121–130 of 597 posts
Most employees can screw around websurfing or shopping just as well at work as at home. They mostly do it because they are bored. Give them interesting, meaningful work and they will be productive.
The only thing that can stop me from slacking off is my screen being visible to others.
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Water cooler chat used to be the big thing when I worked in an office.
I've chatted with a co-worker about all kinds of interesting topics related to our with the last few days. We both work on GPU related stuff, he's been optimizing compute shaders and finding out new and interesting things. The conversations are not conversations I've never seen in chat. He could make a formal presentation but that's not really the point. The point is, as I sat down into the seat next to him, it was o…
We throw "BTW this or that..." several times a day, it's obvious that we can, sometimes via DM, sometimes on specific or generic channels, depending on who we think might be interested in it. Knowledge propagates, discussions ensue, sometimes the original topic devolves into something else and ideas are born.
That's on top of a ~1h tech sync meeting every other week, where anything goes, questions get asked, ideas get challenged, notes get taken.
It works. In my experience it works better than watercooler because it's non-interruptive, scales across TZ, and everyone gets a chance to jump in or catch up later.
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that’s just fine and good for you, but please don’t impose your preferences on the rest of us.
Why not? Companies will eventually sort into ones where likeminded people are together. Some will be more friendly to remote than others. If I want to work in person with people, I’ll join a company that agrees. If someone wants to be remote, they might have to join a different company.
It's unhealthier (loads of sleep deprivation out there), it's bad for the environment and its costs are higher. We can argue all day if the perks of in-person work are worth the cost, but if there aren't any perks besides "I just prefer it that way" I don't think there is even a valid discussion to have. We are talking some of the largest CO2 reductions possible from the average fellow together with more free time, less usage of infrastructure and possibly changes in the housing market.
A corporation doing this "just because" is comparable to a corporation purchasing mattresses to burn them in an open field "just because"
How could remote work not be more productive? Most of my friends/colleagues get back at least an hour of their lives each day they don't commute, and they all use the "extra" time to do more work. People wanna work. They just don't wanna sit in traffic, walk through parking lots and ride elevators for an hour every day.
Also since commute time is not accounted for in your work time, this is a moot point. You don't work more because you don't commute. You just have more free time to do stuff out of work.
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>Give them interesting, meaningful work and they will be productive. How much meaningful and interesting work do you think exists in this world? Every time this topic gets brought up, someone will say "Just give people interesting work, pay them well, don't micromanage them!" as if these jobs grow on trees. And even if these jobs do exist, they're usually reserved for workers who are extremely motivated and capable -…
> How much meaningful and interesting work do you think exists in this world? If you're willing to take a salary cut, lots.
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The only thing that can stop me from slacking off is my screen being visible to others.
Duh, nobody is looking at it. Everybody is either slacking off on their own screen or working.
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> In most companies option B has been on the table for a very long time Mom and Pop may have always been well positioned to fully embrace outsourcing, but they tend to just copy what they see big companies do without any thought. Additionally, where they do put in thought, they tend to lean “shop local” and see offshoring as a threat to their entire business. As for those big companies, truly embracing option B has b…
Difference in timezone is also something that immediately brings attention to "who's going to be managing that?".
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I now have more time that I can spend with daughter, so I guess I may improved my parenting skill? IMO it's also totally fine to use that freed up time to just get a break from... anything. No need to be after self-improvement all the time.
That's a right incentive for workers, but what is needed here for workers is an incentive for companies to expand remote work.
I think that should be enough for any company.
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Why not? Companies will eventually sort into ones where likeminded people are together. Some will be more friendly to remote than others. If I want to work in person with people, I’ll join a company that agrees. If someone wants to be remote, they might have to join a different company.
Assuming that there are no differences in productivity, working on-site is borderline morally evil. It's unhealthier (loads of sleep deprivation out there), it's bad for the environment and its costs are higher. We can argue all day if the perks of in-person work are worth the cost, but if there aren't any perks besides "I just prefer it that way" I don't think there is even a valid discussion to have. We are talking…
But the only way I commute now is by train and/or bike, most commutes to some godawful office park hellscape in San Jose are agony.
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> In most companies option B has been on the table for a very long time Mom and Pop may have always been well positioned to fully embrace outsourcing, but they tend to just copy what they see big companies do without any thought. Additionally, where they do put in thought, they tend to lean “shop local” and see offshoring as a threat to their entire business. As for those big companies, truly embracing option B has b…
That was a bit of a revelation last year - I though most of the time CEO gets shares as compensation then he is tied to the company and in theory should work to make company profit because it is his profit. Seems like for a lot of companies it is not the case but I can see that CEO type of guys can haggle really well and they call the shots as mostly it is companies that need them more than they need the company so t…