141–150 of 632 posts
Does anyone take tossing around words like this seriously anymore?
I am pro working remotely, but this is just ridiculous.
The time theft of traffic, costs of fuel and wear and tear on your car, the cost of lunch if you don't pack a lunch. It all adds up when having to go back to the office. I hate that we had to return to the office because it was like getting a big pay cut. Even the 3 day a week thing, it's like what's the point? We can work from home obviously, what more does going in 3 times a week accomplish other than punish you, s…
Fair point for some people. Something I don’t see on HN is how the ideal wfh works for people who can’t afford a study. What if you live with your parents and share with a sibling? This might not be the case for established six figure programmers in the states. But there are lots of people with less money who might value having a separate space to work. Might even be the silent majority outside of highly paid develop…
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How drastic it is depends on the personality and living arrangements of the people involved. I know it's a common stereotype that developers hop jobs frequently, but there are also plenty of developers who do not. I know many such people at my current employer. I happen to be very content working there despite knowing I could make more if I went somewhere else and then jumped ship again and again.
It’s not a stereotype. It’s statistics. https://developerpitstop.com/how-long-do-software-engineers-... The people who want to work from home and are being forced to work in the office, by definition aren’t “content”. As far as the living arrangements, if the impetus for you leaving is to find remote work, how will changing to another job change your living situation?
I feel like being "content" involves a lot of other factors and trying to determine if someone is content means looking at other aspects of the job holistically. I've always detested yearly evaluations and the 'song and dance' one must do to write "corpo-speak" about their achievements and goals. Yet, that consistent displeasure has never outweighed the work life balance I've enjoyed so far. My concern is that in your framework I would be considered by definition, not content.
>"if the impetus for you leaving is to find remote work, how will changing to another job change your living situation?"
I don't see jobs as fungible. While you might be able to WFH the new company will have different benefits such as potentially worse health insurance, compensation that isn't as good, or fewer paid days off. You might end up working remotely for a company in another timezone and that might mean you cannot drop your child off at school anymore. That kind of thing.
People want to have their cake and eat it too. Silicon Valley companies pay very well because cost of living is very high in the area and they _need_ to pay well to attract talent in that area. If remote work becomes the norm, pay will start to even out across the country. If you live in a place that didn't pay well before, you'll be better off, but if you live in a high cost of work area, you'll probably be worse of…
They pay well because demand for engineers is high. Cost of living is high because engineers have bought all the stock in the area. You've got the order backwards.
Unfortunately the folks that get to make these decisions are so removed from the reality of their company's every day tasks that all they can think is "if I don't see butts in the seats I bought, then obviously no work is getting done".
The problem is, for many people and jobs that heuristic is accurate. I’ve heard of countless examples of people spending their time gaming at home instead of working. Humans need extrinsic motivation. Outside of overheated labour markets, this is going to be a real problem. Expect intrusive monitoring to become widespread if wfh persists.
If a company can't evaluate an employee's performance while they are out of sight, that sounds like a management problem.
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If your hybrid is mandatory then you can expect to be back to full time 5 days in a years time approx.
As a manager, these types of comments and sentiments are so incredibly frustrating for me. This is pure supposition based on no evidence. It's entirely a byproduct of a lack of trust in management intentions. Taking my company as an example, while the executive team has been ambiguous, I know that a full return to 5 days of asses in seats is not being contemplated at all , not the least of which because we don't want…
Usually the result of past "Say one thing, do another" sort of experiences. Once bitten, twice shy, and all that.
In the past decade or so, for instance, a lot of the rush to "open office" (which is Hell on Earth for the sort of deep work a lot of tech types are typically paid to do) has been surrounded with all sorts of talk about the benefits of people and ideas colliding and such... mostly coming from people who have an office with a door that closes.
There's a place and time for those ideas, and it's the various "watercooler" places a typical office has - break room, lounge area, etc. "I am not working on something, let's BS on some ideas!" But there's a time and place for "not having random conversations," and it would be where people try to get work done. It's exceedingly hard to focus on deep work when there are lots of conversations around, and having gone from one extreme to another (open office with probably 100 people in line of sight to my own dedicated shed office), even if you know how bad it is, you don't realize how bad it really is. I listen to a lot less music now, and a lot of what I listen to is quieter and instrumental. In the open office plan, I'd acquired an appreciation for some pretty aggressive metal - because it was better than random conversations. And if I'm in the middle of something, I don't get constantly jacked out of the groove by other people being bored or hungry or such. There are many days out in my shed when I couldn't tell you what time it is without explicitly looking, and on more than one occasion it's been my wife pinging me, "Hey, you coming up to the house for dinner?" I'd been buried in something technical for the last few hours and had no idea it was dinnertime.
But despite all this, a lot of tech companies still try to spin "butts in tiny seats with people all around them" as somehow better.
Anyway, if nobody believes what management is saying, there's probably a very good reason for it.
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>"Stop whining and vote with your feet." If this is a deal breaker, yes. But this kind of approach is a last resort. Why shouldn't someone try to influence company policy before taking such a drastic step?
Because if the CEO of a trillion dollar company wants people in the office, it's very likely that you will convince them otherwise. Tim Cook has tremendous influence over his company, these employees do not. Maybe if they had a union there would be some bargaining power but as it stands they can't do anything outside of leaving. Happy to be proven wrong here, but labor doesn't have much power in the US; especially wh…
I hope you're proven wrong too. I like to think this pandemic has accelerated progress on the worker's rights front. I want to believe workers as a collective have realized they're bigger than the companies they work for. This fight against Apple should be really interesting either way.
The time theft of traffic, costs of fuel and wear and tear on your car, the cost of lunch if you don't pack a lunch. It all adds up when having to go back to the office. I hate that we had to return to the office because it was like getting a big pay cut. Even the 3 day a week thing, it's like what's the point? We can work from home obviously, what more does going in 3 times a week accomplish other than punish you, s…
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Why not allow the flexibility to let both types of people do their best work though?
Maybe allow teams, but I don't think allowing individuals to choose isn't good. Having a team that's half remote/half in-person is worse of both worlds. What typically ends up happening IME is that the in-person half typically gets way way way more visibility than those working remote. It's especially worse if the company isn't remote first at all. It's especially terrible if the team is remotely distributed as well.…
I'm not so sure that's a blanket statement. If teams are properly managed it works out.