131–140 of 216 posts
You read that right - there are 8-dev meetings multiple times a week at my BigCo workplace. The wasted time is palpable.
This study looks at the first 6 months of 2020 when most people working remotely had never done it before and had less than ideal office setups at home. So it's not surprising they ran into some issues.
I have a standing desk, a large monitor and I'm using a dedicated room in my house as my office.
The other day I helped a junior engineer set up their local development environment (who was struggling to do it remotely) by remote controlling their desktop over Zoom. So there are good solutions for collaboration.
Unintentional by accident remote work shouldn’t be considered the baseline for such comparison. This research does at best find results at Microsoft, thus it could be titled “effects of remote work at Microsoft” to not induce the sense of generalist research. For the negative results: remote work creates silos and reduces cross-network collaboration. These might easily be mitigated with strategies and tooling. Nevert…
I was recently interviewing at a really compelling startup backed by YC and I asked them how they communicate and knowledge share. The cofounder showed me pages and pages of well structures bits and pieces of things and findings the team come across and document. It's easily searchable and it's well categorize. It's their internal wiki, and I believe it is one of the most valuable assets a company can have. The startup relies on writing as the main method of sharing knowledge, getting async feedback, and gathering valuable information on important problems.
It is one of the main reasons I was intrigued and decided to join them. Their product is also awesome.
One thing about slack- and zoom-based remote working I've noticed is that there's less room to be your "informal self". Meetings require more coordination since only one person can speak at a time and there are fewer non-verbal cues to communicate which topics are resonating with you. You also can't continue smaller conversations with people after a meeting. Everything is more formalized. Likewise, conversations outs…
Here's an anecdote. I left because Microsoft was being weird about long term remote plans and I wanted to actually be able to plan ahead. They lost me because they couldn't give me a straight answer if I can continue working there if I went fully remote or not.
And yet, companies in interviews will ask you where you see yourself in 5 years.
> over the first six months of 2020 What a completely worthless set of data. Not only do their findings mean nothing for long term remote work, it’s now fuel for the anti-remote work movement. Shameful coming from nature.
Imagine the desperation and helplessness of managers as they brainstorm behind closed doors on how to force back people into their shitty offices. Imagine it, and smile!
I suppose it beats them thinking 'hey remote is great, why don't we start hiring more aggressively in Ukraine instead of Redmond'. If everything is remote companies won't have to pay non-remote wages anymore.
The first line: > The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused a rapid shift to full-time remote work for many information workers. Wow, really? Why is it standard practice to pad these things with useless statements that waste the time of thousands of people? It's disrespectful to your reader to squander their time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe if Microsoft would make an MS teams feature that would operate more like discord then that random smalltalk would happen.
Behind this is one of the problems. In a corporate environment you can't choose the best tool for the job at hand, collaboration. MS Teams is probably the worst tool of its class in this area yet it is, evidently, chosen by people in higher positions who make decisions based solely on their opinion and for the sake of complying with corporate standards, once again, not based on evidence, but, by some MS white paper s…