Return to office is just management reasserting ownership over the serfs dressed up with mindless business jargon (collaboration, innovation, culture etc)
I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it
201–210 of 479 posts
Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it
#202If anyone can do your work remotely...ANYONE can do your work remotely. Do you guys think maybe when the next recession happens we will see unprecedented offshoring due to companies not being able to pay 160K to a developer with 3 years experience? Its all nice and well when every startup can raise as much money as it wants. What happens when/if that pops?
This has been bandied about since the '90s. There might be drastic hiring of people outside of the tech hub area (Midwest, Canada), but offshoring beyond North America is hamstrung by linguistic, cultural, and time zone differences.
I don't know about the US but in the UK I've seen a lot of my corporate customers offshoring work to India.
Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it
#203One thing I noticed is that while more experienced people are productive working from home, it is devastating for fresh starting employees. Work from home eliminates learning through osmosis. If anyone has a work around this let me know. I am surprised no one else has mentioned it here.
Better documentation, learning by osmosis suggests you don’t have a lot written down so people can’t solve their own problems.
Better mentorship, not “here’s your mentor” and it’s some disinterested person who can fob you off to soak it in. The good news is that if people can “learn by osmosis” you probably have some strong informal mentors already. You need to identify who they were.
Better follow up and expectations setting, if there’s obvious stuff you expect people will just get because of team culture make that explicit and check in about it as you would other aspects of work. The big thing IMO in any on boarding situation is to get the new person asking lots of questions ASAP.
All of these will make your on boarding better back at the office as well. On boarding by Brownian motion isn’t really a plan after all.
Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it
#204I just want my own office. That's all. I'd be pretty okay with going in if I had my own office with 4 walls. First job of my career, they told me I would have an office of my own. First day I come back do for full time (I had interned there too with my own office), they tell me they're switching buildings to go open office in about a month's time. I got a precious few weeks with a personal office, and then it was all…
Perhaps companies that require physical offices could try to offer a compromise incentive: personal offices or actual cubicles instead of open office layouts. At least that would solve many of the pain points of physically working in tech.
Maybe personal offices are too expensive, but how much does it cost to set up cubes?
Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
The solution is obvious: structured training and mentoring. When the pandemic hit, I was hiring a team of 5 new engineers. What was I going to do? Throw up my hands? I implemented a weekly technical training program that morphed into the 250 person org official onboarding. Weekly, I literally just get someone on a VC for 30 minutes and record having a conversation about a technical topic at a noobie level. 16 months…
What remote whiteboarding tools do you like? I do a lot less whiteboarding these days and it kills me.
I have a second webcam pointed straight down at my desk, and scribble with a pen on paper.
Frankly, this works better than any of the digital tools I tried, despite not being collaborative. (I tried a number of them, and have both a drawing tablet and a tablet pc)
Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it
#206[deleted]
Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it
#207One thing I noticed is that while more experienced people are productive working from home, it is devastating for fresh starting employees. Work from home eliminates learning through osmosis. If anyone has a work around this let me know. I am surprised no one else has mentioned it here.
The lead / manager (or whatever it is called in your case) on your team should try to encourage pairing or mob programming as much as possible.
It is difficult to pull off, but nothing speaks against an experienced person sharing their screen while working on a particular topic.
Whenever somebody starts working on something they can ping it in a channel, and then interested engineers could join. We try to work that way and it doesn't always work but sometimes it works well.
Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it
#208In my company the only ones that want to go back to the office are those engineers and managers that spend most of their day just walking around, talking to everyone about non important stuff, inviting you to have a coffee, and making jokes until 5pm. Just the people that have nothing to show at the end of the quarter. The most productive engineers, and the ones I enjoy working the most are the remote ones. The only…
Not true at all. When you evaluate opportunity you are evaluating the people. Your success depends not only on your abilities but also on the abilities of your network.
The unproductive ones that invite for coffee, make jokes also have successful careers as they are perceived to be - friendly, high in openness, and high in consciousness. Now, I'm skeptical of your claim that these people are unproductive, not sure whether such an individual would survive a highly competitive environment. I could argue that they are productive enough to have time not just for work but also to engage in things outside of them.
I'm that type of person, my career growth has improved tremendously due to this ability of mine though it is natural for me to engage with people in my workplace. I am the guy people come to build XFN features and products because everyone knows me and I don't come off as a threat. This is a huge plus in large-scale enterprises where each BU works as a startup of its own and collaborating with them becomes a hassle.
Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it
#209Wow, that seems like a terrible place to work. Why is he going to a daily meeting if he doesn’t have to pay attention to the meeting? Why is there not an incentive to complete more than one card a day? If one card can take as little as two hours it seems like a massive waste to expect someone to only do one card. Why doesn’t he have proper equipment? If you spend XXX,XXX a year for an employee it makes sense to spend…
I realized that the OP can correct these actions himself. If he is in a useless meeting then he should speak up and work towards changing that policy. If he doesn't have good equipment he could work with management to lobby for better equipment or bring his own there. Instead of working for 4 hours then "doing whatever" he could make meaningful changes in the organization but he chooses not too. Maybe it isn't a terr…
I agree in theory but in practice regular employees have extremely little agency in team wide matters. With the points you're making you might as well say "he should take things into his own hands and set his own personal permanent WFH policy." See how ridiculous that sounds?
Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, there are also huge human costs that go along with working alone all day, and in the same environment as the rest of your life. For example, commuting, while not nice most of the time, has one great impact on life: it allows you to break from work, which is not happening when you have sleep/work/hobbies/life at the same place. I'm not saying you should spend 1h in traffic or subway, but 20min and walking would…
I'm sure you can have a 20 minute walk after working from home.. I do 40 minutes, personally. It's great!
It might work, but it is difficult to walk just for walking: I know people who walk their dog, which works, but just going out around doesn't seem like a good motivation