141–150 of 219 posts
This article is clearly written to the word count and not the overall content. A painful read.
Google search results is full of this stuff, but first time seeing it at the top of HN
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My employer was very quick to force return to office after covid lockdowns. Like they were willing to pour millions into subdividing offices into closets so people could isolate at work even, but the county health department gave them a stern look and they ended up scraping that and waiting another year to force RTO. But they actually put their money where their mouth is. Ad-hoc conversations in the hallway, going to…
I would love an offline only work environment. Just a small cadre of tech obsessed smart folks working in a room and talking when they need to. In grad school we did this. Everyone was heads down, except when they were stumped they'd go to the whiteboard, which was open invitation to discuss a problem, if you had time. That kind of "opt in" / volunteering help was way more trust building and low pressure than pulling…
Would love to return to offline only, 20 people max environment that paid the bills without worrying about implosion.
This is where remote work goes off the rails, but then it’s wild how intentionally isolating the implementation of RTO that many large corporations are doing now. They line people up in rows, put headphones on their heads and wire them up to Teams and Jira to spend the whole day in isolation. Because taking a walk to another floor of building to talk to someone like a normal human being is too wasteful, but somehow f…
The article is specifically about those with ADD/ADHD, not a generalization.
I may have ADHD, I never went for a diagnosis and found body doubling useful at times, especially when I was in school some decades ago, back then I had no name for it. However, I find white noise very helpful with staying on the task and with increased focus. My company moved, about a year ago, into a very cramped office that is also extremely noisy. This exasperated me, I would get drained of energy in a couple of…
I come to shill my webapp for background noise because it has a twist not appearing in anyone's recommendations. Whenever I'm switching between tasks (thinking vs reading vs writing) I'd either turn the sound off or on, given I needed more or less attention at the moment. Minor problem with that was that sometimes unexpectedly I'd stick with the new task longer than expected, start to get bored, but w/e background so…
I may have ADHD, I never went for a diagnosis and found body doubling useful at times, especially when I was in school some decades ago, back then I had no name for it. However, I find white noise very helpful with staying on the task and with increased focus. My company moved, about a year ago, into a very cramped office that is also extremely noisy. This exasperated me, I would get drained of energy in a couple of…
Beyond type II bipolar, I don't have a diagnosis for anything psychological but I'm pretty sure I have ADHD with a touch of Asperger's(based mostly on a review of my behaviors over the past 50 years). But yeah I've found "smoothed brown noise" to work wonders. I also had some success with wearing a snug fitting balaclava. It's odd, but it worked. Nicotine helped, but I now have NAFLD and nicotine might be a factor in…
You end up with symptoms of a lot of different mental disorders that have a different underlying cause than normal for those disorders.
For example, I have a rather severe impairment of executive function. I have a diagnosis of ADHD, but my internal experience doesn’t seem to match what I’ve read about other people with ADHD and none of the first or second line treatments for ADHD work on me.
I also have a significant overlap in the symptoms of autism, but I do not have the internal experience of someone who is autistic.
I may have ADHD, I never went for a diagnosis and found body doubling useful at times, especially when I was in school some decades ago, back then I had no name for it. However, I find white noise very helpful with staying on the task and with increased focus. My company moved, about a year ago, into a very cramped office that is also extremely noisy. This exasperated me, I would get drained of energy in a couple of…
To help me with my ADHD (diagnosed at 42) I put on some Jungle[A], listen to the repetitive Mountain[B] or even a modern classic like Phillip Glass or Terry Riley[C]. I know it sounds mad, but it gets some body part whipping and just overwhelms any distracting thought I could possibly have.
[A] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7boqBRRiQw [B] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGyVgm6uiSk [C] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRaa34E8tXQ
This is where remote work goes off the rails, but then it’s wild how intentionally isolating the implementation of RTO that many large corporations are doing now. They line people up in rows, put headphones on their heads and wire them up to Teams and Jira to spend the whole day in isolation. Because taking a walk to another floor of building to talk to someone like a normal human being is too wasteful, but somehow f…
My employer was very quick to force return to office after covid lockdowns. Like they were willing to pour millions into subdividing offices into closets so people could isolate at work even, but the county health department gave them a stern look and they ended up scraping that and waiting another year to force RTO. But they actually put their money where their mouth is. Ad-hoc conversations in the hallway, going to…
Cause that's just... the worst.
I’m sure this works for some people. Personally I loathe social interaction of any kind, and mixing that with engineering gets me to my mental/emotional limits much faster. On my own I can work about 2 hours on and 10 mins off, sometimes for 10+ hours total. If I have a 2 hour collab coding call, that’s about all I’ll do that’s productive that day. I’l literally have to spend the rest of that day mentally recovering…
What type of ADHD do you have? Primarily inattentive, hyperactive-impulsive, or combined?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My employer was very quick to force return to office after covid lockdowns. Like they were willing to pour millions into subdividing offices into closets so people could isolate at work even, but the county health department gave them a stern look and they ended up scraping that and waiting another year to force RTO. But they actually put their money where their mouth is. Ad-hoc conversations in the hallway, going to…
I would love an offline only work environment. Just a small cadre of tech obsessed smart folks working in a room and talking when they need to. In grad school we did this. Everyone was heads down, except when they were stumped they'd go to the whiteboard, which was open invitation to discuss a problem, if you had time. That kind of "opt in" / volunteering help was way more trust building and low pressure than pulling…
I like the way you frame it as an "offline only" work environment. Offline vs online does seem to be the main distinction here.
It's not the remoteness. It's the apps and the intellectually-lazy culture they encourage. Slack, Jira, Github, Docs, Sheets, etc. So much of modern work is navigating those byzantine digital games to score virtual communication points, rather than actually communicating anything of value. Being terminally online is almost guaranteed to lead to presence monitoring, stilted communication, territoriality, lack of clarity, poor product quality and dehumanization. It can happen remotely, it can happen in the office. Doesn't matter. The app-ification of all communication lines is what's harmful.
At some point, you need to stop with the digital games and just use your brain. Commit to the deep work of communicating. There are a shocking number of people who would rather shuffle tickets around all day than read or write a single coherent paragraph. Thinking in slack responses and Jira tickets is a symptom of brain rot.