201–210 of 263 posts
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> but many CEOs will tend to believe that things will go better with everyone back in the office Many of us SWEs believe the same!
SWEs that want to force everyone back to office have no life or a personality outside of their job.
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What makes you think this? I haven't observed any advantages to an office beyond overexposing the company to real estate (not really an advantage) - there is nothing I could do in person that I haven't been able to do faster in MS Teams (and better - now I have a written record and recording of everything). Another advantage of remote is that nobody ruins my train of thought by tapping me on the shoulder and asking s…
Very little people are advocating that WFH doesn't work better for focus work of clear and specced tasks. However, in my experience that is maybe 30-90% of software engineering, depending on environment, role and seniority. There are lots of relevant activities that are more challenging remotely, such as 1-on-1 mentoring, pairing for debugging or programming, or designing and collaborating a project or interface acro…
I find these quite easy or even better remote. I just fire up a screen share or even better a Visual Studio Live Share and both of us can see the same thing while we have our own developer environment.
When I was running a startup there were lots of times when I felt kind of lost and it's very tempting to listen to things like this because they seem plausible. It's a huge mistake. This kind of generic armchair general "advice"[1] is everywhere when you run a company and is basically completely useless because every company is a complex and unique special case and if you're in charge you don't have to make the decis…
When I was running a startup there were lots of times when I felt kind of lost and it's very tempting to listen to things like this because they seem plausible. It's a huge mistake. This kind of generic armchair general "advice"[1] is everywhere when you run a company and is basically completely useless because every company is a complex and unique special case and if you're in charge you don't have to make the decis…
I wouldn't hold any special reverence for McKinsey. In general with any of the management consultants, you're going to get people with very little actual experience telling you how to run your company. Whilst some of the stuff, usually more accountancy / factual based, doesn't require experience, and thus may be delivered to a high standard, you're also going to got a bunch of hot takes that don't make sense in reali…
> MAMA (Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple) This is such a lost opportunity for MAGMA (Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple)
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This reminds me of a story I heard about Steve Wozniak's time at HP: They were going to lay off 10% of the staff, but instead they decided to reduce everyone's pay by 10% and give them an extra day off every two weeks.
Conventional management advice -- at least that I've gotten -- is that you cam increase people's salaries, but you can't cut people's salaries. Without a very unique culture, they take it personally and will likely quit. Better to fire underperformers. Side note: if staff took better to getting their pay cut, they'd get more frequent (faster) raises. When a company is suddenly more profitable, compensation increases…
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What makes you think this? I haven't observed any advantages to an office beyond overexposing the company to real estate (not really an advantage) - there is nothing I could do in person that I haven't been able to do faster in MS Teams (and better - now I have a written record and recording of everything). Another advantage of remote is that nobody ruins my train of thought by tapping me on the shoulder and asking s…
I think brainstorming, discovery, and discussion type of tasks work much better in-person, maybe 5-10x better (driven in part by a small percentage that are thousands of times better). Delivery works great remotely, probably better for me and many.
If you adopt a written RFC based slower decision making where people have time to fully articulate their thoughts and have time to respond to those comments then it not worst, just different.
If the house is burning and we need to come up with a solution now the first works way better. There is a reason why the military have war rooms. But for long term changes the second can be as good if not better.
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> but many CEOs will tend to believe that things will go better with everyone back in the office Many of us SWEs believe the same!
Many or a few? Most software engineers find themselves most effective in work from home. This breaks in favor at 3:4 or higher. The software engineers that want to work in office are the odd-balls. I am interested in the break down when one factors in whatever concept of '10x developers' -- which do the most productive of us prefer?
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> but many CEOs will tend to believe that things will go better with everyone back in the office Many of us SWEs believe the same!
I think on remote it’s worth reframing the argument a little. If you’re totally pro-remote, I’d like to hear your thoughts on this formulation. Consider an early stage startup of six employees. Working full remote - everyone at home, communicating via slack and zoom, working hours roughly the same. Vs 9-6 ish hours, some flexibility, where they all come into an office. That office is a small, modern, comfortable offi…
And I find it very hard to believe. When I started working in the 1980s, everybody got a cubicle, we didn't even like cubicles!, but you had walls and it was quieter and people treated it like your personal space.
In my last job, I could've stood up and put my hand on seven different people's shoulders without moving my feet.
So your quiet shielded office doesn't sound like anything an actual company does.
> you’ll need to surrender quite a bit of that to interruptions when remote -
No, you get a lot fewer interruptions when working remotely than in an office. Deliveries do not take an hour a day, particularly when there are two adults who can split the task.
Pet interruptions take basically zero time per day because they aren't actually an interruption: I don't have to stop thinking about my problem for one second, but if I have to answer a single question about some other technical thing, I blow away my whole thought process and have to build it up again.
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Success might be difficult to define. If this produces the results that are desired by Elon and the investors then it's probably a success from their perspective. I worry if that's the case, it'll be like all the buy out, chop up, and liquidate value takeovers they made movies about.
Elon Musk took on significant debt (i.e. interest payments) when he acquired Twitter, and Twitter was already losing money when he did. It will take significantly more than just liquidating Twitter's assets for him to succeed, he essentially needs to turn Twitter into successful company.
With Twitter Blue steadily and exclusively rolling out new features like edit functionality that might've begun contributing more to the bottom line in time too. It was still too new and too geographically limited to be certain.
None of this was necessary.