141–150 of 271 posts
Or maybe ya know... A pandemic has its own negative effect on productivity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has been a massive issue for me. I've had the same problem off-and-on over the past few years, whether in offices or at home. The work I do feels rather pointless in a world collapsing around me with no short or long term future. I at least sometimes get pulled back into feeling good about what I work on because it's a consumer app that does have a large userbase that depends on it for their happiness, and I do…
> in a world collapsing around me with no short or long term future. This is just your world-view being shaped by your “news” sources. Maybe get off of social media for a while or only follow people who do not talk about politics/current events. > but if I was working in finance? No way. People who say this tend to underestimate the importance of finance. For example, enabling easy mobile banking for tech illiterate…
My home has been basically the center of racial justice protests: we’ve had fires set outside our door, tear gas wafting in to our windows, etc.
Even when there’s not a protest, the entire neighborhood is covered in protest-inspired murals that serve as a daily reminder that my life (as a Black person) doesn’t matter right now.
And these past few weeks we’ve been choking on wildfire smoke.
I don’t think this is from watching too much news or doom scrolling. There have been an unprecedented confluence of events that make most tech work seem meaningless right now.
First off, let me say that I have happily WFH for a few years now. I'm not opposed to it. It works for some people. However, this is likely a problem that will get worse, not better, over time. The early WFH experience was able to cruise on the office connections, cross-training, personal knowledge, team-building, etc. that had happened previously. The longer people are away from the office, the more that hard-to-qua…
Interesting, I find on boarding easier with WFH teams because so much of that informal stuff gets documented. Transcripts of troubleshooting text only (slack/IM/etc) meetings for example are a gold mine. It’s really the mix of WFH in mostly face to face offices that’s difficult.
Never believe stories like this, measuring productivity is an impossible problem. Microsoft spend something in excess of 3 billion dollars trying to quantify productivity in the 90s and they couldn't do it. One of my college professors worked on this exact problem for the Army in the 80s, they created a formal domain specific language for quantifying employee productivity it took them 20 years and several hundred mil…
Targets aren't the same things as measures. Measures of productivity are easy, but targets are not.
For example, for a sufficiently large group of people (e.g. all young developers at JP Morgan), you can measure their productivity with how many lines of code they write on average. As long as you aren't using lines of code for performance evaluation, there is no reason any developer will perform needless large refactors or find other means for increasing their delta.
Edit: changed metric to target
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you thought about relocating from SF? Most of my friends, including myself, have taken advantage of the current WFH situation to find much better accommodations for themselves outside of SF. Obviously not an option for everyone, but for those that have it I would definitely pursue it.
Oh yeah, definitely. I held on to my place in SF because it was a rent controlled spot that I clinged on to, but with rents crashing and the quality of life in SF worsening, I've considered terminating my lease and putting my stuff in storage. Where did you move? A few months in a seaside town Airbnb would be nice. I could use the change of scenery.
Never believe stories like this, measuring productivity is an impossible problem. Microsoft spend something in excess of 3 billion dollars trying to quantify productivity in the 90s and they couldn't do it. One of my college professors worked on this exact problem for the Army in the 80s, they created a formal domain specific language for quantifying employee productivity it took them 20 years and several hundred mil…
> Employees always figure out how to abuse productivity metrics. Targets aren't the same things as measures. Measures of productivity are easy, but targets are not. For example, for a sufficiently large group of people (e.g. all young developers at JP Morgan), you can measure their productivity with how many lines of code they write on average. As long as you aren't using lines of code for performance evaluation, the…
First off, let me say that I have happily WFH for a few years now. I'm not opposed to it. It works for some people. However, this is likely a problem that will get worse, not better, over time. The early WFH experience was able to cruise on the office connections, cross-training, personal knowledge, team-building, etc. that had happened previously. The longer people are away from the office, the more that hard-to-qua…
In my experience - heavily relying on relationships built before is how a lot of things are actually get done. While my company closed its offices in March - I see people getting `socially distanced` coffee with their co-workers more and more.
I think there are tasks / kind of work, that requires minimal communication or relationship building, and it's possible to optimize WFH setup to be very productive at it (way more productive than in the office). A lot of comments on HN are alluding to that some people figured that out and are good at it.
There are also tasks that are hard or borderline impossible to do remote. Relationships are harder. Negotiations are harder. Random lunch conversations don't happen anymore, the serendipity of new learnings is lost.
And yes, I can't wait to go back to the office.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> in a world collapsing around me with no short or long term future. This is just your world-view being shaped by your “news” sources. Maybe get off of social media for a while or only follow people who do not talk about politics/current events. > but if I was working in finance? No way. People who say this tend to underestimate the importance of finance. For example, enabling easy mobile banking for tech illiterate…
> This is just your world-view being shaped by your “news” sources. Maybe get off of social media for a while or only follow people who do not talk about politics/current events. This is a good way to escape reality, but not much more. I've done this plenty of times, but the world doesn't stop moving because you're ignoring what's going on. You become ignorant, and that is far worse. > Don’t shit on fields you don’t…
The news have been biased towards negative stories for many decades, way before the internet so I wouldn't say watching/reading the news gives a good, balanced picture of reality. Ideally you need to balance a minimum ingestion of neutral, informative news with staying in touch with the reality around you, by meeting and getting in touch with local people and events. You might be surprised how big the difference is between how the news presents the world and the reality.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Employees always figure out how to abuse productivity metrics. Targets aren't the same things as measures. Measures of productivity are easy, but targets are not. For example, for a sufficiently large group of people (e.g. all young developers at JP Morgan), you can measure their productivity with how many lines of code they write on average. As long as you aren't using lines of code for performance evaluation, the…
Yes, but that proves OP's point. If the productivity metric was equal to the measure of lines of code, then they would figure out that they can abuse the metric by artificially adjusting the output of the measurement.