in the third, but a life changer for them.) Offices don't have to have terrible meal options.…

Surely it is those people who demand to work from an office who should be worried about commanding a premium, if the employer start including the cost of providing an office, especially in a premium area.

> it is those people who demand to work from an office who should be worried about commanding a premium

Before the pandemic, certain employers had to pay a premium for real estate and a premium for talent in prime locations. The former no longer looks justified. That doesn't really give employee or employer any leverage. The latter, which was built on scarcity of accessible talent and the concentration of high-paying jobs in prime locations, however, solely reduces employees' leverage.

One of the barriers to this shift was the massive cost of installing remote-working infrastructure. Financially, technically and culturally. That's now done. How this shakes out, whether it results in lower prices for customers or better returns to shareholders or higher take-home pay for employees, remains to be seen.